 OK, good afternoon, everyone. Welcome. My name is Matthias Breuer. I am a faculty member in the chemistry department. And I'm delighted today to introduce our speaker, our Barak lecturer for this afternoon, Dr. Caleb McLennan, who's coming to us from the Wildlife Conservation Society. So some of you might be wondering why is a chemist hosting a wildlife conservationist? Well, there's two reasons. First of all, just because I'm a chemist doesn't mean I don't like the environment. Chemists get a bad rap, but actually chemistry plays a pretty important role in environmental work, environmental science, certainly testing and monitoring ecosystems, as well as developing new materials to help remediation and developing new materials that are biodegradable. So chemistry certainly does play a big role there. But the other reason, actually, there is a second reason. And that's because Dr. McLennan and I go way back. Actually, we go back till about 1990 or so is when we first met, and I was in high school. So we were in high school together. In fact, we were in a band together called Danny G and the Blue Notes. I was one of two guitarists. He was the lead singer and frontman. So we won't ask him to sing today. He's gone on to better things. But one other interesting thing from our history is that when we were young, we actually looked quite a lot like each other. So even now, we're a little bit similar. But if you get confused at the reception afterwards, he's the one with the good hair that's gone by on me. So sadly, after we graduated, we sort of lost touch. We went off to do our own things. And then fast forward to about 2008 or so. One day, I was driving into work here, driving down Williston Road, listening to NPR, being pretty happy with myself and the position I was in. When, lo and behold, suddenly I hear an interview come on about the coral reefs off the Marshall Islands, and they're interviewing Gail McLennan. So suddenly, I realized that made me rethink my standing a little bit as he's getting interviewed on NPR. But that's all right. So I wasn't really surprised about his success. Even in high school, he always had a certain drive and passion and willingness to go all in that few people had. So filling in the gaps there in his career, he graduated from Middlebury College with a bachelor's degree in environmental studies and geography, and then went on to earn a master's and PhD from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in international environmental policy and development economics. He's now become a real leader in the field of environmental conservation. His expertise has been cultivated through years of on-site practical fieldwork coupled with his graduate work in environmental policy and development economics. In his current position at the Wildlife Conservation Society, he serves as vice president of global conservation programs. And he leads the WCS's cross-cutting strategies to mitigate global drivers of environmental decline. So his job entails finding creative ways to support WCS's conservation portfolio, which is delivered by over 3,000 staff across 60 countries. So this includes WCS's programs for oceans and fisheries, climate mitigation and adaptation, livelihoods, and markets. So these efforts focus on really large-scale problems, that only one organization themselves can't possibly solve. And so he also provides strategic leadership and representation for WCS's efforts to build multi-institutional partnerships with NGOs, corporations, and philanthropic sector to succeed on these big, real big problems. Prior to his position at WCS, he served for over eight years as the executive director of WCS's marine conservation portfolio. In this capacity, he directed their global marine conservation efforts to improve fisheries, establish effective marine reserves, and conserve some of the world's most important marine biodiversity. In this role, he managed a team of several hundred marine conservationists in the waters of 24 countries, over five oceans, in addition to the conservation efforts of the New York Aquarium. Before WCS, he spent over 10 years at sea and abroad as an environmental advisor to the Republic of the Marshall Islands, a GIS analyst and a marine scientist with Woods Hole Sea Education Association. In addition to his current role at the WCS, he also holds an appointment as an adjunct faculty at Columbia University School of Public and International Affairs, where he teaches a class each spring, the Earth Institute Center for Environmental and Sustainability, and he serves as an overseer of the Woods Hole Sea Education Association. And he's an advisor to the New England Aquarium Marine Conservation Action Fund, and also a strategic advisor to the Global Partnership for Sharks. So I have no idea how he manages his time. So before I turn the floor over to Dr. MacLennan, there's just two items of business I need to address. The first is to remind you all that right after this, there is a reception up in Waterman Manor, which is on the top floor of this building, where you can have a chance to meet and greet. I don't know what they're serving at the reception. Great. Cider cheese crackers, cookies. So show up, at least for the food, but also for the interaction. And finally, the last thing that I need to do is present as a small token of our appreciation for coming all this way, a small gift basket of Vermont chocolates and coffees. There's a take home prize for you as well. OK, and with that, I will take that beautiful picture off and put on an even better one. OK. Thank you. Thank you. The mic should be on now? Yeah. So apologies for that audiovisual check. Not on my CV, it was audiovisual. So let's talk about frontiers in terms of where we come from and futures in global conservation. But to start, I, as Mathias mentioned, ended up getting my bachelor's partially in geography. But there's a long history of map making and mapping in my family. My aunt and uncle are cartographers by profession for their entire career, particularly in the field of conservation. As a result, I received map puzzles as a child and spent a lot of time learning about the various parts of the world based on what color they were, according to maps. My uncle and my grandfather were city planners outside of Boston. And as I've gotten older, I've learned more about my grandfather's career. He actually proposed something called the inner belt, which was going to run through Cambridge as a highway through the middle of Boston and I think probably fortuitously for the current residents of Cambridge. It wasn't built, but it was part of the grand age of city planning where people imagined a different future for our cities, built more and more in cars, kind of the opposite of how we think now. And about 30 years later, actually the same aunt and uncle who gave me those puzzles as kids did one of the first models of Boston before all the landfilling that went in to develop the city as we know it today. So I've overlaid that on top there. But as Matthias mentioned, I ended up going on to Middlebury College and getting really infatuated in geography, particularly geographic information systems. And I uncovered a copy here of some early modeling we did of, and I participated on the lab team that did a low costing of a wolf corridor, potentially between the Adirondacks and Algonquin provincial park in Canada. So at this time, when you did GIS, you typed some command lines in, and then you wrote a note on the keyboard, put it on the keyboard, and left for about 12 hours hoping nobody touched that