The concept of the Anthropocene has highlighted the significant global impact of human activities on ecological systems on a geological scale (Crutzen 2002). This concept has come to significantly influence a scientific and political agenda orientated towards documenting and denouncing multiple negative anthropogenic factors that have led to global change. Nevertheless, not all large-scale environmental transformations by human societies have been intrinsically destructive. Many indigenous communities in the Neotropics, Palearctic, sub-Saharan Africa, North America, Indo-Malaya and Australasia have radically – albeit often constructively – modified the physical and biotic conditions of the ecological systems that they inhabit (Ellis 2015). It is necessary to revise the assumption that human actions always degrade the environment, through a reconceptualization that we have previously called ‘anthropogenesis’ (Rivera-Núñez et al. 2020). Instead of the naïve portrayal of the ‘good Anthropocene’ (Hamilton 2015, Fremaux & Barry 2019), anthropogenesis seeks to enrich the biodiversity debate with the historical human expressions of constructed environments that the conservation-focused ‘Edenic sciences’ and the ‘pristine syndrome’ (Robbins & Moore 2013) tend to ignore, or ‘Anthropo-not-see’ (de la Cadena 2019). The objective of this comment paper is to urge the academic community, grassroots organizations and governments to employ a concept of ‘palimpsest’ (from the Ancient Greek for ‘again scraped’, implying that something is scraped clear ready to be used again) in the reconceptualization of biodiversity conservation from a historical perspective that implements research and policy agendas that incorporate the human propensity for environmental construction in a deeper and more inclusive manner.

The concept of ‘biodiversity conservation’ includes diverse notions of what part of ‘nature’ one is trying to conserve. Moreover, the conservation discourse is part of a wider discussion on what kind of world we want for both humans and nature. Over the past few decades, debates have erupted on both fronts: what nature is worth saving and how to link concerns for nature with concerns for larger societal well-being. But proposals such as the Global Deal for Nature (www.globaldealfornature.org) articulated by Dinerstein and others suggest that mainstream conservation thinking has not changed much. I argue that acknowledging multiple values about conservation and about society, rejecting the biocentric high horse, pragmatic pluralism and simplistic ‘win–win’ arguments, and embracing a broader set of societal concerns is a more tenable approach towards achieving a balanced society–nature relationship.

Future global environmental change will have a significant impact on biodiversity through the intersecting forces of climate change, urbanization, human population growth, overexploitation, and pollution. This presents a fundamental challenge to conservation approaches, which seek to conserve past or current assemblages of species or ecosystems in situ. This review canvases diverse approaches to biodiversity futures, including social science scholarship on the Anthropocene and futures thinking alongside models and scenarios from the biophysical science community. It argues that charting biodiversity futures requires processes that must include broad sections of academia and the conservation community to ask what desirable futures look like, and for whom. These efforts confront political and philosophical questions about levels of acceptable loss, and how trade-offs can be made in ways that address the injustices in the distribution of costs and benefits across and within human and non-human life forms. As such, this review proposes that charting biodiversity futures is inherently normative and political. Drawing on diverse scholarship united under a banner of ‘futures thinking’ this review presents an array of methods, approaches and concepts that provide a foundation from which to consider research and decision-making that enables action in the context of contested and uncertain biodiversity futures.

Systems thinking provides a comprehensive range of theories and methods that are useful for understanding and managing sustainability challenges. Biodiversity conservation is riddled with complex interactions between science, society and myriad interacting systems through temporal and spatial scales. This article presents a synthetic analysis of the history of systems thinking from a genealogical perspective, drawing from hard and soft systems thinking, and resilience and social-ecological systems. Using the anchor point of system leverage points and system characteristics (parameters, feedbacks, design and intent), we employ a diversity of examples to illustrate their relevance to multiple biodiversity related problems. We conclude by illustrating the opportunities for systems thinking to bridge epistemic divides with multiple biodiversity actors working towards conservation outcomes. Systems thinking can support more integrative biodiversity interventions, as they provide a pluralistic set of tools for bridging knowledges and disciplines, which can be useful to create new shared understandings of how to conserve biodiversity.

Biodiversity loss is a complex issue and a risk that education cannot overlook. Teachers play a crucial role in how biodiversity, and in particular local biodiversity, is understood. To provide insight into how to improve communication on the subject, we investigate teachers’ perspectives and social representations regarding biodiversity, their fluency in terms of Internet use, their familiarity with biodiversity web portals and perceived pedagogical usefulness of technology. A sample of 243 K–12 schoolteachers of multiple scientific domains from eight Azorean islands answered an online survey, including three free-word association tests using inductive terms such as ‘Internet’, ‘biodiversity’ and ‘familiar biodiversity portals’. Overall, the schoolteachers failed to incorporate the multidimensionality of the biodiversity concept (including natural science teachers) or to show technological fluency, and they tended not to use biodiversity web portals as tools to engage students in teaching activities. Our results indicate that teachers’ perspectives about biodiversity need to be broadened and improved and that it is worth exploring whether information and communication technology represents a window of opportunity to do so. As an example, biodiversity web portals, which are widely recognized as trustworthy information repositories, may be used to engage teachers in this endeavour.

