Nature Conservation is a subject area where
perceptions are polarised: invasive species are always a bad thing,
habitats must be preserved wherever they may be, and there is never
talk of any potential benefits of climate change.
Peter Bridgewater, Chair of the UK
Government’s Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC), today
issued a call for scientists and decision makers to be more
pragmatic in their outlook, in order to work with nature rather
than fight it.
Peter noted: “2009 marks the 150th
anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of
Species. This work clearly demonstrates that change is the
only inevitability in the natural world. However, our entire
outlook in the late 20th, and now 21st,
Century is to try and stop change at all costs. Loss cannot
be prevented, but it can be managed. Novel ecosystems are being
created, and these offer hope for the fight against loss, and also
help with adaptation to climate change. We have to look to
translocation and reintroduction as part of the conservation
effort. And we also have to see that in some cases invasive
species can actually be helpful to ecosystems. All this tends to be
forgotten, where conservation is confused with preservation.”
[See Note 1].
Peter also wants people to understand that
saving a rare species or habitat may mean we take the ‘eye off the
ball’ with regard to those that are currently more abundant. He
said: “Like all good gardens, our ‘global garden’ has rare and
threatened, as well as common, species. Like most gardeners,
our focus is often on the rare and unusual, rather than the
common. Yet common species may be the ones we need to watch,
lest they become tomorrow’s endangered species, and rare species
tomorrow’s invaders!”
In honour of the legacy of Charles Darwin, one
of the world's most creative and influential thinkers, a public
forum was held last week at the McGill University in Montreal,
Quebec, with the assistance of the British Council. This forum
examined how biodiversity is threatened by pressures that Darwin
could never have foreseen. Peter Bridgewater spoke at this
interactive public discussion and addressed the current state of
biodiversity loss, expressing the need to improve our ability to
better evaluate and manage changes, not simply loss, in
biodiversity.
He presented five steps that are needed to
develop a climate of ‘creative conservation’:
- Encourage and educate the wider public;
- Manage for change and with
change, not against it;
- Expect surprises;
- Monitor results and be prepared to change;
and
- Embrace conservation as the heart of
sustainability.
Peter concluded: “We know the target to reduce
or halt the rate of loss of biodiversity by 2010 will not be
achieved – we must redouble our efforts to achieve this in the next
decade. Our future approach to conservation will need new ways of
looking at protected areas, new ways of dealing with species
conservation, all of which will challenge our existing assumptions
and approaches to conservation. Leaving things alone is no
longer an option.”
- ENDS -
Notes to editors: