Peer-reviewed publications

The world's most biodiverse river basins—the Amazon, Congo, and Mekong—are experiencing an unprecedented boom in construction of hydropower dams. These projects address important energy needs, but advocates often overestimate economic benefits and underestimate far-reaching effects on biodiversity and critically important fisheries. Powerful new analytical tools and high-resolution environmental data can clarify trade-offs between engineering and environmental goals and can enable governments and funding institutions to compare alternative sites for dam building. Current site-specific assessment protocols largely ignore cumulative impacts on hydrology and ecosystem services as ever more dams are constructed within a watershed (1). To achieve true sustainability, assessments of new projects must go beyond local impacts by accounting for synergies with existing dams, as well as land cover changes and likely climatic shifts (2, 3). We call for more sophisticated and holistic hydropower planning, including validation of technologies intended to mitigate environmental impacts. Should anything less be required when tampering with the world's great river ecosystems?

Research about ecosystem services (ES) often aims to generate knowledge that influences policies and institutions for conservation and human development. However, we have limited understanding of how decision-makers use ES knowledge or what factors facilitate use. Here we address this gap and report on, to our knowledge, the first quantitative analysis of the factors and conditions that explain the policy impact of ES knowledge. We analyze a global sample of cases where similar ES knowledge was generated and applied to decision-making. We first test whether attributes of ES knowledge themselves predict different measures of impact on decisions. We find that legitimacy of knowledge is more often associated with impact than either the credibility or salience of the knowledge. We also examine whether predictor variables related to the science-to-policy process and the contextual conditions of a case are significant in predicting impact. Our findings indicate that, although many factors are important, attributes of the knowledge and aspects of the science-to-policy process that enhance legitimacy best explain the impact of ES science on decision-making. Our results are consistent with both theory and previous qualitative assessments in suggesting that the attributes and perceptions of scientific knowledge and process within which knowledge is coproduced are important determinants of whether that knowledge leads to action.

There is not an abstract for this publication.

The growing base of information about ecosystem services generated by ecologists, economists, and other scientists could improve the implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of commodity-sourcing standards being adopted by corporations to mitigate risk in their supply chains and achieve sustainability goals. This review examines various ways that information about ecosystem services could facilitate compliance with and auditing of commodity-sourcing standards. We also identify gaps in the current state of knowledge on the ecological effectiveness of sustainability standards and demonstrate how ecosystem-service information could complement existing monitoring efforts to build credible evidence. This paper is a call to the ecosystem-service scientists to engage in this decision context and tailor the information they are generating to the needs of the standards community, which we argue would offer greater efficiency of standards implementation for producers and enhanced effectiveness for standard scheme owners and corporations, and should thus lead to more sustainable outcomes for people and nature.

Quasi-experimental impact evaluation approaches, which enable scholars to disentangle effects of conservation interventions from broader changes in the environment, are gaining momentum in the conservation sector. However, rigorous impact evaluation using statistical matching techniques to estimate the counterfactual have yet to be applied to marine protected areas (MPAs). While there are numerous studies investigating ‘impacts’ of MPAs that have generated considerable insights, results are variable. This variation has been linked to the biophysical and social context in which they are established, as well as attributes of management and governance. To inform decisions about MPA placement, design and implementation, we need to expand our understanding of conditions under which MPAs are likely to lead to positive outcomes by embracing advances in impact evaluation methodologies. Here, we describe the integration of impact evaluation within an MPA network monitoring programme in the Bird's Head Seascape, Indonesia. Specifically we (i) highlight the challenges of implementation ‘on the ground’ and in marine ecosystems and (ii) describe the transformation of an existing monitoring programme into a design appropriate for impact evaluation. This study offers one potential model for mainstreaming impact evaluation in the conservation sector.

Tourism and hunting both generate substantial revenues for communities and private operators in Africa, but few studies have quantitatively examined the trade-offs and synergies that may result from these two activities. We evaluated financial and in-kind benefit streams from tourism and hunting on 77 communal conservancies in Namibia from 1998 to 2013, where community-based wildlife conservation has been promoted as a land-use that complements traditional subsistence agriculture. We used data collected annually for all communal conservancies to characterize whether benefits were derived from hunting or tourism. We classified these benefits into 3 broad classes and examined how benefits flowed to stakeholders within communities under the status quo and under a simulated ban on hunting. Across all conservancies, total benefits from hunting and tourism increased at roughly the same rate, although conservancies typically started generating benefits from hunting within 3 years of formation as opposed to after 6 years for tourism. Disaggregation of data revealed that the main benefits from hunting were income for conservancy management and food in the form of meat for the community at large. The majority of tourism benefits were salaried jobs at lodges. A simulated ban on trophy hunting significantly reduced the number of conservancies that could cover their operating costs, whereas eliminating income from tourism did not have as severe an effect. Given that the benefits generated from hunting and tourism typically begin at different times in a conservancy's life-span (earlier vs. later, respectively) and flow to different segments of local communities, these 2 activities together may provide the greatest incentives for conservation on communal lands in Namibia. A singular focus on either hunting or tourism would reduce the value of wildlife as a competitive land-use option and have grave repercussions for the viability of community-based conservation efforts in Namibia, and possibly other parts of Africa.

