Conclusions: Conservation in the Anthropocene - Biodiversity Conservation and Environmental Change - page 168

8
Conclusions: Conservation
in the Anthropocene
Urgent action is needed to counter the climate disruption, extinctions, loss of diverse
ecosystems, pollution, and consumption patterns that are driving the Earth's life support sys-
tems towards a dangerous tipping point (Barnosky et al. 2014), but at the same time complexity
and uncertainty can lead to inertia and indecisiveness (Rogers et al. 2013, Gillson and March-
ant 2014). Conservationists are grappling with an extinction crisis but are also charged with
helping to build long-term sustainability and resilience, while faced with practical considera-
tions such as limited resources, and the need to balance ecological considerations and social
concerns, in the face of a highly uncertain future. The tension in conservation between wilder-
ness and utilitarian approaches creates both management and philosophical dilemmas over
which landscapes to prioritize, and the often conflicting demands of biodiversity, economic
drivers, and diverse stakeholder needs. Managing and combining the myriad needs of society
and ecology requires a willingness to accept and understand change over time and to embrace
complexity, uncertainty and the plurality of stakeholder perspectives (Funtowicz and Ravetz
1994, Holling 2001, Hirsch et al. 2011, Opdam et al. 2013, Rogers et al. 2013).
Ecosystem management has emerged as the best approach to navigating the complexity of
biodiversity conservation in a dynamic and uncertain world, where change is the norm
(Grumbine 1994, 1997, Smith and Maltby 2003). A key facet of this is adaptive management,
which treats conservation interventions as experiments, the results of which inform future
conservation actions (Biggs and Rogers 2003, Rist et al. 2012). However, adaptive manage-
ment has hit a number of barriers to implementation, including a scarcity of resources, lack
of reiteration of the adaptive management cycle, and an unwillingness to risk changes from
established conservation practice (Allen and Gunderson 2011, Keith et al. 2011, McFadden
et al. 2011, van Wilgen and Biggs 2011, Rist et al. 2012, Westgate et al. 2013). At the same time,
there is growing awareness that the novel conditions of the Anthropocene—both in terms of
climate change and land-use—might create conditions with no past analogue (Williams and
Jackson 2007, Walther et al. 2009). A long-term, interdisciplinary approach, utilizing data
from palaeoecology, archaeology, historical ecology, and long-term monitoring has the
potential to provide context for interpreting changes in today's landscapes, improving esti-
mates of their resilience and adaptive capacity as well as enhancing predictions of of where
they may be heading in the future (Marchant and Lane 2013, Gillson and Marchant 2014).