The Case for Conservation Podcast

Systematic conservation planning began in the late 1980s, partly because protected areas were being set up around iconic species and landscapes, while many ecosystems, especially flat, fertile land suited to agriculture, were left out. The approach aimed to make the choice of where to put new protected areas more systematic, with targets for species and habitats. It has since grown to include ecosystem services, zoning for different land and sea uses, and climate change. For a long time much of the focus has been on mapping the most important and most threatened places. But is a map of important places really what decision-makers need? And if some of those places can't realistically be saved, should they still be the priority?
In this episode I put these questions to Hugh Possingham, Professor at the University of Queensland and co-developer of Marxan, one of the most widely used conservation planning tools. He explains why he thinks we should prioritise actions rather than places, and how knowing whether a threat can be stopped should change where we act. We also discuss what the 30 by 30 target and OECMs mean for conservation planning.
Links to resurces:
Marxan Planning Platform (MaPP) – The free, web-based version of Marxan that Hugh mentions and which he co-developed.
Effective conservation requires clear objectives and prioritizing actions, not places or species – 2015 article by Brown, Bode, Possingham and co-authors in PNAS that sets out the "verb" versus "place" argument.
Systematic conservation planning – Margules and Pressey's 2000 article in Nature, a foundational paper for the field.
Beyond area: evaluating Australia's contribution to Aichi Target 11 and implications for 30 × 30 – 2026 article by Watson, Possingham and co-authors in Conservation Science and Practice.
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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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