Saving Wildlife with Sam
Get to know the extraordinary people who dedicate their lives to save wildlife and the places they call home. We go beyond the headlines to uncover their wildest encounters, toughest challenges, and what keeps them hopeful in the fight for nature.
Saving Wildlife with Sam
Bill Sutherland: Using Evidence to Save Wildlife More Effectively
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Bill Sutherland is Miriam Rothschild Professor of Conservation Biology at the University of Cambridge, Department of Zoology, and founder of Conservation Evidence. For over 20 years he’s been asking a deceptively simple question: if a doctor can look up the evidence for any treatment before prescribing, why can't a conservationist do the same?
Conservation has long relied on tradition, intuition, and accumulated experience. But the tools being used today are often the same ones used 50 years ago, while every other field has been transformed by innovation. Bill's work is changing that. In this conversation:
0:00 - Introduction
9:50 - Conservation Evidence: the database changing how we save wildlife
27:03 - Indigenous and traditional knowledge: opportunities and challenges
46:18 - Horizon scanning: predicting the next big threats to biodiversity
49:50 - AI in conservation: promise and risk
53:10 - Where conservation is headed in the next 5 to 10 years
About Bill Sutherland:
Bill Sutherland is the Miriam Rothschild Professor of Conservation Biology at the University of Cambridge and founder of Conservation Evidence. He coined the term "evidence-based conservation" and has spent over two decades building the tools and frameworks to make it a global standard. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and was appointed Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 2021 for services to evidence-based conservation. He also runs Conservation Concepts, a YouTube channel making ecology accessible to anyone curious about the natural world.
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And we we think it's a big problem. We think there's not enough innovation. We think that the st quite often you look at the conservation tools we have now, and they're the same as we were using fifty years ago.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_02You know, whereas you look at any other field and everything has changed completely.
SPEAKER_03Welcome to Saving Wildlife. With me, Sam Williams. This is where we get to hear from amazing conservationists about their life and work and all the incredible things they do to save wildlife. Bill, you're a tremendous force for good in conservation biology. That's very kind of you to say so. Great to be chatting with you today, and I'm very curious to know a bit of your backstory and where did this all come from?
SPEAKER_02The first memory I can have of being interested in nature was going to a local park and seeing this goose I couldn't identify. And going back home, and my brother had a bird book and it turned out to be a swan goose. And I thought it was kind of cool that you could open a book and then see what it is. It's the only I was very lucky, it's the only book I've ever seen that has a swan goose illustrated in it, but it was sort of a domesticated swan goose. And and then after that, I became a bird watcher. And then I started doing odd bits of conservation in my spare time. And then increasingly I've done more conservation, more research, and then I decided to switch to be a full-time conservationist and devote my life to trying to make things better.
SPEAKER_03So one thing I like to ask people early on is I mean, people the people I talked to have had careers in conservation, and often that gives us a very fortunate position where we have nice encounters with wildlife. Have you any particular stories that uh spring out to mind of nice encounters with wildlife?
SPEAKER_02Oh, lots, including last week I went as in Dunyana and um where is that? Uh in southern Spain. Okay. And we went out uh this local biologist took me out, and then just as it was getting dark, we saw a male lynx. Oh wow, sort of 20 metres away.
SPEAKER_03A reintroduced uh lynx, or was it in the white truly white?
SPEAKER_02It's a Iberian lynx, it's it's it didn't have a colour on it or anything, so it was it was either native or it was reintroduced a number of generations back. Fantastic. And that was just standing there watching me, and then it disappeared behind a bush, and I sort of disappeared behind another bush, so we sort of walked in parallel and then started hunting. Those sorts of things are just mind-boggling, absolutely fabulous experiences.
SPEAKER_03Uh, I have a particular uh story that I'm curious to learn about. I just got a hint of somebody. There's a there's a marine story involving your wife, and she was kidnapped by a marine mammal or something or other. Can you tell us about this?
SPEAKER_02There was on a honeymoon in Vanuatu, and there was a dugong that became very friendly, and we were we were swimming in the sea to sort of see if we could see this dogong, and it sort of appeared, and then it came and brushed against me, and it you know had this five o'clock shadow, and then it sort of disappeared, and then it came up to my wife and went and then sort of pushed her, and I grabbed my I grabbed her foot and dragged her back. Wow, but she was very proud of that bruise. Yeah, she had this bruise on her leg, which is sort of you know lasted a couple of months, which is quite she's quite sad when it disappears.
SPEAKER_03Very nice, very nice. So you're you've been a biologist, and then this a shift into more conservation focus, which leads us to conservation evidence, which we'll get to. Um, what is it that you noticed in conservation that that made you inspired you to help bring about change in conservation?
