̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - BirdLife International

Conservation efforts are bringing species back from the brink

sc604 — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 18:30:46 +0000

A major review of over 67,000 animal species has found that while the natural world continues to face a biodiversity crisis, targeted conservation efforts are helping bring many species back from the brink of extinction.

Sir David Attenborough's 'joy' on visit to Cambridge Conservation Initiative

plc32 — Fri, 27 Sep 2024 16:01:44 +0000

Sir David said of visiting CCI that he felt “an undercurrent of joy” whenever he came to the conservation campus, which is housed in the building bearing his own name.

̽��ֱ��campus was opened in 2016 and is the first of its kind, with over 500 conservation professionals and researchers, from 10 different organisations and the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, all collaborating to stop the biodiversity crisis and build more hopeful futures for people and nature.

Read the full story: 'An Undercurrent of Joy'

Sir David Attenborough spoke of how he feels during visits to the Cambridge Conservation Initiative (CCI) when he stopped by the CCI conservation campus at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge this week.

Cambridge Conservation Initiative

Photo of Sir David Attenborough on a visit to Cambridge Conservation Research Initiative

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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At least 80% of the world’s most important sites for biodiversity on land currently contain human developments

cg605 — Thu, 23 Mar 2023 07:34:07 +0000

A study has found that infrastructure worldwide is widespread in sites that have been identified as internationally important for biodiversity, and its prevalence is likely to increase.

This is the first ever assessment of the presence of infrastructure in Key Biodiversity Areas (KBAs): a global network of thousands of sites recognised internationally as being the world’s most critical areas for wildlife.

Infrastructure is one of the greatest drivers of threats to biodiversity according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. It can cause natural habitat destruction and fragmentation, pollution, increased disturbance or hunting by humans, the spread of invasive species, direct mortality, and can have wider impacts beyond the development site.

Now, researchers from BirdLife International, WWF and the RSPB, in association with the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, have conducted an assessment of infrastructure in KBAs, finding that it is widespread and likely to increase. ̽��ֱ��results are published today in Biological Conservation.

“It’s concerning that human developments exist in the vast majority of sites that have been identified as being critical for nature,” said Ash Simkins, a Zoology PhD student at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge who led the study.

KBAs are sites that contribute significantly to the global persistence of biodiversity. For example, they may contain species that are under a high risk of extinction or are home to species or ecosystems that are found in only a small area worldwide.

Researchers assessed 15,150 KBAs on land and found that 80% contained infrastructure. Multiple combinations of infrastructure types occurred in KBAs with the most common being roads (75%), power lines (37%) and urban areas (37%).

They found that potential future planned infrastructure developments could lead to an additional 2,201 KBAs containing mines (from 754 to 2,955; 292% increase), an additional 1,508 KBAs containing oil and gas infrastructure (from 2,081 to 3,589; 72% increase) and an additional 1,372 KBAs containing power plants (from 233 to 1,605; 589% increase).

Maps of KBAs were intersected with spatial datasets of different types of infrastructure that researchers categorised as transport, dams and reservoirs, extractives (relating to natural resources), energy (power lines and power plants) and urban areas.

Energy and extractives were the only categories for which some global data on potential future planned developments was available.

“We recognise that infrastructure is essential to human development but it’s about building smartly. This means ideally avoiding or otherwise minimising infrastructure in the most important locations for biodiversity. If the infrastructure must be there, then it should be designed to cause as little damage as possible, and the impacts more than compensated for elsewhere,” said Simkins.

Researchers found that countries in South America, (for example 82% of KBAs in Brazil), Sub-Saharan, Central and Southern Africa, and parts of South-east Asia are amongst the areas with the highest proportion of extractive claims, concessions or planned development in their KBA networks. All of the KBAs identified to date in Bangladesh, Kuwait, the Republic of the Congo and Serbia have potential extractive claims, concessions or planned development.

“It’s also concerning to see that in the future, extensive mining and oil and gas related infrastructure is planned to be built in many of the world’s most important sites for biodiversity,” said Simkins.

Some of the technology to tackle the climate crisis, like solar panels and wind turbines, is also dependent on mining for precious metals. “We need smart solutions to the climate crisis whilst avoiding or minimising negative impacts on biodiversity,” said Simkins.

“At the UN biodiversity COP15 meetings in Montreal last year, governments committed to halting human-induced extinctions,” said co-author Dr Stuart Butchart, Chief Scientist at BirdLife International and Honorary Research Fellow at Cambridge’s Department of Zoology. “Widespread destruction or degradation of the natural habitats within KBAs could lead to wholesale extinctions, so existing infrastructure in KBAs must be managed to minimise impacts, and further development in these sites has to be avoided as far as possible.”

