There’s something wrong with 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 that I’ve only recently begun to understand. I’ve started to ask, is the value that inspired conservation action being placed on the animal itself, or on the services the animal provides? On the face of it this may seem trivial but for reasons I’m about to reveal, it makes or breaks economies. This is quite a long read but one of the most important things I’ve written of late. So please share this widely if it resonates. Why? Because conservationists are getting this wrong most of the time and it leads to broadscale economic loss. Refocusing our understanding will shift society from love to hate wildlife to awe-inspiring possibility for regional economies. It’s the key to a more nature-centred and thriving society.
The contradiction between business and conservation
Let’s take a simple analogy. If you run a business and have a fleet of cars, they are an asset so long as they are functioning correctly. If the cars begin to break down, you take them to a mechanic to restore their former function(Of an ecosystem). A subset of ecosystem processes and structures, where the ecosystem does something that provides an ecosystem service of value to people. More so they can operate in the car-based ecosystem we’ve built.
Cars function because of their ecosystem: driving licences, roads, road-safety rules, saleyards, insurance, mechanics, scrapyards, car loans etc. Your accountant might depreciate the value of a vehicle over time and then advise selling it at the end. You usually try to do this before the cost of maintaining a vehicle exceeds its benefits.
Now let’s apply apply the way we do conservation to the same business.
We still believe the cars are an asset but we allow the ecosystem to decline. Potholes form in every road, we remove safety measures, abandon insurance and deregulate traffic laws.
We keep paying to patch up cars but most are now functionless. We cannot afford to run them. Roads are inaccessible and the cars are increasingly damaged by potholes. They have become liabilities. As conservationists, we staunchly believe they are assets to be protected for their individual value while ignoring the ecosystem of which they were part.
In a few years, all we have to show for our efforts is an increasing density of broken vehicles in certain places but an overall decline of healthy vehicles throughout the ecosystem, leading to economic harm.
This irony cannot be lost on anyone. This is exactly how we do conservation. It’s critical for policy-makers to understand that the advice they are receiving about wildlife is damaging our economy. The rest of this article is focused on how to spot the difference and do something about it.
Why there are always too few or too many animals for our liking
Our love hate relationship with wildlife begins here. We have laws to protect wild animals because we value them as assets. But when animals become too uncommon, the cost per animal of keeping them from going extinct increases exponentially. Then the hate begins. They become problems for planning and development, like the few remaining koalas in suburban Sydney and Brisbane. Or kangaroos that are inconveniently abundant in some places, while declining everywhere else.
The way we enable conservation is contrary to the outcomes we want to achieve because they create more cost than they resolve
Even people who love rare animals might not appreciate them any more. Birdwatchers in Victoria recently put a ban on people sharing images and knowledge of critically endangered Orange-bellied Parrots. Public parks are fenced to protect a few rare flowers. It denies us connection to nature.
Then there is the case where animals are considered to be too common. Bird lovers start to hate noisy miner birds in suburban streets. Wild koalas were recently killed en mass in my state1, where the value per individual is a lot less but the cumulative cost for ‘management’ is much higher. Once again, they become a cost to society.
- Interestingly, the koalas in Victoria were killed in part to protect important cultural values. They were eating sacred trees. Whereas the same cultural values that people desire to see nature are denied to them, when they become rarer. It’s a loss-loss situation and the animals can never be too few or too many for our liking.
If we’re talking about wildlife management we’ve already been led astray
Wildlife management is inherently costly. We use taxpayer money to ‘look after’ animals that have become completely disconnected from a functioning ecosystem. Like a zoo, but in the wild.
As ecosystem decline accelerates, rare animals become confined to tiny habitat patches which may not be viable for the species’ long-term survival. Animals that become more abundant either eat themselves out of house and home, or move to new places that are less suitable (leading to higher densities in some places and an ever-increasing demand to cull despite overall losses).
Just when policymakers are trying to value nature, they are receiving advice that is countereffective in ecological, social and economic terms.
Either way, such animals are disconnected from the ecosystem. Our laws to protect them don’t work in these situations because … well, we simply can’t afford them. It leads to inevitable collapse.
The systems set up to protect our wildlife are fine in principle but the way we enable conservation is contrary to the outcomes we want to achieve because they create more cost than they resolve.
We can begin to address this by ascribing wildlife the correct values before we end up making poor decisions.
When is a koala not a koala?
A koala without its ecosystem is functionless. It is no longer a koala. A forest without its koalas is also functionless. It’s no longer a forest. Same goes for kangaroos or any animal.
If we’re already talking about ‘management’ of wildlife we have a problem. It isn’t the animals that is the problem. Higher densities may give the illusion of a bigger population problem but the overall pattern is one of decline, because the animal and the ecosystem depend on each other for mutual function.
In a recent article on kangaroo leather, journalists said ‘Kangaroo numbers are known to boom in times of good rainfall and then crash during droughts – swings that mirror Australia’s variable climate. Yes. In the same way as we see extremes of intense rainfall or drought, so too we see extremes of density in wild animals.
Once again, the problem isn’t the number of animals, it’s the mismanagement of the landscape / ecosystem in general. Killing more animals as the blunt solution is making the economic situation worse.
The biggest mistake we can possibly make is in putting a value on any animal, tree … any component of the landscape.
Unless we focus on restoring animals in their role as functioning components of a landscape, we continuously make animals a liability risk for our economy.
Just when policymakers are trying to value nature, they are receiving advice, often from outspoken academic consultants, that is incomplete. This means it’s confusing and countereffective in ecological, social and economic terms.
This is a serious problem that can be resolved with some common sense.
