Habits and history determine if conservation succeeds or fails
Morgan Kelly, Princeton Environmental Institute
Dec. 27, 2018 11 a.m.
The ghosts of harvesting past can haunt today’s conservation efforts.
The conservation or overharvesting of a resource such as fish, timber or other wildlife often is determined by past habits and decisions related to that resource, according to a study led by researchers at Rutgers and Princeton universities that examined why conservation succeeds or fails.
Patterns of overexploitation can be broken, however, by intensive harvest-reduction efforts, the researchers reported Dec. 19 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. By studying fisheries, they found that quickly implemented institutional campaigns to cap yields to below the largest sustainable catch has spurred long-term conservation practices.
https://www.princeton.edu/news/2018/12/27/habits-and-history-determine-if-conservation-succeeds-or-fails
