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Perseverance eventually gets the policy makers’ attention

10 12 2018

My entry badge today to the South Australian Parliament (sorry for the shitty reproduction, but it’s a shitty photo of a shitty photo)

I’ve often commented on it over the years, as well as written about it both in my latest book, as well as featured it here on CB.com, that little of the conservation science we do appears to reach the people making all the decisions. This is, of course, a massive problem because so much policy that affects biodiversity is not evidence-based, nor do we seem to be getting any better at telling them how buggered our natural world is.

Even the Extinction Rebellion, or school kids screaming in the streets about lack of climate-change policies appears unable to budge the entrenched, so what hope do we lonely little scientists have of getting in a Minister’s ear? It’s enough to make one depressed.

look-at-me-girl So, we go through the motions; we design ideal reserves with the aid of our computers, we tell people how much to fish, we tell them why feral species are bad, etc., etc., and then we publish our findings and walk away. We might do a little more and shout our messages loudly from the media rooftops, or submit comments to proposed policies, or even draft open letters or petitions. Yet no matter how hard we seem to try, our messages of urgency and despair largely fall on deaf ears.

It’s enough to make you reconsider and not bothering at all.

But! Despite my obviously jaded perspective, two things have happened to me recently that attest to how a little perseverance, sticking to your guns, and staying on message can reach the ears of the powerful. My examples are minuscule in the grand scheme of things, nor will they necessarily translate into anything really positive on the ground; yet, they give me a modicum of hope that we can make a positive difference.

The first event happened a few weeks ago after we did a press release about our paper on co-extinction cascades published in Scientific Reports. Yes, it got into a few big newspapers and radio, but I thought it wouldn’t do much more than peak the punters’ interest for the typical 24-hour news cycle. However, after the initial media interest died down, I received an e-mail from one of my university’s media officers saying that the we had been cited in The Senate (one of the two houses in the Australian Parliament)! An excerpt of the transcript is shown below (you can read the whole thing — if you could be bothered — here): Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 9 Comments »
Tags: influence, policy makers, policy relevance, policymakers, power brokers, science-policy divide
Categories : Australia, biodiversity, carbon, climate change, conservation, ecology, economics, ecosystem services, environmental policy, extinction, governance, invasive species, management, monitoring, science, science communication, South Australia

Getting your conservation science to the right people

22 01 2016

A perennial lament of nearly every conservation scientist — at least at some point (often later in one’s career) — is that the years of blood, sweat and tears spent to obtain those precious results count for nought in terms of improving real biodiversity conservation.

Conservation scientists often claim, especially in the first and last paragraphs of their papers and research proposals, that by collecting such-and-such data and doing such-and-such analyses they will transform how we manage landscapes and species to the overall betterment of biodiversity. Unfortunately, most of these claims are hollow (or just plain bullshit) because the results are either: (i) never read by people who actually make conservation decisions, (ii) not understood by them even if they read the work, or (iii) never implemented because they are too vague or too unrealistic to translate into a tangible, positive shift in policy.

A depressing state of being, I know.

This isn’t any sort of novel revelation, for we’ve been discussing the divide between policy makers and scientists for donkey’s years. Regardless, the whinges can be summarised succinctly: Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: advocacy, blogging, decision-making, Economics, energy, journalism, media, policy, policy makers, politics, social media, transdisciplinarity
Categories : agriculture, biodiversity, biosequestration, carbon, climate change, conservation, conservation biology, deforestation, economics, environmental economics, environmental policy, exploitation, extinction, fragmentation, genetic diversity, habitat loss, harvest, human overpopulation, management, REDD, science, science communication, science writing, scientific publishing, scientific writing, sustainability, writing tips

Making science matter

14 10 2013

I’ve been home from my last overseas trip now for nearly two weeks, but despite not feeling caught up, it’s high time I report what I was up to.

Some of you who follow my Twitter feed or who saw a CB post about cartoonist Seppo Leinonen know that I was visiting the University of Helsinki to participate in a three-day short course for PhD students entitled ‘Making Science Matter‘. I was so impressed with how well Mar Cabeza and Tomas Roslin put together the course, that I thought I’d share the format with CB readers (just in case any of you out there can be convinced to design a similar course at your university).

I think it’s important first to discuss the philosophy of the course and what it hoped to provide those early-career researchers.

Most science PhD students will tell you once they’ve completed their degree that they feel completely unprepared to launch themselves into the extra-curricular world of communicating their science beyond the ‘traditional’ (peer-reviewed journals) outlets. Swamped with learning how to write concisely and clearly, getting up to speed with the entire body of theory on which their projects are based, mastering advanced modelling and statistical approaches and learning how to apply efficient computer code, it’s no wonder that many students find precious little time for anything else (including families, good food and proper hygiene).

Once they do land that precious post-doctoral fellowship though, they are immediately expected to interact professionally with the media, embrace social media and give fantastic public lectures to engage the uninformed. Right. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: Citizen science, Ilkka Hanski, Mar Cabeza, PhD student, policy, policy makers, press releases, science communication, Seppo Leinonen
Categories : cartoon, economics, education, environmental policy, environmental science, implementation, journalism, media, research, science, science communication

Conservation research rarely equals conservation

21 07 2010

I am currently attending the 2010 International Meeting of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation (ATBC) in Sanur, Bali (Indonesia). As I did a few weeks ago at the ICCB in Canada, I’m tweeting and blogging my way through.

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Yesterday I attended a talk by my good friend Trish Shanley (formerly of CIFOR) where she highlighted the disconnect between conservation research and actual conservation. I’ve posted about this before (see Out of touch, impractical and irrelevant & Make your conservation PhD relevant), but this was a sobering reminder of how conservation research can be a self-perpetuating phenomenon and often not touch the people who need it most.

Presenting the highlights of her paper published earlier this year in Biotropica entitled Out of the loop: why research rarely reaches policy makers and the public and what can be done, one comment she made during the talk that really caught my attention was the following (I’m paraphrasing, of course).

Most of the world’s poor living off the land are unconcerned about biodiversity per se. As conservationists we should not therefore adopt the typical preamble that biodiversity (e.g., forests) represent the “lungs of our planet” – what people (and especially women) need to know is how biodiversity loss affects “food for my children”.

The paper itself was an interview 268 researchers from 29 countries (of which I was one) about their views on the relevance of their work. Not surprisingly (but amazingly that we were so honest), most respondents stated that their principal target was other scientists, with policy makers and other marginalised groups/local people holding a distant second place. Corporate targets were also pretty rare – I guess we feel as a group that that’s generallly a lost cause.

Neither a surprise was that we generally view peer-reviewed scientific publications as the main vehicle for the dissemination of our results. What was a bit of a surprise though is that we fully admit papers aren’t the best way to trickle down the information (again, more of that brutal honesty); apparently we mainly believe ‘stakeholder meetings’

are more effective (I have my doubts).

Read the rest of this entry »