SPEAKER_02Well, I was very struck. I wanted to do conservation and I wanted, and I knew experienced conservationists, but I couldn't work out where they got their knowledge from. And the answer is that they just built it up and they spoke, spoke to lots of people, and they read some research and that sort of thing. But it's largely just sort of accumulated research and accumulated talking to people. And that seemed an incredibly inefficient way of working. And so I decided, I did a number of things. I set up Habitat Management News in British Wildlife, which you know every issue has. These are the latest snippets of information of people that have tried things or bits of research to sort of make that information available. And then I um uh I edited this book, Managing Habitats for Conservation. Uh, and the idea of this book was each chapter is about a habitat, and to say for heathlands or bogs or woods, what is the the things to do? And one of the things that really struck me when I read this book is there was sort of a literature there, but it wasn't clear how the literature related to the suggestions. There was very often it was saying you should do this. And is that because there's a great body of evidence? Is that because there's one study? Is that because I've seen it and I think it's a good idea? Or is it just, well, that seems to be kind of quite sensible? All of which are all right, but you really need to know where you stand. You know, I think it's irresponsible. If your doctor said, Oh, I'm going to give you this drug just because I think it might be quite a good idea, they get struck off immediately. So it's kind of ridiculous that we do that. So it seemed that what we needed to do was to find ways in which we could pull the evidence together and say, So, do this because there's this body of evidence showing that it works. Yeah. Or a body of evidence showing it doesn't work. And and including your local experience and all those sorts of things. So we're not naive about it.
SPEAKER_03Right. That you've struck out, you hit something there which is close to my heart, where, and I've had interesting conversations with volunteers who've come through our program, and you've just distinguished that you said you had friends that were conservationists, but you saw yourself slightly differently there. How would you distinguish between a conservation scientist or a conservation biologist versus a conservation practitioner?
SPEAKER_02So I guess the heart is are you are you are you doing research, are you finding things out, or are you doing practical work? And we would like to break down that barrier. We'd like to break down that barrier. So if you're doing practice, you you before you do something, you say, What have other people done? Can I reflect on that evidence and that experience and decide what to do? Yeah. And that also you should embed tests occasionally, perhaps as an organization once a year, embed a test into practice. So I'm not sure if this is the best way of treating that invasive plant or that. I'm not sure if encouraging people to keep their dogs on a lead, whether or not this notice is better than that notice. So find the right place that you can do it and do that as a test and then learn and just test that one action, because people spend a lot of money on monitoring and evaluation, most of which I don't think is very useful. Whereas if they just said, let's test these small actions, we would really start learning.
SPEAKER_03Right. So making it more experimental rather than just correlative.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, if you say because the problem is that you say, Well, I'm going to have these notice saying to keep your dog off a lead, and I'm going to have this invasive species problem work, and I'm going to reintroduce, I'm going to restore the habitat, and I'm going to do all of these actions, and my number of lap points has gone from this to this. You don't know what caused it. No idea. Right, right. But you can break that down and say, here will be a really good place to test this single action. So let's do that.
SPEAKER_03Lots of my colleagues have come into conservation from a biological background. Um they, you know, myself and many others, you know, have gone through degrees and then and then found ourselves caring about the animals but wanting to make a difference. But that's not all conservationists, and and a challenge I think we have is where we expect conservation practitioners to communicate like scientists. Um, and conservation evidence seems to break that down a bit. Was that an intentional idea behind trying to bridge that gap? And and is there particular things that you find work well in engaging non-scientists?
SPEAKER_02So we our philosophy is to write in a way that is non-technical, so that a non-technical person could understand it. And I think that's kind of, you know, another person a person who reads a newspaper can understand conservation evidence.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_02Um and that's really what you need to do, and be able to then put that together and then make your own decision.
SPEAKER_03We've talked about we've mentioned conservation evidence already as a sort of a philosophy, but what is the um what are the tangible aspects of conservation evidence? There's there's the publications, there's websites and stuff. Can you tell us a bit more about that?
SPEAKER_02So the idea, so in medicine, there's there's the process of systematic views and the Cochrane Library, and that has pulled together the evidence for the effectiveness of particular actions. It's a very expensive way of doing it. They spent billions of pounds on doing that, but it's hugely successful and influential. And that means that you can you can go there and say, what's the evidence for a particular action? And it seemed to me that we needed the same sort of thing in conservation. We needed to be able to look up and see who's tried this particular treatment and did it work, and and find that in an accessible way and find out where it was done, how good the experiment is, and then say for my particular problem here, what am I going to do? Bearing in mind there are these different studies, which will differ in quality and will differ in how similar they are, and then make your decision based on your values, your local experience, and the available literature.
SPEAKER_03Where would a conservationist go to find this information?
SPEAKER_02Conservation evidence. It's a website, and you just it takes a little bit of getting used to because it's not Google. So if you say, What's the best way of treating my invasive Crustula Helm CI in my marsh, it'll say no idea what you're talking about. But if you type Crustula, it'll give you, I don't know, tens of references, dozens of references.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_02And so it will, and it will say, here's the effectiveness of 20 different ways of treating Crustula, including quite a few for which there are no studies, which we consider an important thing to do. Because we want to, there's a big difference between there doesn't seem to be any literature and I haven't looked. And so, you know, if there isn't any literature, you kind of you're on your own, and that's fine, but you know you're on your own. Right.
