Andrew Balmford is a professor of conservation science at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on planning conservation, comparing the costs and benefits of conservation and how conservation can be reconciled with other activities. [1]
Balmford studied for his undergraduate degree, and PhD at the University of Cambridge before becoming a research fellow at the university. He was then a research fellow at the Institute of Zoology before becoming a lecturer at Sheffield University. He returned to Cambridge in 1998 as a member of the zoology department. [2] He is currently a fellow of Clare College [3] and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2011. [4]
In 1993, along with two other researchers, he investigated why the tails of birds are shaped as they are, aiming to test Charles Darwin's hypothesis that females have a preference for males with longer and more ornate tails using aerodynamic analysis. They reported that shallow forked shaped tails (such as those of the house martin) are aerodynamically optimal and that species with them had similar lengthed tails, indicating they could have developed through natural selection. In species with longer tails, males tend to have longer tails than females and which also create drag, since this is no advantage except for when courting, the authors suggested long tails may have evolved through sexual selection. [5] [6]
In 1998, he published a paper in Nature describing how the biodiversity of rainforest in Uganda could be estimated by counting populations of birds and butterflies. [7] [8] In 1999, again in Nature, he reported that the cost of conserving all life on earth would be approximately $320bn a year compared to the $6bn spent then. [9] [10] According to his group's research, this was less than 25% of the cost of environmentally damaging subsidies that governments supported at that time. The Financial Times commented that removing agricultural subsidies was already known to be "fraught with difficulties" and that only $1bn had been channelled into conservation projects since an agreement in 1992. Balmford was quoted as saying that the strongest argument to protect nature is "moral, cultural and philosophical". [11]
In 2002, he led a research project that found children could name a greater proportion of Pokémon characters than common species of British wildlife; 8-year-olds could identify 80% of Pokémon characters but only 50% of species. Balmford suggested that conservationists could create a game similar to Pokémon to encourage children to learn about the environment, saying "People tend to care about what they know." [12] [13] He also reported in Science that the benefits of conserving nature far outweigh the benefits of development, by a factor of 100 to 1, due to the loss of ecosystem services. It was estimated that humanity loses about $250bn per year due to habitat destruction. [14] [15]
One-third of the world's wild nature has been lost since I was a child and first heard the word 'conservation'. That's what keeps me awake at night. Andrew Balmford – 2002 [14]
In 2003, he led a study which collected data on the maintenance costs of different conservation projects around the world. It was found that there was huge variation in the cost of conserving nature, ranging from $0.07 per acre to $1.37 million per acre depending on the project. Projects in the developing world were generally cheaper than those in the developed world, boding well for the protection of biodiversity hotspots in poorer countries such as Indonesia and Madagascar. Balmford stated that it is important that the value for money of a conservation project should be taken into account as well as the number of threatened species in the region. [16]
In 2004, he published as a lead researcher a paper in PNAS which estimated that to protect 30% of the world's oceans by making them protected areas would cost between $12bn and $14bn each year. He told the BBC that, "meeting this commitment to marine protection will require international effort on an unprecedented scale". [17] [18]
In 2009, a paper that Balmford co-authored was published in Science that found that the benefits gained from deforestation in the Amazon Rainforest were quickly reversed. In recently deforested areas, the Human Development Index (HDI) was higher than other regions, but once deforestation was complete and replaced by other activities, for example farming, the HDI decreased to the same extent as that in areas that had not been deforested. Balmford described the current situation as "disastrous for local people, wildlife and the global climate" but hoped that REDD may allow changes to occur in the future. [19] [20] Another paper published in PLoS Biology found that between 1992 and 2006, the overall number of visitors to 280 protected areas in 20 countries had increased. Visitor numbers in Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America all grew significantly, while those in North America and Australasia did not change significantly. The results contrasted with an earlier study of visitor numbers to protected areas in Japan and the USA which found they had fallen consistently over a number of decades. [21] [22]
Balmford helped to establish the Cambridge Conservation Forum, a network of 1000 conservation professionals from a range of organisations, the Cambridge Conservation Initiative and the annual Student Conference on Conservation Science. [23] [24] He is Principal Investigator on the Valuing the Arc programme, which is focused on the conservation of the Eastern Arc Mountains in Tanzania. [25]
In 2000, Balmford was awarded the Zoological Society of London Marsh Award for Conservation Biology. [26] [27] In 2003, he was included on a list of the top 50 visionaries building a better world by Scientific American for his work on economic development and its impact on the environment. [28] In 2010 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.
