April 2025

Conservation competes with a variety of other societal priorities and interests for funding and for attention. As a result, conservation projects, programmes and even broader concepts are frequently “packaged” in ways that prioritize grabbing attention. But promoting or marketing conservation initiatives in this way carries certain risks. Among them is the risk of being short-lived and without a real basis in the substance of the actual initiative – in other words a fad. Another is the risk of losing what has already been learned, when initiatives are “re-packaged” under a new buzzword.

Kent Redford is the principal at Archipelago Consulting, and previously Director of the Wildlife Conservation Society Institute in New York. In 2013 Kent published a paper in the journal, Conservation Biology to flag his concerns about conservation fads. I called him up to revisit this topic, because it relates quite closely to my increasing concern about conservation buzzwords.

Links to resources

• Fads, Funding, and Forgetting in Three Decades of Conservation – A relevant publication in the journal, Conservation Biology, which Kent lead-authored in 2013.