Seabird patrols to self-healing buildings: the 15 conservation stories to watch in 2021

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If it did nothing else, the emergence of Covid-19 a year ago underlined for all of us the importance of anticipating and preparing for – and, as appropriate, steering the course of – things that might happen in the future.

That is, in a nutshell, the goal of the 2021 horizon scan of emerging global biological conservation issues recently published in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution by the Cambridge University conservation biologist William Sutherland and a team of 24 other conservation practitioners and researchers from around the world.

 The team started by identifying 97 trends with potentially large impacts on conservation and biodiversity, then trimmed the list down to the top 15 that they agreed “society may urgently need to address”.