Dear Peter et al.,

As part of the activities for the Defying Nature's End conference, I committed to producing certain deliverables, post-conference. The point of this letter is to summarize what we've achieved so far and to indicate what should happen over the next few months or so. It also includes the list of ideas that I believe you could present to potential donors, as per our discussions prior to the conference.

The timing is meant for you to have at least something in hand prior to your board meeting later this week.

• Drs. Wilson and Moore have written an op-ed about the conference.
  
  
• Dr. Roger Kitching wrote about the conference for Trends in Ecology and Evolution, the most highly cited ecology journal. That piece will appear presently.
  
  
• In the immediate weeks after the conference, I compiled the nine separate agendas and forwarded them to you. In addition, I summarized these into a smaller, more compact document, which is on the conference web page. http://www.defyingnaturesend.org/
  
  
• I presented the key ideas at a "brown-bag" seminar at Conservation International.

What happens to these nine agendas is a matter of considerable interest to all of us, for the intent is for their recommendations to be implemented, not merely added to the voluminous academic literature.

• Agenda 8, Global awareness (media and publicity) was one of three additional groups that formed during the meeting itself. The discussions were lively, but the group felt that they alone lacked sufficient breadth to complete their task. Robin Murphy has been working with Tom Goldstein, Dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, to hold a one-day conference to further expand this agenda and its recommendations.
  
  
• Agenda 1, Increased knowledge of terrestrial organisms, has already made substantial progress towards its implementation. An unrelated meeting at the MacArthur Foundation, convened by Dan Martin in late May, had a subset of this conference's participants. Following it, Dan conveyed the Foundation's interest in the ideas that Ed Wilson and I had proposed. In Pasadena, these ideas received a considerable boost from Jim Tucker of NASA. He pledged his support to organize a meeting with the NASA administration. There is substantial overlap with ideas on remote sensing developed at CABS and by my research group — the need to have global coverage of the hotspots and the major wilderness areas. For that matter, there is considerable interest across all conservation groups, both local and international, in having such coverage. (The Millenium Assessment is but one example.) The need for the conservation community to have georeferenced museum and herbarium specimens received a boost when Science devoted a special issue to the topic on September 29th. (Ed wrote the accompanying editorial.)

The result of all this is that Wilson, Fonseca, Tucker, Stiassny, Raven, and I will meet with both the NASA administration (including Dan Goldin and Ghassem Asrar) and Dan Martin of MacArthur at NASA on the 20th December to discuss the possibilities of collaborative funding.

• Two of the agenda topics — Major wilderness areas and Hotspots dealt with core activities of Conservation International. As I reported at my luncheon seminar, I thought that Conservation International's willingness "to bare its chest" the scientific community showed great courage and maturity. Scientists are not known for withholding their daggers when given the chance to use them. That your core agenda and mission not only survived, but was strongly applauded by those there, demonstrates the wisdom in the choices you have made. Other groups would have been given a far rougher ride, in my estimation.

You should be very proud of this achievement, following as it does from your unique willingness to expose your ideas to external scrutiny.

I know from my frequent visits to and e-mails with your staff that these activities are continuing and being refined in light of the discussions in Pasadena. In particular, there has been active discussion about how to best leverage funds and effort to protect the relative expensive land within the hotspots.

The final set of deliverables is to be three documents:

• A Policy Forum article to be submitted to Science that summarizes the conference's recommended actions. I have discussed this with Dr. Barbara Jasny (the appropriate editor) and she was very receptive to the idea. I'm now working on it.
  
  
• A special issue of a journal that would publish a series of papers that allow the individual agendas greater length to develop these ideas. We are still working on finding a suitable outlet for these papers.
  
  
• A compact set of ideas that Conservation International could use under the "road show" model we discussed earlier this year. That is, ideas should be packaged that could be suggested to individual donors in the months following the meeting. It is these that now follow.

Lest my thirty colleagues from the meeting rise up and complain bitterly, these are my personal selections. They are largely my mining the post-conference documents for compact, clearly-defined actions. They are ideas that generally expand on Conservation International's core activities in wilderness areas and hotspots. Others will have different choices. They — and you — are quite capable of mining the documents for gems I have missed.

Idea 1: Freshwater initiative

The world's freshwater hotspots are not always in the same places as the terrestrial ones or the major wilderness areas. Conservation International should produce a priority list of freshwater hotspots combining knowledge of endemism of the best known taxonomic groups (probably with fish) and the data on impacts (those compiled by Christer Nilsson, for example). This effort should parallel the one for terrestrial ecosystems chaired by Norman Myers and published in Nature earlier this year. Such an effort would likely be quite modest in its funding needs. Nonetheless, its rapid completion is essential for Conservation International to complete it global planning process.

Dr. Stiassny's team suggest a total cost of $500,000, some of which would be subsumed by the MacArthur/NASA effort, were it to be funded. (Notice that Dr. Stiassny is a major partner in that effort.)

It's my understanding a comparable effort for marine ecosystems is underway.

Idea 2: Conservation centers

The need to establish centers for the training of conservation professionals in each of the hotspots and wilderness areas in developing countries is an obvious and vital extension of Conservation International's current activities.

Protection the hotspots and the wilderness areas is essential in the short term. Yet these areas will not remain protected without continuing effort. Everyone accepts that the problems each area poses are both complex and unique. One size (of solution) does not fit all (problems). The solution must be to train problem solvers who encompass a wide variety of different skills. They must understand the local ecological, social, and political circumstances, an understanding most likely to be achieved if they are indeed local conservation professionals. This initiative calls for distributed rather than centralized conservation actions.

The details of such centers are documented under Agenda 6, chaired by Prof. Roger Kitching, to which I refer you.

After an exploratory phase to document what facilities currently exist, Kitching estimates annual costs at ~$1 million per year per center. A trust fund of ~ 20 million would likely be sufficient to endow each center. The potential to raise such funds on a center-by-center basis is obvious.

Idea 3: Target incentives, disincentives, and perverse subsidies

Counter to the rhetoric that conservation actions thwart economic growth, there are abundance examples where conservation action and sound economics march hand in hand. Whether it is realizing the value of forests in protecting local watersheds or their sequestering of carbon on a global scale, too few ecosystem services are properly valued. In addition, there are many poorly-conceived economic incentives that harm the environment and harm the economy. The 50 cent return on the dollar for the world's fish catch comes immediately to mind.

Tackling every perverse subsidy or poorly-conceived incentive is not practical. Nonetheless, tackling those that directly and seriously impact Conservation International's core activities in hotspots and major wilderness areas is surely a sensible addition to your portfolio.

The details of such a concerted and focussed attack appear in several agenda topics, though Agenda 9, organized by Bradley Raffle, tackles them head on.

It will not have escaped your notice that these three recommendations follow the conferences broad themes:

• protect more area (land, freshwater, and sea)
  
  
• hang onto what has been protected
  
  
• tackle the long-term issues that harm these environments

There are many other recommendations that, to my mind, would expand Conservation International's activities far beyond what it already does. Quite how far — and how ambitious you should be — is surely outside my brief.

Sincerely,

Stuart L. Pimm