Yes, but . . where are the gaps in knowledge?

Dear Martin,

You are encouraging us to find gaps in knowledge of how biodiversity is affected by a number of issues, including tourism/trade/transport/island systems. It may be worth looking also at research questions that run across these issues, and include the other extensive uses that give biodiversity a value, without falling into the categories of tourism and trade. For example, US government surveys estimate individual expenditure in 2001 on hunting and fishing at USD 57 billion, compared with USD 39 billion for wildlife watching (and of the 66 million people who watched wildlife, only 21 million did so by travel of more than 1.6 km from home). Lack of equivalent pan-European data is a pretty big gap, before one even starts to address the question of how to maximise long term value for biodiversity from each activity.

Eugenio Yunis, David Weaver and Lucas Assuncao have already noted the importance of demand for the right sorts of tourism and trade. In terms of impact on biodiversity, management of supply is also crucial. In Kuala Lumpur last February, the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity agreed a set of recommendations (Decision VII/12) for sustainable use of biodiversity (the Addis Ababa Principles and Guidelines or AAPG). A major thrust AAPG is for local people to be enfranchised, empowered, enlightened and enabled.

Enfranchisement and empowerment are essential to ensure that agreement on distribution of benefits and costs of development is local, rather than imposed by distant politicians, corporations and other powerful interests. Remote interests may have too little knowledge or concern for local outcomes, or only a short-term interest. So, rephrasing Adriana Vella's question, how adequate in Europe is local empowerment to manage tourism, trade, transport, etc? What perverse incentives (regulatory and fiscal) should be removed and what powers devolved to improve maintenance and restoration of biodiversity?

Enlightenment implies knowledge by local people of what will be the long-term outcome of developments. Without such knowledge distributed locally, the risk is inadequate regulation of developments that destroy biodiversity resources and hence may cost communities more in the long-term than they gain in the short-term. So, how best to collate and deliver existing and new knowledge?

Knowledge will always in some respects be incomplete for local situations, so local people need to be enabled for adaptive management. That brings the need for suitable indicators and rules based on them or, for maximum flexibility, predictive models also fed with local data. To generalize from your three questions of 10 November and start a process of seeking common features across sites one could ask: what are likely to be the best rules, indicators, monitoring techniques and model networks for integrating socio-economic and ecological data in ways that maximise value for biodiversity?

Starting to build systems for local enlightenment and adaptive management could be another way to reveal gaps in knowledge, as well as to reduce the damage to biodiversity from development that repeats mistakes made elsewhere.

Robert Kenward
Centre for Ecology & Hydrology and IUCN European Sustainable Use
Specialist Group