Identifying the role of conservation biology for solving the environmental crisis

Abstract

Humans are altering their living environment to an extent that could cause environmental collapse. Promoting change into environmentally sustainability is therefore urgent. Despite a rapid expansion in conservation biology, appreciation of underlying causes and identification of long-term solutions have largely been lacking. I summarized knowledge regarding the environmental crisis, and argue that the most important contributions towards solutions come from economy, political sciences, and psychology. Roles of conservation biology include providing environmental protection until sustainable solutions have been found, evaluating the effectiveness of implemented solutions, and providing societies with information necessary to align effectively with environmental values. Because of the potential disciplinary discrepancy between finding long-term solutions versus short term protection, we may face critical trade-offs between allocations of resources towards achieving sustainability. Since biological knowledge is required for such trade-offs, an additional role for conservation biologists may be to provide guidance towards finding optimal strategies in such trade-offs.