The goldilocks conundrum
Trace this problem back and it lands on the place we put the value.
The biggest mistake we can possibly make is in putting a value on any animal, tree … any component of the landscape. There are many reasons not to do this (I’ve listed 17 so far, maybe for a later blog). Not least, it’s the source of all failure of our attempts to do 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 offsets in the past. We create an imperative to spend money protecting that particular feature and it becomes about the number of those things we can save.
But as we have already surmised, there is no such thing as a perfect number of animals. It’s the goldilocks analogy … either too hot, or too cold. They are disconnected from their role and function in nature, which is why numbers don’t matter. Counting the number of animals has never worked, so why would we continue to think this is a suitable measure for any biodiversity evaluation?
Why are we putting our economic future in the hands of people who don’t understand this?
Oversimplified conservation leads to confusion and conflict
The fact is, much conservation work we do is adhering to this wrong principle. We’re told that such matters are too complex, yet government advisors are using very simple reasoning that’s incoherent from a social and ecological perspective.
The reason for this is a lack of basic acumen. It’s become about ‘managing for the number of koalas in a forest’, for example, at the exclusion of the majority of the values koalas provide for our economy and ecosystem.
Secondly, we are not using our knowledge in the right framework for decisions (and therefore making poor decisions); and thirdly, by denying community involvement, we are omitting the kind of Cultural Ecosystem Services that enable us to understand the true value. The fact is, animals are worth a lot more to our economies alive than dead. That doesn’t mean, by the way, that some culling is completely unnecessary. But a scattergun and universal approach to wildlife, without considering ecosystem factors, is profoundly cynical.
The majority of the value of wildlife is being ignored, without which, we are making decisions based on only a fraction of the evidence needed. This leads to rising cost of living. Unfortunately, many of these mistakes are being led by trusted advisors who should know better but are unaware of the mistakes their advice leads to.
Hence, it should not be at all surprising when we end up with confusion, breeding conflict and political divide. This translates into heavy costs for our society. Heavy because we pour money into actions that don’t work. Heavy, because we prohibit more constructive methods to conserve wildlife that would enable positive benefit.
Turning wildlife from a cost into a benefit
To alter the paradigm and make animals an asset, we have to start think differently and more wisely. We have to prioritise restoring wild animals’ role and function in 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 and value that. Put simply, let animals be animals and transform the way we live among them, so they can exist with minimal effort on our part, while still providing services to our economy that we need to prosper.
Those services by the way, could reverse our cost of living crisis by adding $7-30 back into our economy, for every dollar spent on conservation of wildlife. These are the studies that underpin a global shift towards a nature-based economy. By failing to properly value wildlife, we are jeopardising that economic potential.
I’ve summarised this in Figure 1. Here I describe how it’s not the value of the animal that matters, it’s the service it provides.
Once again I’m using koalas as the example. The koala’s service to the ecosystem isn’t even where the process of evaluation stops. It stops at community values. While the diagram shows a roughly equal spread between Cultural, Existence, Habitat and Provisioning services, cultural services are likely to be a major part of the asset value. Mainly because this is what supports all our livelihoods and lifestyles. We don’t have any economy without this part yet it’s the component that’s almost universally left out of evaluation processes by biologists and conservationists.
Figure 1.
Cultural Ecosystem Services (CES) are of particular importance as they lead to more effective and equitable conservation outcomes, including transformational change, which is a financially viable solution.
The current management philosophy (B) is a nature-negative methodology. It puts the value on the koalas. This ignores their ecological function and isolates them from the living landscape. They are forced into small, intensively managed areas, disconnected from Ecosystem Services. This devalues koalas and increases long-term cost. It generates social conflict, unresolved corporate and political risk, and ultimately makes koalas a problem animal. This results in a nature-negative outcome. This methodology is often used in conservation and helps explain why there are continual failures to sustain and finance efforts.
Where to from here?
The reason we love to hate wildlife is because we make it so hard for ourselves. We reduce animals, of all things, to nature-negative liabilities. We pay this price heavily every year when businesses submit tax. Yet if we ran our businesses the way we run nature, we’d fail miserably.
The contradiction comes from a lack of acumen on the part of many advisors to government. It’s hardly any surprise we are not getting the right advice though. We barely put any value on the outcomes. Yet it’s increasingly clear that without good advice, our economies will fail. More worryingly, the greater and awe-inspiring possibilities, that are largely agreed upon globally, will remain out of reach.
It’s time for people to start thinking straight and see nature for what it is; to start taking it seriously. It’s the most important part of our economy and livelihoods. We could do well by starting here with this one basic principle that allows us to value the services animals provide. This alone changes the outcome to nature positive.
Concluding remarks
- To shift to a more nature-centred economy and increase the dividend society gets from public spending, we have to reform the way we interpret wildlife in our economy;
- We are currently making decisions based on advice, mostly from academic consultants, whose opinions are based on a lack of comprehensive understanding about the full value of wildlife or the economic risks;
- By failing to simultaneously address ecosystem decline, we quickly turn wild animals from assets to liabilities. They become a cost, rather than a benefit, to society, which eliminates the value of nature-based solutions and leads to increased cost of living.
- These outcomes also lead to confusion, conflict, political divide and an overall lack of certainty in decision-making and planning;
- The failure to understand this, rife across most advice, research and conservation, presents one of the greatest obstacles to positive change for communities at present;
- To address this requires a fundamental shift in the way we value wildlife, by never focusing on the value of the component and always focusing on the value of the service it provides to society; but
- To unlock this potential pathway requires a fundamentally different community-led approach. This uses techniques that already exist.
