Welcome to posts on biodiversity change to human-related pressure: drivers, solutions and case studies

Welcome to my blog, Hanbin's conservation observatory. The name of this blog comes after a wooden house in Southwestern China to be used by local researchers and me as a cozy place for birds counting. As you might see, I have an particular interest in conservation issues from interdisciplinary perspectives. Hence I will write about the response of biodiversity to global environmental change, mostly caused by human behaviour. Rockstrom is famous for his planetary boundary theory,  in which he defined nine safe operating boundaries to keep the humanity civilisation safe in Earth physical system, and one of the boundary is biodiversity loss (Rockstrom, 2009). What Rockstrom advocated is simple: to respect the rules. And here is people's response:

As a result of breaking the rule, biodiversity loss today has already exceeded ten times beyond its proposed safety boundary in 2009. Humans is a group of animal that keep breaking the rules of Earth, since human has particular difficulties in collective action, for example, NIMBYISM (Not In My Back Yard!) and Prisoner's delimma. Hardin (1968) describes this result as the failure in collective action using the metaphor of the tragedy of commons, in which scenario shepherds raised extra sheep for self-benefit and lead to the degradation of the pasture. it is the similar reasons that account for human-triggered biodiversity loss. To further elaborate this topic in my future blog writing, I want to focus more on a quantitative perspective, but also adopts anthropology, environmental ethics, international development theory and policy making. Hopefully I can present my topic here combining both science, social science and lay knowledge.

Personally I worked before with a few frontline NGOs in conservation, and computer biodiversity modelling behind the scene. I feel that, to solve conservation issues, one need to be flexible and always, act like what Bill Adams said, "to think like a human".  Human is great animal that has empathy, you just can not let it die out when you are looking at such type of pictures.

Here I also attached a short video my classmate and I made three years ago, I think it illustrates some of my personal philosophy on the relationship between biodiversity and human-related pressure. 

Hopefully we will have a nice time together!