As 2025 wraps up, I can’t think of a big, positive accomplishment in the world this year. Major conflicts still rage, including some that remain completely ignored on the world stage. And I’ve just learnt about the phrase “conservation abandonment.”
This concept was recently introduced in a study co-authored by institutions across the globe, including the University of Sydney. Put simply, it refers to projects initially aimed at environmental protection but quickly failing to achieve their goal due to a lack of continuity in the decisions and actions needed to sustain them. Examples include creating national parks that we stop managing after a few years, allowing oil drilling in previously protected areas, or stripping a forest of any protection level it benefited from earlier. Australia, Canada, Chile, Malawi, US … it’s happening everywhere. Initiatives are funded, but protection then erodes or disappears.
Right now, scientists cannot quantify precisely how widespread abandonment is, or its impact on conservation. At a bare minimum, we have eliminated environmental protection on an area as big as Greenland, between 1892 and 2018. But since we surprisingly don’t keep track of legitimate national parks and “paper parks” (parks “on paper only,” a second disturbing concept introduced this month), funding is probably allocated to the wrong places or at the wrong time on a global scale.
Political decisions are partly responsible for abandonment. Governments change all the time worldwide, and with them, priorities. Short-term vision prevails; continuity suffers.
Yet, there is a silver lining here: the concept of conservation abandonment is now clearly defined, the wrath of Indigenous peoples fighting for environmental protection is getting louder (cf COP30), and sometimes even being heard (cf Victoria’s treaty with Australia’s First Peoples).
Is something changing?
The New Year might not bring a miracle, and no matter how we act now, much of the lost natural world will never come back. But acknowledging our failing is an important first step, and we even know how to fix it: “designing for, monitoring, and investing in persistence.”
They say you can’t beat an enemy you don’t know. Well, at least now we do!
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Reference: Pienkowski, T. et al. (2025) Conservation abandonment is a policy blind spot. Nature Ecology and Evolution. Read here.
