Why Conservation Keeps Falling Short at Scale
Conservation does not fail for lack of care.
It fails because the systems we rely on to make decisions were not designed for the scale of the challenges now in front of us.
Climate change, biodiversity loss, land use, governance, and equity are often discussed as separate problems. In practice, they collide across the same landscapes, institutions, and communities—forcing decisions that existing conservation systems were never built to carry.
The result is a growing gap between what conservation is being asked to do and what its decision systems are capable of delivering.
That gap is where progress stalls.
The problem isn’t science. It’s structure.
We know more about ecosystems today than at any point in history. We have better data, more sophisticated models, and clearer signals about what is at risk.
We also have no shortage of ambition.
Targets like conserving 30 percent or even 50 percent of the planet are now widely endorsed across governments, NGOs, and international agreements. The intent is serious.
What’s missing is not urgency or evidence. It’s a system designed to govern decisions at that scale.
Most conservation tools were built for:
individual sites
discrete projects
single agencies or jurisdictions
relatively stable conditions
They were not designed to coordinate choices across whole landscapes, balance competing claims of legitimacy, or adapt as ecological and social conditions shift simultaneously.
When pushed beyond their design limits, they strain—not because the people involved are failing, but because the systems themselves are.
At scale, conservation becomes a design problem
Once conservation operates across regions rather than parcels, the central challenge changes.
The hardest questions are no longer just what to protect, but how decisions are made:
Who participates? Which knowledge counts? How are tradeoffs handled when values conflict? What happens when authority is fragmented or contested? How do decisions remain legitimate over time?
Without a deliberate design for answering those questions, conservation defaults to fragmentation—good intentions scattered across institutions that can’t align or adapt fast enough.
This is why large-scale conservation is no longer primarily a technical problem.
It is a design and governance problem.
What Designing Nature’s Half is trying to do differently
Designing Nature’s Half starts from the premise that conservation systems themselves must be designed—intentionally, transparently, and with an understanding of how real decisions unfold under pressure.
The work does not offer a universal blueprint or a one-size-fits-all framework. Instead, it asks a harder set of questions:
What assumptions are embedded in current conservation systems?
Where do those assumptions break down under scale?
What would it mean to design conservation processes that can function across complexity rather than be overwhelmed by it?
The book this project supports is being developed to explore those questions in depth, grounded in practice, governance realities, and lived experience across landscapes.
It is deliberately not optimized for speed or slogans.
Why this matters now
As pressures accelerate, conservation is being asked to deliver outcomes it was never designed to produce—faster, across larger areas, and with broader participation.
Without a corresponding redesign of how decisions are structured, that pressure leads to predictable outcomes:
stalled initiatives
brittle agreements
eroding trust
diminishing credibility
If conservation is going to operate at the scale the moment demands, it has to become something slightly different from what it has been.
Not louder. Not more urgent in tone.
More capable in structure.
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