EVOLVING CONSERVATION Policies

“It is critically important to reaffirm a more robust understanding of conservation that focuses on management and encompasses not only preservation but also restoration and sustainable utilisation.”

Over the last decades, the concept of conservation in international sustainable development policy has changed. The centrality of conservation to the concept of sustainable development was established in the early 1980s but was lost in the early 1990s. Today there is a need to reconfirm what we mean by conservation and why it is critical to ensuring that development is sustainable.

This article explores the role of wildlife in two key multilateral agreements and two key multilateral strategies that were developed and launched over the last half century:

❶ The 1975 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES),

❷ The 1980 World Conservation Strategy (WCS),

❸ The 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), and

❹ The 2015 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

It proposes that conservation – correctly understood – has a central  place in sustainable development policy.

What is conservation?

Do we have a shared understanding of what we mean by conservation? How does conservation relate to protection? To preservation? To maintenance? To restoration? To sustainable utilisation? Here are some online dictionary definitions of conservation:

• planned management of a natural