When many people think about conservation, they have in mind these natural systems of land or seascapes that are full of plants and animals. But that perspective lacks a really critically important component, and that is people. People around the world interact with biodiversity, they make decisions about biodiversity that can lead to higher levels or lower levels of biodiversity. And in fact, this is in the present but also in the past even some of the most like iconic areas for conservation work such as the Amazonian rainforest are often proclaimed as the last areas of the world that are untouched by humans. But these areas actually grow on rich soils that were modified by humans thousands of years ago. They burned, they mulched and they basically worked that land. And that's why we have incredible diversity in some of these Amazonian rainforests. So that begs the question, what's natural or what's pristine? Does the fact that people worked those areas before these Amazonian forests grew make it no longer an important conservation target? Definitely not. Does this mean that we can do anything we want in the world and destroy biodiversity and eventually biodiversity will prevail and renew itself? Definitely not. It just means that including humans as a part of our consideration in thinking about conservation, is a wise thing to do. It's a wise thing to do because everyone interacts with biodiversity, whether for their livelihoods as fishermen or farmers or for their leisure activities such as hiking or going outdoors. Even people who live in highly urbanized areas experience a connection to biodiversity through parks and community gardens, for example. People everywhere benefit from the services that ecosystems provide such as water filtration and reduced air pollution. So managing human behavior, is an important element of conservation. Work around the world from conservation psychology to anthropology to indigenous movements to protected area management, underscores the importance of understanding motivations for action. Why do people behave as they do? Why do they make the choices that they make? Why do they make choices that result in enhancing or depleting biodiversity? And how can we encourage them to make more choices that help to enhance biodiversity as well as human wellbeing? So at the base of these decisions and behaviors, are people's worldviews and their value systems. If we look, for example, at a coral reef, a local tour guide who relies on income from international tourists might be interested in promoting flashy species that will attract tourists. A local resident might prefer a reef system that provides a favored foods for instance. And a local scientist might value a reef that harbor species that are found only there and nowhere else in the world no matter what that species looks like or tastes like. So what people value influences their actions. And then human actions, knowledge, and beliefs influences the land and seascapes around them. People in turn are influenced by the landscapes in which they're apart. So the dynamic connections between people and place and the continuing adaptation and co-evolution between landscapes and ways of life, is critical to functioning systems. Over time, these relationships result in communities with deeply rooted knowledge about their natural environment and how that environment supports their own well-being. If you extend the definition of conservation to encompass the inextricable link between humans and their environment and the dynamic connections and feedbacks between the two, you might actually identify a different set of problems and a different set of solutions than if you just consider biodiversity from one set of lenses and people from another. You might also choose to measure and monitor different indicators of success. So indicators, are variables that help summarize complex situations and help you to communicate that with different people, to policymakers, to governments and to other organisations. What we choose to measure and communicate represents our value systems and what we define as important. To return to the coral reef example, a conservation approach that puts cultural values and knowledges at the forefront and acknowledges the interactions between people in place. What could be called a bio cultural approach to conservation, that might value and measure, not just the fish population size but the knowledge needed to maintain those populations. It might focus on who is observing increases and declines across a reef and within fish populations. Why and how are decisions made to harvest or not? How did these decisions evolve with changing tools, techniques and contexts? And how is knowledge passed along from one generation to the other? This focus on feedbacks and processes that maintain a healthy system, can help to pinpoint management actions more easily than just measuring an endpoint such as the fish population size. In a hypothetical trajectory, one could imagine that fisher people through time harvest some fish but they know how many of what stage to retain in a population in order to support future fish generations. For any number of reasons, this information about how many fish to harvest at any particular time could begin to erode or not be passed on effectively, from one generation to the next. This could lead to declines in fish populations and fewer fisher people because there are fewer fish to fish. So those fewer fisher people being able to make their livelihoods through fishing, means that there's a decline in fisher people and that decline in fisher people may lead to declines in knowledge being passed on. Ultimately, changes in harvesting techniques may allow even a few people to capture an enormous amount of fish, leading to a decline in the population. So actions early in this process that address the knowledge and that transmission of knowledge of how many fish to take in any particular time and how do you prevent decline, might actually help you to manage this population and be much more informative than just measuring how many fish are in the population. So where has a bio cultural approach been applied