Preserving Nature in New York City: NYC Parks’ Forever Wild Program

Urban biodiversity has increasingly been recognized as providing multiple local, regional, and even global benefits. In New York City (NYC), conservation and planning professionals in the Department of Parks and Recreation (NYC Parks) pursued biodiversity protection through the creation of a “Forever Wild” program in 2001, which designated and aimed to protect 8,700 acres of the largest, most ecologically valuable natural areas across City parkland. In 2018-2020, NYC Parks’ Natural Resources Group (NRG) expanded the program’s extent, resulting in 2,500 acres added to the Forever Wild program, for a total of over 12,300 acres. These additions reflect new acquisitions to the Parks system as well as an acknowledgment of the ecological importance of smaller patches of habitat. By prioritizing the conservation of habitat at the scale of the Parks system, the Forever Wild program enabled tackling some of the scale mismatches that often challenge urban ecosystem management. Over the past two decades, this program has highlighted the value of habitat conservation within NYC Parks, enabled the reduction of natural resource impacts from construction projects in or near Forever Wild areas, and included hundreds of acres of ecological restoration. At the same time, the program has faced constraints and challenges due to competing priorities for limited public land in NYC. Because the program does not confer any regulatory or statutory power, its effectiveness has waxed and waned under different administrations, each with their own priorities. To meet this challenge, NRG has aimed to make information about Forever Wild areas, the program, and its intent widely available within the agency and to the public. NRG has worked to coordinate with other parts of the agency to anticipate and better manage conflicts while protecting biodiversity. Still, upholding the program’s conservation goals in the face of continued threats remains an ongoing challenge. More recently, the need for outdoor recreation during the COVID pandemic has given new visibility to natural areas in NYC. NYC Parks will continue to rely on the Forever Wild program to care for these areas while also facilitating their appropriate use

Blue Spaces as Social Spaces: Measuring the Uses and Values of Urban Waterfronts

Due to a combination of climate change-driven threats and economic opportunities, cities across the world are investing billions of dollars in waterfront infrastructure and coastal restoration. Urban planners and park managers are often tasked with designing and programming blue spaces to maximize ecosystem services (ES) for local users. However, it is not always clear which ES are most valued, and by whom. Thus, the design of urban waterfronts presents challenges in identifying how communities engage with these spaces and how new planning might alter such uses if not accounted for. This paper describes a Rapid Social Assessment (RSA) methodology that has been piloted in the NYC metropolitan area to successfully ground community engagement and planning in an understanding of how urban blue spaces are currently used. This methodology can be coupled with other types of data collection for a better characterization of the coupled human-natural dynamics of these spaces, and can be adapted to coastal, lake, and riparian waterfronts globally

Mainstreaming the Social Sciences in Conservation

Despite broad recognition of the value of social sciences and increasingly vocal calls for better engagement with the human element of conservation, the conservation social sciences remain misunderstood and underutilized in practice. The conservation social sciences can provide unique and important contributions to society's understanding of the relationships between humans and nature and to improving conservation practice and outcomes. There are 4 barriers—ideological, institutional, knowledge, and capacity—to meaningful integration of the social sciences into conservation. We provide practical guidance on overcoming these barriers to mainstream the social sciences in conservation science, practice, and policy. Broadly, we recommend fostering knowledge on the scope and contributions of the social sciences to conservation, including social scientists from the inception of interdisciplinary research projects, incorporating social science research and insights during all stages of conservation planning and implementation, building social science capacity at all scales in conservation organizations and agencies, and promoting engagement with the social sciences in and through global conservation policy-influencing organizations. Conservation social scientists, too, need to be willing to engage with natural science knowledge and to communicate insights and recommendations clearly. We urge the conservation community to move beyond superficial engagement with the conservation social sciences. A more inclusive and integrative conservation science—one that includes the natural and social sciences—will enable more ecologically effective and socially just conservation. Better collaboration among social scientists, natural scientists, practitioners, and policy makers will facilitate a renewed and more robust conservation. Mainstreaming the conservation social sciences will facilitate the uptake of the full range of insights and contributions from these fields into conservation policy and practice

