De-colonizing conservation in a global world.

Humans form an integral part of most ecosystems on earth. To prevent habitat and species loss and destruction, social justice must, therefore, be at the core of conservation efforts. Traditional conservation education approaches focus on building knowledge, skills, and awareness amongst local communities with the hope of leading to behavior change resulting in the protection of species and ecosystems. The principal drivers of threats to these ecosystems, however, are often not the local people but rather the interests of industry, governments and consumers in distant places. To mitigate and abate the threats to ecosystems, conservation approaches must be both localized and decolonized, including on all the relevant stakeholders. This starts by ensuring that industry, government, and financing institutions have the skills and incentives to avoid harm to the people, wildlife, and ecosystems they exploit, and ensuring that local and indigenous communities are not only informed, but much more engaged in leading the activities that affect them or their land/resources. Essentially, it is the behavior of the global community that must change with respect to the consumption, utilization, and extraction of tropical forest resources and conservation targets must reflect this. Conservation can only be successful when the threats to ecosystems are adequately understood and local people are part of the design and leadership of conservation efforts. This commentary provides specific examples of how conservation education can focus on the drivers of threats, building expertize in the relevant audiences and partners.

Great apes and biodiversity offset projects in Africa: the case for national offset strategies.

The development and private sectors are increasingly considering "biodiversity offsets" as a strategy to compensate for their negative impacts on biodiversity, including impacts on great apes and their habitats in Africa. In the absence of national offset policies in sub-Saharan Africa, offset design and implementation are guided by company internal standards, lending bank standards or international best practice principles. We examine four projects in Africa that are seeking to compensate for their negative impacts on great ape populations. Our assessment of these projects reveals that not all apply or implement best practices, and that there is little standardization in the methods used to measure losses and gains in species numbers. Even if they were to follow currently accepted best-practice principles, we find that these actions may still fail to contribute to conservation objectives over the long term. We advocate for an alternative approach in which biodiversity offset and compensation projects are designed and implemented as part of a National Offset Strategy that (1) takes into account the cumulative impacts of development in individual countries, (2) identifies priority offset sites, (3) promotes aggregated offsets, and (4) integrates biodiversity offset and compensation projects with national biodiversity conservation objectives. We also propose supplementary principles necessary for biodiversity offsets to contribute to great ape conservation in Africa. Caution should still be exercised, however, with regard to offsets until further field-based evidence of their effectiveness is available.