Innovate or Watch Rare Species Disappear

New Scientist, September 13, 2007

Peter Aldhous and Bob Holmes

It is one of the most depressing lists ever created. Species by species, the World Conservation Union's Red List, published this week, details the huge swathe of life being driven towards oblivion.

According to the list, 16,306 species are now defined as vulnerable, endangered or critically endangered. According to the best available data, 51 per cent of invertebrate species, 39 per cent of fish, 31 per cent of reptiles and amphibians, 20 per cent of mammals and 12 per cent of birds are threatened. “We're losing the battle on almost every front,” says Gretchen Daily of Stanford University, California.

However, while the Red List details a biodiversity crisis that is all too familiar, the tactics required to tackle it are not. “Traditional approaches on their own are utterly doomed to failure,” says Daily. So she and other conservationists are introducing a raft of innovative policies in a bid to save as many species as they can.

There are a host of reasons why traditional approaches are failing, Daily argues. Given the extent of habitat destruction, even a massive expansion of protected areas could probably only protect 5 per cent of species. The trade in wild species continues, and the spread of invasive plants and animals increasingly threatens native varieties. Even in pristine habitats, climate change is shifting species boundaries too fast for many creatures to adapt.

Such enormous challenges require radical solutions. One approach is to use market forces to safeguard ecosystems. This is the goal of an emerging trend known as the “ecosystem services” approach. Championed by Daily and Peter Kareiva, lead scientist with The Nature Conservancy (TNC), among others, the idea is to put a monetary value on the services that healthy ecosystems provide for human populations - from the role of forest cover in preventing soil erosion and flooding, to the pollination of crops by insects, and revenues from ecotourism. Conservationists would then work with local governments, industry and the financial markets to set up incentives encouraging measures for the protection of ecosystems and the vital services they provide.

This, the theory goes, should protect biodiversity more effectively than approaches that simply rely on appealing to moral duty or the aesthetic attraction of conserving nature.

Ecosystem services schemes are now being implemented around the world. It is too early to point to many clear success stories, but perhaps the most ambitious effort is a collaboration launched in 2006 involving Stanford University, TNC and the WWF. Called the Natural Capital Project, or NatCap, it is working to apply the principles of ecosystem services in four regions of threatened biodiversity: the Hawaiian islands, the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California, the Eastern Arc mountains in Tanzania and China's upper Yangtze basin.

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