Members of 4C have joined with economics and conservation science colleagues in an opinion piece in Science highlighting the problem that efforts to safeguard and restore biodiversity in places which produce food or wood risk simply displacing that production elsewhere. Such leakage is acknowledged as a significant issue in carbon projects, but is largely neglected by conservation projects and indeed larger-scale policies such as the EU’s Biodiversity and Forestry Strategies.
The paper reviews the evidence that leakage is very likely to undermine many hard-won conservation gains, and sets out five ways that conservationists can try to address it – from acknowledging and starting to assess its importance through to working with partners to reduce demand for high-footprint commodities and to increase yields beyond project areas so as to limit the extent of forgone production.
Balmford et al. 2025. Time to fix the biodiversity leak. Science 387: 720-722 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adv8264