SPEAKER_03That um in a way comes to a thought that I had, and I'm sure you've heard it before, is evidence is great, but how do we then if we if we we can't only rely on evidence, otherwise there'll be no innovation. So how does a practitioner go about that? How do they deal with that sit that circumstance?
SPEAKER_02And we we think it's a big problem. We think there's not enough innovation. We think that the st quite often you look at the conservation tools we have now, and they're the same as we were using 50 years ago.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_02You know, whereas you look at any other field and everything has changed completely. And and as an amusing example, there's a study showing that crested tits nesting in pine stumps, uh, they go in through the side and then they have this long, thin nest. So, what's a sensible design for crested tit nest box? Well, why don't you have them long and thin? So Ron Summers put out pairs of nest boxes, beautifully designed experiment, you know, one long and thin, one standard classic nest box that you can buy in any shop, um, and showed that all the birds preferred the long, thin nest box. Right. So this is the most carried-out conservation intervention in the world, I would suggest. And yet it seems that birds don't like it particularly. There's a design that's almost certainly better. Right. And and so I sometimes irritate audiences where I give I've got a slide which says you can do better. And and the message I'm giving is that almost always the actions you're doing can be improved. Almost always the way in which you're dealing with that invasive plant or dealing with that rare species can be done in a better way. And we encourage people to sort of think, well, these are the things I'm doing. What might be a better way of doing this? Right. Yeah. And almost and if you really think about that, then you can think, well, actually, I think we should do it this way. And the problem is we just get into this mindset. This is the way we've always done it. This is what we'll do.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah. The the not things not advancing for 50 years makes me immediately think of radio tracking and the technology there. It is now changing, but we have an incredible challenge of finding tracking devices for macaws that they don't destroy. And the the the radio tracking stuff is just such antiquated technology now, it's but it frustrates the heck out of my team.
SPEAKER_02Um, so but still, if you look at that technology compared to nest box designs or birdbaths, or kind of all of this stuff that we have, you know, which is we just do what we've always done, and the innovation that are in other fields. I think we're missing.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, sure, sure. Are there standout examples of where conservation evidence has had a dramatic impact in the field? And then I've got a follow-up question, I'll leave it there for now.
SPEAKER_02So, yeah, there's some organizations that have taken learning really seriously. The Mauritian Wildlife Trust keep trying different approaches, keep experimenting and learning and doing fabulous results, uh, fabulous conservation as a result. Or in our in New Zealand, there are some brilliant conservation practitioners who just keep trying new things, they're always innovating, they're always thinking, and they're testing and they're learning. They're saying, Let's see if this works, and and monitoring, and that is absolutely fabulous. So there are organizations that take using the evidence and testing really seriously, but then there are very many who, when you ask why they're doing something, will say, Well, we've always done this. And you say, What have you as an organization ever learnt? And they'll say, Well, we do monitoring and evaluation, and you say, Can you tell me something you've ever learnt that is sort of believable? And almost always they'll say, Well, actually, we can't. Right. So there's no there's no building on the global experience and there's no learning in most organizations.
SPEAKER_03So, in a way, we're looking for a cultural shift in the way that conservation is implemented.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and and that more an openness to learning. What role do funders have in championing, championing that?
SPEAKER_02We think they're critical. And they we've we've we hold meetings here, and we've hold meetings with funders uh to discuss how practice can be improved. And we ran a meeting, a number of them worked out there's 10 different ways in which they could ask for about their evidence, which they could ask practitioners about their evidence, depending on, you know, is it are you funding a small intervention or are you co-funding a large organization? You know, it depends on on the type of funding. Uh, and there was, I think, 28 funders, they produced that paper, uh, it came out, and then we brought that group together, and I think it's 18 of them had put that into practice and were asking their practitioners, why do you think this might work? Which is kind of an obvious question. And it's it's mind-boggling that that that's an innovation, but it is. And they do it in different ways, but that's absolutely fabulous. And we're now providing more training. So if you are a practitioner, here are sensible ways of answering, here are ways of answering if there doesn't seem to be any evidence or the evidence is contradictory. What how do you then respond? We're providing that evidence, but asking practitioners why they think their action would work is a game changer. Right. And we think that if that was done and that became routine, then at the beginning of the process, you're setting up your conservation program and you think, well, eventually we're going to be asked why this works. Let's right at the beginning think about that and think about what we're going to do. And if this doesn't work, let's get rid of it now. Right. Rather than say it's best practice or whatever, and keep going with it. So we think it's funders can drive enormous change and are doing so.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. N I mean, would you call that the theory of change that people need to know and rigorously critique their theory of change?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, a theory of change is is a key part of this. So a theory of change obviously is you say, I'm thinking of carrying out these measures. I want to increase my macaw population. I'm going to do these measures, and if I do those, it will result in these changes, and if I have those changes, it will result in that, which will result in more macaws. So we love the idea of theories of change, and we work with the measures of success teams and all those people. But we're saying we want an evidence-based theory of change. Right. So you say if we protect the nest holes, what's the likelihood you're going to get more? And if we if we protect, if we put copper strips around the base, as they do in Mauritius, to stop invasion climbing up, you know, does that work? You know, and you just look at those different elements.
