TY - JOUR
T1 - Priority questions and horizon scanning for conservation
T2 - A comparative study
AU - Kark, Salit
AU - Sutherland, William J.
AU - Shanas, Uri
AU - Klass, Keren
AU - Achisar, Hila
AU - Dayan, Tamar
AU - Gavrieli, Yael
AU - Justo-Hanani, Ronit
AU - Mandelik, Yael
AU - Orion, Nir
AU - Pargament, David
AU - Portman, Michelle
AU - Reisman-Berman, Orna
AU - Safriel, Uriel N.
AU - Schaffer, Gad
AU - Steiner, Noa
AU - Tauber, Israel
AU - Levin, Noam
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank all workshop participants who took part in selecting the priority questions and horizon scanning topics for Israel (5/2011), including (in addition to the coauthors of this paper): Youval Arbel (Friends of the Earth Middle East), Yohay Carmel (Technion), Rami Kalfon (HaMa’arag—The Israel National Program for Ecosystem Assessment), Alon Rothschild (SPNI—Society for Protection of Nature in Israel), Yoav Sagi (SPNI), Yossi Segal (The Israel National Academy of Sciences and Humanities), Moshe Shachak (Ben Gurion University), Margareta Volchek (Israel Nature and Parks Authority) and Menachem Zalutzky (Israel Ministry of Environmental Protection). We thank the many people from dozens of academic, governmental, private and non-governmental organizations that submitted research questions and horizon scanning topics on the web, which led to the success of the project in Israel. We thank Xavier Le Roux and Hugh Possingham for fruitful discussion. WJS is funded by Arcadia. SK is supported by the Australian Research Council.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 Kark et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
PY - 2016/1/1
Y1 - 2016/1/1
N2 - Several projects aimed at identifying priority issues for conservation with high relevance to policy have recently been completed in several countries. Two major types of projects have been undertaken, aimed at identifying (i) policy-relevant questions most imperative to conservation and (ii) horizon scanning topics, defined as emerging issues that are expected to have substantial implications for biodiversity conservation and policy in the future. Here, we provide the first overview of the outcomes of biodiversity and conservation-oriented projects recently completed around the world using this framework. We also include the results of the first questions and horizon scanning project completed for a Mediterranean country. Overall, the outcomes of the different projects undertaken (at the global scale, in the UK, US, Canada, Switzerland and in Israel) were strongly correlated in terms of the proportion of questions and/or horizon scanning topics selected when comparing different topic areas. However, some major differences were found across regions. There was large variation among regions in the percentage of proactive (i.e. action and response oriented) versus descriptive (non-response oriented) priority questions and in the emphasis given to sociopolitical issues. Substantial differences were also found when comparing outcomes of priority questions versus horizon scanning projects undertaken for the same region. For example, issues related to climate change, human demography and marine ecosystems received higher priority as horizon scanning topics, while ecosystem services were more emphasized as current priority questions. We suggest that future initiatives aimed at identifying priority conservation questions and horizon scanning topics should allow simultaneous identification of both current and future priority issues, as presented here for the first time. We propose that further emphasis on social-political issues should be explicitly integrated into future related projects.
AB - Several projects aimed at identifying priority issues for conservation with high relevance to policy have recently been completed in several countries. Two major types of projects have been undertaken, aimed at identifying (i) policy-relevant questions most imperative to conservation and (ii) horizon scanning topics, defined as emerging issues that are expected to have substantial implications for biodiversity conservation and policy in the future. Here, we provide the first overview of the outcomes of biodiversity and conservation-oriented projects recently completed around the world using this framework. We also include the results of the first questions and horizon scanning project completed for a Mediterranean country. Overall, the outcomes of the different projects undertaken (at the global scale, in the UK, US, Canada, Switzerland and in Israel) were strongly correlated in terms of the proportion of questions and/or horizon scanning topics selected when comparing different topic areas. However, some major differences were found across regions. There was large variation among regions in the percentage of proactive (i.e. action and response oriented) versus descriptive (non-response oriented) priority questions and in the emphasis given to sociopolitical issues. Substantial differences were also found when comparing outcomes of priority questions versus horizon scanning projects undertaken for the same region. For example, issues related to climate change, human demography and marine ecosystems received higher priority as horizon scanning topics, while ecosystem services were more emphasized as current priority questions. We suggest that future initiatives aimed at identifying priority conservation questions and horizon scanning topics should allow simultaneous identification of both current and future priority issues, as presented here for the first time. We propose that further emphasis on social-political issues should be explicitly integrated into future related projects.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84958213787&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1371/journal.pone.0145978
DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0145978
M3 - Article
C2 - 26815653
AN - SCOPUS:84958213787
VL - 11
JO - PLoS ONE
JF - PLoS ONE
SN - 1932-6203
IS - 1
M1 - e0145978
ER -
