Climate Change Impacts, Conservation and Protected Values:Understanding Promotion, Ambivalence and Resistance to Policy Changeat the World Conservation Congress

摘要

The impacts of climate change imply substantive changes to current conservation policy frameworks. Debatingand formulating the details of these changes was central to the agenda of the Fourth World Conservation Congress(WCC) of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). In this paper, we document the promotion of,and resistance to, various proposals related to revising conservation policy given climate impacts as they unfoldedat this key policy-setting event. Our analysis finds that, during one-on-one interviews, many experts acknowledgedthe need for new policy means (including increased interventions) and revised policy objectives given anticipationsof habitat and species loss. However, this same pattern and the implied willingness to consider more controversialstrategies were less evident at public speaking events at the WCC. Rather, active avoidance of contentious topicswas observed in public settings. This resulted in the reinforcement (not revision) of conventional policy meansand objectives at this meeting. We suggest that this observation can at least partly be explained by the fact that thedifficult trade-offs (species for species or land base for land base) implied by nascent proposals severely violateprevailing value-based conservation commitments and so understandable resistance to change is observed.