SPEAKER_03Right. Fantastic. I see how that fits with institutional funders. I can see, I also see a flip side of that where I think in our particular organization, I think about 60% of our income is from donors, and 70% of them give emotionally. And this has implications for if we're trying to influence the general public. But also the other the other example is corporate funders, some of those maybe just want to look good. And so they're maybe not evaluating this stuff. Does that then do we still how do we fit that in? And is it on the is the obligation on the conservation organization to want to do good work? I mean, uh that sounds I'm not really asking a good question there.
SPEAKER_02You're you're you're struggling with the unbelievable fact that many organizations are giving away money without appearing to care about whether or not it works. That's why that's why I think we're struggling and finding it difficult to say. Because that you've got to accept that. There are many organizations that say, it will look good if I give away this money, let's just give away that money. And we're saying, well, you're giving away that money to do good, why don't you ensure that it actually does good? And here's and if you just did this couple of measures, it's almost no extra work, and you would improve your effectiveness.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. On the also, it's taking that and sort of being devil's advocate here. Is there a risk of um making it harder for small organizations to get started and get off the ground where they may not be in a position to have the resources? I know we're saying it's it's a little bit of effort, but if they're starting out, and I I believe we need more, we need more of these grassroots conservation organizations, but is there we can't expect them to deliver evidence from day one and certainly not impact from day one? Uh even you know, it may. I mean, I think of the Mauritius example, the Mauritius Kestrel, if we look at the population growth of the Mauritius Kestrel from the 1970s, it was 15 years before they really made a difference. Um how do we balance that? How do funders, should funders look at newer newer fledging organizations and and and nurture them without without being too critical?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and we we have um uh an evidence champion process where we encourage organizations and provide them with guidance and those sorts of things. But often what we're saying is we want you to look at the evidence, and I've got conservation evidence on my phone, and I've got what I call my party trick, which I've done many times in government level discussions. You know, we've done this big review. Well, I've just done an equally large review, and this is what the other evidence shows in two minutes. Yeah. You know, so so quite often people say, I haven't got time to look at the evidence, and you think, well, why don't you do it when you You're having waiting for your kettle to boil for your cup of coffee. You know, often sometimes it it can be difficult, but very often that initial look is incredibly quick. And then in terms of testing, so again, what we're interested in is the testing of the action. So in the Mauritius example, going back to the example that the echo parakeets, where the nest holes were getting filled with snails because that was a nice cool place for them to be, and then they put copper strips around them, which they got from conservation evidence because copper was being used to keep snails off red hellebrines, an orchid. So they took that idea, put it around, and it stopped the snails going in and blocking up the nest holes. And to do that test, well, you needn't even do it in nest holes. You can say, I'm going to create ten holes in, you know, in trees. I'm going to put copper around five of them, not in copper around the others, count the number of snails that go in. There you are. That's a couple of days' work for someone. Sure, sure. It's not a vast amount of work, and you've made your contribution to knowledge, and you can stand up and say, we're a really small organization, but in our first year we've made this contribution to knowledge. And next year we're planning to do some other small stage.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_03If you could embed a particular one one particular activity in conservation organizations tomorrow, would it be testing or would it be something else?
SPEAKER_02Uh I would it would be accepting uncertainty, saying this is terribly arrogant and offensive, to say you're not as good as you think you are. Okay. You're too confident. You should reflect on whether or not these actions really work. So having the humility to look at that. Yeah, and that that is the overwhelming problem. That people say we've always done it this way, this is standard process, this is good practice, all of that sort of stuff. And then when we test it, which has been done at scale, lots of actions, you test those, and they turn out not to be right.
SPEAKER_03Getting conservationist to have the humility to reflect on that.
SPEAKER_02So what are what are the things? It's obvious that works, you know, that's fine. But here I'm not sure if that works. Let's just read a little bit about them or let's do an experiment to test, because you know, it's possible you're not right.
SPEAKER_03Conservation evidence has been a thing for 20 years or more now. 2004 it started. Right, okay. Have you seen signs that it is shifting culture in conservation that gives you hope? Is there uh particular examples there you can?