computer or else just because it took so long for these systems to process. So luckily, it's a little different today. After college, mapping still was part of some of the things I did, but it was more focused on nautical charts. I ended up spending five years working on various boats, particularly with Woods Hole Sea Education Association. Really, the ocean became a learning laboratory where I was teaching, but also learning quite a bit about the physical aspect of the ocean. Somewhere along the lines, visiting dozens of countries, seeing communities interacting with the sea for all the benefits, but also all the challenges that they're facing, I became and decided to switch from natural sciences more over to social sciences, and ended up focusing on policy and economics. And the map-making state with me that actually helped the Marshall Islands government negotiate its official maritime boundary with the Federated States of Micronesia, and this is the actual extract from the treaty that we negotiated while I was there. So a line in the map, yes, but also important in delimiting those fisheries that those countries, one of their most important economic sectors that they use. So naturally, after living on boats, islands, and thinking about how the world is organized, I had to move to the Bronx in New York City, which is where every ocean conservationist wants to live. But I ended up working, and I still am today for the Wildlife Conservation Society, which is based at the Bronx Zoo, formerly known as the New York Zoological Society, founded in 1895, and now a global conservation organization. Why did I go there? WCS has really been a leader in the field of global conservation, helping create over 100-year history, over 400 protected areas around the world in the United States and abroad, supporting governments in this process and really being a leader in that world of conservation. So it was an honor to join their organization and now to help lead some of our conservation efforts. And the map making continued, but this time, working to support our field programs and their partnership in this example with the government of Gabon who last year declared about a quarter of their exclusive economic zone set aside from fishing in a major declaration by Ali Bongo, the president there of Gabon. And one final bit that we were able to do is help mobilize a significant fund for increasing these lines in the oceans, these protected areas. As I'll get to it a little bit later in the talk, there's a tremendous surge of interest in marine protected areas today, and it's a really exciting field to be in. So that was a little bit more about me, and you were thinking, that's not why we came here. What was happening to the planet during this period? I'll generalize the timelines a little bit, but it's really important and I think essential to recognize that as we have our personal stories, there's also this systemic change happening around us. So in my lifetime, the population of the planet has nearly doubled. We're at about four billion at that time, we're approaching eight billion today. The global economy has increased four times the size of accounting for inflation. Poverty at the same time is actually 20% of what it used to be in relative terms, in terms of as measured by people living on $2 a day, and childhood mortality is halved. Health factors have improved tremendously as measured by childhood mortality. So the planet has gone through these immense changes from a demographic perspective, and you could look at any of those factors, hopefully not so much the poverty and health factor, but the first two and think there's positives and negatives of each. We know it's taken a tremendous toll on the planet. In that same time, we've lost tenfold of the world's tiger population. We had about 40,000 in the 70s and now we're down to less than 4,000 wild tigers living on the planet today. So we'll go through a little bit here, thinking about what's happening for the future of the conservation movement reflecting on this change that has happened over at least my lifetime and the time that we've been involved. When Matthias and I were in high school, since it's pointed, the United Nations, our countries came together and negotiated a series of conventions known as the Rio Conventions. One of them is very well known, the Framework Convention on Climate Change, as is realized today through the latest agreement, the Paris Agreement, also a Convention on Desertification, which is less well known, and the Convention on Biological Diversity, which was recognizing the crisis of biodiversity that was facing the planet at that time. But a little less well known, but very important, for the conservation sector. The world was wrestling with this decline and thinking biodiversity is both important locally but also a global good and provides global services as well. A few decades later after implementation, the parties to the convention came together to negotiate 20 targets for biodiversity conservation, known as the IHE targets. You are not meant to read all of these targets. This is to show that these were negotiated text and committed to by the countries of the world, a series of targets on mainstreaming biodiversity conservation, a series of targets on mitigating some of the risk to species extinctions. Many of them not tied to specific numbers. One of the ones we'll focus on, particularly in the conservation sector, because it was tied to numbers, is IHE target 11, which committed the countries of the world that were parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity to conserving 17% of their terrestrial area and 10% of the world's oceans. It combined global commitment. So as these declines are happening, this is just one example of how the world's coming together to think about solutions. What I'd like to do is dive, is go through three focal areas in conservation. First the oceans, then the world's forest, and then thinking about combined about the protected area, the state that we try to use to manage wilderness, and look at some of the change that has happened in each as we think about where we're going in the future. So first with the oceans. Let's start with global fisheries. We're in a situation where we have had tremendous capitalization from the 1950s. If you can't see the X axis there, that's from 1950 to 2013. This is FAO data. So reported by countries, global fisheries have increased significantly as we've commercialized, but also capitalized our fishing fleets. And we've reached a level where we're pulling out the same amount every year. This graph is a little misleading because behind this curve, you have stocks that are declining and then new stocks coming up and emerging, finding fisheries populations that are further and further away. There's a number of ways to show this, but probably one of the most apparent to me is looking at the difference between developing and developed country fisheries. So the blue line on this graph is the fisheries that developed world. Reaching to the mid to late 1980s, reaching their peak, and then as those fisheries collapsed and we had to restrict our effort, of course, fleets moved abroad into developing countries, which has seen the skyrocketing amount of catch. So quite a divergence there happening as we over-exploit our fisheries domestically and then abroad have to or exploiting areas where we know less and less about what the fisheries resource has. Also a very significant shift that's happened in fish production in the world's oceans is the rise of global agriculture. So