Conclusions: Conservation in the Anthropocene - Biodiversity Conservation and Environmental Change - page 169

Scenario-building and modelling have become essential tools in predicting and adapting to
future change (Pereira et al. 2010, Spangenberg et al. 2012), providing potential for integrative
approaches linking past, present, and future.
Conservation in the Anthropocene requires the capacity to adapt to changing climate and
the emergence of new environmental challenges, while at the same time sustaining ecosys-
tem services in ways that respect ecological limits, cultural values, social preferences, eco-
nomic context, and the need in the human spirit to experience and reconnect with nature (de
Groot et al. 2005, Chapin III et al. 2010, Wu 2012, Glaser 2012, Griggs et al. 2013). By examining
key conservation issues, including elephant culling, re-wilding, fire management, adapting
to climate change, maintaining ecosystem services, and the sustainability of cultural land-
scapes, this topic has explored how biodiversity conservation can use long-term data from
palaeoecology and historical ecology to adapt and respond to the dynamic environments of
the Anthropocene. Like all generations, we stand poised on the knife-edge between past and
future, and good planning requires the merging of current ecological knowledge, past envi-
ronmental change, and future predictions. What follows is a synthesis of the lessons from
previous chapters, drawing general principles about how long-term data from palaeoecol-
ogy, historical ecology and other disciplines can help in building resilience and adaptive
capacity of the transient landscapes of the Anthropocene.
Can ecosystem management resolve the conservation paradox?
Conservation cannot hope to maintain a stability or balance that never existed. Over recent
decades the science and practice of ecology has reinvented itself, adapting both theory and
practice to a world in perpetual flux. Considering scale, variability, heterogeneity, and the
processes that generate changing patterns in landscapes are now well established in ecologi-
cal thinking, and new approaches to conservation are based on the multi-scaled ecology of
non-equilibrium systems and ideas from resilience theory (Pickett et al. 1997, Wu and Hobbs
2002). Ecosystem management has emerged as the primary means of addressing the conser-
vation paradox and adapting management and expectations to flux and changing environ-
mental conditions (Pickett et al. 1997, Grumbine 1994, 1997, Smith and Maltby 2003).
Ecosystem management is an adaptive approach that maintains ecosystem processes, builds
resilience, and re-establishes the connections between nature and society.
Conservation goals can rarely be defined in terms of static landscape states or conserva-
tion targets, so management has to be flexible and responsive to changing environmental
conditions, emerging knowledge and societal need (Holling 1996b, Biggs and Rogers 2003).
Adaptive management is at the heart of the ecosystem management approach, enabling con-
servation decisions to be made in conditions of high uncertainty. Adaptive management
embodies the principle of 'learning by doing, by treating management interventions as
experiments, and has the potential to incorporate a range of stakeholder perspectives. How-
ever, consideration of scale is critical and adaptive management rarely incorporates a long-
term perspective that provides the context for designing management goals, interpreting
observed ecological change, and assessing management outcomes (see Chapter 3) (Gillson