to defining goals and developing appropriate indicators? Let's take a look in an example from the Pacific. Island systems in the Pacific are at the forefront of many global challenges and yet they are also places of resilience, where people and ecosystems have adapted to changes and challenges for millennia. In the Solomon Islands, management of natural resources has traditionally been based on close linkages between people and their land and sea. Today many communities face old and new challenges, like natural disasters and climate change impacts, overfishing, logging pressure, and changing diets due to the introduction of new markets and goods. In one project, several communities in the Solomon Islands are taking a bio cultural approach to conservation. One of the focal points of this project is food. Around the globe, the food that we eat is a powerful lens to consider, the connections between humans and their environment. The plants that we grow, the animals that we raise and the fish that we catch, are essential for our survival and health and the food on our plates, not only links us to the earth's natural resources but it also reflects our culture and the broader food systems around the world. People in the Solomon Islands communities rely heavily on productive land and seascapes for food. One aspect of this work, is looking at the importance of local knowledge and improving access to healthy, culturally-appropriate foods, given community concerns about increased diet related illnesses and high levels of micronutrient deficiency across the country. Another aspect of this project looks at how a better understanding of ecology and agricultural practices can help combat a pernicious pest of the sweet potato. Sweet potatoes are high quality locally produced crop that are very important for people. So indicators of this bio cultural system include the percentage of people who are growing locally important crops. It includes the number of gardens that are actively managed in terms of their soil health. It includes the number of informants with understanding of seasonality and planting calendars. It includes the presence or absence of resilient varieties and disaster management practices such as emergency gardens in case something happens to a regular food supply. Indicators also include knowledge of the relationships between pest abundance and local deforestation. There might be some connection between actions that are happening around the garden and the prevalence of those pests within their garden. So what the Solomon Islands example highlights, is how intertwined human wellbeing and conservation goals are and how different types of knowledges and values can help us ensure that we achieve these goals. There are many different ways of producing food around the globe and these are often dependent on the specific climatic or geographic or soil characteristics of a particular place. And these different ways are constantly changing as humans innovate and as economic, political and social factors come into play. Each food system, no matter what size, involves a series of inputs and outputs and these are driven by the values of the people who are managing that system. The impact of food choices on biodiversity is well documented. Globally, agriculture accounts for a third of greenhouse gas emissions contributed to anthropogenic climate change. Growing crops and raising animals takes an enormous amount of natural resources. Almost 40 percent of the Earth's ice free land and 70 percent of freshwater, withdrawn from lakes, rivers and aquifers goes to agriculture. Modern agricultural practices that have developed over the last century value production of large quantities of food as cheaply as possible and consequently, these have focused on intensive techniques and tools that increase yields. They employ fertilizers and pesticides and usually create large areas of land that are monocultures. They manage these single crops, for instance, corn in a way that they can efficiently harvest. But there are some human health and environmental concerns that come with these practices. These include, impacts such as eutrophication of waters through nutrient enrichment techniques and loss of non target pollinators through the use of pesticides. They also include contributions to global climate change as well as habitat loss through land use change. Agricultural land use changes from expansion into uncultivated areas and intensification of existing agricultural land is a leading driver of biodiversity loss. And many areas that are high in species, that are endemic are only found in one particular area are also at risk with rising agricultural demand. In contrast to industrial scale agriculture, practices that depend on a strong understanding of the relationship between ecology and agriculture, what are called agro ecological methods or diversified farming, these result in agro ecosystems that have a lower impact on the environment. These methods are used across the world by small scale farmers. And they play an increasingly important role in the United States and other industrialized countries. As plots and lands are adapted to the local geography and climate, they usually offer different types of habitats and food sources for a broader range of species. These practices also reflect the cultural heritage that evolves and is passed down through generations. Agro ecosystems such as practices in Europe called High nature value farming, can represent a bio cultural approach to producing food. So these are just examples from the lens of food on bio cultural approaches. But there are multiple other lenses one could use for instance, recreational value of a place or spiritual attachment to a place. And these lenses can help us to underscore how important it is to understand what motivates people to act, what resource managers value, and how people and place interact has such a fundamental part of overall conservation goals. A biocultural approach which focuses on local knowledges, beliefs and worldviews and addresses the processes that support interactions between people and place can contribute to effective conservation.
