Integrating proximal and horizon threats to biodiversity for conservation

Abstract

Global conservation promotes solutions to different dimensions of threat and response: land-use change, climate change, pollution, and so forth. Countering each threat has its band of proponents who advocate for their cause as paramount, increasingly, given limited resources, by downplaying the relative importance of others. Not only does this encourage a compartmentalised view of the world, which is ecologically unsound, it allows politicians and others to cherry-pick responses in light of political expediency or local demands. We should instead aim to achieve win–win conservation strategies that address multiple threats to diversity acting at different timescales, as well as ‘horizon threats’, which occur at large scales and may be the most challenging conservation issues to address in both the present and the future.