The Holocene extinction, or Anthropocene extinction, is the ongoing extinction event caused by humans during the Holocene epoch. These extinctions span numerous families of plants and animals, including mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, and invertebrates, and affecting not just terrestrial species but also large sectors of marine life. With widespread degradation of biodiversity hotspots, such as coral reefs and rainforests, as well as other areas, the vast majority of these extinctions are thought to be undocumented, as the species are undiscovered at the time of their extinction, which goes unrecorded. The current rate of extinction of species is estimated at 100 to 1,000 times higher than natural background extinction rates and is increasing. During the past 100–200 years, biodiversity loss and species extinction have accelerated, to the point that most conservation biologists now believe that human activity has either produced a period of mass extinction, or is on the cusp of doing so. As such, after the "Big Five" mass extinctions, the Holocene extinction event has also been referred to as the sixth mass extinction or sixth extinction; given the recent recognition of the Capitanian mass extinction, the term seventh mass extinction has also been proposed for the Holocene extinction event.
Biodiversity or biological diversity is the variety and variability of life on Earth. Biodiversity is a measure of variation at the genetic, species, and ecosystem levels. Biodiversity is not distributed evenly on Earth; it is usually greater in the tropics as a result of the warm climate and high primary productivity in the region near the equator. Tropical forest ecosystems cover less than 10% of Earth's terrestrial surface and contain about 50% of the world's species. There are latitudinal gradients in species diversity for both marine and terrestrial taxa. Marine coastal biodiversity is highest globally speaking in the Western Pacific ocean steered mainly by the higher surface temperatures. In all oceans across the planet, marine species diversity peaks in the mid-latitudinal zones. Terrestrial species threatened with mass extinction can be observed in exceptionally dense regional biodiversity hotspots, with high levels of species endemism under threat. There are 36 such hotspot regions which require the world's attention in order to secure global biodiversity.
Protected areas or conservation areas are locations which receive protection because of their recognized natural, ecological or cultural values. Protected areas are those areas in which human presence or the exploitation of natural resources is limited.
Conservation biology is the study of the conservation of nature and of Earth's biodiversity with the aim of protecting species, their habitats, and ecosystems from excessive rates of extinction and the erosion of biotic interactions. It is an interdisciplinary subject drawing on natural and social sciences, and the practice of natural resource management.
Habitat conservation is a management practice that seeks to conserve, protect and restore habitats and prevent species extinction, fragmentation or reduction in range. It is a priority of many groups that cannot be easily characterized in terms of any one ideology.
A biodiversity hotspot is a biogeographic region with significant levels of biodiversity that is threatened by human habitation. Norman Myers wrote about the concept in two articles in The Environmentalist in 1988 and 1990, after which the concept was revised following thorough analysis by Myers and others into “Hotspots: Earth’s Biologically Richest and Most Endangered Terrestrial Ecoregions” and a paper published in the journal Nature, both in 2000.
Wildlife conservation refers to the practice of protecting wild species and their habitats in order to maintain healthy wildlife species or populations and to restore, protect or enhance natural ecosystems. Major threats to wildlife include habitat destruction, degradation, fragmentation, overexploitation, poaching, pollution, climate change, and the illegal wildlife trade. The IUCN estimates that 42,100 species of the ones assessed are at risk for extinction. Expanding to all existing species, a 2019 UN report on biodiversity put this estimate even higher at a million species. It is also being acknowledged that an increasing number of ecosystems on Earth containing endangered species are disappearing. To address these issues, there have been both national and international governmental efforts to preserve Earth's wildlife. Prominent conservation agreements include the 1973 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) and the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). There are also numerous nongovernmental organizations (NGO's) dedicated to conservation such as the Nature Conservancy, World Wildlife Fund, the Wild Animal Health Fund and Conservation International.
In biology, a refugium is a location which supports an isolated or relict population of a once more widespread species. This isolation (allopatry) can be due to climatic changes, geography, or human activities such as deforestation and overhunting.
