The Future of Sustainability: Have Your Say!

Week One - “Global Challenges to Sustainability in the Twenty-First Century”
Comment / Comentario / Commentaire

Dr William Jackson – Director Global Program, IUCN

Moderating team: Bill Jackson adds market and policy failures, particularly in the agricultural sector, to Jeff’s ‘litany of woes’. In addition to economic improvements, he highlights the involvement of interest groups in decision making as key to achieving successful long-term conservation efforts, though challenges remain.

Bill Jackson añade dos desafíos adicionales a los citados por McNeely: el mercado y las políticas gubernamentales– especialmente en el sector agrícola. Recalca que los procesos exitosos de conservación (a largo plazo) conllevan un alto involucramiento en los procesos de decisión por parte de los grupos de interés.

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Jeff McNeely's short paper addresses many of the big challenges that we will face in the coming years. One area that I would add to Jeff's depressing 'litany of woes' is the role of governance, and in particular the impact of market and policy failures and the inadequate application of 'rule of law'. There are, unfortunately, far too many examples of markets and policies failing to value the role of biodiversity, and particularly to value the ecosystem goods and services that biodiversity provide to our societies and economies. The result of this omission is that environmental capital is often undermined to secure relatively short term economic gain. This problem is particularly acute within the agricultural sector which remains the single largest threat to biodiversity through land use change, pollution and the introduction of invasive species. Removal of those agricultural, fisheries and forestry subsidies that have adverse impact on biodiversity and that perpetuate wealth disparities between producing and consuming nations may offer a useful first step towards addressing this problem.

Jeff asks what will be the key breakthroughs in conservation biology and environmental science. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment provides a very useful exposé of the types on knowledge that will be needed as well as the approaches to applying that knowledge to policies and economic systems. A key challenge will be to provide decision makers with robust economic arguments for maintaining and restoring ecosystem goods and services. Ensuring the involvement of key interest groups in decision making is a major challenge to successful long-term conservation efforts. To date, a great deal of effort has been expended in understanding and promoting participatory processes at community level and, while much work remains, there have been sufficient studies to demonstrate that local communities can and do play a key role in sustainable management of resources. However, a key challenge remains - the opportunities for making land-use trade-offs at the local level are often relatively limited when compared to broader geographical areas. More sustainable outcomes may be found by both enhancing community management while also developing approaches that enable decision making on ecosystem services and economic systems at broader landscape (or seascape) scales. That is, put the ecosystem approach into practice. One problem with so-called landscape approaches is that the involvement of stakeholders in meaningful and equitable decision making appears to be increasingly complicated with scale. Finding effective means to involve stakeholders in negotiated outcomes at landscape scale is an area that requires concerted effort.