First published in The Conversation on 15 July 2015 The restoration of natural ecosystems – “rewilding” – ought to be a chance to create inspiring new habitats. However the movement around it risks becoming trapped by its own reverence of the past; an overly nostalgic position that makes rewilding less realistic and harder to achieve.
Originally published in The Conversation on 1 Oct 2014 Full marks to colleagues at the World Wildlife Fund and the Zoological Society of London for the Living Planet Report 2014 and its headline message which one hopes ought to shock the world out of its complacency: a 52% decline of wildlife populations in the past
Originally posted to the FreshwaterBlog on 30 May 2014 The designation and management of protected areas has been a cornerstone of biodiversity policy for more than a century. In the 1970s, for example, the international community agreed to expand the global protected reserve area system guided by the representation principle – the idea that populations
Originally posted on May 16, 2014 to The Freshwater Blog A beautiful photograph of Lake Vendel, Sweden by BioFresh scientist Sonia Stendera In the coming weeks, this blog will transition to the new Freshwater Blog run by the MARS project. To mark this transition, Paul Jepson and Rob St. John discussed the process of running the BioFresh
Originally posted on the Freshwaterblog on 28 March 2014 Freshwater scientists are passionate about the state of freshwater life, but making our science relevant to policy means building a friendly dialogue with policy-makers. The recent Water Lives science-policy symposium was a land-mark for freshwater policy in the EU. It established a foundation of collegiate understanding
First published in The Conversation on 10 Oct 2013 In an article for National Geographic and a forthcoming documentary film, author and birder Jonathan Franzen ponders the slaughter of migratory songbirds around the Mediterranean, and asks how it can be stopped. When the same question was asked 40 years ago, the result was the 1979
Originally posted on the FreshwaterBlog on 21 & 22 May 2013 With World Biodiversity Day just one sleep away, Will Darwall, Head of the IUCN Freshwater Biodiversity Unit, sat down with Paul Jepson from the University of Oxford to discuss some of the big challenges facing freshwater biodiversity. The theme of the International Day of Biodiversity 2013
I wrote and shared this vison back in the Olympic summer of 2012, as a summer evening project to explore more local river valley and to imagine what my neighbourhood could become. A 2020 vision of the Isis I have written this account of an imagined future walk along the Isis between Folly Bridge and Iffley
