Bertarelli Summer2024 FINAL - Flipbook - Page 62
CO M M UNIC AT IO N
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RE W I L D I NG
Patty Baiao has led island conservation projects
across the United States since 2016, including rat and
mouse removal projects, particularly on Midway Island
in the south Pacific.
Nick Graham is a professor and chair of marine
ecology at the Lancaster Environment Center in the
United Kingdom, and a Royal Society research fellow.
In his work, Graham takes a socio-ecological approach
to investigating how and why coral reefs change and
the implications.
Together, they discussed ways to deepen scientists’
understanding of ecosystems and how they can scale
conservation and prioritize future growth.
COMMUNITY FIRST Conservationist Rob Dunbar says
it’s vital to include the local community at the very early
stages of any restoration work. He says when he was working on the island of Palau, it took six or seven years before
people would invite him into their homes. “They wanted to
make sure I wasn’t a flash in the pan,” he says.
I want to start by asking all three of you to tell us
about the projects you’re currently working on in
conservation.
Rob Dunbar: I got into this through scuba diving. I
went on my very first dive in 1967 in Haiti in Port au
Prince harbor. The reef there was spectacular. It’s hard
to imagine today, because the situation has changed
so much. But that’s when I knew I wanted my life’s
work to take me to some of these spectacular places,
A MNAT30 / S H UT TER STO CK
This requires a change in thinking. It’s not just a
case of adding more zeroes to the budget and doing
more of the same. You might need to change how you
approach these smaller scale projects so that you can
build on them later.
To explore that idea and the implications of scale
for conservation, we sat down with three experts in
conservation and restoration at huge scales.
Rob Dunbar, a professor at Stanford University,
is interested in climate change and marine ecology,
oceanography, and biogeochemistry. His work has
spanned carbon dioxide removal projects, Antarctic
ice sheet instability, and climate impacts on coral reefs.
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