Discover why counting animals may no longer be a useful past time for conservationists

Every year, billions of dollars are spent counting wildlife but can we say the money has been well spent, when the work to date has foreshadowed catastrophic declines in most species? Counting wildlife doesn’t improve the environment, it only tells us how many animals there are. What does it mean? Why does it matter? And, can the money be better spent?

In the late 1990s, I was invited to author two academic textbooks on wildlife survey methods. In those days, conservationists were busy gathering a global database to help us evaluate biodiversityWhat is the definition of biodiversity? When we ask, what is the definition of biodiversity? It depends on what we want to do with it. The term is widely and commonly misused, leading to significant misinterpretation of the importance of how animals function on Earth and why they matter a great deal, to human survival. Here I will try to More. The presumption, which stands correct to this day, is that ecosystemsHow ecosystems function An ecosystem is a community of lifeforms that interact in such an optimal way that how ecosystems function best, is when all components (including humans and other animals) can persist and live alongside each other for the longest time possible. Ecosystems are fuelled by the energy created by plants (primary producers) that convert the Sun's heat energy More that have a greater diversity of wildlife, are the healthiest and most valuable.

Back then, we were trying to maintain those values and would write management plans in the hope of securing the future abundance and distribution of threatened wildlife. We didn’t realise that it’s actually the animals managing everything and that little or nothing we did would make any difference in the future.

How do we know this? It’s simple really. In the thirty years since, the populations of most of the threatened animals we were ‘surveying’ and ‘managing’ have declined even further. If our efforts had worked, the opposite would surely be true? All that counting animals ever really did for us, was prove what we suspected all along, that animal populations were in free fall.

Science in the new era of ecosystem collapse

In the late 1990s, we might have been preoccupied with the rate of decline of species but thirty years later it’s irrelevant. Today we know that entire ecosystems are collapsing and with them, goes all the wildlife and the life support for everything, including our own civilisation, economies, lifestyle and eventually our existence.

Everything we might hope to achieve from a better relationship with nature, from medicines to crops, disease control, water, food security and so on, won’t be achieved if we allow this to continue.

Which is why I am sceptical of a report this week from the Australian Academy of Sciences where it connects taxonomy (identification of new species) with biodiversity benefits.

The link between taxonomy, wildlife surveys and the modern pressures of conservationWhy is animal conservation important? Animal conservation is important, because animals are the only mechanism to create biodiversity, which is the mechanism that creates a habitable planet for humans. Without animals, the energy from today’s plants (algae, trees, flowers etc) will eventually reach the atmosphere and ocean, much of it as carbon. The quantity of this plant-based waste is so More outcomes is tenuous and many of the perceived benefits of ‘nature’ can only be fully realised if there is a reversal in loss of biodiversity. Indeed, the report recognises this, by saying that ‘the importance of preserving biodiversity is an increasingly critical part of ensuring long term social and economic success’ and goes on to ‘[highlight the risk] of overemphasising protection of threatened species as a measure of conservation’.

I’m not saying that this taxonomic work isn’t needed or valuable. The report is a commendable insight into the importance of wildlife for our economy. I am questioning whether the outcomes are feasible and if the biodiversity outcomes are achievable, realistic, and timely; and also whether its practicality needs to be framed within the context of a far greater problem. By the time the work is done (over about 25 years) we will already be on the brink of economic and ecosystem collapse, unless we prioritise the restoration, protection and revitalisation of ecosystems today.

The untold significance of wildlife conservation

As I covered in this recent article about mouse plagues, Australia’s GDP lost due to land degradation is about $170 billion a year, though in terms of income, the recovery of ecosystems would create more than ten times that amount of welfare to all Australians.

Let’s put that into perspective, Australians are losing a staggering $1.7 trillion a year due to ecosystem collapse.

Taxonomic studies are arguably needed as part of any conservation push but gains of $29 billion over 25 years are a drop in the ocean compared to ecosystem collapse. The broader benefits won’t be achievable if we continue to lose wildlife biodiversity at current rates – all we might end up doing is identifying more species that are going extinct, without doing anything about it.

