EMBO reports (ER): What is the role of you and your team at IUCN?
Thomas Brooks (TB): IUCN is a union of states, government and non‐governmental organisations, charities and indigenous peoples’ organisations. It has, over the past decades, developed standards for initiatives such as the assessment of species’ extinction risk—through the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species—and the identification of key biodiversity areas. Specifically, the Science & Knowledge Unit in IUCN's Secretariat supports the scientific underpinning and maintenance of such knowledge generation. We also help to ensure connection and collaboration between IUCN and related scientific organisations and networks, such as the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). Finally, we maintain the culture of science within IUCN, such as the Union's library, peer‐review process, editorial board and publications unit.
… the Red List doesn't face towards any single application; rather it is very widely used across a range of different arenas. It has been in place for more than 50 years now.
ER: What do you regard as the main function and impacts of the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species?
TB: The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species documents assessment of extinction risk for more than 100,000 species, under the authority of IUCN's Species Survival Commission (SSC), and implemented by the Red List Partnership. The way that the categories, criteria and structure of the Red List were developed was very much with the mindset that assessment of extinction risk should be wholly evidence‐based and not just on whether a particular species is charismatic. There are a set of procedures to ensure this: there are multiple levels of peer review, consistency checking, as well as an independent body of recourse, to ensure transparency, traceability and, if necessary, challenging of assessments. As a result, the Red List does not face towards any single application; rather, it is very widely used across a range of different arenas. It has been in place for more than 50 years now.
In recent decades, the introduction of quantitative criteria has been complemented by a significant expansion of the coverage of the Red List across vertebrates species such as birds, mammals, amphibians and more. Many terrestrial vertebrate groups have now been assessed multiple times, giving both a snapshot of their current state and insight into what is happening over time. This is important for evaluating national, regional and global progress towards targets for sustainability, such as the European Union's biodiversity strategy, or the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal targets. It can also guide local and regional governments in understanding areas of particular environmental sensitivities.
The overarching mechanism for advancing conservation at the intergovernmental level is the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). In 2010, the 196 governments party to the CBD agreed on a ten‐year strategic plan for biodiversity, and the Red List is used extensively to both guide implementation of actions to deliver that plan, and then to assess how it has been progressing. This initiative reaches its conclusion in 2020, and there is much ongoing discussion about the establishment of a post‐2020 biodiversity framework—an intergovernmental commitment to sustain life on Earth over coming decades. Initially, this will likely involve halting the loss of nature, mitigating threats and stabilising trends. Longer‐term, there will probably be a 30 years or so vision of restoration and recovery. The 2020s been declared the UN Decade of Restoration, consistent with the idea of ameliorating threats, stopping declines and bending the curve upwards towards recovery.
… conservation responses from governments, civil society and industry have been making a difference, but there is still a long way to go.
ER: To what extent can the Red List support protection of species not classified as “threatened” but where populations are only stable in a fraction of their natural range such as the saltwater crocodile, or of populations that are not threatened but have lost ecological function such as the bison of the great plains of North America?
TB: There has been a lot of discussion recently about developing approaches to not just stopping declines but guiding and measuring restoration and recovery, and the American Bison is a good example of this. IUCN has been developing a hand‐in‐glove approach with red listing, called green listing, for assessing restoration and recovery. This will encompass species, ecosystems and individual protected areas. Each of those is in different states of development. For recovery of species, the scientific basis is already quite strong, but the broader application is in its early days. There are a couple of hundred species with Green List assessments now, a small fraction of the estimated total life on earth of up to ten million species. This might not be a huge problem, however: the highest priority for green listing at the moment is species like the bison, that is, wide ranging, large bodied and keystone species. For protected areas on the other hand, there has been extensive application already, working with national agencies to better understand the impact of individual protected areas and to find mechanisms to highlight, reward, and incentivise their effective and impactful management.
Thomas Brooks is Chief Scientist at the International Union for Conservation of Nature. His responsibilities include scientific support to the delivery of knowledge products (such as the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species), maintaining interactions with peer scientific institutions and strengthening the Union's culture of science. He holds a B.A. (Hons) in Geography (Cambridge University) and a Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (University of Tennessee). His background is in threatened species conservation, especially of birds, and biodiversity hotspots. Dr Brooks has extensive field experience in Asian, South American and Africa tropical forests. He has authored 270 scientific and popular articles.
Image credit: © Yurii Fomin
The work draws inspiration and techniques from other fields, particularly medical science, and the emerging picture is somewhat positive. Using such counterfactual techniques shows that, for example, the rate of decline of species towards extinction would have been about 20% worse over recent decades in the absence of conservation. So conservation responses from governments, civil society and industry have been making a difference, but there is still a long way to go.
ER: What evidence is there of ecosystem and species decline on a global scale? Do we have a good idea of what is going on, at a planetary scale?
