Measuring Conservation Effectiveness
At a two-day event at the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation on changing an entire movement. The people attending all believe that we have to focus much more on conservation outcomes: are there more tigers? are there more gorillas? Nick Salafsky used the death of George Washington as an example of what happens when you don't use evidence in making decisions. Apparently, when George got sick, one of the early treatments was to bleed him. When that didn't work, they bled him again. And again. And again. By the time they'd removed more than six pints of blood in one day, he died. It wasn't until later that we found that with rare exceptions, bleeding people doesn't work! Measuring outcomes is difficult, measuring activities is easy. But, if we only measure activities, we could find ourselves being "successful" while the species we're trying to protect goes extinct or the biome we're trying to protect loses viability and diversity. The focus is...