Andrew Balmford

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Andrew Balmford is a professor of conservation science at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on planning conservation, comparing the costs and benefits of conservation and how conservation can be reconciled with other activities.[1]

Education and career[edit]

Balmford studied for his undergraduate degree, and PhD at the University of Cambridge before becoming a research fellow at the university. He was then a research fellow at the Institute of Zoology before becoming a lecturer at Sheffield University. He returned to Cambridge in 1998 as a member of the zoology department.[2] He is currently a fellow of Clare College[3] and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2011.[4]

Research[edit]

In 1993, along with two other researchers, he investigated why the tails of birds are shaped as they are, aiming to test Charles Darwin's hypothesis that females have a preference for males with longer and more ornate tails using aerodynamic analysis. They reported that shallow forked shaped tails (such as those of the house martin) are aerodynamically optimal and that species with them had similar lengthed tails, indicating they could have developed through natural selection. In species with longer tails, males tend to have longer tails than females and which also create drag, since this is no advantage except for when courting, the authors suggested long tails may have evolved through sexual selection.[5][6]

In 1998, he published a paper in Nature describing how the biodiversity of rainforest in Uganda could be estimated by counting populations of birds and butterflies.[7][8] In 1999, again in Nature, he reported that the cost of conserving all life on earth would be approximately $320bn a year compared to the $6bn spent then.[9][10] According to his group's research, this was less than 25% of the cost of environmentally damaging subsidies that governments supported at that time. The Financial Times commented that removing agricultural subsidies was already known to be "fraught with difficulties" and that only $1bn had been channelled into conservation projects since an agreement in 1992. Balmford was quoted as saying that the strongest argument to protect nature is "moral, cultural and philosophical".[11]

In 2002, he led a research project that found children could name a greater proportion of Pokémon characters than common species of British wildlife; 8-year-olds could identify 80% of Pokémon characters but only 50% of species. Balmford suggested that conservationists could create a game similar to Pokémon to encourage children to learn about the environment, saying "People tend to care about what they know."[12][13] He also reported in Science that the benefits of conserving nature far outweigh the benefits of development, by a factor of 100 to 1, due to the loss of ecosystem services. It was estimated that humanity loses about $250bn per year due to habitat destruction.[14][15]

One-third of the world's wild nature has been lost since I was a child and first heard the word 'conservation'. That's what keeps me awake at night. Andrew Balmford – 2002[14]

In 2003, he led a study which collected data on the maintenance costs of different conservation projects around the world. It was found that there was huge variation in the cost of conserving nature, ranging from $0.07 per acre to $1.37 million per acre depending on the project. Projects in the developing world were generally cheaper than those in the developed world, boding well for the protection of biodiversity hotspots in poorer countries such as Indonesia and Madagascar. Balmford stated that it is important that the value for money of a conservation project should be taken into account as well as the number of threatened species in the region.[16]

In 2004, he published as a lead researcher a paper in PNAS which estimated that to protect 30% of the world's oceans by making them protected areas would cost between $12bn and $14bn each year. He told the BBC that, "meeting this commitment to marine protection will require international effort on an unprecedented scale".[17][18]

In 2009, a paper that Balmford co-authored was published in Science that found that the benefits gained from deforestation in the Amazon Rainforest were quickly reversed. In recently deforested areas, the Human Development Index (HDI) was higher than other regions, but once deforestation was complete and replaced by other activities, for example farming, the HDI decreased to the same extent as that in areas that had not been deforested. Balmford described the current situation as "disastrous for local people, wildlife and the global climate" but hoped that REDD may allow changes to occur in the future.[19][20] Another paper published in PLoS Biology found that between 1992 and 2006, the overall number of visitors to 280 protected areas in 20 countries had increased. Visitor numbers in Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America all grew significantly, while those in North America and Australasia did not change significantly. The results contrasted with an earlier study of visitor numbers to protected areas in Japan and the USA which found they had fallen consistently over a number of decades.[21][22]

Other work[edit]

Balmford helped to establish the Cambridge Conservation Forum, a network of 1000 conservation professionals from a range of organisations, the Cambridge Conservation Initiative and the annual Student Conference on Conservation Science.[23][24] He is Principal Investigator on the Valuing the Arc programme, which is focused on the conservation of the Eastern Arc Mountains in Tanzania.[25]

Awards[edit]

In 2000, Balmford was awarded the Zoological Society of London Marsh Award for Conservation Biology.[26][27] In 2003, he was included on a list of the top 50 visionaries building a better world by Scientific American for his work on economic development and its impact on the environment.[28] In 2010 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.