TB: We know from extensive assessment that about 25% of terrestrial vertebrate species have an elevated extinction risk over their natural background rate. More recently, there has been a lot of effort to expand coverage of extinction risk not just to life on land, but also underwater. There has been significant progress: fish assessments are two‐thirds completed globally now, and there has been much more attention to plants, with a major campaign underway to assess all of the world's tree species. There has also been a lot of effort towards assessment of terrestrial, marine and freshwater invertebrate taxa. These assessments have revealed some alarming trends. For example, the Red List Index for coral species shows some of the most dramatic declines of any taxonomic group, and assessments appear bleak for many amphibian species. The recent global assessment by IPBES used IUCN Red List assessments as the basis for extrapolations widely reported in the media in May 2019 that one million species face extinction.
… the Red List Index for coral species shows some of the most dramatic declines of any taxonomic group, and assessments appear bleak for many amphibian species.
Emerging technologies, especially remote sensing, have allowed a much more comprehensive understanding of the status and conditions of ecosystems, especially on land. We still have some big knowledge gaps in understanding the status of aquatic ecosystems, but emerging evidence from national and sub‐global studies and from consideration of the species data suggests strongly negative trends in aquatic ecosystems, especially freshwater ecosystems. It is not all bad news: some species and some ecosystems flourish with our human‐dominated landscape, thriving even in commercial agriculture or urban landscapes. But this is a small minority: meanwhile, those species and ecosystems that have the smallest ranges or are most unique evolutionary are very often those that face the most severe threat. The net trend is very much one of declines around the world.
ER: What data are missing in relation to the measures that can be taken to safeguard and restore species and their habitats?
TB: For major branches of the tree of life, the extent of our understanding of what is happening as a result of human impacts is still quite sparse. Countries such as South Africa, Colombia, China and Brazil have taken a real leadership in understanding what is happening to their plant species, but there are still hundreds of thousands of plant species around the world for which we do not have much information. Similarly, for invertebrates, beyond a fairly limited set of species groups—such as corals, odonata and lepidoptera—when you get into mega diverse groups such as beetles and spiders, or fungi, there is very little in the way of data to guide conservation.
Another big gap is in ecosystems and biomes. We have a pretty good idea of what is going on land—we are terrestrial primates!—but what is happening underwater we are much less clear about. We know quite a bit about the near‐shore, but as we get into the high seas or the deep seas, or freshwater ecosystems, our understanding of human impacts is very low. The latter is particularly astonishing, given how important freshwater is for human lives and livelihoods.
Through environmental management going back decades, even hundreds of years, we have a pretty good idea about what it takes and what is necessary to respond to many of the negative impacts that humanity has inflicted on nature through agriculture, mining and urbanisation. We understand the importance of not only control and eradication of invasive species, but also the importance of biosecurity and customs regulations in minimising and halting their spread. And there is a strong body of knowledge on sustainable farming, hunting, fisheries, forestry and so on that can help to protect species’ populations. But it is increasingly recognised that there are a set of drivers of negative changes and threats that are poorly understood, and which we have little clue what to do about. Emerging diseases, for example, are likely to be triggered by a whole suite of stressors such as climate change, invasive species and habitat loss. A widely known example is chytridiomycosis, a fungal disease in amphibians which has been a major driver of extinction, with the loss of entire species and catastrophic declines across many others. Another example is the impact of ocean acidification in dismantling entire coral reef ecosystems. What conservation responses can be found to address these emerging and poorly understood threats remains a huge knowledge gap, and is a major priority for research.
ER: How do you go about filling these gaps?
TB: Emerging threats are an arena that would sit well as a “grand challenge” in contemporary science. It needs to bring together a whole range of different disciplines. We need to understand more about the underlying drivers of climate change, habitat loss, invasive species‐type stressors, disease ecology, the implications for medical science and solutions emerging from fields such as synthetic biology. But at the same time, we also need to combine this knowledge with social science approaches in order to understand the potential implications of responses, how they are governed, and the impacts on local communities or indigenous peoples. Individual projects and grants can contribute to this. It seems to me this is something that requires Horizon 2020‐level major research themes from the EU, National Science Foundation programmes from the USA or equivalent science investments from other countries, dedicated towards addressing these fundamental societal and environmental challenges.
ER: How have advances in fields such as genetics and genomics enhanced understanding of ecosystems and nature? How has this impacted the way in which conservation projects are coordinated?
TB: Advances in genetics and genomics over the past decade or so have opened up the potential for a wide range of advances in conservation and environment. At the moment, they tend to have a fairly narrow thematic focus rather than providing any all‐encompassing framework. Nevertheless, there are a number of promising areas, advanced through IUCN by SSC's Conservation Genetics Specialist Group.
… meanwhile, those species and ecosystems that have the smallest ranges or are most unique evolutionary are very often those that face the most severe threat.
