The world is in the midst of a sixth mass extinction of species, caused by a wide range of human activities. The 2023 State of Nature Report, highlights the UK’s ongoing decline in nature, and its status as one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world. If we want to stem and even reverse these alarming losses, there is no time to lose using techniques that don’t work. Like medical interventions, conservation actions need to be based on the best available evidence, shared rapidly and easily accessible to practitioners. This in turn needs a deeper cultural commitment to testing, learning form, and improving the effectiveness of conservation interventions. Here, a new vision is set out to ensure that nature recovery programmes really do address decades of damage to the natural world and funding has real and lasting impact.

To support this process, a new vision for the future conservation evidence landscape has been published in the scientific journal Ecological Solutions & Evidence. Read it in full at https://doi.org/10.1002/2688-8319.12397

The paper’s authors are representatives of 27 organisations, including Amphibian and Reptile Conservation, from across the environmental sector. They identified a broad range of key actions, in four areas: (1) evidence creation, (2) access to evidence, (3) evidence culture, and (4) enabling evidence-based conservation.

Some key changes that the paper’s authors highlight include:

• More evidence of what works and what doesn’t to be generated from ‘real world’ practitioner-led experiments delivered through partnerships of nature conservation practitioners, researchers and local communities;
• Enhanced use of local, traditional and indigenous ecological knowledge and the use of well-resourced citizen science programmes to create useful evidence;
• More open access and better sign-posting to the best available evidence of all kinds;
• More widely available and well supported peer-to-peer learning about nature conservation and nature recovery policy and practice;
• A stronger and more widespread evidence culture within which the evidence needs of conservation practitioners are a key driver of conservation science, conservation work is judged by its outcomes and research institutions have long-term, funded professional partnerships with conservation practitioner organisations; and
• More practitioner participation in the development and delivery of public funded research grant programmes, to encourage a stronger focus on the sector’s needs and co-creation of effective research projects.

Lead author Dr Mark O’Connell (University of Gloucestershire) said: “The way in which evidence is co-designed and subsequently used by conservation practitioners and decision makers, needs to change radically.”

Co-lead author Dr Rachel White (University of Brighton) said: “Our vision provides a new approach to evidence that will allow nature recovery to be fully evidenced-based by 2035.”