What to Conserve in a Rapidly Heating World?

Keynote speaker: Dr Charlie Gardner is a conservationist, climate communicator and activist. An associate senior lecturer at Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology (DICE, University of Kent)

The conservation of nature has always been a place-based effort to prevent and reverse change – we seek to conserve the biodiversity we have, and ideally restore it to a desired past state. However, planetary heating means change is inevitable and renders this approach obsolete, so conservationists must reconsider what we‘re trying to achieve as the planet heats. Using the future of Britain’s forests as a thought experiment, I suggest that conservationists should seek to maintain functional ecosystems rather than trying to prevent the local extinction of species, and that this will require a change to our non-interventionist approaches. It will mean looking to the future rather than the past, identifying the species that will thrive in future conditions, and facilitating their establishment through assisted colonisation.

This provocative talk brings nature, climate change and geography together to explore how we adapt to our changing world, and will interest anyone with an interest in place or the future.