Conference report article
JANET MACKINNON
Introduction: ‘Think Global, Act Local’
The full title of this highly immersive online gathering was ‘UKOTCF’s 7th conference on conservation and sustainability in UK Overseas Territories, Crown Dependencies and other small island entities’. This territorial portfolio is of great environmental and geo-political significance, representing some 94 per cent of biodiversity within UK-controlled jurisdictions, one of the world’s largest marine estates and islands of strategic global importance. It’s scope is evident in the conference logo and includes parts of the world on the frontline of major natural hazards, conservation and sustainable development challenges. The British Association of Nature Conservationists’ (BANC – publisher of ECOS) relationship with the UK Overseas Territories goes back to 1986 with UKOTCF’s most recent contribution to ECOS in 2022.1 This conference report provides only a snap shot of the four-day event – certainly a peak online experience for me! – conducted via Zoom. The hard work of its organising committee in putting together and managing a fascinating programme was indeed a collective achievement, and those organisations who supported this enterprise should also be applauded. Full details of the proceedings are available via the UK Overseas Territories Conservation Forum website.
Central themes identified for the UKOTCF’s 7th Conference were:
· Sharing Experiences across Territories
· Biodiversity and Sustainability Targets
· New Technologies and Conservation
· Future Challenges and Opportunities
· Resourcing and Funding Environment
Some related key issues emerging from the above are:
· Balancing terrestrial and marine conservation requirements.
· Preservation versus restoration dimensions of conservation.2
· Securing conservation alongside sustainable development.
Representation from the UK and UKOTS governments included:
· Hon. Mary Creagh, Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Minister for Nature and nominated minister for the UK Overseas Territories.
· Hon. Prof. John Cortés, Gibraltar Minister for Education, the Environment, Sustainability, Climate Change, Heritage, Technical Services and Transport; and Chair of the Council of Environment Ministers of UK Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies.
By way of context, data provided for the UK Government’s 25 Year Environment Plan on the status of endemic and globally threatened species in the UKOTs paints a challenging picture for conservation:
“As of March 2025, 48.5% of the endemic species in the UKOT’s are considered threatened. These fall under the Vulnerable, Endangered and Critically Endangered IUCN Red List categories, with 75, 101 and 145 species under each category respectively. A further 6.7% and 0.6% of endemic species are considered Extinct or Extinct in the Wild respectively. Since the initial assessment of Red List assessed endemic species in 2023, 3 have changed Red List Index category, 2 have progressed to a more threatened category, 1 from Endangered to Critically Endangered and 1 from Vulnerable to Endangered. One species improved in its Red List Index, moving from Endangered to Near Threatened. Note that of the current endemic species list of 662 species, 142 are unassessed”.3
However, the mood of this conference, at which all UKOTs and CDs were represented by some 165 participants, was generally upbeat and uplifting, whilst remaining pragmatic. The old environmentalist adage of ‘Think Global, Act Local’ was very much in evidence with strategic conservation successes described alongside more local, but nonetheless significant, endeavours. Particularly impactful was the work of National Trust Organisations and Botanic Gardens working across the Caribbean, in Bermuda, Gibraltar and St Helena. These demonstrate the importance of education for protecting and restoring natural heritage, and bring together nature conservation specialists with community engagement and funding partnerships. Involvement of young people is seen as essential, reflecting sustainability’s key aspiration to secure the wellbeing of future generations.
Sharing experiences across Territories
This session opened with a presentation on the Manx Blue Carbon Project led by the Isle of Man Government. The importance of Marine Protected Areas and other management arrangements, especially species protection, for maritime environments was highlighted. These are very much at the intersection of climate change, nature conservation and sustainability. A global problem that increasingly challenges marine environmental governance is plastic pollution; and a presentation about the South Atlantic Plastics Project from the Zoological Society of London provided an overview of its magnitude as well as international efforts to tackle root causes. Unfortunately, a UN Global Plastics Treaty is currently stalled, but significant progress has been made towards ratification. However, among the most uplifting narratives of the conference was the recovery of whale and turtle populations around the South Atlantic island of South Georgia (above slide) and the British Indian Ocean Territory. While the former featured in the session on biodiversity and sustainability targets (see below), both accounts are testimony to the power of concerted long-term conservation efforts to reverse iconic endangered species decline.
The case of sea turtles also reflects the importance of integrating marine and terrestrial conservation. Some diverse and interesting examples of the latter from across the UKOTs were also shared, including invertebrate recording in St Helena’s Cloud Forest together with recolonisation and expansion of the island’s avian Masked Booby population. Ongoing restoration of the Cloud Forest, home to some 250 plant and animal species found nowhere else on earth, is widely cited as a conservation success story which provides a nature-based solution to improved water management on the drought-prone island too. Nearly 5 000 miles north west across the Atlantic, the potential for nature restoration on East Caicos Island, part of the Turks and Caicos Archipelago and one of the largest uninhabited islands in the Caribbean, was also described. Along with a presentation from the Marine Conservation Society, this reflected a fundamental requirement for community engagement and empowerment, themes continued in a keynote lecture based on the Bermuda National Trust’s experience of partnership working with young people and local businesses.