In any conservation programme, a variety of actors participate and interact in its different phases. They commonly have different perspectives and priorities regarding conservation, and diversity in the ensuing perspectives constitutes a barrier to effective conservation. In this paper, we analyse the different perspectives around the Programa de Conservación de Maíz Criollo (Programme for the Conservation of Native Maize in Mexico; PROMAC) in order to understand the possible causes that resulted in the programme not fulfilling its objectives. We used Q methodology and semi-structured interviews with farmers from a natural protected area to analyse the perspectives of the key actors who conceptualized, designed and implemented the programme and of the target population. Our research identified two different perspectives: (1) native maize can only be conserved with the support of community processes; and (2) the government, and not farmers, is responsible for the conservation of native maize. For farmers, native maize is key to their subsistence livelihoods, and they participated in the programme because of government monetary incentives. These differences contributed to dissimilar interpretations throughout the programme’s implementation phase, which, in turn, likely contributed to PROMAC failing to meet its objectives.

Payments for ecosystem services (PES) programmes have been considered an important conservation mechanism to avoid deforestation. These environmental policies act in social and ecological contexts at different spatial scales. We evaluated the social-ecological fit between stakeholders and ecosystem processes in a local PES programme across three levels: social, ecological and social-ecological. We explored collaboration among stakeholders, assessed connectivity between forest units and evaluated conservation activity links between stakeholders and forest units. In addition, to increase programme effectiveness, we classified forest units based on their social and ecological importance. Our main findings suggest that non-governmental organizations occupy brokerage positions between landowners and government in a dense collaboration network. We also found a partial spatial misfit between conservation activity links and the forest units that provide the most hydrological services to Xalapa. We conclude that conservation efforts should be directed towards the middle and high part of the Pixquiac sub-watershed and that the role of non-governmental organizations as mediators should be strengthened to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the local PES programme.

Promoting human-carnivore coexistence is a main component of carnivore conservation. Coexistence programmes are usually informed by attitudinal studies that evaluate intended behaviour towards carnivores. This questionnaire survey assesses attitudes of governmental and non-governmental conservation stakeholders in Zimbabwe towards living with carnivores, large carnivore species and the conservation of wildlife, and determines whether being part of coexistence programmes (CAMPFIRE, TFCAs) positively affects attitudes. Stakeholder attitudes were most positive when employment was directly related to wildlife and stakeholders had knowledge about and exposure to carnivores. Stakeholders who depend on livestock and/or had little knowledge about and less exposure to carnivores were most negative, this included governmental stakeholders responsible for natural resource management. Positive attitudes were largely based on the aesthetic and economic value of carnivores, while negative attitudes were based on the fear of livestock loss and perceived danger to humans. Subsistence farmers were the most negative stakeholders, as such, the focus on this group to promote coexistence seems justified. However, although some stakeholders were more positive in CAMPFIRE areas or TFCAs, CAMPFIRE and TFCAs failed to improve attitudes of subsistence farmers, which highlights a need to evaluate and adapt these programmes.

People who live on the edges of protected areas may harvest timber to make their living from this natural forest product. Therefore, understanding timber consumption at the household level is critical for developing effective conservation policies. Previous studies have highlighted relationships between the consumption of forest products and socioeconomic status, but they have failed to examine timber consumption under cultural contexts. In this study, we interviewed 121 villagers to examine the socioeconomic profiles of timber consumers with regards to their indigenous culture in the buffer zones of Vietnam’s Bu Gia Map National Park. We found that indigenous identity, landownership, number of crops grown by villagers and proximity to markets are statistically significant for explaining the consumption of timber from natural forests. Given the high likelihood that most of this timber was collected illegally, we make several recommendations for forest managers on how to interact with villagers to improve park protection.

The practice and science of conservation have become increasingly interdisciplinary, and it is widely acknowledged that conservation training in higher education institutions should embrace interdisciplinarity in order to prepare students to address real-world conservation problems. However, there is little information on the extent to which conservation education at the undergraduate level meets this objective. I carried out a systematic search of undergraduate conservation degree programmes in the UK and conducted a simple text analysis of module descriptions to quantify the extent to which they provide social science training. I found 47 programmes, of which 29 provided module descriptions. Modules containing social science content ranged from 3.8% to 52.2% of modules across programmes, but only 55.2% of programmes offered a social-focused conservation module, and only one programme offered a module in social science research methods. On average, almost half of the modules offered (46.2%) comprised biology and ecology modules with no conservation focus, and 17.9% comprised skills-based modules (research and vocational skills). Conservation-focused modules comprised a mean of only 22.5% of modules. These results show that undergraduate conservation teaching in the UK is still largely biocentric and is failing to deliver the interdisciplinary education that is widely called for.