1/2 idea No. 14 Extend IUCN to ecosystems

(I am sharing my possible research ideas, see my tweet here. Most of them remain only 1/2 or 1/4 ideas, so if any of them seem particularly promising or interesting let me know @jon_agar or jonathan.agar@ucl.ac.uk!)

This project would be an extension of my interest in the history of the Red Lists. The IUCN – International Union for the Conservation of Nature – began issuing Red Data Books (in fact the first were files, and there’s a short blog piece by me here with pictures) in the 1960s. They identified the rarest organisms, and gave a qualitative rating of the threatened status. Rarity was a matter of judgement.

But as concerns over extinction increased, and, in particular, the rarity of creatures became subjects of legal challenge because of issues of land use and trade in flora and fauna, so this qualitative rating began to crumble.

In the late 1980s, conservation scientists, notably Russell Lande and the late lamented Georgina Mace, offered new quantitative criteria for measuring levels of threat. It was a fascinating and largely successful bid to move from an appeal to expert judgement to an appeal to expertly-followed procedures of measurement in order to be able to speak, with authority, about threats to extinction.

It was a case study of how science could respond to the Sixth Extinction, and the politics of objectivity. I published a short version (7000 words) as ‘What counts as threatened? Science and the sixth extinction’ in Patrick Manning, Mat Savelli (eds.), Global Transformations in the Life Sciences, 1945–1980, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1nthg6.18 . I have a long version (17000 words) with expanded examples and evidence here.

The Mace-Lande criteria addressed threats to species. It was taken up, by the IUCN, within CITES, and even Wikipedia (if you look at any species page on Wikipedia you will see, in the box on the right-hand side a ‘conservation status’; that’s based on on the Mace-Lande criteria as ratified by the IUCN; for example, on the African Bush Elephant page you will see EN – Endangered).

Since the quantitative approach worked it has become the model for further projects to cement objective statements about threats to biodiversity. In the early 2010s, it was proposed that ecosystems should be red-listed.

The proposal therefore is to trace the history of this extension from species to ecosystems. How as it decided? Did it provoke a similar intense debate? How was it used or challenged?