The Case for Conservation Podcast

As a result of our success as a species, we have been ushering other species toward extinction for thousands of years. The pace of those extinctions increased markedly with the growth of the world’s …

Many conservation managers and scientists may not be aware that there is a single, common set of global biodiversity targets that inform national conservation strategy in almost every country in the …

This month’s episode is about activism and science communication, and whether or not they should be combined. There are obvious tensions here because science is meant to be as objective as possible, …

Climate change gets a lot more attention and funding than biodiversity. But, as conservation organizations are keen to point out, climate and biodiversity are intimately linked and there is, therefor…

In decades past, conservation was notorious for ignoring other development goals. These days, its focus has expanded to consider those other goals, including the prevention of poverty and hunger. In …

Species. We take them for granted as the main currency of biodiversity. But how many of us really know what species are? And do we attach too much importance to them, especially in the context of con…

Historically, the oceans have received too little attention in discussions about the environment and biodiversity. On the topic of biodiversity loss in particular, however, one marine system has attr…

ESG is the latest buzzword in business & biodiversity circles, but it’s not actually new - only newly popular. And it’s one among many terms and acronyms in this field, which may be familiar but are …

There is a tendency in societies to adhere to conventional wisdom. We resist challenges to consensus views, and may even dismiss those who do challenge them as conspiracy theorists... which they some…

You may have heard of the concept of “biodiversity risk”, especially in the context of business. It has become increasingly widely used in recent years and the Task Force on Nature-related Financial …

Wherever conservation takes place, at whatever scale, and in whatever form, there’s a good chance that it is somehow affected by the decisions taken under multilateral environmental agreements, or “M…

In days gone by development (of cities, infrastructure, agriculture, etc.) happened without regard for the environment. And it was really the devastating effects of unimpeded development that led to …

After decades of struggling for recognition, environmental issues, including biodiversity conservation, have exploded onto the global scene in recent years. This is incredibly encouraging and gratify…

After decades of struggling for recognition, environmental issues, including biodiversity conservation, have exploded onto the global scene in recent years. This is incredibly encouraging and gratify…

This month, for the first time, I am the interviewee rather than the interviewer. This episode was recorded for BioScience Talks, the podcast of the journal BioScience, which recently published an ar…

Covid-19 has, probably more than anything, ever, made science communication a matter of public interest. A couple of weeks before recording this episode, the journal BioScience published an article t…

Cities - even the greenest of them - replace nature with glass, concrete and asphalt. And their footprint extends far beyond their boundaries to provide for the needs of the thousands, millions, or t…

Few technologies are viewed with as much suspicion as genetic modification. Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are banned in several parts of the world; an entire protocol under the Convention on …

This episode is about environmental alarmism. Alarmism means exaggerating danger and thereby causing needless worry or panic. These days the media is flooded with proclamations and predictions of eco…

Most people outside Africa probably don’t associate trophy hunting with conservation. In fact, certain publicized incidents of trophy hunting have caused something of a global moral panic. The same o…