The Case for Conservation Podcast

Almost every country in the world has signed up to the same set of biodiversity targets, agreed in 2022 under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). Unlike the Aichi Targets before them, these come with a monitoring framework meant to show countries whether they're on track, and countries are now reporting their progress through their national reports. That gives us a first chance to look at how the framework is working in practice. It also raises a more basic question I've been thinking about for some time. Does it make sense to set sweeping targets at the global level, when conservation actually happens nationally and locally, and when none of the previous targets were completely met?

To explore this, I spoke with Alice Hughes, now Professor at the University of Melbourne, whose work sits where biodiversity science meets policy. Alice returns to the podcast to discuss whether the monitoring framework’s indicators can really measure what the targets set out to achieve, and whether we have enough data to act on. We also ask whether ambitious targets do more good than harm. Finally, we consider what the alternative to global targets would be, and how agreements like the GBF might be made more effective.

Link to resources

• The true scale of global wildlife trade is obscured by data gaps
• How networks and the Global Environment Facility can turn national reporting into lasting biodiversity monitoring capacity
• One Health, multiple gaps: Comparative analysis of global policies for zoonotic surveillance

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For decades I've been trying to get a definitive picture on whether organic agriculture is actually better for the environment. And if it is — where's the widespread adoption? When I started out, organic was treated as a fringe idea. Now, the pendulum has swung so far the other way that it's often treated as inherently virtuous, even beyond environmentalist circles. Perhaps it's for that reason that it's been remarkably difficult to find anyone willing to discuss it. That has made me even more keen to do it properly, and I finally found the perfect person to discuss it after realizing how relevant it was to his main focus, and another great interest of mine — the land sparing versus land sharing debate.

Andrew Balmford is a Professor of Conservation Science at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of the Royal Society, whom I met many years back when he was on sabbatical in South Africa. He is one of the world's leading authorities on land sparing (using the land intensively on a smaller footprint, so we can leave more of nature intact) and land sharing (using the land gently but across larger areas and making it friendlier for wildlife). Organic is a somewhat classic example of land sharing, as we discuss. Andrew has spent the better part of two decades across five continents, measuring what different kinds of agriculture do to biodiversity. We talk about what the data show, why he thinks the conservation movement has got organic wrong, and what a serious plan to feed the world without wrecking it would actually require.

Links to resources:

• Sustainable high-yield farming is essential for bending the curve of biodiversity loss - 2025 paper by Andrew and co-authors in Philosophical Transactions B.
• Reconciling Food Production and Biodiversity Conservation: Land Sharing and Land Sparing Compared - 2011 article by Andrew and colleagues in Science.
• The environmental costs and benefits of high-yield farming - 2018 article by Andrew and colleagues in Nature Sustainability.
• Reflections on the Global Biodiversity Framework: Achievements, gaps, and future priorities - The 2024 essay compilation in One Earth that Andrew referred to i the discussion.

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In its purest form, environmental science is meant to describe the world objectively, and let policymakers decide what to do about it. But what if the tools we rely on — assessments, indicators, models — do more than describe, and quietly help shape decision-making? Why do certain framings of biodiversity come to feel like simple facts rather than choices? And what happens to other forms of knowledge when we try to integrate them into scientific narratives?

To explore these questions, I spoke with Esther Turnhout, Professor of Science, Technology and Society at the University of Twente. Esther’s work focuses on how scientific knowledge is produced, made authoritative, and put to work in biodiversity policy — including through assessments like those of IPBES. We discuss how facts and values become entangled in environmental science, what tends to go wrong in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaboration, and whether plural knowledge systems can really be integrated. In closing we transition onto a broader topic: Esther suggests that science may be no more universal than any other form of knowledge. This is a claim I find myself strongly resisting, and which I might pursue further another time.

Links to Resources

• ‘Measurementality’ in Biodiversity Governance: Knowledge, Transparency, and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) - 2014 article by Esther and colleagues
• A better knowledge is possible: Transforming environmental science for justice and pluralism - 2024 article by Esther

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Few ideas are as deeply embedded in how we run our societies as economic growth. Across the political spectrum growth is treated as self-evidently good, and the debate tends to be a tug-of-war between those who want to keep growing and those who argue we urgently need to do the opposite. Degrowth is the argument that wealthy societies should deliberately shrink their economies to stay within the planet's limits. Most of us can probably sense that there's no end to the expansion of human activity, and that something has to give. But how well does degrowth actually hold up when you examine the evidence behind it? And is it a realistic strategy for confronting our environmental crisis, or is it missing the point?