Conservation social science: understanding and integrating human dimensions to improve conservation

It has long been claimed that a better understanding of human or social dimensions of environmental issues will improve conservation. The social sciences are one important means through which researchers and practitioners can attain that better understanding. Yet, a lack of awareness of the scope and uncertainty about the purpose of the conservation social sciences impedes the conservation community's effective engagement with the human dimensions. This paper examines the scope and purpose of eighteen subfields of classic, interdisciplinary and applied conservation social sciences and articulates ten distinct contributions that the social sciences can make to understanding and improving conservation. In brief, the conservation social sciences can be valuable to conservation for descriptive, diagnostic, disruptive, reflexive, generative, innovative, or instrumental reasons. This review and supporting materials provides a succinct yet comprehensive reference for conservation scientists and practitioners. We contend that the social sciences can help facilitate conservation policies, actions and outcomes that are more legitimate, salient, robust and effective

Land Use, Diverse Values, and Conservation Practice in the Periphery of Makira Natural Park, Northeastern Madagascar

This dissertation examines the intent and reality of a conservation project that aims to be participatory and to provide benefits to local landholders. I make a contribution to research about the social impacts of conservation projects as well as to scholarship that aims to improve conservation policy and practice. Using both ethnographic and ecological methods, I explored the multiple and contested values related to land use. Changing local land use practices, especially reducing swidden agriculture, is a major focus of conservation interventions in the region. The conservation project has framed this change as a technical problem, and has devised economic incentives to shift local people's land use. Because of the dissertation's interdisciplinary approach, and the sometimes contentious relations between conservation biologists and practitioners and social scientists, I begin with a review of the challenges to achieving interdisciplinary collaboration. In the second chapter, I seek to understand how a government policy that was meant to benefit forest-dwelling communities was instead experienced as disempowering and restrictive. Chapter 3 uses land-use scenarios to evaluate the multiple objectives of Makira Natural Park (i.e., biodiversity conservation, climate change mitigation and sustainable livelihoods support) through the lens of ecosystem services, concluding that the best strategy to meet Makira's multiple objectives is to support a broad diversity of land use types rather than eliminating some and favoring others. In Chapter 4, I demonstrate how the conservation project's reliance on an economic model of human motivation to shift land use practices relies on a set of values that are not necessarily shared by local landholders, which explains in part their lack of traction to date. I conclude with a series of recommendations for how to transform conservation practice in Makira to make it more effective, culturally appropriate, and just

Moving beyond the human-nature dichotomy through biocultural approaches: including ecological well-being in resilience indicators

International audienceDiverse and productive ecosystems and human well-being are too often considered opposing targets. This stems mainly from nature being perceived as separate from culture, which results in resilience indicators that focus predominantly on either ecosystems or humans, and that overlook the interplay between the two. Meanwhile, global targets for biodiversity conservation and human well-being have yet to be satisfactorily achieved. We believe that in order to develop effective, culturally appropriate, and equitable conservation strategies that ensure social-ecological resilience, conservation planners and practitioners must conceive of human and ecological well-beings as an interrelated system. By giving nature a voice, and by viewing nature and people as an undifferentiated whole, some indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLC) have philosophical bases for achieving well-being for both humans and nature. Biocultural approaches to conservation ground management in local knowledges, practices, and ontologies. These approaches encompass both the biological and cultural aspects of a system, address complex relationships and feedbacks within human and ecological well-being, and offer flexible frameworks that facilitate synthesis across different metrics, knowledge systems, and ontologies. The process of developing indicators of resilience with a biocultural approach could help (1) overcome the human-nature dichotomy that often makes global approaches incompatible with local approaches by integrating local peoples' diverse forms of relating to nature, (2) reflect two-way feedbacks between people and their environment by focusing on processes, not just final states, and (3) define, measure, and monitor ecological and human well-being as a whole. It can also facilitate dialog between IPLCs and global decision-makers who are disconnected from local realities, and between people from a diversity of disciplinary, ontological, and professional backgrounds

Conservation Social Science: Understanding and Integrating Human Dimensions to Improve Conservation