on the orange part of this is the total capture production, that initial slide that I showed on fish production, and the blue is the rise of agriculture. Today, the fish that you eat on your plate, you're more likely that that fish that we actually consume as of about 2013, more likely that that was a farmed versus fished in the wild. So we have a massive substitution of our fish production system towards farmed fish and agriculture. And in the last few years, while some of you have been at UVM, we've gone through that switch from wild to farmed. So these changing taking place, a lot of most of this agriculture development is also happening in developing countries, areas where there might not be as solid environmental codes and introducing significant challenges. Also, one last point on fisheries before we move on to some news that's happening that's very positive is the increased understanding that of the global fish production that we are reporting to the FAO, the slides that I just showed you is a significant under-reporting. This is data from the Sea Around us project at the University of British Columbia where they've remodeled fisheries particularly in developing countries based on household surveys and calculated that small scale fisheries, that those fisheries happening in artisanal and near shore fleets in some countries such as the case of Mozambique here might be four times the harvest of the official reported catch. And these areas are extremely governance poor and even more challenging to try to manage, especially from a centralized way. So we have these dynamics of a significant shift from the developed to the developing world, the rising agriculture developing world and also a significant under-reporting and a lack of management of the fisheries is particularly small scale fisheries in the developing world. So let's just look at one example with the time we have where this situation is being managed quite effectively. WCS actually works in Belize and has been supporting as a partner to the government and other organizations there for over three decades helping create the marine reserve system but also now supporting significant fishery reform. And just last year for the first time ever, Belize did something that is actually more common in the coast of Maine, signing territorial use zones to different fishing groups and limiting access or managing access across the entirety of their territorial sea. And this has received incredible support from the small scale fishers that are engaged there, increased improved catches and much better enforcement and management. This is a model of increasing the tenure or management rights of fishers in a more decentralized fashion and relying less on the central government to control and more on fisher groups to organize and create their own rules and systems to manage these. And it's actually also been encoded in the FAO voluntary guidelines on small scale fisheries. So a real interesting tipping point as we now understand the extent of small scale fishers around the world where people are starting to think about and countries are taking a lot of action to improve this catch. Incredibly important from conservation but also for the livelihoods of these fishers. Moving on to another area of the oceans. The greatest threat to marine species today, the greatest species that under the greatest threat are the world sharks and rays. 10 years ago, we wouldn't even be talking about this because it wasn't necessarily in the mainstream media. Images like this, a rooftop in this case in Hong Kong that has been repeated through a number of media sources have helped people understand the grave threat to the world's sharks and rays. Skyrocketing catches significant values and essentially the same problem that I just articulated with small scale fisheries not very much management at all. Very little rules on the ground as you'll see. Just to get a sense, this is a graph also produced by the Food and Agriculture Organization, the FAO of the rising trade in shark fins from the mid-70s to today. So a significant boom in shark fin trade. And geographically looking at this trade as probably many of you understood and knew the width of the arrow is the volume and obviously the directionality going primarily to East Asia. But what a lot of people don't know about the shark trade and the pressure that's on it is that actually the volume of meat, shark meat and shark and ray meat that is traded globally is greater. And it's actually heading in a very different direction towards Europe and also to some countries in South America. So it's not a unidimensional problem but it is growing increasingly with our lack of or historic lack of management of these populations. And in many countries and waters, shark and ray populations have been at least locally extirpated or significantly diminished. As I mentioned, as shown here in a paper by Lindsay Davidson in 2015, the management rules and regulations of shark and ray fisheries is just not present in so many countries. Even basic rules for finning but also having adequate shark and ray management plans, not regarded as a productive economic fishery that needs to be managed. So there is a change in the last few years which is really hopeful for sharks and rays. And actually it's been considering them more under the Wildlife Treaties, the Convention on International Trade and Endangered Species. In 2013, for the first time ever, the parties to cites through a two thirds majority listed the first ever commercially traded species of sharks and rays. This is listed on appendix two which doesn't ban their trade but it provides significant restrictions on the trade in that it can only happen if it's deemed sustainable by scientific evidence. So it's a big shift from an unregulated, traded product of wildlife or fishery to something that is now entering the regulatory regime. And this happened both in 2013 and again in 2016, the last two Congress of the parties have ended up listing a range of species of sharks and also larger Manta and Mobulid rays. Tangibly, what does this do? Many people can be jaded about international treaties and their effectiveness. One of the world's largest shark and ray fishing countries in Indonesia very soon after due to a combination of this as well as domestic pressure fully protected mantas in their country. And as a result, eliminated the legal trade in these at the country level previously they had been and also created one of the world's largest Manta sanctuaries in Eastern Indonesia. And follow that up by actually engaging in arresting and providing fines to those individuals that were trading in these commodities. And so significant decline in Manta catches happened as a result quite rapidly from the 2013 and 2016 listings. Moving on to the last piece of the ocean just briefly. We can't necessarily cover everything but with coral reefs we have another emerging crisis in our hands as probably many of you know. The world's coral reefs were significantly on the radar interestingly in 1992 around the Rio Conventions. They were included in the original Aichi targets as a priority. And of course we knew climate was a threat because of these particular sensitivity of coral reefs to heating where they bleach and expel their symbiotic algae, zoanthellae. So what has happened in the last three or four years as you've seen probably also in the media is this intensive bleaching particularly in the Great Barrier Reef and Pacific where the heating events are repeating over and over and contributing to massive