2024 conservation wins: bison, tigers & more
- Date: 07 January 2025
We’re kicking off the new year with another edition of Nature Breaking’s “Headlines & Trendlines.” Seth is joined once again by Hayley Lawton as they count down four of their favorite conservation wins from 2024: major progress for bison restoration, a commitment to raise $1 billion to save wild tigers, innovations in “environmental DNA” that could change the way we approach conservation, and the first-ever photograph of a rare bird species.
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Seth and Hayley also close with a discussion of what they’re most excited about heading into 2025.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Seth Larson: Happy New Year, and welcome back to Nature Breaking, a World Wildlife Fund podcast focused on the news and trends affecting our natural world and the people and species who call it home. I'm Seth Larson, and to kick off this new year, I'm bringing back my colleague Hayley Lawton for another edition of Headlines and Trendlines.
Hayley and I will be looking back at four of our favorite conservation wins from 2024. You know, the last 12 months brought plenty of challenges, from extreme weather and climate emergencies to a series of global conferences on major environmental challenges that all fell short of their goals. But 2024 also had some real bright spots that we'll shine a light on today. We'll also talk about a couple of the things we're most excited about for this new year, 2025.
Before we begin, I have a new year's request for you, our listeners and viewers. Please subscribe to Nature Breaking on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening or watching this episode.
Subscribing is free. It ensures that you'll never miss an episode and it helps us build a community of listeners who care about nature. Thank you for listening today. Well and now, let's bring in my co-host, Hayley Lawton.
Hey, Hayley. Welcome back to Nature Breaking.
Hayley Lawton: Hi, Seth. Thanks for having me.
Seth Larson: Yeah. Always my pleasure. Really great to have you back to kick off the new year. And before we dive into our favorite conservation wins from 2024, I wanted to just start with something a little lighter and ask you if you have any personal highlights from 2024, that you'll reflect on most fondly coming into the new year.
Hayley Lawton: Yes, I do actually. So I had the opportunity to travel to Botswana in Africa last July with our, um, travel partners, Natural Habitat Adventures, and it was the best trip I've ever taken so far in my life. I want to go back already. We were on a safari every day. We saw any possible animal you could think of in Africa. We saw it there. It was really fun. It was very surreal.
Seth Larson: Do you have a favorite, animal that you saw while you were there?
Hayley Lawton: I did. I saw cheetahs and cheetahs are also my favorite animal. So that was really cool. We saw, um, yes, it was a pack of brothers, so that was really cool.
Seth Larson: Nice. Well, uh, for me, uh, you know, that cheetahs are also my son's favorite animal, and, um, I think my biggest reflection on 2024 is, I think I'll always remember it as the year my kid started kindergarten. Um, that just was a big and exciting but kind of scary and really meaningful transition in our household to see him go from this sort of very protected daycare environment where everything is structured and there's only a handful of other kids in the class and there's lots of teachers keeping an eye on everyone and all of a sudden he's taking the bus to school and he's kind of having to be responsible for like his own lunch every day and, and figure out the ways of the world and meet new kids and, uh, and deal with different social interactions.
It was really, really cool to see him go through that and just like a big moment for our household. So that's definitely going to be the indelible memory for me of 2024. Not related to conservation so much, but he does really like animals like cheetahs, I said...
Hayley Lawton: Yes, that's very exciting.
Seth Larson: Definitely, um, so, let's talk about 2024 from the perspective of the conservation field that we work in.
WWF recently published a story on our website, highlighting more than 20 big developments in the conservation field from last year. I'm going to include a link in our show notes to that web story in case anyone wants to read the whole list. For now, we're going to just pick four of our favorites to talk about.
So Hayley, I'd love for you to go first and what story do you want to highlight?
Hayley Lawton: Well, there are a lot of great stories to highlight, but I think we should start off with bison and this is really exciting news for bison. So, this past June, WWF and partners launched a new partnership to restore bison back to tribal lands. And this partnership was called the Tribal Buffalo Lifeways Collaboration.
It's not only for cultural and spiritual rejuvenation, but also for ecological restoration and economic development. So this is really cool for bison.
