This article was originally published on Ensia.
“Project Drawdown is a research organization that “reviews, analyses and identifies the most viable global climate solutions, and shares these findings with the world.” The organization has produced a table ranking the most impactful 82 climate change solutions as measured by a single metric: total atmospheric CO2 reduction.
The conservation community needs a similar gold standard metric for assessing the impact of biodiversity interventions. And to pick it and create a table similar to Project Drawdown’s, we need to establish a robust evidence base similar to the one Project Drawdown has synthesized (see #5 on the organization’s list of Frequently Asked Questions to learn about its process).
Once a metric is picked, a Project Drawdown for Conservation should take several other pages from the original Project Drawdown.
First, Project Drawdown evaluates solutions by a wide range of criteria, including scalability, economic viability, size of impact and whether positive results will outweigh negative ones. Biodiversity conservation, which has for too long been focused on philanthropically funded solutions that cannot support themselves and that still too often have negative impacts on human communities, needs to think similarly about its interventions.
Second, Project Drawdown has been effective in communicating its solutions to broader audiences through a book, an interactive website and partnership outreach. Biodiversity conservation science needs to move beyond technical papers and reports so its solutions are more easily accessible to the private sector, civil society and the policymaking community.
Third, Project Drawdown is a living research project, committed to updating its recommended solutions with research on emerging interventions. A Project Drawdown for Conservation needs a similar ongoing commitment to review and test novel interventions, and to recommend the most promising ones for further large-scale testing.”
Read on at: Ensia.
