Conservation biology: four decades of problem- and solution-based research

Conservation biology is designed to identify pressing environmental problems and to solve them. This review evaluates the relative effort of conservation biology in problem-based and solution-based research, and tests whether or not this has changed in the past decades for five major drivers of biodiversity loss, i.e. habitat loss and fragmentation, overexploitation, biological invasion, pollution, and climate change. By randomly sampling papers from four decades of the conservation literature (1980–2019), we estimated the frequency of solution-based research related to the five biodiversity loss drivers. We also estimated how the ratio of the words ‘problem’ and ‘solution’ has changed over time, as a proxy for discourse bias. We found that a quarter of the scientific papers on conservation constitute solution-based research, while three-quarters were classified as problem-based. Temporal analyses showed that the proportion of solution-based papers increased along the four decades, from 0.18 to 0.30, mostly due to research on effects of habitat loss and fragmentation, and overexploitation. The solution-to-problem word ratio increased steadily, from almost zero in the 1980s to 0.60 in 2019. Significant increases occurred for all drivers of biodiversity loss, indicating an important temporal change in conservation discourse and concerns. We propose that, in order to be more effective against the biodiversity crisis, conservation science should expand the solution-based agenda by active changes in graduate education, research choice, research funding priority, editorial emphasis, and media coverage that can produce desired impacts on conservation practice, public perception, and environmental policies.