Seth Larson: Yeah, I remember hearing about this one when it launched back in the summer of 2024, and it's really cool. I know it's a partnership between WWF and another, a number of other NGOs, as well as a number of tribes and the US government through the Department of Interior and the Department of Agriculture.
And, you know, this is one of a number of really great moments for bison over the last 12, 14 months. I think in late 2023, there was a big Ken Burns documentary on PBS. Um, there were some other initiatives that launched around that time that WWF was involved in to return bison to places in the northern Great Plains, where they had historically lived, but had been extinct from, uh, for a number of decades. And we were able to work with tribes to bring bison back to those places and return them to their sort of ancestral homelands. And this collaboration, um, that launched last summer is sort of the latest in a series of really good news moments for bison. So that was great to see. So I'll go next and, uh, with my, my second conservation moment from 2024 that I want to highlight, and I'm going to stick in the species conservation realm, um, but I'm going to shift to talk about tigers.
2024 was a big year for the protection of wild tigers in part because of a major conference that was held in Bhutan. The conference brought together leaders from most of the countries where tigers currently live in the wild. And they agreed to collectively raise a billion dollars for tiger conservation over the next 10 years.
This was super important because as we've covered on this podcast before. There's been a lot of progress on tiger conservation over the last decade or so. Tiger populations sort of bottomed out around 2010 with a historic low of 3,200 left in the wild. That number has steadily increased in the last 10, 12, 13 years.
The latest estimate was that there's about 5,500 tigers in the wild today. So that's not quite a doubling of the number of tigers in the wild, but pretty close. And the thing is, to keep that momentum going and to increase it so that we can see even bigger gains, one of the biggest stumbling blocks is lack of financing.
And so this conference was really intended to bring leaders together to talk about how we can raise more money. And they did end the conference by sending, setting this ambitious goal of raising a billion dollars over the next 10 years. So that could potentially unlock a lot of big wins for tigers going forward.
And, um, so it was really exciting to see. And I was, I was really happy to hear about it.
Hayley Lawton: That's really great. Um, and even though it's not a huge, huge number of tigers right now, but I mean, it's still a step. And a small step, that's a win.
Seth Larson: Definitely. Absolutely. It's, it's those little building blocks that add up to major progress down the road.
Exactly, exactly. And Seth, I am glad that you mentioned Bhutan because this next story I wanted to mention is It actually took place in Bhutan. WWF is testing eDNA technology, and that just means environmental DNA, and that's being used to help monitor biodiversity. And here's how it works. So, animals naturally shed their DNA throughout their movement in their environment, whether it's through their feces, or skin cells, or etc. And with that, scientists can test that and sample it through the soil, the water, snow, or even the air to determine what species are in the area, especially endangered species. Yeah, that's really amazing stuff. It's, it's so incredible that scientists are able to isolate those little strands of animal DNA from a soil sample or a water sample. I know the study you referenced in Bhutan was focusing mostly on sampling water from, uh, from rivers and streams. So it was flowing water.
I know part of the study was actually identifying that water collected from flowing water um, it provides better data for animal DNA than water collected from like standing water puddles or, or the like.
Um, but, uh, one of the really cool things that I've learned about this idea of eDNA is it really enables us to do the work we need to do for conservation in a less invasive way, because historically, if we needed to collect data about a species, whether it's a tiger or, uh, a polar bear or anything else, we often needed to… I don't mean me and you "we," but conservationists needed to tranquilize the animal and sedate it and collect, you know, a blood sample or a skin sample or a hair sample to be able to take back to the lab, to identify, uh, the health of that animal, what its diet was like, what its life cycle was like to then be able to take that information and apply it to the conservation work we're doing to be able to better protect those species.
Collecting eDNA allows us to get a lot of that same information without having any interaction with the animal.
So we're not having to, you know, put the animal in any potential danger. We're also not having to put conservationists any, any potential danger because they're not interacting directly with the animal.
