Reimagining conservation messages from the 2025 IUCN World Conservation Congress

“If I can visualize the consequences of my behavior, it helps me avoid actions that could lead to bad endings. For example, if I wake up in the morning and take a little journey in my mind – imagining what it would be like to spend 24 hours without water – I’m sure that, by the end of that exercise, I will truly understand the value of water.

If I do this with people who don’t yet appreciate how precious water is – if I guide them through this meditation and help them visualize a day without it – they will inevitably change their behavior toward water. And if they don’t, then they are not noble people!

And it is especially important to do this with children, because they are more sensitive and naturally connected to nature. 

I do it with my grandchildren, for example, when we talk about people throwing plastic into the sea. I ask them to imagine what happens when a turtle comes out to play, sees the colorful plastic, and eats it. They understand that the turtle will die and that they should never throw plastic into the sea. I do the same when they use up many tissues, I ask them to imagine the tree it came from. Every sheet of paper is a piece of that tree’s life. When we waste paper, we take part in the process of chopping off more trees to give us this tiny thing, so before pulling more than a single tissue, think of our beautiful friend, the tree – thankfully this helped. 

Because I bring this kind of visualization into every environmental activity we do, my grandchildren have become the ones who remind others not to behave badly and to act in eco-friendly ways. And this transformation happens through the power of visualizing and reimagining.”

“When we think about reimagining conservation, to some extent we have to ask the question, it's really about conservation moving beyond the crisis of its own making. So when we look at traditional conservation approaches, there are key points and challenges where we can see that traditional approaches aren't necessarily working anymore. 

And one of those is the fragmentation of purpose. We find conservation today is becoming responsible for so much more than just protected areas and engaging with the protection of species. It intersects with livelihoods, rights, gender… a diversity of issues that one might argue are essentially outside of the core focus or mandate of the conservation sector. And so the question is, how is conservation preparing itself to be playing a much more intersectional role, if one might call it that, in the landscapes where conservation action is taking place? 

Another aspect is that conservation sometimes has an approach of static thinking in a world that is essentially dynamic and changing. And we see this change with migration, movement of species, movements of people, changing ecosystems as a result of climate impacts, natural disasters, environmental degradation of land. And really, the key message for me is that conservation needs to be much more flexible, both in its approach and in its adaptability to changing scenarios. We tend to conserve for the past when we need to be thinking of how we conserve for the future in the sense that past systems, past scenarios in landscapes may no longer be relevant in 10, 15, 20, 30, 50 years time. So how do we conserve for a changing landscape when we're not even sure how it's going to be changing? This is the challenge of our time, and demands an expanded integrated, deeply holistic approach. 

We also need to acknowledge that the planet is not dying. It's more a situation that's changing so fast that conservation can't even keep up with that in its own imagination. So one of the key things that is going to help us moving forward is to think of conservation instead of protecting species and places specifically, it's about protecting processes and ensuring that processes can unfold effectively with meaning, with resilience, with broad input from a diverse community of actors and resilience particularly in the light of change. How do we keep things going despite the environment shifting and changing?

Then we've got the situation of what one might refer to as economic capture of conservation. It's become dependent on markets, carbon markets, tourism, biodiversity offsets. These are all sorts of market related impulses that can distract also from some of the key functions, but also shifts our relationship and perceptions of nature more broadly. And I think we still need to be cautious of that. 

Another insight is the question of rethinking knowledge. Today we can see at this congress a multiplicity of businesses offering satellite data capture, genomics, capturing species information at a genome level, being able to map unbelievable amounts of information from very small bits of sampling. And yet at the same time, we've got the urgent need to continue to build relationships. And we've got other ways of knowing, traditional ways of knowing, indigenous ways of knowing, inter-species ways of knowing. And that raises for me this idea of something one might call intersentience, where to know a place, to know a species, to know a dynamic in a landscape requires both satellite imagery, satellite data, microscopic analysis of things, but it also requires the stories, the narratives, the history of place, the types of relationships people have with that place, and with the processes that happen there. In traditional conservation, we still see human communities as a challenge and a problem. That's certainly something that needs to shift. And we are beginning to see this happen. After all it is us, as human communities, who are the key threat and the key solution to conservation as a living practice of harmony with the natural world.” 

“One way Indigenous people and local communities are working to reimagine conservation is through the motions process. We reimagine our world, we talk about what we think the world is or should be, or we restate what reality is. 

We're currently supporting at least three motions here this year. One, to bring more support to linguistic diversity, languages that are more in touch with the biodiversity of place. And these most often are the languages of indigenous people. We're also supporting a motion to unequivocally recognize territories of life or indigenous and community conserved areas as an effective way to conserve our places. And the third motion is motion 96, setting area-based conservation targets in a manner that includes justice and doing right by the people who live in those places.”