die offs 30 to 50% of the surface reefs, not the deep water reefs on the Great Barrier Reef bleaching. Creating massive significant crisis in the world for the long-term survival of these species. So this is a moment in time for coral reefs and for the conservation of coral reefs where it has always been a priority but has been elevated to a new level. And there's an emerging set of both governments through the International Coral Reef Initiative and the UN Environment Program as well as philanthropy to make a major investment in identifying places that have the most likelihood to survive. Maybe they have cold water upwelling. Maybe they're actually backwater shallow lagoons that have been evolved to handle high heat stress areas to actually prioritize those places for conservation so that when the heating events come through those can serve as refugia. But then also other folks are looking into identifying and even doing some genetic work to find the most heat tolerant taxa or strains of the species and repropagating them after bleaching events as well. This is just emerging now in the last couple of years going from ideas into practice because basically business as usual for coral reefs means losing them all and something has to change. And will be interesting as we move on through 2020 where we end up in the space with corals and if these investments pay off. One of the biggest governmental investments has been on the Great Barrier Reef dealing with a significant amount of pollution as well as climate change that's coming from land. So moving on to the hand here, let's talk about one aspect particularly of importance both globally and in terms of for climate but also for biodiversity, the world's forest estate. So as with many, as with all global statistics the dimensionality matters. If you look at historic, this will be, this pattern is very classic for many environmental issues. It's the same pattern you see for the ivory trade paint the same pattern you see for climate where much of in this case, temperate forests particularly in the current developed part of the world were massively deforested and actually are now going into recovery. So a huge historical legacy of deforestation followed by the rapid deforestation of the tropics. On a multi-decadal scale, the good news for our world's forests is the deforestation has slowed down tremendously. We think maybe the levels today are 50% or less than where they were a few decades ago. As you'll see in some of the data it's hard to know this for sure. So there's a multi-decadal slowdown. This is specifically advertised and reported by the FAO through their classification systems. Some countries particularly have led the way as you probably know, some countries experiencing increased deforestation but in the last 20 years or so Brazil has shown great leadership through a combination of increased enforcement, promoting indigenous rights, decentralizing their monitoring and surveillance and having much more or much stronger legal framework for the protection of deforestation in the Amazon. Interestingly, the last few years they've loosened up some of the regulatory control and we're seeing a slight increase in deforestation. So it's something, a watching brief but if you look at the significant decline in deforestation rates in the Amazon it's really important to recognize this success story. One really important aspect of tropical forest conservation particularly in the Amazon is recognizing the role of communities. This is another success story. It's not ubiquitous in that every single place it's necessarily a silver bullet but across the Amazon there's good evidence to suggest that community-based, particularly indigenous lands are five times more effective at slowing the rate of deforestation than other methods around them and specifically this one example is the Takana people in Bolivia who are working and they demonstrated a three times more effective rate conserving their communal lands than the other approaches around them. So this is due to, similar to the local fisheries management idea in Belize and also Costemain and other places when you provide that local control and local incentives there's a better chance for better solutions for both people but also for the forest as well. Another approach for forest conservation that is really in the experimental phase due to the slow pace of our climate negotiations and process although till recently we thought it was picking up a bit and that is the idea of carbon credits and reduced emissions from deforestation and degradation. WCS works to support two carbon credit generating forests one in Makira which is the largest intact forest in Madagascar and the other in Sama and Cambodia and these places you have to demonstrate through remote sensing and GIS and show that there is a trajectory of forest decline but through payments appropriately to both communities to government and to technical agencies you can halt that deforestation and hence get carbon credits for it. This has contributed to significant decline in deforestation rates in both the places where we're working as well as a number of other red credit forests around the world. Importantly one of the challenges to the red approach one is the ballooning effect or leakage where you might protect this forest but what about the neighboring one where you can now secure the same amount of fuel but at twice the rate because you can no longer work in the protected area and for this reason the red marketplaces and ideas moving more to a jurisdictional level so thinking about country-wide red programs versus just single forests so you don't end up with that leakage effect. So the statistics that I've presented so far in forests are all from the food and agricultural organization. They're reported by countries in a consistent manner for a long period of time. We are getting, we generally the world, getting much smarter at how to understand forest cover. Here's data from the World Resources Institute's Global Forest Watch which is using active remote sensing data to get a better sense in near real time from a global change perspective of what's happening to the global forest state and here we're actually seeing a slow rise again in deforestation rates as we're having tremendous development pressures happening on the world's particularly tropical forests and through an open portal you can see this on a global perspective or you could zoom in to a non-protected area where you're working to visualize on their platform, Global Forest Watch and importantly to decentralize and I would also reference democratize access to what's happening to the world's forest estate. So just three layers here. This is Global Forest Watch forest cover. This is showing forest decline since 1990 in pink where you see all the areas that have declined and then many aspects of the world's forest particularly in the temperate world in pink and purple here are actually showing forest recovery. So it's a very dynamic system and you need to understand at a very local level what's happening. So it is more nuanced with greater amounts of information. We can go deeper and think about what strategies to deploy at the level that matters for these forests. There are also political commitments. There were some in the IIT targets they were not as hard as they needed to be for forests. So in 2014 there was a voluntary declaration called the New York Declaration on Forests with the goal to half deforestation rates by 2020 and fully eliminate deforestation rates by 2030. Some not all countries