Conservation biology: four decades of problem- and solution-based research

Abstract

Conservation biology is designed to identify pressing environmental problems and to solve them.This review evaluates the relative effort of conservation biology in problem-based and solution-basedresearch, and tests whether or not this has changed in the past decades for five major drivers of biodiver-sity loss, i.e. habitat loss and fragmentation, overexploitation, biological invasion, pollution, and climatechange. By randomly sampling papers from four decades of the conservation literature (1980–2019),we estimated the frequency of solution-based research related to the five biodiversity loss drivers. Wealso estimated how the ratio of the words ‘problem’ and ‘solution’ has changed over time, as a proxyfor discourse bias. We found that a quarter of the scientific papers on conservation constitute solution-based research, while three-quarters were classified as problem-based. Temporal analyses showed thatthe proportion of solution-based papers increased along the four decades, from 0.18 to 0.30, mostly dueto research on effects of habitat loss and fragmentation, and overexploitation. The solution-to-problemword ratio increased steadily, from almost zero in the 1980s to 0.60 in 2019. Significant increases occurred or all drivers of biodiversity loss, indicating an important temporal change in conservation discourse andconcerns. We propose that, in order to be more effective against the biodiversity crisis, conservation sci-ence should expand the solution-based agenda by active changes in graduate education, research choice,research funding priority, editorial emphasis, and media coverage that can produce desired impacts onconservation practice, public perception, and environmental policies.