References[edit]

  1. ^ "Department of Zoology – Andrew Balmford". University of Cambridge. Retrieved 6 February 2010.
  2. ^ "Conservation Science Group – Professor Andrew Balmford". University of Cambridge – Department of Zoology. Archived from the original on 2 November 2009. Retrieved 7 March 2010.
  3. ^ "Teaching at Clare". Clare College, Cambridge. Retrieved 6 February 2010.
  4. ^ "Royal Society".
  5. ^ Mason, Georgia (3 April 1993). "Science: Are birds with long tails sexier?". New Scientist. Retrieved 7 March 2010.
  6. ^ Balmford, Andrew; Thomas, Adrian L. R.; Jones, Ian L. (18 February 1993). "Aerodynamics and the evolution of long tails in birds". Nature. 361 (6413): 628–631. Bibcode:1993Natur.361..628B. doi:10.1038/361628a0. S2CID 4370761.
  7. ^ "Ecologists tally few species as proxies for the rest in the jungle". Associated Press. 30 July 1998.
  8. ^ Balmford, A.; Howard, P. C.; Viskanic, P.; Davenport, T. R. B.; Kigenyi, F. W.; Baltzer, M.; Dickinson, C. J.; Lwanga, J. S.; Matthews, R. A. (1998). "Letters to Nature: Complementarity and the use of indicator groups for reserve selection in Uganda". Nature. 394 (6692): 472. Bibcode:1998Natur.394..472H. doi:10.1038/28843. S2CID 4302769.
  9. ^ Radford, Tim (23 September 1999). "The price of life". The Guardian. Retrieved 4 April 2010.
  10. ^ James, Alexander; Gaston, Kevin; Balmford, Andrew (23 September 1999). "Balancing the Earth's accounts". Nature. 401 (6751): 323–324. Bibcode:1999Natur.401..323J. doi:10.1038/43774. PMID 16862091. S2CID 4410695.
  11. ^ "Game of high stakes in a world being bled dry". Financial Times. 23 September 1999.
  12. ^ Harfield, Roger (29 March 2002). "Is that a bee, a bird or Pikachu?". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 7 March 2010.
  13. ^ Balmford, Andrew; Clegg L; Coulson T; Taylor J (March 2002). "Why conservationists should heed Pokémon" (PDF). Science. 295 (5564): 2367b. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.477.3630. doi:10.1126/science.295.5564.2367b. PMID 11924673. S2CID 36411415.
  14. ^ a b Kirby, Alex (8 August 2002). "Nature 'pays biggest dividends'". BBC News. Retrieved 4 April 2010.
  15. ^ Andrew, Balmford; Bruner, Aaron; Cooper, Philip; Costanza, Robert; Farber, Stephen; Green, Rhys E.; Jenkins, Martin; Jefferiss, Paul; Jessamy, Valma; Madden, Joah; Munro, Kat; Myers, Norman; Naeem, Shahid; Paavola, Jouni; Rayment, Matthew; Rosendo, Sergio; Roughgarden, Joan; Trumper, Kate; Turner, R. Kerry (August 2002). "Economic Reasons for Conserving Wild Nature". Science. 297 (5583): 950–953. Bibcode:2002Sci...297..950B. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.320.6503. doi:10.1126/science.1073947. PMID 12169718. S2CID 18615499.
  16. ^ How to get a bigger bang for your eco buck New Scientist – 25 January 2003
  17. ^ Rincon, Paul (15 June 2004). "$14bn cost of protecting oceans". BBC News. Retrieved 6 April 2010.
  18. ^ Balmford, A.; Gravestock, P.; Hockley, N.; McClean, C.; Roberts, C. (2004). "The worldwide costs of marine protected areas". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 101 (26): 9694–9697. Bibcode:2004PNAS..101.9694B. doi:10.1073/pnas.0403239101. PMC 470737. PMID 15205483.
  19. ^ Black, Richard (11 June 2009). "'Boom and bust' of deforestation". BBC News. Retrieved 6 April 2010.
  20. ^ Rodrigues, A.; Ewers, R.; Parry, L.; Souza Jr, C.; Veríssimo, A.; Balmford, A. (2009). "Boom-and-bust development patterns across the Amazon deforestation frontier". Science. 324 (5933): 1435–1437. Bibcode:2009Sci...324.1435R. doi:10.1126/science.1174002. PMID 19520958. S2CID 206519980.
  21. ^ Balmford, A.; Beresford, J.; Green, J.; Naidoo, R.; Walpole, M.; Manica, A.; Reid, W. V. (2009). Reid, Walt V. (ed.). "A Global Perspective on Trends in Nature-Based Tourism". PLOS Biology. 7 (6): e1000144. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1000144. PMC 2694281. PMID 19564896.
  22. ^ "Are rich tourists losing touch with nature? – environment – 30 June 2009". New Scientist. Retrieved 4 July 2010.
  23. ^ "Professor Andrew Balmford". Interacademy Panel Conference on Biodiversity. Retrieved 6 April 2010.
  24. ^ "Cambridge Conservation Initiative: transforming international biodiversity conservation". Research Horizons – Cambridge University. May 2009. Archived from the original on 7 July 2010. Retrieved 6 April 2010.
  25. ^ "Valuing the Arc Home". Valuingthearc.org. Archived from the original on 30 June 2010. Retrieved 4 July 2010.
  26. ^ "Recipients of The Zoological Society of London Marsh Award for Conservation Biology" (PDF). Zoological Society of London. Archived from the original (PDF) on 15 September 2012. Retrieved 6 February 2010.
  27. ^ Swain, Harriet (24 August 2001). "Glittering prizes". Times Higher Education Supplement. Retrieved 7 March 2010.
  28. ^ Warren, Marcus (10 November 2003). "Livingstone becomes 'leading thinker'". The Daily Telegraph. New York. Retrieved 6 February 2010.

External links[edit]

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