Work carried out by zoos, aquaria and botanical gardens in ex situ conservation—such as captive breeding and propagation—is perhaps the most long‐standing application of genetics in conservation. It provides a background to understanding conservation genetics, ensuring fitness and, ultimately, the reintroduction of populations into the wild. The work is used, for instance, in informing Red List categories and criteria for the assessment of extinction risk, underpinning the estimation of minimal viable populations of threatened species.
Research carried out by the agricultural community on crops and domestic animals has similar implications, focussing on the maintenance of genetic diversity across species. There have recently been important complementary studies published on trends in extinction risk of wild relatives of domestic animals and plants.
… the explosion in availability of molecular phylogenies available allows us to think more about the implications for setting priorities for conservation incorporating evolutionary history.
Another important area is studies that place conservation within an evolutionary context. For example, the key biodiversity areas’ standard allows for application of distinct genetic diversity as an assessment parameter, while genetic information is continually advancing alpha taxonomy and determination of species limits. Moreover, the explosion in availability of molecular phylogenies available allows us to think more about the implications for setting priorities for conservation incorporating evolutionary history. These studies allow people making conservation decisions to assess priorities based on the evolutionary uniqueness of the species in question, or indeed of entire clades. Perhaps surprisingly, the emerging picture here suggests that incorporation of phylogenetic information into conservation planning adds rather little to the results yielded from assessing species per se.
Genetic techniques have also led to recent advances in field surveys. The detection of species through environmental DNA techniques is especially important in ecosystems that are otherwise hard to survey: where species are cryptic, difficult to detect, nocturnal or simply hard to count. More broadly, conservation genetics provides non‐invasive methods for species monitoring, and estimation of connectivity and population isolation.
A final arena where I think the conservation community is only just waking up to the potential is in synthetic biology. There have been major developments over the past decade in industry, health and agriculture, and its potential positive and negative impacts on nature have been high on the agenda at the IUCN for the past few years. In 2016, IUCN members requested that the Union undertake an assessment of the implications of interactions between synthetic biology and biodiversity conservation. This includes potential direct implications, such as in invasive species control, and indirect implications, for example the knock‐on impacts on nature of the expansion of agricultural frontiers. The goal has been to provide a balanced assessment to help guide policy development. IUCN Council has proposed a draft motion on the subject that will be debated via members over the coming months and potentially adopted at the next IUCN World Conservation Congress in Marseilles in June 2020.
ER: What are some of the biggest success stories in your view?
TB: Some of the most exciting stories come from small island nations—this is really inspiring given the challenges of remoteness, human capacity and resources. For example, efforts on islands like the Seychelles and Fiji have been successful in putting in place programmes to control and eradicate invasive species, which have generated dramatic conservation successes for native species such as the Seychelles Magpie Robin. Such approaches often go hand‐in‐hand with the establishment of protected areas or halting the destruction of natural ecosystems. One such example that has been underway for several years now is the reestablishment and reintroduction of antelope species like the Scimitar‐horned Oryx into the Sahara, from where its populations have been extirpated over recent decades. A major effort by the governments of Chad and the UAE to reintroduce and safeguard the species has delivered particularly promising results, which showcase the effectiveness of large‐scale, multi‐actor approaches.
ER: What impact does the work of the IUCN, and in particular the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, have on education and public understanding?
TB: The Red List is widely used as a resource about species, an entry point for education about extinction and environmental declines, but also as a window for learning about life on Earth more generally. Much of the traffic through the Red List website comes from the educational side, from university students to school kids. It is also used by the private and financial sector for maintaining social licence to operate, and stakeholder and shareholder respect, as well as ensuring that organisations operate in accordance with national laws and international conventions. For example, the International Finance Corporation (the private sector lending arm of the World Bank) and the Equator Principles Banks invest billions of dollars in infrastructure such as dams and roads around the world every year. They have a set of established performance standards, including an environmental performance standard which is heavily based on the Red List. While it is difficult to measure the precise impact of what would have happened in the absence of those safeguards, there is no doubt that they yield substantial benefits in helping to sustain life on earth.
Much of the traffic through the Red List website comes from the educational side, from university students to school kids.
ER: What impact do you see grassroots movements such as Fridays for Future having? Do you see a change in awareness and of political reality?
TB: It has given the entire conservation movement a desperately needed wave of optimism, seeing emerging concern around the world, especially from young people, for the future of life on our planet. It has been an incredible boost to sustainability and conservation around the world. It is wonderful! In the short term, the immediate need is delivery of a robust global framework for maintaining and restoring life on Earth—the post‐2020 framework will be negotiated and hopefully agreed in China in October 2020, building from the IUCN World Conservation Congress in France in June. We already do have a very strong framework with the Sustainable Development Goals of the UN—the broad structure is already there—and so to me the really big thing is implementation. That will only come with pressure from grassroots. It underscores the importance of initiatives such as Extinction Rebellion to drive broader social change in relation to how people and nature coexist.
Dr Brooks, thank you for the interview.
The interview was conducted by Adam Gristwood.
EMBO Reports (2020) 21: e49802