Event Title
Location
Room 460
Start Date
4-7-2012 1:15 PM
End Date
4-7-2012 2:45 PM
Description
Biodiversity protection is becoming increasingly reliant on metrics, lists, and indicators. Check the box approaches to taking biodiversity into account attempt to reduce complex concepts, and contested science, into simple standards, often translated into numerical representation. The acronyms alone associated with such attempts to numerically account for and prioritize nature are mind boggling even for the initiated: are habitats IBAs (Important Bird Areas), IPAs (Indigenous Protected Areas), AZE (Alliance for Zero Extinction) sites, KBAs (Key Biodiversity Areas)? List-based approaches dominate both international treaties (the World Heritage Convention, the Ramsar Convention, CITES) and leading international instruments such as the IUCN Red List. The development of mechanisms for accounting for forest carbon and the conservation and sustainable management of forests will be critical to the success of REDD+ initiatives.
To date, biodiversity indicators and critical habitat categories have been the subject of debate among environmental economists and conservation biologists. Legal scholarship has been largely silent on the implications of this accounting for nature. International environmental law has tended to entrench the assumptions underlying these quantitative tools, rather than to expose the ways in which quantification contributes to limited types of knowledge.
This paper seeks to map international law’s growing attempts to count nature. In so doing, it exposes the ways in which lists and numbers obscure contested knowledge. Numbers and lists are becoming the bedrock of biodiversity law. Their very appeal lies in their seeming neutrality. But who is creating the metrics? Who is doing the counting? And how does the translation of biodiversity indicators into international law and policy targets transform the information in the original indicator?
Beyond simply mapping attempts to account for nature in international law, this paper’s central concern is with the potential for greater reflexivity in international law list-making. In what ways do international environmental law’s lists and metrics allow for learning and adjustments? Given the fast-changing pace of biodiversity science, how can we better ensure that international environmental law is capable of learning and of incorporating a dynamic approach to both counting nature and understanding the limits of counting?
Presentation
Included in
Counting Nature and the Nature of Counting
Room 460
Biodiversity protection is becoming increasingly reliant on metrics, lists, and indicators. Check the box approaches to taking biodiversity into account attempt to reduce complex concepts, and contested science, into simple standards, often translated into numerical representation. The acronyms alone associated with such attempts to numerically account for and prioritize nature are mind boggling even for the initiated: are habitats IBAs (Important Bird Areas), IPAs (Indigenous Protected Areas), AZE (Alliance for Zero Extinction) sites, KBAs (Key Biodiversity Areas)? List-based approaches dominate both international treaties (the World Heritage Convention, the Ramsar Convention, CITES) and leading international instruments such as the IUCN Red List. The development of mechanisms for accounting for forest carbon and the conservation and sustainable management of forests will be critical to the success of REDD+ initiatives.
To date, biodiversity indicators and critical habitat categories have been the subject of debate among environmental economists and conservation biologists. Legal scholarship has been largely silent on the implications of this accounting for nature. International environmental law has tended to entrench the assumptions underlying these quantitative tools, rather than to expose the ways in which quantification contributes to limited types of knowledge.
This paper seeks to map international law’s growing attempts to count nature. In so doing, it exposes the ways in which lists and numbers obscure contested knowledge. Numbers and lists are becoming the bedrock of biodiversity law. Their very appeal lies in their seeming neutrality. But who is creating the metrics? Who is doing the counting? And how does the translation of biodiversity indicators into international law and policy targets transform the information in the original indicator?
Beyond simply mapping attempts to account for nature in international law, this paper’s central concern is with the potential for greater reflexivity in international law list-making. In what ways do international environmental law’s lists and metrics allow for learning and adjustments? Given the fast-changing pace of biodiversity science, how can we better ensure that international environmental law is capable of learning and of incorporating a dynamic approach to both counting nature and understanding the limits of counting?