Nature Unbound, A New Paradigm

Nature Unbound, A New Paradigm
Major New Conservation Report Offers Pathways to Peak Human Impact

Over the last two centuries, the growing human population and rising consumption have caused widespread loss of wildlife and natural habitats. Existing conservation approaches based on protected areas and ecosystem services have been unable to stem this loss at the global scale. A new report, titled Nature Unbound: Decoupling for Conservation, offers a new framework for global conservation that can significantly enhance current efforts. The report argues that only by accelerating processes that 'decouple' economic growth from environmental destruction will we be able to return more of the Earth to nature.
In this month's print edition of Scientific American, the Nature Unbound authors use Virunga National Park as a case study for why modern agriculture can actually help save endangered wildlife like gorillas. The piece opens with a woman named Bernadette, whose livelihood is threatened by baboons and elephants that stray from Virunga National Park in search of food from neighboring villages. "On the front lines of conservation, where people live intimately with primary forests, biodiversity hotspots, and endangered species, it is often grinding poverty that drives the destruction," Blomqvist, Nordhaus, and Shellenberger write. "Protecting remaining wilderness in the face of escalating demand for food, resources and energy will require accelerating decoupling—in other words, speeding up urbanization and intensifying modern agriculture." Read the oped here.

Thankfully, there are reasons for hope. As lead author Linus Blomqvist described in his presentation of the report at a seminar at Resources for the Future last week, much of the harm that people inflict on the environment has begun to flatten and even decline in countries with higher material living standards. "It's time to take all of these great trends we've heard about and accelerate them to get where we need to go," said Thomas Lovejoy, professor of biology at George Mason University and panelist at the seminar. Watch the RFF presentation of Nature Unbound here.

Download Nature Unbound: Decoupling for Conservation (PDF) here.http://thebreakthrough.org/images/pdfs/Nature_Unbound.pdf