SPEAKER_02Yes. I've got a Google search for evidence-based conservation, which is a term I invented in 2000 in the conservation handbook. And I get, and each day I get a bleep with a number of messages. So it's kind of becoming a standard term. And more organizations are just accepting they should do this. We have our evidence champions that have committed to taking evidence seriously. Tell us about those. So they're practitioners or funders. So if they're practitioners, there's ten different things they could do, such as have an evidence strategy, when you employ someone, ask for evidence as part of the job description, when you've got your annual appraisal, ask about evidence use as part of that. They're those sorts of things that organizations can embed into practice and prove that they've done so, carry out tests, those sorts of things. And we ask that organizations do four of those, and then two years later they've got to move up to five, and two years after that they've got to move up to six. So it's it's all doable if you're an evidence-based organization. And organizations struggle because they're not. But once they take evidence seriously, it's very easy to do. Right. So we're just encouraging organizations to be evidence-based, and and we're giving them a lot of support and encouragement. We s my philosophy is we want these organizations to be more efficient and richer. And we're actively saying, if you're a philanthropist, give your money to an evidence champion because they're much more likely to be effective. So that that's the thing to do. Great. So that's what we want to do. We want to say, you know, if you, you know, in the same way you have two doctors, and this doctor uses the evidence and a thought about this person just decides, well, I'm going to do what I think's a good idea. Which one are you going to go to? Which one are you going to encourage? Which one do you think the state should fund?
SPEAKER_03I've got into conservation through science and doing an undergraduate degree in NMC. So I'm I'm a trained scientist. I don't really think of myself as a scientist anymore. Um, I'm aware though that I believe in science and the scientific approach, but I'm aware that that is a paradigm. And I'm wondering how does how do we make this equitable so that indigenous knowledge or traditional knowledge is incorporated in this framework?
SPEAKER_02Well, and and that's a really serious problem. And we've spent a lot of time thinking about it. We've written a number of papers, we've written a book, Transforming Conservation, a practical guide to evidence and decision making, and a great chunk of that is about how you make decisions, including how you have different knowledge systems. And the and we're also working, we're setting up with a a range of different cultural groups to work out what's the best way that they can store their knowledge in the way that works for them, but ideally enable some of that knowledge to be available in an appropriate way to a wider community. Because, you know, we often we say we, you know, that knowledge can help save all sorts of things. You know, how can that be accessed? What's an appropriate way of doing that? So we've got projects to try to try to do that. But we've done it, so as in Greenland the last year, working with everyone else apart from me was involved in polar polar environmental issues, so there were hunters and there were government people, trying to think about how you can make evidence available and usable. And the one of the problems is that um there are quite a lot of evidence or pieces of information. If you say this person thinks that the caribou are thin this year, then we chat to the government people and they say but I can't use that. You know, I can't decide to to do something because of that statement. Right. But if it was this person who's been hunting caribou every spring for the last 25 years, has been out this year for 15 days in this area and this area, and noticed of the 23 caribou scene, you know, many of them had their ribs sticking out in the way they've not noticed ever before, and the two that they shot had less muscle than, you know, then that that becomes information that you can then use. Okay. And you can then combine that with other sorts of information. So for us, a lot of the challenge is to find ways in which that can be done in an appropriate way. Because you if you're a local community, you can say the Caribbean are thin, therefore we're going to do something. So if you're making a decision, that's fine. But if someone else is making a decision, the state level, or someone else doing something, and they want to combine some scientific studies, which will say this is what that shows, with this local knowledge, then it has to stand up against that scientific knowledge. And so for us the challenge is to think of ways that work for communities. And so over there they have a database called Persuna, where it's for particularly hunters to describe what they've seen. And the point is that the more defendable that is, then the more influential that will be. The reason why they set up that database was they wanted to be listened to. And so what we need, I think, is those sorts of processes, and we fully accept that not all information's available. And you have to bear that in mind. But that very often we want to think of ways in which if people want their evidence to be used, how can it be prepared and stored in a way that it can be used? And that to us is a we've we've we've suggested ways forward, but that to us is a really important field.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I and I can see that that I mean that gets incredibly complex when you the more indigenous or more I'm thinking of the Amazon or Papua New Guinea or something, and that must be incredibly challenging, but incredibly important.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. And and of course, you've got to bear all of that in mind. There are many communities where they want that information to be confidential. There's communities where if it's knowledge of someone that's dead, then it shouldn't be said. You know, all those sorts of complexities, and you you just have to respect that. But then what are the opportunities where you can make that information available in a way that the local community welcomes?
SPEAKER_03Right. Yeah. It's interesting because it's different, it's that same thing of similar to conservation practitioners and not necessarily scientists. How do we communicate with that audience or the stakeholder group? And it's just another stakeholder group, and finding ways to draw the information out of them and to share it.
SPEAKER_02And and as you say, it is a very difficult field. And you know, there's there's lots of opportunities to really upset people. Yes. But I think we need to make substantial progress because there's lots of talk about the way you know that this information is essential for you know restoring the planet, and yet we've got to find ways in which that information can be used to restore the planet.
SPEAKER_03Right. Yeah. Yeah. And so there's there's to some extent almost an obligation on the communities to open open up and share for the benefit of their the ecosystems in which they they live, in a way. Um you mentioned transforming conservation. I noticed, I had a look at that and tremendous success of I think over 20,000 downloads.
