We didn’t get to ask all questions that came in during Hugh Possingham's workshop. If you have any questions for Hugh, or anything else you'd like to share, please comment below 👇
Kathy Meakin (Butterfly Conservation): Delivering cheap and effective small scale monitoring of nature reserves in the UK NGO sector is an area I have been working on: doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoinf.2017.10.013 We urgently need dialogue with funders and decision makers to enable them to ask the incisive questions about what monitoring is needed to overcome the evidence problem. It is an elephant in the room that goes deep into the issue of public understanding of science, that as Hugh said, COVID-19 might just have helped us with. Once I explained monitoring as a mandatory process of auditing, my member of parliament has decided to take up my case for monitoring with the Department for Environment and Rural Affairs (Defra). Here in the UK, agricultural reforms are going through parliament that will pay farmers for delivering public environmental goods, which explicitly includes biodiversity gain. How are the farmers to show this without a biodiversity auditing system? To my knowledge, the evidence mechanism has not been addressed. I'm interested in building up demand for evidence from the ground up, as my paper shows it can be done in a meaningful way for landowners.
