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CONSERVATION PLANNING--A YOUNG SCIENCE PLAYING IN THE BIG LEAGUE

BY BOB PRESSEY

In April 2001, I received an email from Barry Noon with an interesting subject line: Edward T. LaRoe III Award. Of the messages waiting that morning, this was one of the few I opened straight away. It seemed best to read the others after a second coffee. The contents of Barry's message were surprising, to say the least. Since then I've been to Hilo for SCB's 2001 meeting and attended the meeting banquet and awards ceremony, where I was one of the few without an Aloha shirt. I was honoured and delighted to receive the award and to have a few minutes to address the entire audience with some reflections on the state of conservation planning as a field of science. This column is an attempt to summarize and enlarge on those reflections.

I've been working on conservation planning for around twenty years, if you count the attempts in the early 1980s to apply now-outdated scoring approaches to identify wetlands of high conservation value. Since the late 1980s, I've been working on computerized methods for what was then termed "reserve selection." At that time, and in the early 1990s, ideas and techniques were coming mainly out of Canberra, Sydney, London, and Cape Town. We had a sense of developing a new paradigm and were strongly focused on finding ways of dealing with biodiversity pattern in the form of species localities and maps of vegetation or other land types. Some of us were riding on the wonderful work that had come out of CSIRO on land classification and planning, before the organisation's output was reduced by the accountants who now run the world.

The field of systematic conservation planning has matured considerably since the 1980s. And there are lots of new players in the game from a much larger set of agencies and institutions. Some important changes have happened or are underway:

• The techniques for choosing new reserves are being applied increasingly to guide the location of off-reserve conservation measures. The real issue is not "reserve" but "selection."
• Conservation targets and planning decisions increasingly concern biodiversity as both pattern and process. The planning goal is shifting from representation to persistence.
• People are beginning to distinguish between planning, in the sense of producing a static array of candidate conservation areas, and implementation, in the sense of scheduling the allocation of limited resources strategically in the face of ongoing loss and degradation of native vegetation.
• Some of us have become involved in exercises in real-world planning, combining our principles and techniques, in varying measures of success, with the pragmatism that produces political outcomes.
• Frameworks for planning are beginning to emerge that attempt to integrate previously disparate ideas. Pictures are beginning to take shape of approaches that combine statistics, GIS, selection algorithms, decision-support systems, population viability analyses, metapopulation models, expert workshops, ecosystem management, and experience in making conservation happen on the ground.

A second reason for the gap between science and practice is the immaturity of conservation planning. Activities in fields such as aviation, civil engineering, and medicine are generally based on clear goals. The steps taken to achieve the goals are usually explicit and the outcomes are assessed against predefined criteria which reflect how well the goals were achieved. Approaches that work are pursued. Approaches that don't work are analysed to establish what went wrong. Mistakes can be clearly defined and are generally agreed to be serious. Efforts are made to avoid repeating them. Conservation planning is often a much messier process. Mistakes tend to be difficult to define and are not issues of major public concern. In these ways, conservation planning also differs from many of the well funded and well organized activities that destroy biodiversity. Conservation planning is out of its league.

Two related ways of improving this situation are to encourage debate about approaches to conservation planning and to develop methods for evaluating conservation plans. Debate does not mean endless delays while species become extinct. It means getting on with the job as well as possible while continually improving our methods. The extent and sophistication of debate are presently disappointing. There is confusion over goals and the circumstances under which they must be achieved, leading to ineffective claim and counter-claim. Agencies and NGOs are actively stifling debate to defend turf and avoid exposure of embarrassing failures. Effective debate also has to happen in the face of increasing calls for organisations to work together. From the perspective of someone based near the eastern edge of the world map as it usually appears in the USA, working together could mean several things. The darkest hypothetical scenario would be, say, two major NGOs based in Washington, D.C. forming a kind of coalition with common planning methods. Their combined funds and influence would make them relatively impervious to criticism from small players so constructive debate would be further reduced. A brighter scenario might see cooperation and open, constructive criticism happening together. Stranger things have probably happened.

Part of the brighter scenario could be the development of minimum standards for conservation plans. These would recognise that mistakes in conservation planning are often irretrievable because a cost of bad planning is extinction, as serious as a collapsed bridge or a contaminated blood transfusion. The standards would identify critical requirements without being so prescriptive as to constrain adaptation to local situations and varying levels of resources. Funding of planning processes and their implementation would be contingent on meeting the standards. The standards would themselves be debated and progressively improved. And there would be no need for another cumbersome, expensive layer of bureaucracy. All this might sound fanciful, but it is hard to deny that the standard of conservation planning is very patchy, that scarce resources have been spent on poor planning, and that poor plans pre-empt good ones. We need to begin the discussion on standards for conservation planning soon.

Bob Pressey
New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service
P.O. Box 402, Armidale NSW 2350 Australia
bpressey@ozemail.com.au

Robert Pressey received SCB's Edward T. LaRoe III Memorial Award in recognition of his leadership in translating principles of conservation biology into real-world conservation

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