And obviously if you're trying to collect data about a tiger or an elephant that can be like potentially pretty dangerous for the people too. So, um, there's, there's a lot of cool reasons that this work is so important, but that was one that stood out to me that just made a lot of sense. Like, oh, that's so much easier for these scientists who are doing this.
Hayley Lawton: It is. And I just, I just think it is just so cool because I remember hearing about it the first time and I was like, what is eDNA? Like, what is that? But I love it. I think this is great.
Seth Larson: Alright. So the last story that we wanted to talk about today, uh, for our 2024 review is a pretty fun one. Um, and the story is back in September, a rare new Britain goshawk was photographed for the first time in history. The photographer, a man named Tom Vierus, it's spelled V I E R U S, and I hope I'm pronouncing that right.
Um, he was part of a WWF expedition on the Island of New Britain in Papua New Guinea, which is just due north of Australia in the Pacific Ocean. And apparently this bird had been spotted before, but never photographed. And the last time a physical specimen was found was in 1969, which was way before either of us were born, Hayley.
Um, so. You know, it's always surprising to hear nowadays that anything could go unseen, let alone unphotographed for that long. People are everywhere, and all of us have our cell phones connected to our hip, and we're snapping photos of everything we see. So, the idea that this species could go unseen and unphotographed for so long really struck me, and it was just kind of an interesting reminder that nature still has its secrets sometimes.
Hayley Lawton: Yes.
Seth Larson: Those are the big four stories that we wanted to highlight, uh, as we reflect on 2024. Again, I'll link to the whole article that WWF published. There's more than 20 stories in there. They're all super interesting. These were just four of our favorites. Um, and before we wrap up today, I do have one more question for you, Hayley.
Uh, looking ahead to 2025, what are you most excited about going forward in the world of conservation?
Hayley Lawton: That's a good question, Seth. I think I'm going to take it back to the eDNA.
Seth Larson: Okay.
Hayley Lawton: I am really excited to see what other discoveries come with this, what other species we find. If there are any species that we've never seen before, that would be really cool to discover. I was actually just telling my family about eDNA over the holidays about how cool it is, the technology. So I think that's what I'm most excited about too.
Seth Larson: That's a great point of what species we might not even, uh, know we're looking for that we might find. Maybe the New Britain Goshawk would have been located earlier if we'd been applying eDNA in Papua New Guinea. And maybe we'll do that there and find out that there's way more of them than we thought there were. And we, they're just really good at hiding.
Hayley Lawton: Exactly.
Seth Larson: So my big thing that I'm looking forward to in 2025 is that, um, listeners might remember that the UN Biodiversity Conference in October of last year concluded without a final agreement on how to finance global biodiversity work.
That conference is now scheduled to resume in late February in Rome. And I was following the conference really closely in October. It was really disappointing to see it fall apart at the end. So I'm very hopeful that negotiators are going to be able to finish out their work and deliver a plan to raise the funds required to protect species and ecosystems all around the world.
I think that would be a really nice end note to a conference that started with a lot of hope, um, kind of struggled to, to grind to a conclusion, but it's getting a second chance to sort of get things right and to get that big win that we need to protect biodiversity going forward.
So I'll be looking forward to seeing what happens there.
Hayley Lawton: Same, same. That'd be cool.
Seth Larson: All right, Hayley. Well, thanks so much for joining me again for an episode of Headlines and Trendlines on Nature Breaking. It's always great to have you. Um, I love these conversations. We'll be doing more of them in 2025 and I'll end by saying happy new year.
Hayley Lawton: Happy New Year, Seth, and I will see you in 2025.
Seth Larson: That's a wrap for today's Headlines and Trendlines edition of Nature Breaking. Thanks to Hayley for joining once again to co-host and for sharing her favorite conservation wins from 2024.
For me, this conversation was a great reminder that even in trying times, we can still make real progress in the fight to protect nature. 2025 will present plenty of opportunities to do that again, from the resumption of the UN Biodiversity talks in February to the finalization of negotiations on a global plastics treaty later in the year.
This year will no doubt also bring its share of challenges, but let's start the new year off on the right foot and resolve to look for opportunities where they might present themselves and together to keep building a more sustainable future. Thanks for listening.