have signed onto this but it's a sign of growing political momentum around trying to slow deforestation rates. Interestingly as that is being signed better and better data is showing rising deforestation rates and even the reporting mechanism of the New York Declaration on Forests is showing those trends of increasing deforestation rates. So the opposite way it was intending to go. However with forests it's not just deforestation that matters and this photo kind of gives you an example of what I mean. Increasingly we're learning as we have better and better data about the world's forest not just from remote sensing but also from on the ground say crowdsource road data where people are saying which were different paths are moving through around the world. There's amazing new data sets that are coming in and we know when you drive a road through a rainforest the actual deforestation that happens from that road it's close to linear. So it's not so much from a square kilometer perspective but the degradation impact of that goes out 20, 30 kilometers into the forest. So the quality of the forest declines significantly. And so while we have on a multi-decadal scale slow deforestation rates even with a recent slight increase we are significantly losing the battle and the rates of forest degradation that loss of forest quality are actually twice that of the rates of deforestation. This map shows you can just barely see the light green is the global forest cover of the planet. The dark green is what's left as intact. It's only about 20% of the world's standing forest today is actually intact and not degraded in any way. So we're having these multi-layer challenges for forest conservation. Nowhere in any policy statement commitment is the idea of intactness included. We need to think about intactness targets. Targets to protect against both degradation as well as deforestation. So combining this together and thinking somewhat agnostic of terrestrial mean and thinking about what's left on the planet for wilderness and one of our main tools for protecting wilderness the protected area. Some recent research with as we have data particularly some done by WCS collaborators at the University of Queensland and some of our scientists have shown that we are continuing to experience this erosion of the world's remaining wilderness. We think as a study that came out in science last year about a tenth of the world's wilderness has been lost since the 1990s. We've less than a quarter of wilderness across land agnostic of ecosystem left today on land. And interestingly when you look at what's left in the world's oceans some work Ben Halpern has done has shown that essentially the entire ocean has been impacted. The fluid nature of the ocean much easier transmits impacts as well as the pressures of climate are so great on the ocean itself. So we have a increasing loss of wilderness on the planet both in terrestrial and marine increasing loss of those last intact places. As I mentioned, IHE target 11 was one of the strategies to try to deal with this expanding protected areas both terrestrial and marine protected areas. And here is an interesting story. Increasingly the world's terrestrial target is approaching the 17% figure for when the convention was signed or committed to in the early 90s at about 15%. And rapidly for those of you and following what's happening in marine conservation we're having experiencing significant growth of marine protected areas. Importantly this graph is showing just that in jurisdictional water. So just within the exclusive economic zones of countries when you actually look at the whole ocean it's less than 7% that's protected. So we still have a ways to go towards this target. So on paper the world is rapidly, countries of the world are rapidly increasing their protected area state to meet IHE target 11 which is exciting. However similar to many of the other stories we said the impact of those protected areas the actual protection most peer reviewed work that looks at what the rules and regulations or the actual management capacity both in terrestrial and in marine show that a much lower percent of the world's ocean in this case and in the next slide you'll see land is actually protected. So while we're meeting the written intent of the target of the percentage we're not meeting the other part of the target that's talking about the actual effective management. And this is a really real challenge as we in some press you might see this great congratulations to the world of meeting its approaching to meeting its protected area targets and realizing that's really the first step even of those original IHE targets as we start thinking towards the future. So here's an article by the former publication by the former head of NOAA Jane Lubchenco and some colleagues looking at that only a fraction about 1.6% of the ocean actually is truly protected contrary to that figure that we mentioned earlier. As well a similar the same group at WCS who in University of Queensland that worked on the wilderness study also looked at the state with all this remote sensing and other data of the protected area habitat itself looking at just the terrestrial state and found that of all those protected areas one third of them are under incredible intense pressure. You're seeing protected areas with industry mining communities of tens, 20 even hundreds of thousands of people actually living within in fully commercialized areas within these protected areas. This chart left is cut off for space but the high red areas are areas where the protected areas are really not serving the purpose that they are intended to serve. So at both on land and in the sea you're seeing a significant gap between what is committed to drawn on paper and that is what is actually managed. One last component of this before we start reflecting and thinking a little bit about where this takes us for the future not only is there a challenge of managing that which is created but there's a really interesting program called Protected Area Digazetment and Degradation the pad tracker that looks at over 4,000 events where similar to maybe the most notorious here in the US with Bears years you have protectors that have been created but then significantly restricted either in their size or intent and downgraded. And so actually creating the protected areas is only a beginning of the work if you also have to deal with the challenges of this degazetment and degradation and downgrading of protected areas as well. This too is a crowdsourced platform actually where you can from wherever country you are log in and talk about what's happening to your protected areas since the understanding of these is quite vast. So thinking about at least a select component of air aspects for conservation in the world's oceans and land and then thinking about wilderness and area space protection. Originally the idea is to talk about so where are we going post 2020? 