Biodiversity and sustainability targets
Given historic and ongoing failures to meet global and national targets for biodiversity conservation and sustainable development, including adequate designations of protected land and sea areas, this was inevitably going to be a challenging session, but there were some good news and positive case studies. The political challenges for UK and UKOTs environment ministers had been reflected earlier in brief contributions and question responses from the British government’s Mary Creagh and Gibraltar’s veteran Professor John Cortés representing the Overseas Territories. Nevertheless, conference participants were reassured that a long-awaited biodiversity strategy for the UKOTs would soon be published, following adoption last year of a new UK Biodiversity Framework, as well as publication in 2025 of the National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan for 2030 co-ordinated through the Joint Nature Conservation Committee (one of the conference sponsors).4 The UK strategy document makes a number of key references to UK Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies, with the Convention on Biological Diversity currently extended to six UKOTs and two CDs.5
Contributors to this and the later conference session on ‘challenges and opportunities’ were of an opinion that the anticipated biodiversity strategy for the UKOTs, alongside a range of other interventions, had potential for the UK government to demonstrate world leadership in conservation. Once again, there were a wide range of presentations on specific and targeted interventions extending from invertebrate conservation in St Helena to delivering protection for 30% of land and sea areas for the Isle of Man. Another contribution explored ‘Backyard Rewilding’ as a response to habitat loss in the UKOTs. Unsurprisingly, considerable attention was given to securing reliable, comprehensive and accessible data, together with effective management systems. A presentation from Belgium’s Meise Botanic Garden – which has collaborated with UKOTCF on several initiatives – looked at how the Global Biodiversity Information Framework could be used for this purpose.6 The importance of accurate information was again evident in the work of the Fisheries Transparency Initiative.
New technologies and conservation
The session’s full title was ‘using technology and data to inform and monitor conservation process and novel approaches to address threats to biodiversity.’ Due to other commitments, my attendance at this and the next session was limited so the commentaries are shorter, but brevity does not reflect their relative importance. Some of the topics covered included: use of satellite data for environmental monitoring; combining field data, genetics, seed biology and geographical information systems in work led by the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew for the British Virgin Islands; IRecord as a community platform for biodiversity knowledge empowering conservation action; the Cyprus database of alien species; and modern remote monitoring of animal populations, particularly in isolated territories such as Tristan da Cuhna. In terms of novel approaches to biodiversity protection, a ‘conservation detection dog’ was mentioned in conference recommendations. These also emphasised that ‘novel (data collection) techniques …may be complementary to traditional monitoring rather than a replacement methodology. Side-by-side validation can help determine whether new technology provides consistent results in long-term monitoring’.
Future challenges and opportunities
As the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration 2021-30 enters its second half, notwithstanding adoption of a number of key international conventions and treaty ratifications on conservation and sustainability, progress remains slow. A conference presentation for this session led by the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology considered how Ecosystem Integrity Assessments might be used to support better realisation of targets.7 This form of assessment is usefully summarised by a Google AI mode search as: “an evaluation of the health, completeness, and functionality of an ecosystem compared to its natural or historical reference state. The process provides critical information to land managers, conservationists, and policymakers about the factors causing degradation and how to prioritise conservation and restoration actions”. Sounds good to me! Other contributions to this session looked at the relationship between interventions for climate resilience and nature conservation in the British Virgin Islands; and boosting seabird populations through invasive species (house mouse) eradication on Gough Island (Tristan da Cunha) in work led by the RSPB.8 Invasive species remain one of the most significant challenges for many UKOTs. Education work across a range of issues was again highlighted as a general area of opportunity.
Resourcing and funding environment
While raising money, particularly long-term, represents the major challenge for many organisations engaged in nature conservation and restoration, the focus here was more on the opportunities of conventional and novel approaches. The Isle of Man Wildlife Trust’s experience of transformative funds from Aviva, as part of The Wildlife Trusts’ umbrella partnership with the insurance giant to restore Britain’s temperate rainforests, provided a great example of the new resourcing environment.9 However, a highly informative presentation by the South Georgia Heritage Trust also demonstrated that concerted and creative philanthropic fundraising continues to have a core role, especially if projects can access individual, charitable trust and corporate donors in North America. In each case, the value of long-term relationships was emphasised even if the aim is to generate shorter-term funding or other resources. With this aim, the UK Overseas Territories Conservation Forum have developed a scheme called EcoMatch which aims to link potential supporters to wide a variety of projects, ranging from conservation grazing in the Channel Islands to a plant nursery for the remote and ecologically unique Pitcairn Islands in the South Pacific.10
Notwithstanding an emphasis on raising money from private sources, with excellent representation at the conference from the business sector, including Lloyds Bank and Isle of Man-based Resilience Asset Management, the ongoing requirement for government funding of UKOT conservation was emphasised too. A key – but surmountable – challenge is effective integration of public and private support through partnerships as evidenced by many of the projects described previously. For example, the global university sector, including Welsh institutions – I am based in Mid Wales – with strong track records in marine biology and environmental sciences, was very well represented. This sector has access to substantial funding streams unavailable to other types of organisations, but academic researchers and students benefit considerably from collaboration with these, and vice versa. The UK Government’s Darwin Plus scheme remains a core funder of conservation and sustainability programmes in the UKOTs, and has recently broadened its approach to support more grass-roots projects. However, conference recommendations identify an outstanding need for greater direct UK government engagement, of the kind traditionally available through relevant departments, with the UKOTCF; “the only organisation devoted solely to nature conservation and sustainability across all the UK Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies”.
