Thoughts from influential nature conservationists…
NIGEL DUDLEY & SUE STOLTON
Career highlights
Nigel and Sue established Equilibrium Research in 1990. We see biodiversity conservation as an ethical necessity, which can also support human wellbeing.
We started our professional life together working on nature conservation standards for organic agriculture, initially for the UK and then globally through the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements. This set the scene for work we have continued to do over three decades on a broad range of issues.
An early highlight was developing the first report reviewing status of temperate forests, over 30 years ago. At the time global conservation organisations were totally focussed on tropical forests and were ignoring losses ‘in their own backyards’.
We have worked on several issues from an initial definitional process through to implementation at national and site level. These include the revised version of the IUCN definition of a protected area and the development of the framework and many methodologies for assessing the management effectiveness of protected areas. All collaborative projects, and all have had global uptake.
Twenty years ago it became clear that conservation, and specifically conservation through protected areas, needed greater understanding and broader attention. We collated global testimony of wider values in a series of reports and developed a tool (the Protected Areas Benefits Assessment Tool) to gather information from the bottom up (e.g., from people living in or near protected areas) to contribute to what is now a familiar theme in conservation.
Much of this work came together in the Global Biodiversity Framework, agreed by the 15th Conference of Parties (COP-15) to the Convention on Biological Diversity in Montréal in December 2022 – of which more below.
How do you define nature conservation?
We increasingly see ‘nature’ as a broad term which while rooted in the conservation of functioning ecosystems also has strong cultural elements. Conservation success (which should be the outcome of nature conservation) needs to be strongly linked to, and even led by, effective and equitable governance.
What’s the good news about wildlife and nature at present?
We try to balance working at site level around the world, interacting with those doing conservation and being impacted by conservation, while maintaining a strong policy focus. Over the last few years, this focus has been on the much-delayed COP 15. We laid out a vision for conservation in 2020 (when the meeting should have taken place) in our book Leaving Space for Nature, and continued to work on the themes outlined there (and as always on new issues that keep arising) in the build up to the COP. We are enthused by the ambition of the Global Biodiversity Framework agreed in Montréal, but of course ambition has to become intention, intention become action and actions need to make a real difference.
We are also encouraged by the increasing focus on restoration and re-wilding (we won’t enter into the debate about terminology here, Nigel wrote a book on the concept of authenticity several years ago which discusses our take on many of the associated issues). Conservation alone is no longer enough, and we have been closely involved in the conceptualisation and early implementation of ideas around forest landscape restoration.
Beyond the obvious of habitat loss and species decline, what’s your greatest concern in UK nature conservation at present?
The continued failure to tackle overuse of agriculture chemicals despite decades of evidence of their impacts and the real and growing crisis facing invertebrate populations has remained a concern of ours for decades. This is now coupled with likely deregulation following Brexit. However hard conservationists work to conserve our native species and habitat, if we lose ecological integrity of the whole system we are in real trouble.
If you had a limited budget on nature conservation in Britain, what would you prioritise and why?
We need to switch the focus from overemphasis on globally common species on the edge of their range in the UK, with consequently small populations, to species of global concern which have (or should have) major populations in the British Isles and those few species which are endemic to the UK. This should also be a focus for conservation in UK overseas territories. The increasing attention paid to restoration, particularly of areas like peatland which were seen as valueless a few decades ago, is encouraging and more restoration of habitats for conservation, linked to climate change mitigation, should be an increasing focus of national spending. On a broader scale, many of our larger protected areas, including national parks and AONBs, are not functioning as effective conservation tools and greater emphasis on conservation management is needed here.
We have also both had a long interest in what are globally termed as privately protected areas. In the UK we are fortunate to have so many NGOs, big and small, dedicated to conservation and many thousands of volunteers working on conservation issues. Small amounts of funding to dedicated locally run initiatives can have results which multiply the value of initial investments many times over. Getting funding to grassroot initiatives would thus be one of our overarching priorities.
How do you feel about your input to the subject – what if anything has it achieved and would you do it differently if starting again today?
Firstly, we should emphasise that we work collaboratively with individual and groups all over the world. We would have achieved nothing without them; every conversation, every site we work in/visit brings new ideas and enriches our professional experience.
We laid out some of our overarching achievement above, but overall, we feel our achievements have been routed in our approach to work which is based on the concept of collaboration while remaining a very small, independent group, allowing us to follow our instincts on where we need to work and what we need to do, rather than having to follow large funding trends and priorities.
The one thing we would do differently, is to have put even more emphasis on social and equity issues thirty years ago. This is an increasing focus of our work today. But if we don’t get the social and equity issues right around conservation, that is to say if we don’t bring people with us on the conservation journey, then nature conservation is unlikely to succeed in the long-term aim of reversing long-term decline.