| Colloquium paper: where does biodiversity go from here? A grim business-as-usual forecast and a hopeful portfolio of partial solutions. | |
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MedLine Citation:
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PMID: 18695214 Owner: NLM Status: MEDLINE |
Abstract/OtherAbstract:
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The threats to the future of biodiversity are many and well known. They include habitat conversion, environmental toxification, climate change, and direct exploitation of wildlife, among others. Moreover, the projected addition of 2.6 billion people by mid-century will almost certainly have a greater environmental impact than that of the last 2.6 billion. Collectively, these trends portend a grim future for biodiversity under a business-as-usual scenario. These threats and their interactions are formidable, but we review seven strategies that, if implemented soundly and scaled up dramatically, would preserve a substantial portion of global biodiversity. These are actions to stabilize the human population and reduce its material consumption, the deployment of endowment funds and other strategies to ensure the efficacy and permanence of conservation areas, steps to make human-dominated landscapes hospitable to biodiversity, measures to account for the economic costs of habitat degradation, the ecological reclamation of degraded lands and repatriation of extirpated species, the education and empowerment of people in the rural tropics, and the fundamental transformation of human attitudes about nature. Like the carbon "stabilization wedges" outlined by Pacala and Socolow [Pacala S, Socolow R (2004) Stabilization wedges: Solving the climate problem for the next 50 years with current technologies. Science 305:968-972] (1), the science and technologies needed to effect this vision already exist. The remaining challenges are largely social, political, and economic. Although academic conservation biology still has an important role to play in developing technical tools and knowledge, success at this juncture hinges more on a massive mobilization of effort to do things that have traditionally been outside the scope of the discipline. |
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Authors:
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Paul R Ehrlich; Robert M Pringle |
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Publication Detail:
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Type: Journal Article; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't; Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S. Date: 2008-08-11 |
Journal Detail:
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Title: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America Volume: 105 Suppl 1 ISSN: 1091-6490 ISO Abbreviation: Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. Publication Date: 2008 Aug |
Date Detail:
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Created Date: 2008-08-15 Completed Date: 2008-09-05 Revised Date: 2010-09-22 |
Medline Journal Info:
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Nlm Unique ID: 7505876 Medline TA: Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A Country: United States |
Other Details:
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Languages: eng Pagination: 11579-86 Citation Subset: IM |
Affiliation:
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Department of Biological Sciences, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA. pre@stanford.edu |
Export Citation:
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| MeSH Terms | |
Descriptor/Qualifier:
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Animals Conservation of Natural Resources Extinction, Biological Forecasting Greenhouse Effect Humans Species Specificity* |
| Comments/Corrections | |
From MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine
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