Who can protect biodiversity?

The UN conference on stopping biodiversity loss, COP15, which has concluded today, aimed to get governments from around the world to rise to the challenge of agreeing a new set of goals to “halt and reverse nature loss” which is also critical for limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees. Two elements of this are a plan to drive finances toward sustainable investments and away from environmentally harmful ones and a plan to safeguard the rights of indigenous peoples and recognise their contributions as stewards of nature.

Conservation scientist Charlie Gardner puts the stewardship challenge in a straightforward way in our Cambridge Core blog.

“I’d realised that no amount of ecological understanding or data would help conserve wildlife in the face of rapid deforestation, overfishing and other threats. To do that we first had to understand those threats, and that meant understanding the needs and livelihoods of local resource users.”

Sustainable livelihoods

Resource Extraction and Arctic Communities: The New Extractivist Paradigm, edited by Sverker Sörlin at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, looks at the trade-off between commercial exploitation of mineral resources versus more sustainable commercial activity, such as renewable power, wilderness tourism – which relies on biodiversity – and scientific knowledge about climate change, and the benefit the latter should offer to Arctic residents and Indigenous peoples.

Local communities sustaining forest restoration is one of the facilitating factors that leads to successful reforestation programmes, research has found, as well as a supportive policy framework and financial incentives. The thought-provoking research into what it takes to restore forests (read the blog) also identifies motivating factors including the desire to mitigate land degradation, droughts or floods or to contribute to biodiversity conservation. The findings are in the most recent volume of Environmental Conservation, which we publish for the Switzerland-based Foundation for Environmental Conservation.

Payments for environmental services are also having a positive impact in the central highlands of Việt Nam both on forest management as well as local livelihoods. The early access study is being published this month in the latest volume of the journal Environment and Development Economics, which we publish in association with the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. (This will be the last print edition of the journal, which is going 100 percent online from 2023.)

On a macro-scale, in his award-winning book, Economics for a fragile planet: rethinking markets, institutions and governance, environmental economist Edward Barbier, based at Colorado State University, offers a blueprint for a greener and more inclusive economy, decoupling wealth creation from environmental degradation through business, policy and financial actions.

Future conservationists

Charlie’s research paper, which is freely available as part of the Environmental Conservation editors’ choice collection, looked at if university-level conservation students would be taught to value local communities in global efforts to preserve biodiversity. While the discipline of conservation science should join-up conservation biology with economics, anthropology, psychology, political ecology and other social sciences, she discovered that less than 1 in 5 undergraduate conservation degrees included any social science content.

In her blog, Charlie notes:

“Both conservation practice and conservation science have made enormous strides towards interdisciplinarity over the last few decades, but the training we are providing to students appears to be lagging behind. If conservation is to become truly interdisciplinary then we must ensure that interdisciplinarity is incorporated into conservation training from the earliest stages.”

We bring different disciplines together in our new Ecology, Biodiversity, and Conservation series for university students, researchers and teachers as well as ecologists and conservationists, and just three years ago one of the first books to take an interdisciplinary approach to the important issues of biodiversity and biological extinction was Biological extinction: new perspectives, edited by Partha Dasgupta, Peter Raven and Anna McIvor.

Award-winning biodiversity publishing

The books and journal articles already mentioned are some of the many publications in our collection of books, journals and Elements - a book-journal hybrid - relevant to biodiversity that are available to buy or read via a subscription to Cambridge Core. These include recently published books by Cambridge University Press that were winners or finalists for CHOICE Outstanding Titles in 2021 or 2022 (find out more). Choice is part of the American Library Association and supports the work and professional development of academic librarians:

• Andy Haines and Howard Frumkin, Planetary Health: Safeguarding Human Health and the Environment in the Anthropocene
• Alexandre Roulin, Barn Owls: Evolution and Ecology
• Kevin D Hunt, Chimpanzee: Lessons from our Sister Species
• Chris C Funk, University of California, Drought, flood, fire: how climate change contributes to catastrophes
• Edward Barbier, Colorado State University, Economics for a fragile planet: rethinking markets, institutions and governance
• Michael Hannah, Victoria University of Wellington, Extinctions: living and dying in the margin of error
• Paul F. Hudson, Universiteit Leiden, Flooding and management of large fluvial lowlands: a global environmental perspective
• Norbert Sachser, University of Münster, Much like us: what science reveals about the thoughts, feelings, and behaviour of animals
• Sarah J. Morath, Wake Forest University, North Carolina, Our plastic problem and how to solve it
• R. J. Pentreath, University of Reading, Radioecology: sources and consequences of ionising radiation in the environment

The UN says achieving its “comprehensive, far-reaching and people-centred set of universal and transformative sustainable development goals” involves balancing three dimensions – economic, social and environmental. This year's edition of the Sustainable Development Report, an independent annual review of how well 193 countries are doing on progressing these global goals, draws out the importance of international financing mechanisms and promoting sustainable investments into physical and human infrastructure.

Protecting the environment and human rights are also two of the four themes in the ten universal principles for corporate responsibility set out in the UN Global Compact with labour standards and anti-corruption. As signatory of the compact we are taking part in a six-month programme to work out where we can have the biggest, positive impact on global sustainability goals, including our responsible use of natural resources and protecting biodiversity. For example, sustainable management of forests is one of the environmental concerns closest to our operations as we presently need paper to print books and exam papers while we seek digital alternatives and research the environmental impact of these.

We’re also working on ‘greening the curriculum’. We’ve appointed our first global director, climate education, the transferable skills of the next generation of decision makers are being shaped through Cambridge Global Perspectives, and our UK exam board, OCR, continues to lead the way on developing a GCSE in Natural History.

Creating a better future for all in a way that enhances, not reduces, the natural world is what we believe in, and it is what the teachers, learners and researchers whom we exist to serve rightly demand. Through education and access to research and debate, we aim to create a better future for all, informing and shaping learning and debate around climate change and environmental sustainability.