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AbstractAsian's remarkable economic growth brought many benefits but also fuelled threats to its ecosystems and biodiversity. Economic growth brings biodiversity threats but also conservation opportunities. Continued biodiversity loss is inevitable, but the types, areas and rates of biodiversity loss are not. Prioritising biodiversity conservation, tempered by what is tractable, remains a high priority. Policy and market distortions and failures significantly underprice biodiversity, undermine ecosystems and create perverse incentives, leading to over‐consumption and under‐conservation. Properly priced biodiversity creates price signals and incentives that account for all contributions from biodiversity and ecosystems. Habitat conservation remains the centrepiece of biodiversity conservation. The next steps forward include selected command‐and‐control measures and economic policies that eliminate perverse incentives and creating positive ones along with improved enforcement.

Decolonizing biodiversity conservation science and practice involves a transition towards more locally rooted, plural, socially just, and convivial forms of conservation, moving away from mainstream conservation approaches, such as protected areas, sustainable resource management plans, or market-based instruments that are strongly rooted in Eurocentric ontologies and epistemologies. In this article, we introduce and review the contributions to the special issue "Decolonizing biodiversity conservation" and we identify six principles that can be thought of as starting points in efforts to decolonize conservation: recognition, reparation, epistemic disobedience, relationality, power subversion, and limits. We explain how these principles feature in the collection's contributions and how they can contribute to decolonizing conservation science, policy, and practice. We also acknowledge that there can be differences over meaning and emphasis regarding the principles among Indigenous and local peoples, scholars, and practitioners. Yet we think that their implementation can result in subtler and less universalizing conservation approaches.

Agricultural industrialization alters rural landscapes in Europe, causing large-scale and rapid loss of important biodiversity. The principal instruments to protect farmland biodiversity are various agri-environmental measures (AEMs) in the EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). However, growing awareness of shortcomings to CAP biodiversity integration prompts examination of causes and potential solutions. This thesis assesses the importance of structural heterogeneity of crop and non-crop habitats and evaluates some related aspects of the CAP for 2015-2020. This includes studies of crop diversification, organic farming and buffer strips, and their potential for supporting deteriorating farmland bird diversity in a forest-farmland gradient. It also evaluates the role of collaborative conservation, with particular attention to the Swedish Volunteer & Farmer Alliance (SVFA), as a tool for influencing farmers' engagement in AEMs as well as unsubsidized conservation. Structural crop diversity, rather than the number of crop types in itself, positively affected farmland birds, especially in arable-dominated landscapes. Still, as almost all farms already met the CAP requirements for crop diversification, this policy may miss an important opportunity to deliver biodiversity benefits by setting limits too low and by neglecting structural crop diversity. The establishment of buffer strips along ditches boosted Skylarks and invertebrate numbers in adjacent cereal fields, while organic farming had only small and mixed effects on farmland birds, with both positive and negative effects on field nesters in the most arable-dominated landscapes and more forest- dominated landscapes, respectively. In general, landscape composition had a major effect on species richness, with different habitat preferences among field-nesting and non-crop-nesting birds. Social factors were more important for farmers' engagement in AEMs than for unsubsidized conservation, suggesting that production-impeding AEMs may have poor chances of acceptance in regions with prevailing productivist norms. We also found that SVFA promoted both AEMs and unsubsidized conservation, and that measures positively affected farmland bird diversity in the most arable- dominated landscapes. However, low implementation rates of measures across SVFA limited the large- scale impact, highlighting the importance of following up stakeholders' involvement. This thesis suggests that farmland biodiversity conservation partly relies on policies that increase the structural heterogeneity of arable landscapes (e.g., through crop diversification and establishment of buffer strips). This is especially important in regions where arable farming is predominant and farmland heterogeneity is low. We conclude the future of AEMs for biodiversity protection partly lies in better integration into cultures of farming communities, possibly through volunteer-based approaches as an alternative to centralized solutions.

Biodiversity conservation is a major issue in ports and harbours as scientists, managers and the public become increasingly aware of the importance of healthy ecosystems to the wellbeing of urban populations. Sydney's Harbour provides essential environmental, social and economic values to community, government and industry. Recent systematic reviews of the biological and physical characteristics of Sydney Harbour revealed high environmental and conservation value, especially considering the large numbers of people using its resources. However, like many coastal areas, the harbour has been subject to stressors such as habitat loss, metal, organic and nutrient pollution, the introduction of non-indigenous species, foreshore construction and commercial and recreational fishing. Here we outline the environmental assets of the harbour and the major threats, and report on current and developing conservation strategies. By learning about the progress of environmental management in Sydney Harbour, the difficulties faced and new planning strategies implemented, coastal and harbour environmental managers within the region can be better prepared when faced with similar challenges.

