What’s the most important environmental problem to focus on?

I recently started a blog series called The Effective Conservationist, where I will look at ways that one person can make a difference in preventing species extinctions and population declines.

I’ve said before that I truly believe that one person can have a big impact on the fate of biodiversity and ecosystems. But to do so, one of the key decisions is deciding what to focus on.

If you want make a difference, whether that’s with your career or phD, your volunteering, your conservation film, or even your blogging, then should you be concentrating on deforestation, sustainable palm oil, marine plastics or pollution?

There are many worthy environmental and social causes, but is there a way of picking one area where you personally can do work that matters, and make an effective contribution? What’s the most pressing environmental problem?

Scrolling through the web, I was surprised to find that the people best answering these sorts of questions are a bunch of moral philosophers at Oxford University. Concerned with finding ways of  doing good better, they’ve developed what seems like a particularly useful framework for zeroing in on areas where one person can really make a difference.

According to their framework, the most pressing problems will have a good combination of the following qualities (I’ve edited these a little to more incorporate environmental outcomes):

1. Big in scale: What’s the magnitude of this problem? How much does it affect species, populations and people today? How much effect will solving it have in the long-run?

2. Neglected: How many people and resources are already dedicated to tackling this problem? How well allocated are the resources that are currently being dedicated to the problem?

3. Solvable: How easy would it be to make progress on this problem? Do interventions already exist to solve this problem effectively, and how strong is the evidence behind them?

To find the problem you should work on, also consider, personal fit. Could you become motivated to work on this problem? If you’re later in your career, do you have relevant expertise?

Big in scale

An Inconvenient Truth, the Oscar-winning documentary about climate change, provides a good example of ignoring the importance of scale. Produced for US audiences, the program ends with the call to “buy energy efficient appliances and lightbulbs, change your thermostat, weatherize you house, recycle, and if you can buy a hybrid car.”

Seems like sound advice, until you realise that the first recommendation, household lighting, accounts for only 2.3% of US household carbon emissions. Much better would have been to recommend a more effective and proportional means of downsizing one’s carbon footprint–say switching to a predominantly plant-based diet, reducing private vehicle use (which consume six times more household energy than lighting), or having fewer children.

In a previous article, I argued that “making a difference” includes contributing to reducing population declines and the risk of species’ extinctions. Based on this definition, an environmental problem has greater scale:

1. The larger the number of species are threatened by it.
2. The larger the long-run benefits of solving the problem (including to people).
3. The larger the population declines (e.g. it’s better to focus on globally rare species).

Scale is important because the bigger a problem is, the bigger a difference can be made solving it. You can focus on small fry problems, and, say, spend €100,000 releasing a single oversized manta ray from its restrictive cage in a Portugese aquarium (and yes, that actually happened). Or you could spend the same amount of money protecting a rainforest–maybe somewhere hyperdiverse like Peru, where as little as £5 million of additional annual spending between 1992–2003 would have actually halved the country’s biodiversity loss.

Similarly, you can focus on red squirrel declines in the UK, an animal that is common across Europe. Or else you can divert your attention towards globally endangered species, that have undergone much larger declines. Maybe even ones that are also evolutionarily distinct, and so hold millions of years of genetic uniqueness

Neglected

In 2006, over one third of global fish catch didn’t actually go towards feeding human mouths. Instead, 33.2 million tonnes of seafood (species like anchovies and sardines that feed towards the bottom of the food chain) went towards “non-food uses”–mostly to make fish oil and fish meal to nourish carnivorous fish like farmed salmon and land-based livestock.

Now here’s the really crazy bit.  At least as of 2009,  farmed fish, pigs, and chickens consumed as much wild seafood as industrialized countries combined. That’s more than double the amount of wild seafood consumed directly by China. Three times the consumption of Japan. Six times more than the U.S.

Why am I mentioning this? Because at a time when it was all the rage to be trying to make fishing more sustainable by encouraging better consumer choices in the supermarket, the problem of wild seafood fishing for non-food purposes slipped under the radar. It was neglected.

