https://orcid.org/0009-0003-3716-6637
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Rongfei Su, Annah Lake Zhu, Shiyu Ye, Nan Jia, Ruishan Chen, Community-scale biodiversity conservation in cities, BioScience, Volume 75, Issue 2, February 2025, Pages 100–103, https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biae107
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After three decades of setting elaborate biodiversity goals and failing to meet them, global biodiversity conservation is in need of a revamp. The post-2020 Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework has brought new hope to global initiatives, but new approaches to implementation are required to ensure its future does not resemble the failed outcomes of decades prior. One area ripe for rethinking is urban biodiversity conservation. Current approaches to conservation in cities need to move beyond critiquing the impacts of urbanization on biodiversity and toward positive interventions to leverage the potential of cities to contribute to a more sustainable and biodiverse future (Kendal 2023).
Although biodiversity conservation efforts have previously been pursued in urban settings (Mumaw et al. 2019, Kendal 2023), current global policies, investments, and the implementation of multilateral commitments still predominantly focus on nonurban areas distant from cities. When urban areas are the focus, biodiversity conservation efforts tend to prioritize natural or seminatural settings within urban areas, such as urban parks and wetlands. Rather than imposing conventional conservation models on urban settings, urban biodiversity conservation requires a radical rethinking. Community-scale design can move conservation approaches away from models based on isolated parks or preserves and toward more human-integrated urban conservation.