‘Fragments of Paradise’ revisited
As mentioned before, BANC’s relationship with the UK Overseas Territories began in 1986 with support for research published as Fragments of Paradise. From this project emerged the UKOTs Conservation Forum’s outstanding work. The late 1980s was a time when the concept of sustainability came of age, framing the discourse between development issues and the environment, including connections between human wellbeing and that of the natural world. This progressive agenda underpinned the recent conference, detailed recommendations from which have been put together by the UKOTCF.
Some of my key take aways from ‘Conservation and Sustainability’ are:
Picture of challenges and successes
This virtual event took place alongside the IUCN’s quadrennial in-person World Conservation Congress held in Abu Dhabi. Zoom facilitated representation at both conferences which shared similarities of outlook on global nature decline, species recovery and prospects for ecosystem restoration, as well as emerging threats (increased natural resource extraction) and opportunities linked to new funding sources. However, the UKOTCF conference was undoubtedly a more ‘bottom up’ gathering of the kind enabled by digital technologies (see below).
Diversity of perspectives essential
The added value of bringing together a genuine diversity of conservation perspectives and experience from a wide range of initiatives across the UK Overseas Territories is undoubtedly one of UKOTCF’s major achievements. Representation from non-government and community-based organisations, academic and scientific institutions, as well as governments and businesses provided an inclusive setting for both knowledge-sharing and reality checking for those inclined to be either overly optimistic or pessimistic about the future.
Conservation geopolitics emerging
Although the term ‘conservation geopolitics’ has been around for a while in academia, it is perhaps an idea whose time has come now come for a wider audience. Some commentators highlight a shift from the global sustainability agenda to one more concerned with international and resource security. This inevitably has implications for the future of some UK Overseas Territories, subject to sovereignty disputes, and in the case of the Chagos Archipelago transfer to Mauritius, plus strategic conservation initiatives linked to these.
Environmental governance needed
In the above context the need for much improved environmental governance – ranging from spatial planning and appropriate control of development (and resource extraction) to designation and enforcement of protected area status – is vital. Despite the UKOTCF’s longstanding work on Environmental Charters, considerable progress is still needed to ensure those Overseas Territories most subject to development pressures have progressive agendas on issues such as waste management and active travel, and sustainable infrastructure in place.
Critical roles for new technologies – The word critical is used here in 2 senses that reflect technology’s increasingly central role in conservation and the need to apply some critical thinking to its deployment. By way of acknowledging the former, this conference was made possible by a user-friendly digital platform, and a plethora of new technologies are now used by conservationists, not least to educate and engage people, especially younger ones, in the natural world. However, digital experiences can also detach people from nature and distract those in positions of power from some hard realities of life on the ground.
References
1. Pienkowski, Mike et al (2022) “ECOS 43 (3.2.1)- The UK Overseas Territories: moving away from colonialism in the environment?” ECOS 43 (3.2.1) ECOS 43 (3.2), British Association of Nature Conservationists. www.ecos.org.uk/ecos-43-3-2-1-the-uk-overseas-territories-moving-away-from-colonialism-in-the-environment
2. Mori, A. S., & Isbell, F. (2024).Untangling the threads of conservation: A closer look at restoration and preservation. Journal of Applied Ecology, 61,215–222. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2664.14552
3. https://oifdata.defra.gov.uk/themes/international/K3
6. Groom, Q., Meeus, S., Bárrios, S., Childs, C., Clubbe, C., Corbett, E., Francis, S., Gray, A., Harding, L., Jackman, A., Machin, R., McGovern, A., Pienkowski, M., Ryan, D., Sealys, C., Wensink, C., & Peyton, J. (2025). Capacity building needed to reap the benefits of access to biodiversity collections. Plants, People, Planet, 1-9. https://doi.org/10.002/ppp3.70029
7. https://www.ceh.ac.uk/training/ecosystem-integrity-assessment
8. https://jncc.gov.uk/our-work/environmental-resilience-and-security-in-the-overseas-territories
9. https://www.wildlifetrusts.org/news/manx-wildlife-trust-restore-largest-area-rainforest-date
10. https://www.ukotcf.org.uk/ecomatch