The US National Marine Fisheries Service recently came up with a recovery plan for two threatened species of the coral Acropora in the Caribbean territories of the United States. They quickly discovered a teensy-weensy problem.
Implementing the program would cost a minimum of US$255 million. And it would take more than 400 years to complete.
In conservation, we’re not short of grand challenges. We are, however, much more constrained by a lack of scalable conservation models or interventions.
Ones that don’t have such a puffed up pricetag that it precludes their use at any meaningful scale.
Ones that aren’t just applicable under the small and peculiar circumstances under which they were developed but which can be rolled-out out much more widely.
Sometimes, achieving conservation at scale will mean making tough choices, sidelining classically emotive projects in favour of those that can deliver big.
Restoring tropical forests through tree planting, for example, is a cornerstone of many a conservation project. And although it can work, it’s also very expensive to prepare the soil and raise seedlings.
Actively planting just one hectare of rainforest costs between $1,400-34,000, according to one estimate. It’s also limited my human power. People can’t plant everywhere, it would take too long.
In contrast, allowing forests to naturally regenerate on forest-flanking agricultural lands can deliver all the biodiversity benefits of active planting. In fact, allowing for natural regrowth is much better for plants, birds and invertebrates.
And it can be done at a fraction of the cost, potentially allowing for the regeneration of rainforest over gigantic areas.
We don’t always have to actually intervene to achieve conservation successes. Sometimes just letting nature heal itself can be the easiest and most effective way.
Scalable conservation articles:
P.s since I started this blog post bashing coral restoration, I feel obliged to point out that even this could soon be done in a much more scalable way.
Using locally available and inexpensive organza cloth to incubate coral larvae and deploying mass larval resettlement techniques instead of transplantation of coral fragments can reduce the costs of re-establishing coral colonies by 13 times. This strategy could soon allow restoration to be mounted over whole reefs.
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