2020 matters, some policy wonks have been calling at the super year because there's so many commitments and it's actually not just in the policy circles but also corporate circles and many NGOs including WCS have a 2020 plan. So many commitments will be measured in that year. Did we meet them but also what's next? Next month, the Convention on Biological Diversity is having its conference of parties in Egypt and then a year from now the 2020 COP will be in China and it is at that COP that there will be a new set of commitments for biodiversity and the question is where should the countries be going and committing to in the political front to continue their trajectory, what's working, what's not working, what needs to change. Simultaneous to this, as many people know we have gone through the sustainable development goals and one of the challenges for nature conservation is mainstreaming yes but then also having select targets and goals in them of themselves. With the SDGs, there's two targets of life below water and life on land that particularly call out conservation issues, they repeat those IHE targets of 10 and 17% by 2020 but then also a range of other sustainable development goals and food, nutrition, health and climate that intersect with the IHE targets as well. So the harmonization of these global commitments is important. The next slide is not to necessarily be a totally absorbed but here is the path to the COP in China next year. You'll see a range of different discussions, meetings and events to gather ideas from the world and we're really, we're not at the beginning but the official governmental process began at the beginning of 2018 where it was some stakeholder dialogues to be part of the conversation and discussion about what the world should be committing to in 2020 for the next 10 years of biodiversity conversation, conservation. So it's an important time to be reflecting on what's worked, what hasn't worked. So here are our thoughts or my thoughts on where we might be going. One of the accepted challenges that has been discussed some of these events that have already been taken place led by the Convention on Biological Diversity is that there needs to be a greater effort to mainstream and get biodiversity issues in within the priorities of other sectors and not necessarily silo itself off within sectors that think about economic development, sectors that think about technological innovation, financial innovation but also leaning into this idea of decentralization and democratization and it's the combination of technology, decentralization and democratization that we think we can see significant transformative change. The convention and the stakeholders are going to are trying to think about that and how that could be possibly enshrined in some of the commitments coming out. So I have a couple ideas we'll put out there before we open up to questions. I would like to say importantly beyond 2020 we cannot lose track of what has been done so far. Remember many of the protected areas that are in the world across land see this is a map showing the official world database on protected areas are not managed adequately. As we leap to ideas about future expansion goals we need to remember to take stock and significantly invest double, triple, maybe tenfold increase our combined global investments in managing the world's protected areas that we've created. We've gone through our startup growth curve for protected areas now we need to manage and realize the returns on that investment even as we take on other issues. So while the convention and many parties that you mentioned will be thinking about new and innovative ideas is really important to think about redoubling our efforts across the protected areas that have been created. But thinking about how to make some leaps forward here's a few programs that we're working on that embrace this idea of both technology but also finance and democratizing the data that we use for conservation. We have all of these interestingly are partnerships. WCS works in a number of countries around the world but we work almost nowhere alone and especially when we're getting into global initiatives it's really important to work across partners. One of the things is managing protected areas is incredibly costly. So we've worked with a number of organizations to create the SMART partnership that is a law enforcement efficiency tool essentially helping use they're now working on even an artificial intelligence module to predict where enforcement fractions will happen based on past data and then reallocate in patrols out there. This is freely available to any country of the world and as a result has been downloaded and used by hundreds and hundreds of protected areas in dozens of countries around the world. So you need to scale this type of technology that helps make enforcement and management of protected areas much more efficient and much more effective. Another project that's just kicking off which is really exciting is a collaboration called Wildlife Insights. This product is just emerging. A lot of the, a lot of how we understand and know about the biodiversity particularly in dense tropical forests is through the use of camera traps because you can't use regular survey line transit data because many of the species won't be around or they're at nighttime when you can't detect them. So camera traps are relatively low cost and efficient to gather the data but very expensive when it comes in a time and effort to analyze that data. So this partnership Wildlife Insights which is just emerging is to use the same idea of artificial intelligence to automatically automate the detection and sentencing of animals that come through down to the individual but importantly not just for say tigers and jaguars and the main species I'm looking for but the other dozens of prey species which we can't use that data currently because it's too time and effort intensive to manage. So this would significantly increase the amount of data available on biodiversity across the place of the work. Similarly, working on this when coral reef conservation on significantly improving the efficiency of collecting but then sharing for global analysis on coral reef project called Mermaid looking at both pooling this data on the cloud as well as immediately visualizing the results. So we have a better sense of where things are happening at time. Right now a lot of data is collected on paper, input by hand and all those create slot significant errors. With sharks and rays, it's a partnership. Paul Allen's philanthropy is funded called FinPrint, a series of beta remote underwater video cameras to better census the world sharks and rays around marine ecosystems. And what I'm wondering, remote underwater video can be quite affordable. Again, it's that analysis side. So can we use AI and other cloud data management to get that data managed more rapidly and available to decision makers but also to the general public similar to the way we think about global forest watch. And probably the best example of this, I put a bunch of emerging ideas out there. Here's one that's working today, global fishing watch intentionally labeled and similar to global forest watch where using artificial intelligence, a partnership with Google and Oceana, they have modeled fishing activity on the automatic identification systems, AIS of fishing vessels around the world, albeit the larger ones, but they can model and tell when a boat is fishing versus linearly transacting and create these heat maps of where fishing effort is happening around the world without any vessels in the water. The biggest cost to managing fisheries is vessel-based enforcement. And if you know where to send them, similar to the smart protocol, you can be much more effective. And then most importantly, it's not the interception, it's the deterrence of future activity. This is a really exciting space and that data is also publicly available, which is quite exciting. Thinking about democratizing and making available spatial data on ecosystems as well, there's two projects, one quite far ahead of the other, one on key biodiversity areas. There's no current standard of