The composition of Madagascar's wildlife reflects the fact that the island has been isolated for about 88 million years. The prehistoric breakup of the supercontinent Gondwana separated the Madagascar-Antarctica-India landmass from the Africa-South America landmass around 135 million years ago. Madagascar later split from India about 88 million years ago, allowing plants and animals on the island to evolve in relative isolation.
Tropical ecology is the study of the relationships between the biotic and abiotic components of the tropics, or the area of the Earth that lies between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. The tropical climate experiences hot, humid weather and rainfall year-round. While many might associate the region solely with the rainforests, the tropics are home to a wide variety of ecosystems that boast a great wealth of biodiversity, from exotic animal species to seldom-found flora. Tropical ecology began with the work of early English naturalists and eventually saw the establishment of research stations throughout the tropics devoted to exploring and documenting these exotic landscapes. The burgeoning ecological study of the tropics has led to increased conservation education and programs devoted to the climate.
Stuart Leonard Pimm is the Doris Duke Chair of Conservation Ecology at Duke University. His early career was as a theoretical ecologist but he now specialises in scientific research of biodiversity and conservation biology.
William F. Laurance, also known as Bill Laurance, is Distinguished Research Professor at James Cook University, Australia and has been elected as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science. He has received an Australian Laureate Fellowship from the Australian Research Council. He held the Prince Bernhard Chair for International Nature Conservation at Utrecht University, Netherlands from 2010 to 2014.
Katherine Jane Willis, Baroness Willis of Summertown, is a British biologist, academic and life peer, who studies the relationship between long-term ecosystem dynamics and environmental change. She is Professor of Biodiversity in the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford, and an adjunct professor in biology at the University of Bergen. In 2018 she was elected Principal of St Edmund Hall, and took up the position from 1 October. She held the Tasso Leventis Chair of Biodiversity at Oxford and was founding Director, now Associate Director, of the Biodiversity Institute Oxford. Willis was Director of Science at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew from 2013 to 2018. Her nomination by the House of Lords Appointments Commission as a crossbench life peer was announced on 17 May 2022.
Protected area downgrading, downsizing, and degazettement (PADDD) events are processes that change the legal status of national parks and other protected areas in both terrestrial and marine environments. "Downgrading" is "a decrease in legal restrictions on the number, magnitude, or extent of human activities within a protected area ." "Downsizing" refers to a "decrease in size of a protected area as a result of excision of land or sea area through a legal boundary change." "Degazettement" is defined as a loss of legal protection for an entire national park or other protected area. Collectively, PADDD represents legal processes that temper regulations, shrink boundaries, or eliminate legal protections originally associated with establishment of a protected area.
Katherine Elizabeth Jones is a British biodiversity scientist, with a special interest in bats. She is Professor of Ecology and Biodiversity, and Director of the Biodiversity Modelling Research Group, at University College London. She is a past chair of the Bat Conservation Trust.
Biodiversity loss happens when plant or animal species disappear completely from Earth (extinction) or when there is a decrease or disappearance of species in a specific area. Biodiversity loss means that there is a reduction in biological diversity in a given area. The decrease can be temporary or permanent. It is temporary if the damage that led to the loss is reversible in time, for example through ecological restoration. If this is not possible, then the decrease is permanent. The cause of most of the biodiversity loss is, generally speaking, human activities that push the planetary boundaries too far. These activities include habitat destruction and land use intensification. Further problem areas are air and water pollution, over-exploitation, invasive species and climate change.
Lian Pin Koh is a Singaporean conservation scientist. He is the Kwan Im Thong Hood Cho Temple Professor of Conservation, Vice Dean of Research at the Faculty of Science, Director of the Centre for Nature-based Climate Solutions, and Director of the Tropical Marine Science Institute at the National University of Singapore (NUS).
Debbie Pain is a conservation biologist and ecotoxicologist working on endangered birds around the world. Since 1988 she has led projects into reversing the decline in several species through research, practical and policy measures at the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and Wildlife and Wetlands Trust.
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Adina Merenlender is a Professor of Cooperative Extension in Conservation Science at University of California, Berkeley in the Environmental Science, Policy, and Management Department, and is an internationally recognized conservation biologist known for land-use planning, watershed science, landscape connectivity, and naturalist and stewardship training.