DEVELOPING NEW BIODIVERSITY CONSERVATION STRATEGIES IN RESPONSE TO GLOBAL CHANGE

Abstract

As numerous reports and assessments have indicated, the world is having to face up to challenging
problems in conserving biological diversity in the face of increasing habitat loss, fragmentation or
simplication, overexploitation of resources, and threats from alien invasive organisms, all of which have led
to the widespread loss of genes, populations and species.  In the last few years the situation has been
exacerbated by the growing acceptance of the likely effects of global change – demographic, disturbance
regimes and climatic – on species, populations, ecosystems and ecosystem functioning. Although the details
of global change will be worked out over the coming decades, it is already clear that out existing
conservation policies and planning are not likely to be able to meet these new challenges and that novel
conservation strategies will be required. These include: possible institutional changes at national and
international level; more effective implementation of existing commitments/agreements; more effective
application and scaling up of existing approaches; application of new techniques such as the use of
complementarity techniques in reserve selection, measures for assessing the effectiveness of reserves,
methods for predicting species’ distributions and patterns of richnesss, incorporation of phylogenetic and
molecular methods into conservation assessment and use of DNA bar-coding in identifying populations at
risk, applications of spatial analysis and phylogeographic methods for a better understanding of diversity
patterns and of what to conserve, application of biodiversity informatics, novel methods for asessing
extinction risks, and predicting the likely impacts of invasive species and for monitoring and controlling
them. In addition, priority determining mechanisms need to be revisited, the currently fashionable
application of goals and targets needs critical evaluation, the desirability and feasibility of conserving
cultural landscapes, and better methods are needed to measure the economics and cost-effectiveness of
different conservation approaches.