Intro -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgements -- CHAPTER I -- Scaling in ecology andbiodiversity conservation:An introduction -- The meaning of "scale" -- CHAPTER II -- Conceptual framework andtypology of drivers -- Scaling of drivers of changeacross administrative levels -- Scaling of habitat loss inNatura 2000 network -- Fragmentation across spatialscales -- European projections ofhabitats and carbon stocks:Negative effects of climateand positive effects of CO2changes dominate, but landuse is also of importance -- CHAPTER III -- The scaling of geneticdiversity in a changing andfragmented world -- Population viability: On themove from small to largescales and from single tomultiple species -- Scaling communitiesand biodiversity -- Scaling of biodiversity changecaused by land-use change -- The interface betweenconservation areas andagriculture: Functional spilloverand ecosystem services -- Conserving different kinds ofbiodiversity in different sortsof landscapes -- CHAPTER IV -- Determining responsibilitiesto prioritize conservationactions across scales -- A GIS-based spatiotemporalmodeling with Bayesianmaximum entropy method -- Downscaling climate data topredict species' ranges -- Connectivity:Beyond corridors -- CHAPTER V -- Systematic site selectionsbeyond Natura 2000 -- Governance of network ofprotected areas: Innovativesolutions and instruments -- Ecological fiscal transfers:A policy response to localconservation challenges -- EU Green Infrastructure:Opportunities and the needfor addressing scales -- Conservation strategiesacross spatial scales -- Biodiversity monitoring andpolicy instruments: Trends,gaps and new developments -- Biodiversity monitoringand EU policy -- CHAPTER VI -- Spatial data standardizationacross Europe: An exemplarytale from the SCALES project

We consider a world economy, in which the global public good 'biodiversity' is positively correlated with that share of land which is protected by land-use restrictions against the deterioration of habitats and ecosystems. The willingness-to-pay for biodiversity conservation is positive in 'rich' developed countries (North), but very low in 'poor' developing countries (South). Taking the no-policy scenario (Regime 1) as our point of departure, we analyze the changes in allocations and welfare when the North financially supports biodiversity conservation in the South – as stipulated in the Convention on Biological Diversity (1992). We model that support as a market for biodiversity conservation and distinguish the cases, in which the North does (Regime 3) or does not (Regime 2) coordinate its biodiversity conservation actions. Our numerical examples exhibit various unexpected and even undesirable results. The move from Regime 1 to Regime 2 hardly improves welfare and biodiversity in our examples irrespective of whether governments act strategically. That may explain the low level of North's financial support of biodiversity in the South we observe in practice. Without strategic action, the move from Regime 1 to 3 enhances aggregate welfare, because Regime 3 is efficient, but the North or the South may be worse off due to unfavorable changes in their terms-of-trade. If governments act strategically, the aggregate welfare may decline when moving from Regime 1 to 3, but the welfare changes with opposite signs for North and South tend to be smaller than without strategic action.

This paper aims at explaining the importance of the democracy stance as compared to the efficiency stance in order to deal with complexity in biodiversity conservation. While the efficiency stance refers to the realm of relatively simple systems, individual rationality, and instrumental values, the complexity stance transcends these boundaries into the realm of complex systems, social rationality and intrinsic values. We argue that the task of biodiversity conservation is impossible to achieve in economically efficient ways, because (a) it is impossible to come to a (fully informed) complete account of all values, not only because it is costly but also because (b) moral values are involved which (by their nature) exclude themselves from being accounted for, and (c) biodiversity conservation can be regarded as an end in itself instead of only a means towards an end. The point we raise is, that in order to cope with biodiversity conservation we need to apply valuation methods which are from the complexity stance, take better account of intrinsic values and feelings, as well as consider social rationality. Economic valuation methods are themselves 'value articulating institutions' and as biodiversity conservation confronts us with the complexity of social-ecological systems, the choice of the 'value articulating institutions' needs to consider their ability to capture instrumental and intrinsic values of biodiversity. We demonstrate a method, based on cybernetics, which is able to take into account the issues raised.

India is one of the 34 Mega biodiversity hotspots of the world. It is home for threatened and endemic species that have immense ecological and commercial value. Due to increased human population and overexploitation of natural resources biodiversity is under threat worldwide. Threats to species are principally due to decline and fragmentation of their habitat. Biodiversity, as measured by the number of plant and vertebrate species, is greatest in the Western Ghats and North East in India.Biodiversity has several values such as economical, ecological, ethical, medicinal, aesthetical, social and many more. The present need of the hour is the sustainable use of biodiversity. Inventory only will identify the key issues of management of biodiversity which include a continuing process of searching and re-examining the early findings. Conservation of biodiversity is being done in the form of various legislations, the establishment of the protected area, Zoos and botanical gardens, gene Bank, seed bank etc. In this paper, the overview of Biodiversity and Its types, values, the status of biodiversity in India, causes of threats and various steps to be taken for the conservation of biodiversity have been discussed.