critically important biodiversity areas around the world that is built from the bottom up. Birdlife International worked on something called important bird areas. And some other criteria for certain species has emerged, but not one, as they call it, the essential currency for conservation of some of the most important biodiversity areas in the world and done to international standards. So the key biodiversity area partnership, which is coordinated by the IUCN and WCS and a range of the world's leading conservation organizations are part of it, is a bottom up process country-driven to identify these areas in a globally consistent manner and then make them available to the public, not just the government, but to the public, to companies who might be thinking about investing, to know where to avoid in terms of key critical areas for biodiversity. We're also developing, this is a not yet released tool, more real-time using Google Earth Engine, bringing in real-time data sets and near real-time from a global perspective, not just remote sensing, but I mentioned the crowdsourced roads, wildlife surveys when they come in to get a much better picture of what the antagonist level of forests and other ecosystems are. This data set that we're working on and antagonist will eventually be available on WRI's Global Forest Watch data set. So you can see not just with a satellite sea, but also what we know about from the underlying vector data about roads, settlements, demographics, lights at night, et cetera. And finally, just two areas linking to the market side of things and the financial piece, which I've notably skipped through for most of this discussion. We have massive investments in the order of trillions of dollars predicted in infrastructure. I don't think I mentioned on the roads graph, but the biggest impact from infrastructure is the roads that are created. We think about 20, it's projected about 25 million kilometers of roads, new roads will be put on planet Earth by 2050. These roads have tremendous impact and the infrastructure associated in the restaurant and ecosystems. In the United States, each state has created some sort of financial mechanism to offset the impact of development. So one of the ones, at least for a while until recently has been quite successful in the state of Florida, every single real estate transaction, you pay a fee and that goes into environmental fund in the state of Florida, and that has created a significant state park system in Florida. So the importance of connecting at every level environmental impact to some offsetting mechanism when you can't entirely avoid it is really important. One project we're working on in Africa, the COMBO project is looking at introducing the policy framework for what's known as the mitigation hierarchy. First avoid, but if you can't avoid, then pay, return, pay into a fund to offset that impact so that on the net, there is a no net loss of biodiversity. A challenging idea, but something that has really helped scale conservation efforts and explains the growth of a number of the leading US conservation organizations here in the US and resulting protected areas that we have in the US. Finally, we'll need to continue on finance and innovative approaches, not just payments for development, but insurance schemes, public-private partnerships. How can we think about better financing conservation beyond grant dollars or beyond just government revenue? WCS is also the secretariat for the Conservation Finance Alliance, which is an alliance of several hundred trust funds for different protected areas around the world, thinking about how to leverage better their endowments with a range of innovative financial tools. We'll need to significantly scale these efforts after 2020 to manage that estate, because all the ideas in the world, if they can't be funded, can't be executed. Thank you very much. This is supposed to inspire questions or rebuttal either way. Do you want me to? Okay. Yes, could you clarify for me how the intactness and wilderness coincide? Does a forest need to be intact? It need to be a wilderness area to be intact and being protected to further go on with that. When you talk about democratization of conservation, we're looking at a peopled world, so we're thinking about connectivity and keeping that intact and mitigating fragmentation. So I guess I'm confused a little bit about what's intact, what's wilderness, are they the same? Yeah, so the term wilderness in the U.S. context has a very specific definition because of our Wilderness Act. In the presentation I made, the wilderness areas are those that are fully intact. That is what we're thinking of them as one and the same. But let me lean into one question you asked because I did glance over it is that we think, and it's only gonna be possible to secure that intact wilderness with protected areas for only a portion of it. Other areas will have to be community-based conservation convention, indigenous land tenure, and even policies that just restrict infrastructure to the outside of those areas without actually creating parks that need to be management. So parks will be protected areas will be one piece of a global equation to holding onto what remains for intact wilderness. So they are one and the same, and I'm using them, but I use them separately in this presentation. Can you address the study that just came out? I think it was from Puerto Rico where there was like a 95% collapse of insect species that they found there. And if you're losing all these insect species that are the foundation of a lot of these other species, how does that all tie into conservation of all these different, those species that actually depend upon what's collapsing right now? Yeah, actually is where I work as a curator at the, the chief curator at the Central Park Zoo who spends his day with all these amazing charismatic wildlife of the zoo, but his training is in insects and he is actually trying to push at WCS for us to be thinking more about that invertebrate core of wildlife conservation because, or of conservation generally, sorry, not just wildlife conservation, because they're so important for the structure of the ecosystem. I don't know enough specifically about the Puerto Rico example to talk about it generally, but one of the big challenges for thinking about that is a whole series of different threats for insects, kind of like when you think about coral reefs, it's more environmental or maybe even toxins that are coming in as opposed to the direct poaching or overfishing and overconsumption. So I think certainly an intelligent conservation strategy has to deal with the most important threats in places and areas where you're seeing that's incredible pressures on invertebrates, that should be the priority. It is actually met with a few student classes here at UVM earlier and one of the questions was about how do you deal with challenges in 2050 versus challenges today and conservation is basically all about triage. What's the biggest driver right now? And unfortunately what that means is you're probably missing something coming in 10 years, but if you didn't do what you did now, you wouldn't be there in 10 years. So there's that challenge. But it certainly, I think it's an under-prioritized aspect of conservation today for sure. Yeah, but it won't record you. They need to record it for a second. Oh, I see. So I was just curious, I think you talked much about it, but you know, how much, because I'm a chemist, right? Working with a kind of colleague. So I wonder how much, in your opinion, is plastic