SPEAKER_02The wonders of open access. You know, I produced lots of books, many of them, you know, if you're lucky, they sell 10,000, many of them sell a few thousand.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_02Uh and and that they only go to a small community, although we've given lots of books away. But but making books open access is part of the solution. But I think you're going to say it's not the entire solution.
SPEAKER_03Well, I did notice, I looked at the downloads and I noticed something like a very approximately 40% were the downloads were, or I assume it's downloads were in North America, for approximately 40% in Europe, but only 4% in Africa and 4% in South America. Now I appreciate there might be language, although I think it might be translated, I'm not sure. Some of the publications are. How do we that that seems like a bit of a gap, and how do we get this philosophy into those areas that hold the most biodiversity and and where there's greatest need?
SPEAKER_02It's a huge problem, and we're and we're committed to it. So one component we have is we look at the global science. So we did a review with Tatsuo Amano, who's done a lot of work in this area, which showed that 35% of the literature on biodiversity is not in English. And if you look at the scientific papers and map those according to their language, there's about half the world where the the main language for publication is not English. So you go from South America across bits of Africa, southern and eastern Europe, across most of Asia, skirting India, going across to China and Japan, you know that's about half the world. Right. And there there are fewer papers, but the papers that there are are not in English. And you read one of the government reports, and almost never do they have a paper that's not in English. So we we've through Tatsuma and his translate group, they've produced a group of people, so we've now extracted the literature in 18 languages, including English, and made that available, so that we've got a database of non-English studies, so that that's a way of making that information more available.
SPEAKER_03Having evidence is is obviously critically important, but there are examples now, there's some clear examples of where we've got the evidence, but things are not changing. And I've got three examples come to mind. One is sea turtles, which, given where I've been working, I see quite a lot, where there's protection of nests and eggs, and yet there's a paper in the 70s which showed we needed to look after juveniles that were at sea, and the impact on the population numbers would be tremendous. And we've all this work goes into nest turtle nestings, and populations are still declining. We've got more currently in Britain tuberculosis and badges and the management of badges, and then the bigger picture of climate change. So there's lots of examples where there is evidence, but we're not quite transforming that evidence into policy, and and how are we going to achieve that, or what are the gaps there?
SPEAKER_02So I think there'll be sort of wins and losses. So in the sea turtle example, so the the analysis is a Leslie matrix, then there's a number in the middle that says if the juvenile mortality really makes the difference. And that that one figure resulted in quite a bit of change, particularly the turtle exclusion devices. They largely came about because of that Leslie matrix that you just referred to. Okay. So science can actually make a real difference and change things. But the uh what we do is we say this is the evidence, and you have your evidence and you have your values and you have your local experience, and there can be the problem that sometimes the values that conservationists have aren't necessarily the values that other people have. And so sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. But I think the continually being able to say that evidence shows this is an extremely powerful tool because you then have to say, yes, we are going to ignore that for these other political reasons.
SPEAKER_03Right. It might be a bit, I think the term's meta, but what about are we getting evidence on how to communicate evidence and for it to be more successful? Because it seems the bottleneck maybe isn't the refinement of the technique so much as getting somebody to act on the evidence.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, no, and there are lots of studies looking at that. So the classic example is getting people to recycle their towels in hotels. Right. So if you if you say last week 97% of people in this hotel recycle their towels, compared to it's much better if you recycle their towels, the first one is immensely more effective. Right. You know, that's that's you know, that's a way of getting a message across. Or similarly, there's an experiment in Petrified Rock National Park, I'm not sure I've got that name entirely right, in the States.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Whereby lots of people were stealing rocks. And that they did an experiment when they said last year 35 tons of rocks, or whatever, I'm inventing this, 35 tons of rocks were stolen by visitors, and that they experimentally put some rocks down, or they didn't have that sign. And these were different people coming different days, so it's sort of a good experimental design. And if you put up the sign, you lose more rocks. Oh. Because it is because you go along and think, well, 35 tons or whatever it was stolen last year. And similarly. Yeah, exactly. Right. So so I've tried explaining this to my doctor. My doctor has a sign in the notice book notice room saying last month 231 people didn't attend their appointments. You know, that we know that is a catastrophic thing to do. So there are ways, there are ways of doing this, and a lot of it is about normalizing it, is to say this is what people do, this is what is expected, this is how people perform. So why don't you do the same?
SPEAKER_03Right, right. Interesting.
SPEAKER_02And so we but we need a lot more work in you know at all sorts of different levels, you know, how do we how do we get politicians to change, all those sorts of things. We need a lot more research there.
SPEAKER_03Well, it seems to me that in conservation has a lot of focus on communicating science into policy, and and that's great because we want the policymakers to make good decisions, but ultimately, isn't it that the the policymakers are influenced by the public? And it and at the very root is the public, and we need the public to care more. And the challenge is how do we get them to think about triple bottom line and instead of just economics and things like that. Um and I'm wondering so I wonder if there's is there evidence on how we can achieve that?