My guest is Jeroen van den Bergh, a Research Professor at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and at VU University Amsterdam, and one of the sharpest critics of the degrowth movement. But as you'll hear, he's an equally sharp critic of growth-at-all-costs. In 2024 he published a widely discussed review of the degrowth literature that concluded much of it is built on conviction rather than rigorous research, a verdict that earned plenty of push-back. In this conversation we dig into the appeal of degrowth, the reasons it's politically radioactive, and what a more evidence-based approach to growth and the environment might look like.

Links to resources

• Reviewing studies of degrowth: Are claims matched by data, methods and policy analysis? - Jeroen's 2024 paper with Ivan Savin, reviewing the body of work on degrowth.
• Environment versus growth - A criticism of "degrowth" and a plea for "a-growth" - An earlier (2011) degrowth and a-growth paper by Jeroen.

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Synthetic biology, the engineering of life at the genetic level, is advancing at pace. Much of the public conversation fixates on de-extinction and charismatic creatures like woolly mammoths, dire wolves, and moas, but is that really what matters in this new world we are looking at? And while we debate whether these technologies should be applied to the natural world at all, massive investment in human medicine and agriculture is already releasing genetically modified organisms into open systems, including soils, freshwater, oceans, and even our own bodies. Synthetic biology also raises difficult questions about who benefits, who bears the costs, and what it means when private intellectual property becomes embedded in the genome of an endangered species.

To explore all of this, I spoke with returning guest on the show Kent Redford, a conservation scientist who has spent well over a decade trying to bring synthetic biology to the attention of conservationists. We discuss the blurry line between genetic engineering and synthetic biology, the promise and peril of engineered gene drives, and why he believes the field's obsession with de-extinction is largely a waste of time. Kent also makes a deeper, more unsettling argument: that conservation is gripped by a kind of "Holocene hubris," still trying to restore a past that is already slipping away.

Links to resources

• Strange Natures: Conservation in the Era of Synthetic Biology - Kent's book on synthetic biology in conservation
• Synthetic soil crusts against green-desert transitions - 2021 article by Solé and co-authors 
• Beneficial Microorganisms for Corals (BMC): Proposed Mechanisms for Coral Health and Resilience - 2017 artilce by Peixoto and co-authors

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Collaboration is one of the most widely accepted ideas in environmental governance. When faced with a complex problem, the instinct is almost always to bring stakeholders together and work toward a shared solution. When that process fails the response is often to “collaborate harder”. But what if that instinct is sometimes counterproductive? What if the sheer number of collaborative initiatives is stretching participants so thin that none of them achieve very much? And what if the conflicts that collaboration is supposed to resolve are actually being deepened by the process itself?

To explore these questions, I spoke with previous guest Örjan Bodin, Professor at the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University. Örjan's research examines how networks of actors collaborate — or fail to collaborate — around environmental problems, and what determines whether those efforts lead to meaningful outcomes. We discuss why collaboration is not always the best response to every problem, how conflict and cooperation coexist, the role of power imbalances in shaping outcomes, why trust takes far longer to build than most initiatives allow for, and whether the small, incremental wins that feel unsatisfying might actually be the best path to lasting progress.

Links to resources

• Polycentric systems for coping with collective action and global environmental change - 2010 Ostrom article about the benefits of small initial gains.
• A population ecology of network domains. Public Management Review - 2023 article on the issue of ever-increasing number of collaborative venues.
• Reconciling Conflict and Cooperation in Environmental Governance: A Social Network Perspective - 2020 article by Örjan and others on the interplay between conflict and collaboration, and its (partial) separation in scholarly work on environmental governance.
• Collaborative environmental governance: Achieving collective action in social-ecological systems - 2017 article by Örjan in Science.
• The Environmental Performance of Participatory and Collaborative Governance: A Framework of Causal Mechanisms - 2018 article by Newig et al.