“Infrastructure underpins our societies, delivering the water we drink, the roads we travel on, and the electricity that powers livelihoods,” said Wendy Elliott, Deputy Leader for Wildlife at WWF. “This study illustrates the crucial importance of ensuring smart infrastructure development that provides social and economic value for all, whilst ensuring positive outcomes for nature. Making this happen will be the challenge of our time, but with the right planning, design and commitment it is well within the realms of possibility.”

Researchers say that infrastructure within a KBA varies in the degree to which it may drive a loss of biodiversity. More research is required to find out the extent to which infrastructure in a particular KBA affects wildlife within the site and what measures are needed to mitigate this.

Reference: A T Simkins et al, A global assessment of the prevalence of current and potential future infrastructure in Key Biodiversity Areas, Biological Conservation, DOI: 10.1016/j.biocon.2023.109953

At least 80% of sites identified as being internationally important for biodiversity on land currently contain infrastructure − of which more than 75% contain roads. In the future, more sites that are important for biodiversity could contain powerplants, mines and oil and gas infrastructure

It’s concerning that human developments exist in the vast majority of sites that have been identified as being critical for nature.

Ash Simkins

EduLeite / E+ via Getty Images

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Climate change threat to seabirds must be properly considered for their conservation to be effective

jg533 — Wed, 09 Mar 2022 05:01:00 +0000

Seabirds such as kittiwakes and puffins are being put at higher risk because of a disconnect between conservation efforts on the ground, and research knowledge of the threats to these birds from climate change. However, a new study has found that better integration of the two is possible to safeguard biodiversity.

̽��ֱ��study, published today in the Journal of Applied Ecology, involved leading conservation experts at the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, BirdLife International, RSPB and the IUCN Climate Change Specialist Group.

It revealed that the climate change threats highlighted by European seabird conservation groups are often poorly understood. In addition, almost one third of possible conservation interventions aimed at reducing the impacts of climate change on seabirds have conflicting or lack of evidence on their effectiveness.

̽��ֱ��team has proposed an approach for connecting conservation research and management, which they call a ‘pressure-state-response framework.’ This provides a platform for identifying missing information and areas where connections need to be tightened to improve conservation outcomes.

Co-author Dr Silviu Petrovan - a researcher in the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Department of Zoology - said: “Climate change is happening at frightful pace, but our understanding and testing of practical responses for protecting biodiversity are lagging behind. This must change if we are to make substantive improvements - and seabirds are an urgent example.”

Lead author and ZSL Institute of Zoology post-doctoral fellow, Henry Hakkinen said: “There is a real opportunity here to identify missing information, and marry existing research on the risks of climate change with effective conservation and wildlife management.”

"Through our work we have identified several climate change threats and conservation actions that are well understood, but also several threats that are poorly understood and several actions that have very limited or mixed evidence on their effectiveness. These gaps urgently need addressing if we want to work out how we can best help seabirds adapt to climate change and survive.

“Seabirds in Europe are heavily researched and receive quite a lot of conservation attention. They are also heavily impacted by climate change, so are a good species group to start with."

For the study, the team sent a series of surveys to more than 180 seabird conservation practitioners across Western Europe. They identified major knowledge gaps and began tallying up ways in which conservation action could address some of the major threats posed to the species by climate change.

For example, 45% of those surveyed said that disease risk from climate change was a serious threat to seabird populations, but the study showed that more needed to be done to monitor the effectiveness of conservation tools available to practitioners to address this. Hand rearing and vaccinations are suggested tools that could help.

“We need to be pragmatic and evidence-based - but also bold, and explore new approaches including, where appropriate, supporting colonisations of new habitat or even creating new habitats or breeding structures for seabirds. Bridging climate change research and conservation action has never been more important,” said Petrovan.

Seabirds represent one of the most threatened groups of birds in the world, with almost half of all species in decline. They are also significantly directly and indirectly threatened by climate change – for example by heatwaves, extreme wind and rain, and changes in food availability in response to changing climatic conditions, which lead to lack of fish for chicks during the nesting season.

Frameworks that link pressures on the environment, their effect on biodiversity and ways society can respond are often used in global policy-making to translate research to action. ̽��ֱ��team suggests that their ‘pressure-state-response framework’ could be applied to specific groups of species or ecosystems to identify existing gaps between research and conservation solutions for wildlife most at risk.