SPEAKER_02Um there's certainly examples that you know the the David Attenborough Plastics campaign was mind-boggling. You know, that was a bit of footage and attitudes to change, you know, and practice changed at scale, just from I think the right person and the right footage and the right message coming over at sort of the right time when there were solutions available, you know, that it can you can have phenomenal change, but then you can think of lots of other examples where people are campaigning and very little seems to happen.
SPEAKER_03Interesting. I think that that's something that we both share. There's two links there that I want to follow up on. One is that we both share the desire to, through our different communication tools of communicating conservation to a broader audience. And I think that that ultimately is the hope that we can catch people that wouldn't otherwise uh think about conservation. And I know that your your YouTube channel is giving very nice short snippets of ecological insights. Um tell us a bit more about that that work that you've been doing and and what you're seeing as a result of that that channel.
SPEAKER_02Well, kind of I like the idea of people understanding ecology and understanding conservation, you know. And I've done a lot of that. I produced books, I produced lectures, etc. etc. I give a lecture. Yeah, exactly. That's a large chunk of what I've done. And then you ask people, you know, what textbooks they've got, you know, what ecology textbooks do you have or do you recommend? And they all go, ooh, well, there's Beegan Harper and Tanzend, which is a pretty old book. Yeah. Yeah, and you know, so where do they learn? And people learn through YouTube, it's the most important channel at the moment. So I thought it'd be interesting to see if I can produce what are nerdy videos where I say, here's an idea, and I'm going to explain this idea in a way that I think anyone can understand, but you've got to be interested in that nerdiness. You know, it's it's it's not a fluffy little thing, it's here's here's a concept. And people seem to watch them.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02I'm kind of and it it's not overwhelmingly popular, but if I consider um that if I'm giving lectures, you know, I might excluding teaching, I might give, I don't know, a dozen lectures to under a hundred people a year, I might give a few lectures to over a hundred people at some big meeting, I might give a lecture to over a thousand people a couple of times in my career, and yet on YouTube, you know, I can I produce two videos a week that are, you know, watched by on our with a median is about two thousand people. Right. So kind of with a lot of scatter. But you'll produce stuff that a fair audience is watching. Yeah, that's a great way of influencing people and and making a difference.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. I think the key word there is is influence. Influence. And that's something that ultimately I'm hoping influence for good, not just for popularity, but having impact, but also having influence, so that there's a there's a bigger reach. And I think I think what you're doing on the channel is is fantastic.
SPEAKER_02And and the idea is that if you understand more, you might find it more interesting. You know, you appreciate nature more because there are I I hope I teal lots there are lots of things that I think are really cool. Yeah, I think wow, that's just so cool. But also there are things that you can be a better conservationist because you understand the underlying processes.
SPEAKER_03I I think people in general, my my personal experience is that if I'm out and about with people and I'm I'm hearing birds and I'm seeing things, and I just tell them a little snippet. Generally, people are fascinated and and they've they're they have that moment to enjoy it. And I think it's the world is going on around us, and so we you know why not take a moment and enjoy it, and it's it's nice. So yeah.
SPEAKER_02And and sometimes it's just extraordinary. Yeah. So I so I produced one, I made it over Christmas and launched it a month or so ago called Marcenescence, the the fact that leaves die on the tree, beech leaves or whatever, and then they stay there for most of the winter. And it's caught the title of the video is Marcenescence. You know, it's not wow, ten amazing facts about trees. You know, it is called Marcenescence, and then the the the photo is you know, why are these leaves staying, or something like that. Yeah. And that's had 13,000 views or something. Wow! You know, kind of so people, although it's nerdy, yeah, there's clearly an audience for that nerdy stuff, yeah, which is great, fabulous. A bit it's a bit hard to predict what's going to work and what isn't.
SPEAKER_03But you mentioned David Attenborough's plastics campaign, and as I if I remember this correctly, the another aspect of your work is the horizon scanning. And one of the things that was an initial prediction in the horizon scanning was the impact of microplastics, and that came around shockingly fast. The looking back, uh well, first of all, perhaps can you tell us a bit more about the horizon scanning practice that you that you do?