in the ocean a problem for the environment? Like for the life in the ocean. Is this really just overplayed by us? You know, I know we shouldn't be keeping dumping stuff, but the fish eat it and they think it's plankton. But is it just they need to eat a little more and it's fine or is it really a huge problem? It's a really important question. So actually plastics in the ocean is a good example of where information has become much more democratized. We've learned a lot more about what's happening in the oceans and one of the most palatable is, can you believe this trash is ending up out there, particularly plastics today? I thought we weren't allowed to do that. You know, we know from scientific research that the vast majority of that is coming from 10 major river systems. And so solving the plastic in the ocean challenge is all about waste management in a small set of countries around the world. It's really about trash management. But to get to your question, for a specific set of species, marine turtles, seabirds particularly, increasingly some fish we're seeing, particularly larval fish of some species where it may be a longer term, it is an acute threat and very important for those species. On the order of comparing it to say something like global overfishing or depleting of fish stocks, I'd personally put it slightly lower than those, but it's an area that's very tangible and it shouldn't be an issue for us today given a waste was one of the original parts of the environmental movement. Everyone I think knows today, it was five years ago we all imagined the garbage past being something we could walk on. I think media has done a good job at sort of re-educating that it's significant. It's not the density that you might imagine, but on the global scale it's significant and it's out there and it's getting into these digestive systems. Happy to talk about that. More at our reception, hopefully without plastic straws, we'll find out. And in Europe now. Yeah, some countries in Seattle and we're trying in New York City as well. Are there any countries that aren't part of the global organization and has it been hard to kind of enforce rules upon them, if so? Yeah, so I think you mean the Convention on Biological Diversity or did you mean by global organization? So the US is not a- I guess the one that's meeting- Yeah, so the US is not a party to the Convention on Biological Diversity, which one maybe not, surprise anyone, but it has not been a party since the beginning, particularly because if we had more time to talk about the original text, when the Convention on Biological Diversity was negotiated in the Rio Convention, it was a divide between conservation and protection versus intellectual property rights and right to develop. And so there's a lot of protections written in on intellectual property rights of the biodiversity in your country and the US at the time and still to today is not happy signing away those rights of some other country to that country. That's the reason we're not party. But the vast majority of the countries of the world are, for whatever it's worth. Given limited funding, does WCS have a general framework for how it thinks about prioritizing investments in conservation? I guess you use the example of, with coral reefs targeting reefs that are the most likely to recover, for example. You just use the word triage. I guess what is that decision-making process within WCS look like? Yeah, so on a global level, we believe in long-term conservation. So we have programs that are thinking about conservation from a decadal perspective, which means once we decide to work and invest in a partner or a government, we're there for the long haul. And our filters are really those places that still have large intact assemblages of wildlife and the ecosystems that support them, but also have some credible threat on them today. So we're not in these places that are far, far away from anything. And also are in need of significant capacity, their financial or technical resources. So that tends to put us in developing countries, particularly developing tropics, both for reefs and for us. We have worked and we still do, have program in temperate areas as well, but that is not necessarily our focus. So large aggregations in intact ecosystems and we tend to prioritize actually the landscape and seascape scale even within those countries. Hey, thanks for a great talk. So a lot of NGOs have been shifting and conservation conversations have been shifting away from sort of biodiversity conservation for its own sake to biodiversity conservation for our sake. So ecosystem service type arguments, well-being as an outcome that we're after, not just global biodiversity. Could you just talk a little bit about how WCS sees itself on that spectrum and how has that been changing, say, in the last 10 years? Yeah, so you're 100% right. The whole sector, even the sustainable development goals, as articulated by the idea of sustainable development has shifted towards why protect nature for people versus nature for nature's sake. We have, the reason I switched the slides is to show one of our mottos we stand for wildlife. We've intentionally decided as an organization to stay focused from a mission perspective primarily on wildlife and biodiversity. In our mission statement, it does include for the well-being of people, but our ethic is much more on that side in recognition that so many other groups have shifted towards conserving nature for people. And if there aren't some organizations that stay focused on wildlife and conservation we'll be missing some important pieces of the puzzle. So the reality is I said, actually it also took last earlier, on the ground is when you get to a real conservation challenge, even the two ethics when you come together, you're gonna, going back to Tria's, you're gonna take on an approach that is both human-centric and wildlife-centric to have a successful model of conservation. But our organizing principle and missions and values are more on the wildlife and biodiversity side. All right, I think we have time for one last question. And as EMC, I'm gonna take it. All right, no, just EMC. I don't know where the E came from. All right. Roads, other than decimating the local squirrel and rabbit population, why are roads so impactful? Yeah, so there's just incredible evidence. Even some recent data suggests that the Amazon, 95% of deforestation can essentially be explained by being within five kilometers of a road. So it's, of course, the subsistence or maybe even small-scale commercial hunting, but then the illegal small-scale agriculture that comes in, illegal logging that comes in, it basically provides that vein of access. So it's a whole range of activities that can be associated with it, not just the hunting, but the clearing of the forest and then the land use afterwards for economic activity. To reiterate this point about roads, when mines, oil and gas, mining activities go in to otherwise unaffected areas, the acute impact of that mine is nowhere near the long-term effect of the road that's coming in to what, from a wildlife and biodiversity conservation area, from a chemistry perspective, actually the mining area might be the most important, the issues used, but on an aggregate scale, the impact of that road will be much greater due to the range of factors I mentioned. Okay, well, let me remind you all that there is a reception following up in Waterman Manor, and please join me in thanking Dr. McClendon for a wonderful talk. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.