ZSL Senior Research Fellow and senior author Dr Nathalie Pettorelli said: “Our study provides an easily transferable approach for identifying missing information, and areas where connections between research and management need to be tightened to improve conservation outcomes.”

This research was funded by Stichting Ave Fenix Europa.

Reference

Hakkinen, H. et al: ‘Linking climate change vulnerability research and evidence on conservation action effectiveness to safeguard seabird populations in Western Europe.’ Journal of Applied Ecology, March 2022.

Adapted from a press release by the Zoological Society of London.

A new study shows how knowledge of climate change threats could be better connected with conservation efforts to help protect seabirds and other at-risk species.

Bridging climate change research and conservation action has never been more important.

Silviu Petrovan

Seppo Häkkinen, Third-Eye Photography

Puffins

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These birds will soon go extinct. But their disappearance need not be in vain.

jg533 — Wed, 19 May 2021 19:11:36 +0000

̽��ֱ��White-tailed Swallow and Ethiopian Bush-crow are living in ‘climatic lifeboats’ with their tiny ranges restricted on all sides by temperature and rainfall patterns. Even under moderate climate warming, models predict a severe loss of suitable climate for these birds within the next 50 years - dramatically heightening their risk of extinction.

Online resource to support the work of biodiversity conservation organisations

lw355 — Wed, 01 Oct 2014 08:01:57 +0000

Capacityforconservation.org is a free online resource designed to act as a central hub where biodiversity conservation organisations can download tools, contribute their expertise, and learn from one another to strengthen their ability to address complex conservation challenges.

Knowing the best way for an organisation to develop to become a sustainable and resilient entity, or even understanding the questions the organisation needs to ask of itself in order to start this development, can be a daunting challenge.

̽��ֱ��new resource recognises that conservation organisations often ask similar questions as to how they can best address the challenges they are tackling – whether it’s a local organisation on the Kenyan coast seeking to improve the sustainable management of marine and coastal resources or a grassroots non-government organisation trying to tackle the trade in threatened species in Vietnam.

Capacityforconservation.org provides resources such as published reports, case studies and indicators that these types of organisations can use to help them answer their questions, as well as a global platform for organisations to share best practice with one another. Having a single source of information and a platform where organisations can share their experiences of undertaking their own development will be a significant benefit to these organisations, and, in turn, the conservation actions they are undertaking.

Christina Garcia, Director of the Ya’axché Conservation Trust, Belize, and a user of capacityforconservation.org said: “Accessing different tools on the Capacity for Conservation website allowed Ya’axché to realise the experiences we have are shared among organisations around the world.”

In addition to access to resources and examples of best practice, capacityforconservation.org also offers self-led organisational health checks for conservation organisations. ̽��ֱ��results of these health checks indicate areas where organisations could consider improving their capacity, along with recommendations for tools on the website that the organisation could use to do so. An organisation that needs to work on its financial management, for example, would be directed to over 25 resources, ranging from a guide to budgetary management to a document about risk analysis.

Professor Nigel Leader-Williams, Director of Conservation Leadership at the Department of Geography, is a member of the consortium who developed capacityforconservation.org. “ ̽��ֱ��site seeks to offer conservation organisations around the world the ability to self-check their capacity to meet the immense organisational challenges they face in saving biodiversity globally.

“Based around an easy to navigate and attractive interface, capacityforconservation.org has the potential to make a real difference to the ability of conservation organisations to implement conservation actions on the ground. Developed by a group of partners in the Cambridge Conservation Initiative, the resource draws on the experience within CCI and its networks to offer a unique resource to conservation practitioners world-wide.”

Capacityforconservation.org has been developed by the Capacity for Conservation Collaboration, a joint initiative between the Cambridge Conservation Initiative’s partners BirdLife International, Fauna & Flora International, the Tropical Biology Association and the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Department of Geography, with funds from the Cambridge Conservation Initiative’s Collaborative Fund for Conservation.

Capacityforconservation.org currently contains over 140 tools, resources and case studies gathered by leading conservation organisations. Resources are available in 18 languages, and work is under way to translate the site into Spanish, Portuguese and Italian.

A free online resource, launched today (1 October), will help conservation organisations share expertise and tools, aiding them in addressing some of the planet’s most challenging conservation issues.

Capacityforconservation.org has the potential to make a real difference to the ability of conservation organisations to implement conservation actions on the ground

Nigel Leader-Williams

Paul Haigh

Bee

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page. For image rights, please see the credits associated with each individual image.

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Putting a value on what nature does for us

sc604 — Thu, 11 Sep 2014 13:00:00 +0000

A new online resource, developed by researchers at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge in collaboration with other organisations based in Cambridge, helps those in both the public and private sector see how changes to an ecosystem can affect its value, in order to make more informed decisions about how the natural environment should be developed.