SPEAKER_02So, okay, so in 2006, thinking about the the George Bush in his State of the Union address had this big push for biofuels, and the European Union had a big push for producing biofuels, and it seemed that we as an academic community were not prepared. You know, what are the what are the ecological and food production and energy production consequences of producing a lot of biofuel? Uh we should have been prepared. We should have seen that coming and had some research, so so we'd be part of the discussion at the time rather than let Yeah, let's let's let as we tend to do, let's complain and produce our research five years later. So it seemed that wasn't the way to do it. Uh, we're you know, we're we're we're driving along, looking in the back mirror to see what's happening and looking forward. And so it seemed interesting to see if we could have this process of horizon scanning. And so we bought a team of people who who seemed to know stuff, you know, that they were experts in their field, or there were professional horizon scanners, or there are people from large professional organizations, large conservation organizations who could reach out to a lot of people, and say, what are the issues coming up? And we we produced a list of 15. And then 10 years later, we then went back and had a look at that list, and thankfully, for a different reason, we'd taken that list and we'd gone to the chief scientists or the CEOs of a dozen conservation organizations and said, Have you heard of these? And and on average they're about half had, you know. So, you know, these were things that were not generally known. And then we looked again ten years later, and we looked at the subjects and also how the literature had changed. But there are things like microplastics, artificial meat, artificial life. Using your phone to collect environmental data, you know. So good as well as bad, like positive or negative. Yeah, but any but using your phone to collect data, half the people had never heard of that as an idea. Wow. Um that seems crazy now. Exactly. Yeah, and and we had a whole set of topics, you know, the the lionfish that are in the Caribbean and various places. We had a whole set of topics like that that are now mainstream, but in 2006 we knew from this survey that only about half of people had heard of. So kind of those were not at all well known. So we just produced this every year, and the idea is to be continually saying, these are more topics for you to think about. Yeah. Think about whether or not you should be doing research, think about whether or not we should be thinking about the policy consequences, but start thinking ahead rather than always looking backwards.
SPEAKER_03And when you look back now at this this process, were there emerging issues that have kind of shocked you how quickly they came around? Like we mentioned the I mentioned the plastics. Were there other issues?
SPEAKER_02Well, yeah, some of them come faster than others. Some of them are difficult, so we don't cover political changes because that's kind of you know hard hard to do, and what do you and how do you do that? But you know, various issues, you know, AI and things like that have come right up the agenda very quickly. Yes. So, you know, with all sorts of transformative changes.
SPEAKER_03So what are the what do you anticipate there with AI specifically and I mean in terms of I think of infrastructure, but I'm also curious on societal change as well. What are you I'm not I'm not asking you to bring out your crystal ball, but what what do you think may be challenging for conservation?
SPEAKER_02Well, there's firstly there's lots of great stuff. So we're using it to extract literature and it can find the literature at scale. We worked with the university librarian who's we've got publishing deals, so we've got PDFs of environmental papers and the university computer, which we can search. We've downloaded the all the PDFs from the internet, and we've got those. Right. So we can search this stuff and find the literature at scale, which is and that's not a Cambridge thing, any university could do this, but we've we've got this librarian that's pushed that through. And and we can then use that to pull out the literature and and extract it and summarize it, and and that's what we're doing now. We're use we're using that for the conservation evidence uh uh toolkit, but we're insistent on using humans, and our concern is that lots of people are going to do this without having what they call the human in the loop, rather defensive term. So the the then that the concern is that will be less rigorous. Yeah, yeah. You don't know where it comes from. Sure. You don't know you don't know where it comes from, and you can't defend it. So when you go to say you can't do this because it's detrimental, and they say, Why do you know that? And you say, Well, we've got this analysis, and they say, Where do you come from? And they say, Well, we don't really know. It's this large language model produced it. Right. And they'll say, Well, we've just put the same words in today, and it's come up with a different result. You know, why is that different? And you say, Well, I don't know. Right. You know, it's just not tenable. You need a rigorous process. But other concern is that lots of literature will will be sort of fabricated because it's easy to fabricate at scale. Sure. And we might have this swamp of new literature.
SPEAKER_03We're seeing that in in imagery. Uh even on YouTube, there's such nonsense videos of giant slugs eating elephants and things like that. That is very concerning because it degrades conservation.
SPEAKER_02And and you two, and both of us must work fast at this at our particular activities because we're going to be replaced by AI very soon.
SPEAKER_03For sure. On the ground, though, are there I I'm what comes to mind when I think about AI is the amount of infrastructure needed for energy production and transmission lines and data centers and heat generation of that stuff.
SPEAKER_02Uh and and and other concerns too, such as your particular knowledge system, where we're talking about, as we talked about earlier, about diversifying sources of knowledge, decolonizing conservation, those sorts of things. And what we're likely to do is then go, everything's going to come back again. So a couple of organizations will dictate everything. Right. And and they will have their knowledge system built in that, and you there's nothing you can do. Interesting.
SPEAKER_03Moving on to something slightly more cheery. Good. Hopefully, hopefully more cheery. Um if we look at sort of a horizon scanning activity, almost like an interview question, where do you see conservation going in five to ten years?
SPEAKER_02I think there's a potential for lots of good news. There's lots of people that are interested, there's lots of landowners that are interested in making a difference. There's lots of people caught up in all sorts of concerns and interest in making a better planet. And if we can take that interest and we can make sure that activities are effective, and we can have sensible policymakers, and we can avoid doing things like paying for activities that are damaging and still pay for activities that are beneficial, and appreciate the real importance of the natural world and how that underpins everything. And it's not an optional extra, it's kind of the key element that enables everything else to happen. I think the planet could be a much better place.
SPEAKER_03Fantastic. And that's a wonderful note to uh wrap up on. Thank you so much for everything that you do. Yeah. I'm excited to keep chatting and find ways to build bridges. Absolutely. And yeah, just thanks for your time today.