It has long been claimed that a better understanding of human or social dimensions of environmental issues will improve conservation. The social sciences are one important means through which researchers and practitioners can attain that better understanding. Yet, a lack of awareness of the scope and uncertainty about the purpose of the conservation social sciences impedes the conservation community\u27s effective engagement with the human dimensions. This paper examines the scope and purpose of eighteen subfields of classic, interdisciplinary and applied conservation social sciences and articulates ten distinct contributions that the social sciences can make to understanding and improving conservation. In brief, the conservation social sciences can be valuable to conservation for descriptive, diagnostic, disruptive, reflexive, generative, innovative, or instrumental reasons. This review and supporting materials provides a succinct yet comprehensive reference for conservation scientists and practitioners. We contend that the social sciences can help facilitate conservation policies, actions and outcomes that are more legitimate, salient, robust and effective

Mainstreaming the social sciences in conservation

Despite broad recognition of the value of social sciences and increasingly vocal calls for better engagement with the human element of conservation, the conservation social sciences remain misunderstood and underutilized in practice. The conservation social sciences can provide unique and important contributions to society's understanding of the relationships between humans and nature and to improving conservation practice and outcomes. There are 4 barriers—ideological, institutional, knowledge, and capacity—to meaningful integration of the social sciences into conservation. We provide practical guidance on overcoming these barriers to mainstream the social sciences in conservation science, practice, and policy. Broadly, we recommend fostering knowledge on the scope and contributions of the social sciences to conservation, including social scientists from the inception of interdisciplinary research projects, incorporating social science research and insights during all stages of conservation planning and implementation, building social science capacity at all scales in conservation organizations and agencies, and promoting engagement with the social sciences in and through global conservation policy‐influencing organizations. Conservation social scientists, too, need to be willing to engage with natural science knowledge and to communicate insights and recommendations clearly. We urge the conservation community to move beyond superficial engagement with the conservation social sciences. A more inclusive and integrative conservation science—one that includes the natural and social sciences—will enable more ecologically effective and socially just conservation. Better collaboration among social scientists, natural scientists, practitioners, and policy makers will facilitate a renewed and more robust conservation. Mainstreaming the conservation social sciences will facilitate the uptake of the full range of insights and contributions from these fields into conservation policy and practice

The Conservation Social Sciences: What?, How? and Why?

to understanding the relationship between humans and nature and to improving conservation outcomes. Conservation scientists, practitioners and organizations recognize the importance of the conservation social sciences and are increasingly engaging in and funding conservation social science research. Yet conservation organizations and funders often lack a clear understanding of the breadth of the conservation social sciences, the types of questions that each field of conservation social science poses, the methods used by disciplinary specialists, or the potential contribution of each field of conservation social science to improving conservation practice and outcomes. Limited social science capacity and knowledge within conservation organizations may also mean that conservation practitioners and organizations looking to fund conservation social science research do not know where or how to begin defining a social science research agenda

Biocultural approaches to developing well-being indicators in Solomon Islands

To meet local and global aspirations toward sustainable resource management, we must first understand what success looks like. At global levels, well-being can be narrowly defined, which may clash with local values and cause adverse impacts. Melanesia is home to a complex mosaic of resource management systems, and finding locally appropriate indicators of success poses particular challenges. We propose that biocultural approaches can assist in developing grounded and appropriate well-being indicators. Biocultural approaches frame issues from the perspectives of place-based communities and work with resource users to develop desired outcomes. In doing so, biocultural approaches recognize links between people and the environment and seek to understand feedbacks between social and ecological components. Biocultural approaches may help to improve the fit between local aspirations and national or international actions and can also cocreate knowledge that draws on local knowledge and practice as well as western science. Here, we report on one such approach in Western Province, Solomon Islands, where rural communities are weighing a variety of trade-offs around the use of natural resources. The work encompasses four locations and seeks to define local needs and priorities, develop appropriate local indicators of success, assess indicator baselines, and catalyze appropriate action. Implementation challenges have included scaffolding between local and national levels and the diversity of the four locations. These have, however, been offset by the engaged nature of indicator creation, which assists communities in planning toward action around local definitions of well-being