̽��ֱ��Toolkit for Ecosystem Service Site-based Assessment (TESSA) was launched online this week to coincide with the 7th Annual Ecosystem Services Partnership Conference in Costa Rica, and allows users to make a direct comparison of the value that an ecosystem can provide to a community in different states, by providing access to state of the art information about their financial value.

Ecosystems provide us with an extensive range of benefits for free, often described as ‘ecosystem services’. These benefits include the provision of food and clean water, erosion control and carbon storage. A reduction or loss of these services can have severe economic, social and environmental impacts. However, methods for obtaining such data are frequently too expensive, or too technically demanding, to be of practical value.

TESSA has been developed by a consortium of experts from six institutions, including staff at the Departments of Geography and Zoology. It allows non-experts to derive reasonable estimates that an individual location provides to society, both locally and globally. TESSA provides guidance and methods to value the services provided by an ecosystem at a specific location compared to the likely provision of such services under different management decisions. This allows the consequences of alternative management decisions to be assessed.

“If a mangrove forest was cut down and turned into a shrimp farm, or a forest was converted to grassland - what is the value of each of those habitats and what is the impact of such a change on different people? We can now provide a quantitative way of determining the value of the many ways in which an ecosystem works for us,” said Dr Iris Möller of the Department of Geography and Fitzwilliam College, one of the leaders of the project. “A thirsty forest may help prevent flooding in an area, but it can also contribute to drought. This tool allows us to determine what would happen to that water if the forest were to be cut down.”

TESSA addresses the gap in valuation tools available for non-expert use at the site level and to date has been used at 24 sites spread across five continents. Most users have been conservation practitioners, although the methods are applicable to a wide range of users, including natural resource managers, land-use planners, development organisations and the private sector.

“We hope that by making TESSA more intuitive to use, and available both on- and offline, many more people will be able to assess the ecosystem service values of sites and how they might change under different land use decisions,” says Jenny Merriman, BirdLife’s Ecosystem Services Officer and TESSA Coordinator.

“This information is critical for informing decision-making at the local level and when scaled up, can demonstrate the social and environmental consequences of our actions,” said Möller.

Building on previous funding from other sources, including the Cambridge Conservation Initiative (CCI), the development of the interactive TESSA manual was funded by an ESRC Impact Acceleration Account pilot grant awarded to Cambridge ̽��ֱ��. TESSA is an evolving resource and, subject to continued funding, more content will be added in future versions.

TESSA is the result of a collaboration between the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, Anglia Ruskin ̽��ֱ��, BirdLife International, Tropical Biology Association, RSPB, and UNEP-WCMC.

Interactive online tool allows the value of an ecosystem to be calculated, and allows users to determine how altering a habitat can affect its economic, social and environmental worth.

We can now provide a quantitative way of determining the value of the many ways in which an ecosystem works for us

Iris Möller

Phil's 1stPix via flickr

West Summerland Key Mangrove Ecosystem, Florida Keys

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Climate change: can nature help us?

Anonymous — Wed, 08 May 2013 11:05:19 +0000

Flooding, landslides, crop failure, water shortages. Across the globe, the frequency with which humans are suffering the ill effects of climatic variability and extreme weather events is on the increase. Can natural environments be used effectively to help people adapt to the effects of climate change? ̽��ֱ��first systematic review of this question – facilitated by the Cambridge Conservation Initiative (CCI) Collaborative Fund for Conservation – finds much evidence of their effectiveness.

" ̽��ֱ��delays in international agreements on ways to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions mean that planning to counter the impacts of climate change is a necessity,” said Robert Munroe, Climate Change Officer at BirdLife International. “Governments of all countries should be making plans to protect us against these impacts.”

One adaptation option is to invest in costly, large-scale structures such as sea walls, irrigation systems and dams. But while their short-term impact is clear, these solutions lead to ever-increasing maintenance costs and often have negative impacts on local ecosystems and biodiversity.

“International policy makers are having to think about the different approaches they could take, but the problem is that they don’t have enough information to make informed decisions,” said Munroe.

“Hard-engineered sea walls have a limited life span, and we know that they change wave and tidal currents, often to the detriment of saltmarshes or mangroves that act as a natural buffer to storm surges and coastal erosion. Do we really want to lose these buffers and face increasing costs of sea wall maintenance?” asked Dr Iris Möller, Deputy Director of the Cambridge Coastal Research Unit in the Department of Geography.