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The relationship between science, policy, and society is often framed as a search for objective answers. In reality, it is shaped by partial perspectives and competing forms of knowledge. Why do certain perspectives dominate? Why is there such a persistent expectation that science can deliver answers to fundamentally political questions? And how do these dynamics affect trust in expertise?

To explore these questions, I spoke with Mark Neff, Professor at the College of the Environment at Western Washington University. Mark’s work sits at the intersection of environmental policy, science policy, and science and technology studies, focusing on how societies organize and use scientific knowledge in decision-making. We discuss the limits of scientific authority in a democracy, the tensions between different forms of knowledge, the risks of claiming certainty, and why acknowledging uncertainty may be essential to restore trust in science and policy.

Link to resources

• De-Facto Science Policy in the Making How Scientists Shape Science Policy and Why it Matters - A 2013 (but still relevant) paper co-authored by Mark
• Mark is currently working on a book introducing some of the ideas we discuss. Link to details will be added here once it is available.

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Biodiversity loss is an ongoing challenge, but some of the language we use to describe it may be on shakier ground than we realize. Are we really living through a “sixth mass extinction”? What does that phrase technically imply, and how well is it supported by the data? And what about climate change: how much species-level extinction can credibly be attributed to warming so far, and how do you attribute causes when multiple threats interact?

To explore these questions, I spoke with John Wiens, an ecologist at the University of Arizona whose work focuses on extinction rates and climate-driven range losses. We discuss what the evidence suggests about acceleration (or the lack thereof) in extinction in recent decades, why documented extinctions have been concentrated on islands and in freshwater systems, and how climate change is expected to reshape extinction risk through mechanisms like heat extremes, shifting range limits, and disease dynamics. The thread running through it all is credibility and ambition: how to communicate urgency without overclaiming, and why a stronger conservation goal is not “avoiding a mass extinction,” but preventing extinctions wherever we still can.

Links to resources

• Future threats to biodiversity and pathways to their prevention - The 2017 Tilman et al. article that John referred to in our discussion
• Questioning the sixth mass extinction - A 2025 article by John and colleague

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This episode does not argue against renewable energy—renewables are essential to decarbonization—but it does ask what the transition looks like when you account for materials, extraction, and infrastructure.

The clean energy transition is often framed as a straightforward swap: renewables replace fossil fuels, emissions fall, problem solved. But beneath that story sits a harder set of questions. How material-intensive is a renewables-led grid, really? What happens when you account for the steel, concrete, and critical minerals that make wind, solar, and battery storage possible? And if mining expands dramatically to enable decarbonization, what are the environmental and social trade-offs?

To explore these questions, I spoke with Saleem Ali, a systems scientist and industrial ecologist at the University of Delaware who studies the “materials–energy nexus”—the idea that energy systems are constrained not only by fuels and emissions, but by infrastructure, extraction, and supply chains. We talk about why wind and solar can be surprisingly material-heavy up front, how storage options like pumped hydro compare with large battery farms, why nuclear and biofuels remain part of the conversation, and what a more pragmatic approach looks like when every option carries trade-offs.

Links to Resources

• The fight over minerals for green energy — and a better way forward - Saleem's 2024 TED Talk

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The intersection of science, politics, and environmental discourse is full of puzzles: why has nuance gone missing from the conversation? Why are heterodox or balanced views often sidelined? And how do echo chambers, alarmist rhetoric, and the erosion of trust hinder lasting progress in conservation?

To explore these questions, I spoke with Roger Pielke Jr., a political scientist well-known for his work on contested science in contentious policy areas, from climate and extreme weather to COVID origins and sports governance.

Links to resources

• The Honest Broker - Roger's website and blog, with lots of free content and even more in the paid version.
• What Happened on Deliberation Day? 2007 paper mentioned by Roger in which the researchers found that like-minded deliberation led to stronger, more extreme post-discussion views, while mixed groups became more open and less certain.
• The Rightful Place of Science: Disasters and Climate Change - Book by Roger, emphasizing evidence-based nuance over alarmism.
• Messaging Should Reflect the Nuanced Relationship between Land Change and Zoonotic Disease Risk - BioScience paper that we discussed, on the links between land change and zoonotic spillover risk.

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