“I’m tired of being only an archivist of loss,” Becky Chaplin-Kramer, a lead scientist for the World Wildlife Fund, told the Fourth World Biodiversity Conference in mid-June.
The scientific effort to document the biodiversity crisis, she told her listeners, had successfully forced political leaders to recognize the crisis as an existential threat. But to solve the crisis, she said, the “science of decline” must be accompanied by a science of recovery.
Chaplin-Kramer is far from the first to argue that the “crisis discipline” of conservation biology should turn more of its attention to solutions. But her short talk, worth watching in its entirety, is an excellent summary of why that’s needed, why it’s difficult, and how the field can get there.
She recalled the news, earlier this year, that the number of monarch butterflies overwintering in central Mexico had increased by 64 percent from 2025. Her initial joy, she said, was soon dampened by doubts. Why had the population rebounded, and would the rebound last? Were the butterflies responding to backyard gardeners’ milkweed plantings, or to less disturbance in the pine forests where they spent the winter? Had they simply enjoyed better weather, or good luck?
“If we can’t explain why recovery happened, we can’t replicate it. We can’t scale it,” Chaplin-Kramer said. “We can’t invite farmers, and cities, and local protected area managers, and transportation authorities, and other forms of government to join us in making it happen again.
“We’re not ready for a positive future,” she added, “because we’ve never built for one.” Most everything about conservation science, she argued — its metrics, its models, its funding, its preoccupations — is organized to document loss.
The first step toward changing that, she said, is for conservation scientists and advocates to change how they think about recovery. Instead of waiting for species to come back and then counting them, researchers should draw on satellite data and local knowledge to understand the conditions that make lasting recovery possible, then work to expand those conditions.
Doing this systematically requires sustained funding, not the short-term public and private grants most conservation scientists rely on. Chaplin-Kramer argued that those who break it must buy it:
The actors creating the impact, the industries, the developers, the supply chains, should be funding not only the restoration activities to mitigate the damage, but the infrastructure to learn from it. If you’re transforming a landscape or a seascape, you should be paying to manage and measure recovery from that transformation.
Wishful thinking? Maybe. But the evidence that restoration is a defense against climate-change-fueled disasters becomes clearer with every fire and flood, and the ecosystem research Chaplin-Kramer supports is attaching real numbers to such benefits for humans and other species. Science can’t force corporations to pay for their damages — that’s a job for political leaders and the rest of us — but it can draw up a very persuasive bill.
Finally, Chaplin-Kramer said, conservationists need to be ready for political opportunities, which tend to arise unexpectedly and fade quickly. Even this ink-black time for conservation holds opportunities for progress, from the Tropical Forest Forever Facility to the European Union’s Nature Restoration Regulation to the multilateral investment in Ethiopian drought relief.
Instead of responding to these opportunities by reflexively suggesting more research, she said, conservation scientists should provide “frameworks that let us move fast … Frameworks that say, ‘Okay, for this type of freshwater system, this is what recovery looks like. This is how to measure it. This is how much that costs’ … Not one-size-fits-all answers, but a scaffolding for generating locally specific answers.”
Previous generations of ecologists, afflicted with physics envy, tried and mostly failed to develop universal laws that would explain messy ecosystems. Today’s conservation scientists suffer from the opposite condition, so aware of the particularities of individual systems that they’re afraid to extrapolate. Chaplin-Kramer and others are urging their colleagues to overcome this induction reluctance, and recognize that lessons learned in one system can be applied, with appropriate caution, in others.
The good news is that the science of recovery is already taking shape, though it needs a lot more recognition and support from governments, the public, and conservation institutions. The Conservation Measures Partnership, founded at a Society for Conservation Biology conference in 2002, has developed a set of general standards for the practice of conservation that is now in its fifth iteration. The SCB Impact Evaluation Working Group promotes counterfactual studies as a means of documenting causes and effects in conservation practice. The Conservation Evidence project at the University of Cambridge gathers and summarizes the evidence for the effectiveness of various conservation measures.
And last month, the Conservation Measures Partnership and the Wildlife Conservation Society launched the Conservation Monitoring Effectiveness Techniques or COMET platform, an open-access repository of field-tested, cost-effective methods of monitoring conservation progress.
The platform offers detailed guidance on topics including assessing stream health, measuring a human community's food security, monitoring sea ice, and respectfully engaging with traditional knowledge holders.
“We’re telling you how to gather the evidence that then tells you whether or not what you’re doing is effective,” Gautam Surya, a conservation planning scientist for WCS, told me when I spoke with him last month. “Knowing whether what you’re doing is or is not effective then leads to better learning.”
Like Chaplin-Kramer, Surya, his WCS colleague Rachel Neugarten, and their collaborators want to shift the culture of conservation science, creating a “community of practice” dedicated to documenting success. “There’s a growing army of impact evaluation people who are all trying to bite off pieces of this,” Neugarten told me. “It’s an exciting world to be part of right now.”
Check out this profile of Jeanmaire Molina, a Pace University biologist collaborating on a decade-plus-long effort to cultivate one of the world’s weirdest flowers. Molina first encountered Rafflesia, a genus of parasitic plants known as stinking corpse lilies, while growing up in the Philippines, and became fascinated by their cryptic life cycle, their powerful stench, and their giant, leathery red blossoms. After a Lady Gaga-themed crowdfunding campaign and multiple failed attempts, Molina and her colleagues managed to cultivate Rafflesia buds at the U.S. Botanical Gardens — a Western Hemisphere first. Molina hopes the breakthrough will promote protection of the species in its native forest habitat.
Stinking corpse lilies are reminiscent of but unrelated to the stately Amorphophallus titanum, better known as corpse flowers, which bloom once every two to three years. If you were near the Huntington Gardens in Pasadena, California, last month, you might have caught wind of their corpse flowers Odorysseus and Orora, each twelve feet tall, as they reached peak bloom on July 13, attracting crowds in person and online.
Benji Jones of Vox continues to shed much-needed light on the funding crisis in U.S. state wildlife agencies, this time with a report on the quietly mind-blowing (and thoroughly imperiled) biodiversity of Alabama.
Finally, I was honored to help host the launch of The Earth Said Remember: How to Revive Our Memories and Restore the Planet by my friend Jason Dove Mark. The book is a wonderful testament to the power of observation and recordkeeping in a time of shifting baselines; check it out, and be inspired.
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