“There’s anecdotal evidence from events like the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that villages surrounded by mangroves were significantly less affected by the tsunami than more exposed areas,” she added. ̽��ֱ��mangroves may have saved thousands of lives and properties by absorbing a large proportion of the energy in the waves.

But local anecdotal evidence is not enough to provide a reliable measurement of the effectiveness of an approach. Now a review has been completed of the effectiveness of natural approaches to buffering the effects of climate change. Termed Ecosystem-based approaches for Adaptation (EbA), this relatively new concept incorporates approaches that have been used for a long time to address climatic variability, but not necessarily in the context of adaptation to climate change.

“We wanted to understand what the research evidence tells us, in terms of the relative importance of ecosystems as opposed to hard-engineering solutions to the same problem,” said Dr Bhaskar Vira in the Department of Geography. Vira, Möller, Dr Tom Spencer (Director of the Cambridge Coastal Research Unit) and Dr Andreas Kontoleon (Department of Land Economy) worked with climate change policy expert Munroe at BirdLife and climate change expert Dr Nathalie Doswald at the United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre, as well as with the International Institute for Environment and Development in London. They looked at published studies from around the world in which a wide range of EbA had been assessed. ̽��ֱ��step-by-step detail of their systematic review method was published in Experimental Evidence in 2012, which will enable it to be replicated for consistency in future studies.

“ ̽��ֱ��systematic review is very specific: we sifted out the most relevant published studies and compiled evidence from them on the different interventions being used and how effective they have been,” said Vira. ̽��ֱ��team found that activities related to EbA have been used across the globe to address a broad range of climatic hazards and impacts.

Interventions include the sustainable management of wetlands and floodplains to act as floodwater reservoirs and provide important water stores for times of drought, and the conservation and restoration of forests and natural vegetation to stabilise slopes and regulate water flows, preventing flash floods and landslides due to increased rainfall. Most of the approaches were reported by the studies to be effective in reducing human vulnerability to the effects of climate change, climatic variability or natural hazards.

“ ̽��ֱ��results are providing general guidance on the circumstances in which an EbA may be useful,” said Vira. “There are cases where it isn’t necessarily going to be helpful – if you live in Gloucestershire and you’re about to get flooded, you can’t start planting trees, you have to use sandbags. These interventions take time, and there are limitations to their effectiveness.”

“It’s important to work towards fully informed decision-making between alternative adaptation approaches,” said Munroe. “Large-scale infrastructural solutions may tend to be pursued because the financial costs are clear and their short-term effectiveness at buffering hazards has been tested by engineers. But by constraining natural ecological cycles, they may increase social vulnerability in the medium to long term. We found some discussions on the comparison between ecosystem-based and other kinds of approaches to adaptation, which are valuable for policy makers.”

“We also realised there are some real knowledge gaps,” added Möller. “We need information on the costs as well as the benefits, and on whether monitoring systems have been put in place to assess the long-term effectiveness of these approaches. With respect to ecosystems as coastal protection, for example, we need to know exactly how much energy mangroves and marshes absorb and what we can do to maximise and maintain the effect.”

̽��ֱ��project collaborators recognise that the divide between scientific research and policy making must be bridged if governments are to make the best decisions for long-term adaptation to climate change. “Our partnership with NGO colleagues meant the project has both academic rigour and a built-in pathway to impact,” said Vira. ̽��ֱ��Collaborative Fund for Conservation, which was established with the generous support of the Arcadia Fund, was set up explicitly to foster these innovative partnerships.

̽��ֱ��team’s collective range of contacts has enabled them to disseminate their results and recommendations. Their presentations at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Durban in December 2012, and the distribution of briefing papers and guidance documents, have drawn the attention of decision-makers at the highest levels to the possibilities of ecosystem-based approaches.

“A technical workshop on EbA, likely to involve 70 countries, was recently convened by the Climate Change Convention,” said Munroe. “Our work contributed to the momentum that resulted in this decision. It’s really exciting as it’s the first time the Convention has met to discuss this approach.”

“EbA is an important tool in the adaptation toolkit, which has often been ignored because the evidence base had not been made clear,” said Munroe. “Employing it alongside other adaptation options will result in much more sustainable responses to the effects of climate change in both developed and developing countries.”

Hard-engineered sea walls have a limited life span. Could saltmarshes and mangroves offer a different approach to buffering against storm surges and coastal erosion?

Do we really want to lose these buffers and face increasing costs of sea wall maintenance?

Iris Moller

Saltmarshes starting to be inundated by the tide at Abbots Hall, Cumbria, UK

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