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Scope of Conservation Management

6 May, 2015 - 09:39

Conservation management implies the control of environmental and socioeconomic factors in order:

  • to make more efficient use of materials,
  • to recycle materials and energy that are vital to human survival,
  • to restore derelict land
  • and to maintain the capacity of ecosystems, which are the basis of all economies, to renew and grow.

This is a vast area of applied science and technology, which is developing alongside new social attitudes towards the values of natural resources.

Over the years, particularly at a governmental level, conservation management has come to focus on biological resources such as:

  • Agriculture and pastoralism
  • Fisheries
  • Forestry
  • Water
  • Tourism and recreation
  • Wildlife
  • Genetic resources

From this perspective the aim is to foster attitudes in community and industry to the use of biological resources, changing from the 'maximum yield' approach to one of ecologically sustainable yield. This new attitude recognises the need for conservation of biodiversity and maintenance of ecological integrity.

Since the first Global Environment Summit in 1992, national strategies are now commonly in place to integrate regimes of conservation management within and between industry sectors and communities to meet appropriate environmental, economic and social objectives. The practical aim is now to turn these strategies into operational systems and so balance exploitative management of natural resources with their conservation management. The goal is to provide the principles and tools to soften the clash between Earth’s ability to sustain life and the character of its human occupancy. This means developing methods for biological conservation management alongside softer technological organisations for production (natural economy) and ‘green’ legislative actions for the organisation of people for production (political economy). The global educational topic-framework, which links conservation management with exploitative management, has been defined as ‘cultural ecology’. It is within this area of knowledge that conservation management systems can be seen to require more than the scientific input of conservation biology. The essential feature of conservation management programmes is that they are part of the linkages between environmental, social and economic progress; between peace and security; between productivity of environment and community; and between sustainability and the renewal and extension of democracy. This is a roundabout way of saying that conservation management is about working on behalf of the wild to restore a culture, where people live and think as if they were totally engaged with their place on the planet for the long future.