Holly Green

What is needed to save the world's birds? Understanding the conservation action gap

The project: 

Nearly half of the world’s bird species are in decline due to threats such as habitat loss, invasive species, overexploitation and other human-driven pressures. Yet despite many conservation successes, failure to meet conservation outcomes creates a “conservation action gap” – the difference between actions needed and those carried out.

Holly's project explores the conservation action gap by developing a replicable framework to quantify gaps and understand the factors influencing them. She analyses spatial and taxonomic patterns in gap size, examine how socioeconomic factors influence implementation, and assess how unaddressed gaps affect bird population trends. She also estimate the financial cost of closing these gaps.

This research assesses how conservation needs and implementation vary across IUCN Red List of Threatened Species categories, ecological traits, taxonomic groups and geographic regions. This approach identifies where efforts are falling short, highlights priority species and regions, and provides a framework to guide more effective global bird conservation.

More broadly, this research considers one of the central sustainability challenges of our time: why society fails to act on known solutions. Working across ecology, policy and sociology, this research aims to strengthen the evidence that conservation works, and to clarify the social, political and financial barriers that prevent effective action.

This project is in collaboration with BirdLife International.

Social media:

LinkedIn