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The Tansley Lecture
at the BES Annual Meeting
17:15 Tuesday 11 September
Glasgow University

We are delighted that Gretchen Daily has agreed to deliver the Tansley Lecture during the Glasgow meeting.  Trained as an ecologist, Professor Daily has led the way in demonstrating how to work with economists, lawyers, business people, and government agencies to incorporate environmental issues into business practice and government policy.  The theme of the talk will be ‘Aligning Economic Forces with Conservation’.  Gretchen says of her plans for the lecture:

‘For conservation to have enduring success, over meaningful scales of space and time, it must attract the willing and long-term participation of people deriving their livelihoods directly from the target systems.  This is because the global network of protected areas, even if ambitiously expanded, is likely to sustain only a tiny fraction of Earth’s biodiversity and ecosystem services over the long run. 

Thus, the future of biodiversity hinges increasingly on countryside – conserving populations of diverse and functionally important species in the growing fraction of Earth’s unbuilt land surface whose ecosystem qualities are strongly influenced by humanity.  Which elements of the biota are likely to survive?  What attributes of countryside confer the greatest conservation value?  And how sustainable – over centuries to millennia – are patterns observed today?  I will discuss a variety of empirical and theoretical approaches to answering these questions.

And then I’ll turn to the relevance of these answers in the real world of decision-making.  Innovative approaches that align economic forces with conservation goals are emerging in diverse places worldwide.  They are changing the way people think about conservation and broadening the population practicing and investing in it.  I will give an overview of these approaches, and their strengths and risks, while highlighting important research opportunities for advancing this work’.

Gretchen C. Daily is Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences; Director of the Center for Conservation Biology; Director of the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Environment and Resources; and Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment, at Stanford University.  She co-founded and chairs The Natural Capital Project, a partnership among academic institutions and The Nature Conservancy and World Wildlife Fund, with the aim of aligning economic forces with conservation.  She and her research group have on-going projects in Costa Rica, Ethiopia, Hawai’i, Kenya, India, and Turkey. 

Gretchen’s work has been recognised by numerous awards and honours, and in addition to over150 published papers she has published four influential books, most recently The New Economy of Nature: The Quest to Make Conservation Profitable co-authored with Katherine Ellison and published by Island Press in 2002.  At a time when global change has finally risen up the political agenda in the UK we are delighted to welcome one of the most accomplished and influential conservation biologists of the current generation to our Annual meeting.

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