Conservation Evidence

The current biodiversity crisis requires conservation action that is effective and transformative. Yet many interventions to protect and restore nature still aren’t designed on the basis of scientific evidence, and many fail to fully deliver their intended outcomes. Conservation Evidence is an initiative based at the University of Cambridge that makes evidence on nature conservation easily and publicly accessible. This supports practitioners around the world to make decisions based on the best available science and the learnings of others. Conservation Evidence also co-designs tools and processes to ensure the evidence is embedded in practice.

conservationevidence.com | Partner since 2023

Challenge

There is an urgent need for effective, transformational nature conservation action to address the rapid loss of natural habitats and biodiversity. However, many efforts to protect and restore nature have – although well-intentioned – failed to deliver their desired positive outcomes. Or they only do so at a much slower pace and higher cost than necessary. Researchers and practitioners have identified that the current lack of easily-accessible summaries of the science, best practices and learnings is a major obstacle to more effective, evidence-based nature conservation.

Response

Conservation Evidence is an initiative launched and hosted by the University of Cambridge that makes evidence of effective nature conservation easily and publicly available. To date, its team has reviewed and summarised more than 9,000 studies on the effectiveness of specific conservation actions for different groups of species and habitats. This database of conservation evidence is freely available to anyone who wants to find out which kinds of interventions have or haven’t worked in the past. More than a million users have already accessed this valuable online information source.

We are now supporting Conservation Evidence to take this unique resource to scale by harnessing the power of AI. In collaboration with the Cambridge Department of Computer Science and Technology, Conservation Evidence is developing an AI-powered methodology to speed up and reduce the costs of evidence synthesis, while maintaining a robust, repeatable and transparent process that generates reliable, actionable responses for users.