This already leads to funding resistance. Reports used to lobby governments can shoot themselves in the foot if they don’t make a strong case for animals as critical drivers of ecosystems, biodiversity and therefore, the economy. Oftentimes, wildlife decline is used as political strategy, to avoid prioritising funding, because neither party has yet accepted that humans can’t survive without other animals. Until that’s accepted, there is the real risk that any other related work will fall to the wayside. And this risk only increases every year we do nothing about restoring wildlife populations.

I wrote about a similar problem relating to a study on blue carbon in the Gulf of Mexico. By omitting the role of ocean wildlife in ecosystem stabilisation, the authors inadvertently gave politicians the ammunition needed to reject the study’s premise altogether.

Also read: Overlooking ocean wildlife leads to poor outcomes for conservation

The fact is, we would all be better off if we knew this. The benefits to any wildlife-oriented scientific work would also be even greater if done in parallel with a commitment to nature-based solutions.

Doesn’t this beg the question, why doesn’t this tend to get mentioned?

The link between animals and ecosystems

The reason why these things don’t get mentioned goes back to what I said earlier. Our knowledge about how ecosystems work has come a long way but our policy institutions and scientific reasoning haven’t caught up. The whole premise of nature-based solutions. Incidentally, this year’s World Environment Day marks the official start of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration – but what does that mean without wildlife?

The aforementioned Australian Academy of Science report says “it is difficult to manage what cannot be readily measured”.

That is true … but only insofar as you can ‘manage’ something. As we discovered earlier, our attempts to manage ecosystems have utterly failed to protect wildlife and now ecosystems are collapsing. Why? Because it was the animals all along that were maintaining ecosystem stability.

We thought we could count animals as a way to prove our land management had worked. In actual fact, our management had failed and the animals declined … we were focusing on the wrong thing all along. It was the animals managing the land and our failure to protect them, is what led to ecosystem collapse.

For reasons I explain in the article above, we cannot manage wildlife. Knowing how many species are in a system does not mean that system is protected. The only way to maintain complexity and diversity – to deliver clean water, stable climate and food security – is to allow animals to succeed. Animals manage ecosystems, not humans.

This is why measuring animals cannot be connected to conservation outcomes and how our only solution is to rebuild wildlife populations – that takes a completely different approach but the good news is, the outcomes are worth trillions of dollars a year and the benefits are a better life for us all.

Where do we start?

We need to change the narrative and completely redefine what we mean by ‘biodiversity’. We need to realise that animals are the only mechanism that drive ecosystem stability, so we can retarget funding to projects that restore nature.

We need to relearn our relationship with animals and by understanding that they are the key to food security, stable climate, disease control and clean water, resist trying to manage systems just for us and allow animals the chance to fulfil their critical roles in nature for us. This will mean allowing nature to take its course and being less inclined to control the outcomes (for as I explained here, our efforts to control a yielding force will always lead to less stability and this is the reason why we’re in this predicament in the first place).

Where science will have a role is in monitoring the success of animals. This is distinctly different from monitoring our success by counting animals. We need a generation of scientists with a deeper understanding of how ecosystems work that can determine which actions we don’t do are working best … that allow animals to rebuild ecosystem function. We need to do less and allow animals to do more, so they can restore the diversity we lost, when we became control freaks and tried taking over.

Any of us who propose biodiversity conservation today, from taxonomists to consultants, journalists to politicians, need to rethink what we were taught because in the few decades we’ve been trying to protect wildlife, the baseline has shifted. As Isabella Tree attests in her book Wilding, when it comes to conservation, ‘science progresses one funeral at a time’. We can’t afford to wait another generation to make a change.

Unless we embrace a new understanding of the critical role of wildlife for human survival, our continuing repetition of past mistakes presents a tangible risk to our future. As conservationists, we need to work together to do better.