The Convention on Biological Diversity's Aichi Target 11 mandates that 17% of terrestrial and 10% of marine environments be conserved in protected areas by 2020. Such simple numeric indicators act as motivators and a measure of progress. But striving to meet the stipulated coverage should not compromise the convention's broader goal of maximizing biodiversity. Area coverage is the only element of Target 11 that is on track, at least on land (D. P. Tittensor et al. Science 346, 241–244; 2014). Other crucial elements are effective, equitable biodiversity management; ecological representation of a mix of ecosystems; and connectivity between sites to allow species dispersal. Some species and ecosystems may be lost if implementation of these elements is delayed much longer. Focusing on area coverage alone risks creating perverse outcomes. It encourages the proliferation of large protected areas that are under little threat, and neglects areas where protection is most needed (see go.nature.com/o5ny9j and go.nature.com/hi6qn5). If not considered in the context of other elements of Target 11, maximizing the area under protection increases the financial and political cost of meeting the same biodiversity goals. As with other global policy goals (see S. Fukuda-Parr J. Hum. Dev. Capab. 15, 118–131; 2014), the abstract global target has created unintended consequences for national conservation planning. With negotiations beginning in 2016 for the next tranche of the convention's targets, new incentives are needed to emphasize the pivotal additional elements of Target 11.

Marine protected areas (MPAs) are increasingly employed worldwide to conserve marine resources. However, information on the role of governance mechanisms, in particular those associated with compliance, in shaping ecological condition inside MPAs at the regional scale remains deficient. An exploratory data analysis was conducted to evaluate links between strategies used to promote compliance with MPA regulations (e.g. incentives and penalties) and indicators of ecological condition, including biomass and density of commercial fish species, fish functional groups and coral cover in 21 MPAs across 13 different countries and territories in the greater Caribbean region. The strategies used to promote compliance with MPA regulations were correlated with indicators of ecological condition. For example, MPAs in which a larger number of incentives and penalties are present in the governance system are associated with higher commercial fish biomass and density as compared to those with fewer penalties and incentives available to promote compliance. Although most MPAs in the greater Caribbean use penalties to enforce compliance, these results suggest incentives may also be an important governance strategy for ensuring efficacy of protected areas in conserving key species. Alternatively, the presence of a high number of penalties and incentives in governance systems may also be indicative of greater state capacity and political will in these MPAs resulting in better managed MPAs. Further research is necessary to evaluate results of the exploratory data analysis presented in this study with a more in depth analysis of the de facto use of the regulations evaluated and their efficacy. Multi-country comparisons of MPA governance and ecological indicators can help policy and decision makers maintain MPAs that most effectively achieve MPA conservation objectives.

Ecological resilience assessments are an important part of resilience-based management (RBM) and can help prioritize and target management actions. Use of such assessments has been limited due to a lack of clear guidance on the assessment process. This study builds on the latest scientific advances in RBM to provide that guidance from a resilience assessment undertaken in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI). We assessed spatial variation in ecological resilience potential at 78 forereef sites near the populated islands of the CNMI: Saipan, Tinian/Aguijan, and Rota. The assessments are based on measuring indicators of resilience processes and are combined with information on anthropogenic stress and larval connectivity. We find great spatial variation in relative resilience potential with many high resilience sites near Saipan (5 of 7) and low resilience sites near Rota (7 of 9). Criteria were developed to identify priority sites for six types of management actions (e.g., conservation, land-based sources of pollution reduction, and fishery management and enforcement) and 51 of the 78 sites met at least one of the sets of criteria. The connectivity simulations developed indicate that Tinian and Aguijan are each roughly 10 × the larvae source that Rota is and twice as frequent a destination. These results may explain the lower relative resilience potential of Rota reefs and indicates that actions in Saipan and Tinian/Aguijan will be important to maintaining supply of larvae. The process we describe for undertaking resilience assessments can be tailored for use in coral reef areas globally and applied to other ecosystems.

Inclusive wealth is a measure designed to address whether society is on a sustainable development trajectory. Inclusive wealth is defined as the aggregate value of all capital assets. Increases in inclusive wealth indicate an improved productive base capable of supporting a higher standard of living in the future. To be truly inclusive, measures of inclusive wealth must include the value of all forms of capital that contribute to human well-being: human capital, manufactured capital, natural capital, and social capital. Sustainability concerns have increased attention on the ways of measuring the value of natural capital. We review various attempts to measure natural capital and to incorporate these into inclusive wealth including estimates using national wealth accounts and integrated ecological and economic models used to estimate ecosystem services. Empirically measuring the value of various types of capital in terms of a common metric is hugely challenging, and no current attempt to date can be said to be fully inclusive. Despite the empirical challenges, inclusive wealth provides a clear, coherent, and systematic framework for addressing sustainable development. Combining measures of semi-inclusive wealth that capture forms of capital that can be relatively easily measured in monetary terms with a set of biophysical metrics capturing important aspects of natural capital that are difficult to measure in monetary terms may provide a good set of signals of whether society is proceeding along a sustainable development trajectory.