The US-based Packard Foundation, for example, donated $37 million dollars between 2006-12 towards conservation and science related to “sustainable seafood”. Yet only a fraction of this went towards activities such as research into alternative animal feeds–something which would have disproportionately alleviated the pressures placed on wild marine populations. Instead, most of this money went towards trying to influence consumer choices in the shopping aisle through eco-labelling.

Focusing on neglected areas, global regions, topics or species can substantially increase your chance of making a difference. This is because of diminishing returns.

The more people are working on a particular problem, the harder it is to bring something new and important to the table and make a difference.

There’s a premium to looking for solutions where nobody else is, or drawing attention to a topic that’s being ignored. The eminent biologist E.O Wilson sums it up nicely in his book Letters to a Young Scientist when he says to march away from the sound of the guns.

Solvable

Some conservation interventions don’t work. Some can even prove downright harmful. Here are two examples of well-meaning interventions that backfired.

In 1993, the president of Indonesia declared the endangered Javan Hawk Eagle as Indonesia’s National Rare/Precious Animal. This status made it illegal to keep this eagle species as a pet. The idea was that this would protect eagles from a burgeoning illegal pet trade. It did exactly the opposite.

By highlighting the Javan Hawk Eagle’s conservation plight, a spotlight was shone onto the already imperilled species. The result was that the trade in these animals actually increased following their elevation in conservation status.

Meanwhile, a similar policy under the Endangered Species Act supposed to protect endangered red-cockaded woodpeckers didn’t go quite to plan in North Carolina. This Act made it illegal to kill woodpeckers or to damage their habitat, meaning that if private landowners found a woodpecker on their property, they were suddenly banned from any timber harvesting activities.

The result was  almost too predictable. To avoid the hefty price of having a resident woodpecker, landowners preemptively cut down their forests to remove any prime woodpecker habitat. Consequently. an area of forest that could have supported over sixty woodpecker colonies–more than half of what was needed to meet the species’ conservation target–was destroyed.

Some conservation interventions, then, can do more harm than good. More often the case though is for conservation interventions to be of unknown effectiveness.

An assessment of the evidence behind 78 bat conservation efforts, for example, found that:

48 had no evidence at all as to whether they worked or not, and for a further 12 the evidence was so equivocal, localised or scanty that the intervention was classed as ‘unknown effectiveness’.

Similar patterns prevail across conservation, which still lags behind global health and development in untangling what works from what doesn’t.

This means if you were to blindly pick to support or start a particular conservation intervention without exploring the evidence for its effectiveness beforehand, you’d have no way of knowing whether what you were doing was actually making any difference at all.

So, before you choose an environmental problem to focus on, ask yourself the following questions (again, edited from the smart folks at Oxford):

1. Is there a way to make progress on this problem with rigorous evidence behind it? For instance, lots of studies have shown that killing invasive mammals on tropical islands is amongst the most effective ways of preventing extinctions. Evidence-based conservation is the best kind of conservation.
2.  Is this an attempt to test a new but promising programme, to see whether it works?
3. Is this a project with a small but realistic chance of making a massive impact? For instance, research into a key question, or a political campaign.

A balancing act

Whether you’re planning a conservation-themed documentary, are searching for the right phd, or want to know what causes to support with your hard earned cash, considering the scale, neglectedness and solvability of an environmental problem can be a really helpful roadmap to making a difference.

It’s unlikely that you’ll find a problem that bangs the nail on the head for all three considerations. But a problem that has some combination of the above might be a good one for you to focus your time or money on.

And don’t forget personal fit

Make sure the area you choose is something you would be interested to work on. Do you have, or could you develop, the relevant skills needed to explore the area you’ve identified?

It’s no use deciding that you want to explore how deforestation in the Amazon is related to murky transactions via tax havens if you have no prior knowledge on economics or investment flows!

Fortunately, most things are learnable, if you’re willing to give them a try!

Okay so what’s the most important environmental problem to focus on?

That’s something I’ll be doing a lot of thinking about for an upcoming blog! So stay tuned and let me know what you think are neglected, large and solvable environmental problems!

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Interested in making a difference?

Want to help slow species extinctions and population declines but don’t know where to start?

Then you might enjoy my previous blog post.

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