Organizer: Thomas Jahn, Co-Organizer: Flurina Schneider

Moderation: Flurina Schneider

With growing standards in daily life and the expectation of a permanent economic growth, resource demands particularly in the Global North have risen dramatically since the 1950’s. This has led and continues to lead to the destruction of highly vulnerable ecosystems, e.g. in the coastal areas in West Africa, in the Amazon region or in poorly researched but very particular ecosystems in Central Asia (e.g. southern Mongolia).

Beyond this, nature and biodiversity conservation is also a telecoupled phenomenon, where mostly urban dwellers consider nature and wilderness as something particularly valuable. They invest in species protection programs and force species protection policies while at the same time ignoring the troubles that these very selective programs cause for the Indigenous and local human populations that are dependent on their land. In addition, conservation is increasingly externalized to biodiversity hotspots in low-income regions, while the growing demand for resources like soy, lithium etc. is simultaneously met with imports from these countries. In this context, protected area governance and its effect on local populations is often ignored due to selective knowledge-based and one-sided conservation decisions. The perception of negative effects of telecoupled protection decisions on culture, knowledge, traditions and responsibilities of people for their land are not yet being sufficiently researched and should be considered much more intensively in future projects.

A challenge for the future will thus be to identify negative telecoupled effects on biodiversity on the one hand and negative impacts on the balance between nature and people on the other.

Speakers:

Grace Wong (Research Institute for Humanity and Nature (RIHN), Kyoto, Japan) – “Financial flows, diverging interests and injustice in frontier governance in Mai Ndombe, Democratic Republic of Congo”

Sébastien-Pierre Boillat (University Bern, Switzerland) – “Telecoupling and justice challenges in environmental initiatives: from biodiversity conservation to agroecology“

Jens Newig (Leuphana University, Lüneburg, Germany) – “Sustainability Governance of Global Telecoupling”

Shelby Matevich (University of Amsterdam, University of Wageningen, Netherlands) & Louise Carver (Lancaster University, Great Britain) – “Convivial Conservation offers a Theory of Change”