Conservation Stories, Conservation Science, and the Role of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services

Science and stories are not the same thing, although stories have long been the outward face of conservation science. The rate of species’ extinctions that framed the launch of our discipline was too high not to use whatever communication tools would be most effective to get people to address the crisis. We practiced science, and science structured the programs conservation practitioners implemented, but science showed no promise of changing peoples’ attitudes and behaviors. Stories did that, and we used them to convince the world of the urgency of paying attention to the global loss of biodiversity (genes, species, and ecosystems). But with the launch of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES; www.ipbes.net), we are going to have to more carefully and strategically untangle our stories from our science. The IPBES was established by more than 90 governments in Panama City, Panama, on 21 April 2012 as a “global mechanism recognized by both the scientific and policy communities that will gather, analyze, and synthesize information to inform decision making in a range of policy fora such as global and regional environmental conventions and development policy dialogues.” The IPBES is promising to provide scientific information on biodiversity and ecosystem services to governments and will have four main functions: identify and prioritize scientific information needed by policy makers and catalyze efforts to generate new knowledge, perform regular and timely assessments of knowledge on biodiversity and ecosystem services and their relations; support policy formulation and implementation; and prioritize capacity building and call for financial and other support for the highest priority needs. Although national governments are the major clients of IPBES, there is a major effort to involve the scientific community, nongovernmental stakeholders, and civil society in general in its activities. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has called for IPBES to be the “most authoritative, multidisciplinary, overarching mechanism on biodiversity and ecosystem services” (IUCN 2011). The IPBES has the potential to give conservation science the visibility that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) gave to climate science. Climate science has captured world attention by relating changes in climate to events that affect the lives of people (e.g., sea-level rise, severe storms), while conservation science has languished. The lack of world attention to our discipline may change as activities designed to increase governments’ attention to biodiversity and its connections to human welfare are conducted by the IPBES (Perring et al. 2011; Vohland et al. 2011). Many commentators have remarked on the similarity between IPBES and IPCC. The journal Nature (2010) editorialized, “Wanted: an IPCC for Biodiversity,” and Larigauderie and Mooney (2010) call for IPBES to be an “IPCC-like mechanism for biodiversity.” We suggest that conservation professionals need to be careful as biodiversity conservation becomes the priority we hoped it would. The stories conservation practitioners have told to gain public support may be chosen for analysis rather than the science underlying them. Our reliance on storytelling is understandable because storytelling is an ancient human behavior and a very effective way to engage an audience. We tell compelling stories about the impending loss of a species and the speed of ecosystem destruction. We tell success stories to inspire people to replicate success. These stories, originally told by conservation practitioners, are written down and widely shared by public affairs, development, and communication scribes. As with court scribes of old, these scribes make the stories more engaging, more inspiring, and scarier—with the aim of engaging more donors and reaching a broader public. The IPBES and its activities may focus on some of our stories that will not stand up to careful scientific scrutiny. We are concerned about not only the conflation of stories with science, but also about the robustness of the science underlying the stories. If the science is merely an inspiration for the stories then it has probably been shielded from testing and refining through the rough