Posts Tagged ‘conservation’
Can you conserve biodiversity in the urban area?
Posted in RDAG by Virginia on June 18th, 2009
There are currently more people living in urban areas than there are living in rural areas. Due to increasing urban pressures, an increasing amount of natural land is turned into agriculture pasture or residential developments. Some argue, because of urban sprawl, that biodiversity conservation must be considered within cities as well as in the natural environment.
Since an increasing amount of natural land is continuously being turned into developments, a growing number of conservation biologists, social scientists and other trans-disciplinary scholars have advocated the need to spread conservation efforts into urban areas. They argue that neglecting the urban environment is neglecting a large potential of land that can facilitate in conserving biodiversity. Other arguments that are used in support of the integration of biodiversity into urban areas is that in doing so, can close the gap between society and nature that has formed in our society. Thus conserving biodiversity in the urban environment can both enhance the amount of conservation and also act as an education program to introduce and remind urban dwellers the presence of nature.
Despite the promising tenets of conserving biodiversity on urban land, there are several implementation problems. Firstly, any sort of conservation project situated in the urban area must take into consideration community concerns. An example of the importance of the community was seen with the relocation of the grey headed flying fruit bats from the Royal Botanic Gardens to Yarra Bend Park in Kew. There were concerns from the locals of the spread of disease, disruption due to bat noise and loss of agricultural produce from nearby small scale farms. After community consultation had occured, the project was able to be approved and has since been hailed as a success in urban biodiversity conservation.
Situating a conservation project amidst the urban environment also presents numerous management problems. These problems are presented as an increase in environmental weeds escaping from private backyards, increased number of cats and other domestic animals which prey on the conservation land and increased visitors which bring their own set of management challenges such as rubbish and degradation to the natural environment. These factors then contribute to a loss of quality to the overall conservation area.  All these elements combined transform into an increased costs of managing an urban conservation project compared to a rural or natural conservation project. Thus, it is more economically efficient to devote resources into conserving a prsitine, natural environment than implementing an urban conservation project.
Urban conservation projects may have numerous social benefits, however, in terms of economic efficiency and the limited budgets of most conservation projects, urban conservation projects may not be the most viable option.