Leaving Space for Nature: The critical role of area-based conservation
Nigel Dudley and Sue Stolton
Routledge, London & New York, 2020, 204 Pages
Paperback: £36.99 | ISBN: 9780367407537
Review by Patrick Roper
The authors of this modestly sized book are well-known, very experienced ecologists and nature conservationists. As well as detailing the global development of conservation, particularly in the last 12 years, many examples are given of programmes and policies in which the authors have been involved worldwide from the tropics to the arctic including some in the British Isles where they live. Dudley and Stolton are successful professionals in their field having set up their business of Equilibrium Research some 30 years ago.
Work on nature conservation has evolved rapidly in the 21st century driven by the growing understanding that we are dependent on rapidly declining biodiversity and ecosystem services for survival, an understanding driven partly by the growing attention given by the media to wildlife and the efforts of an army of both professional and volunteer conservationists. One of the strengths of Leaving Space for Nature is the enormous number of references cited, and its related indication of the increasing number of people that are contributing to this field.
As the importance of biodiversity and ecosystem services has made its way up to the policy makers agenda in the United Nations, much effort has been expended in trying to create a global framework dedicated to halting the decline in wildlife and, where possible, to restore some of what has been lost. Dudley and Stolton explain that an important international agreement with targets was reached at the Aichi Conference of the Parties (COP 10) in 2010 (Aichi is the place in Japan where meetings were held). It was here that the idea was formalised that if biodiversity was to be protected and restored, far more land and sea had to be appropriately managed than is currently the case. While nature reserves, National Parks and other conservation areas were often doing well, the world had many important and rich ecosystems with no formal protection, though the people who lived there often had a long-held conservation role. These places outside existing protected areas are the ‘area-based’ places featured in the book’s subtitle. At Aichi, these places, or something very similar, became known as OECMs (Other Effective Area-Based Conservation measures, a rather awkward term that I would need more space than I have here to deconstruct). However, these concepts and their implementation are fully explained by the authors, and although they are far from user-friendly terms, their names, but not their aims, seem to have been largely dropped at the recent COP 15 which has built on the Aichi initiative. As a 2022 Defra report has said: “standardisation of some key-terms is urgently needed”. People need to know if they are talking about the same thing.
Despite the amount of detail in this book and the many exotic examples of conservation practice, I found it difficult to determine what might or might not be considered as an OECM (and therefore eligible for some grant funding). According to the online World Database on Other Effective Area-Based Conservation Measures there are no OECMs in the UK, though it seems to me that projects like the Brighton and Lewes Downs Biodiversity Reserve or the Purple Horizons project in the West Midlands might qualify. In general, the book remains focussed on area-based conservation and I would like to have seen more discussion of some of the alternatives such as rewilding, which gets only brief mentions. The book inevitably has to use many acronyms and I would have found a glossary of these useful.
One of the biggest problems in delivering more nature conservation by whatever means is its cost. At the recent COP 15 in Montreal many governments committed their countries to the agreed policies and their targets, but one has to be optimistic to believe that long-term political will and funding is likely to be readily found, especially in our currently troubled world, or with the knowledge that none of the 20 targets agreed at Aichi were reached. Another persistent issue is the situation of indigenous people in protected, or potentially protected, areas. It is now fully accepted that they must be involved in any conservation decisions made for their areas on land or sea. Dudley and Stolton address both these issues, but again they are rapidly changing areas of discussion and many readers will be aware of recent disputes within this topic. There are also new COP 15 targets in regard to the rights of and benefits to indigenous people from natural and genetic resources in their areas.
Because of the rapid growth of research, discussion and action on biodiversity and ecosystem services a book like the one under review is bound to date fairly quickly. A more up to date account is, for example, given in Defra and the Nature Conservancy’s 2022 report Best Practice in Delivering the 30 x 30 target which was edited by Dudley and Stolton (30 x 30 is the political commitment to protecting 30% of land and sea for nature by 2030). However, Leaving Space for Nature gives a detailed account of how the nature conservation movement got to 2020 and covers many of the issues that are likely to be critical in the future. Debates on what happens to land and sea whether ecologically, in terms of development, or in the interests of the people who live or work there, are bound to be fierce and the authors highlight the range of issues that are likely to be encountered by those working in the field.
The text of the book is quite densely set in a small Bembo typeface and there are no pictures or diagrams (unlike many other publications in this genre) but a useful index. Editing is efficient as befits a book in a series of academic titles on related subjects and there are few literal errors (I have to mention ‘hotpots’ for ‘hotspots’ on page 56). Overall the book will be of value to students and academics in the conservation field with the proviso that much has happened and continues to happen since it was written in 2020. In their final pages the authors talk eloquently about the Snowdonia National Park, whose name was formally changed to Eryri in November 2022 as the Welsh language name was thought by many local people to be more appropriate than the English. The book ends, perhaps rather sadly, but in my view probably accurately when the authors write: “If we want what will amount to a global revolution in the way in which we approach land and sea, we need to shift the axis of the debate in subtle but fundamental ways. But the future remains uncertain, as always, and some of the signs are that things are going to be much worse before they get better, if they ever do get better. It is time for cautious optimism but also stamina and courage.”