SPRING MONITORING
Is generational amnesia driving acceptance of nature’s decline? Ben Siggery is GIS, research and monitoring manager at SWT. As part of the Space4Nature project, he is researching a Doctoral thesis that looks at how measuring past evidence can help us set targets for future biodiversity. As conservationists go about restoring habitats and nature, how do we decide what a healthily populated natural environment should look like? We can compare past trends to the current state of the natural world, but where is our baseline? When setting targets to measure our success in helping nature’s recovery, do we go back to the 1960s, the 1860s, or the 1460s?
Shifting baseline The term ‘shifting baseline’, often used in reference to climate change, suggests that because the environment has changed so drastically, the level we can realistically reattain is far away from what we ideally want. A similar phrase, ‘shifting baseline syndrome’, refers to the related change in perception of what we consider
8
normal – in our case, what we think a healthy ecosystem should look like. This term was originally coined in 1995 by a fisheries scientist called David Pauly, who observed how successive generations of fisheries staff had different reference points for fish populations and how depleted (or not)
they ought to be. Because the scientists’ expectations were largely based on the state of the fishery at the start of their careers, and because global fish populations continue to decline, each new generation accepted progressively lower standards as ‘normal’.