Shifting Baseline Syndrome: Causes, Consequences, and Implications
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REVIEWS REVIEWS REVIEWS 222 Shifting baseline syndrome: causes, consequences, and implications Masashi Soga1* and Kevin J Gaston2 With ongoing environmental degradation at local, regional, and global scales, people’s accepted thresholds for environmental conditions are continually being lowered. In the absence of past information or experience with historical conditions, members of each new generation accept the situation in which they were raised as being normal. This psychological and sociological phenomenon is termed shifting baseline syndrome (SBS), which is increasingly recognized as one of the fundamental obstacles to addressing a wide range of today’s global environmental issues. Yet our understanding of this phenomenon remains incomplete. We provide an overview of the nature and extent of SBS and propose a conceptual framework for understanding its causes, consequences, and implications. We suggest that there are several self- reinforcing feedback loops that allow the consequences of SBS to further accelerate SBS through progressive environmental degradation. Such negative implications highlight the urgent need to dedicate considerable effort to preventing and ultimately reversing SBS. Front Ecol Environ 2018; 16(4): 222–230, doi: 10.1002/fee.1794 he magnitude, rate, and extent of the changes that Daniel Pauly elucidated the concept of “shifting base- Thumans have made to the Earth’s natural environ- line syndrome” (SBS) in a seminal essay that placed it in a ment are hard to grasp. Quantitative estimates abound. fisheries context (Pauly 1995). He pointed out that fishers For instance, over the past several decades, almost one- and marine scientists tend to perceive faunal composition quarter of all primary production has been appropriated and stock sizes at the beginning of their careers as the for human consumption (Haberl et al. 2007), one-half of unaffected baseline condition against which catch size is the planet’s wildlands have been lost (Ellis et al. 2010), subsequently judged, and that this is likely to result in a and wildlife populations worldwide have fallen by one- gradual acceptance of the loss of fish species (Pauly 1995). half (Dirzo et al. 2014). However, these estimates are Thus, a species that was widespread and abundant centu- quite abstract for many people, and discussion on these ries ago may have experienced a large population decline topics often references personal – usually local- scale – over the intervening period, but most current researchers anecdotes and examples of environmental change incorrectly presume that the population status in recent (Al- Abdulrazzak et al. 2012; Ziembicki et al. 2013; Jabado decades is the appropriate baseline (Bonebrake et al. et al. 2015). Unfortunately, there are reasons to believe 2010). By way of a terrestrial example, consider Japan, one that such contextualizing can serve to understate the of the world’s most heavily forested countries, with more changes that have taken place. than 70% of its land area covered by forest. For those who were born five or ten generations ago, old-growth (pri- In a nutshell: mary) forests were the most predominant component of • Shifting baseline syndrome (SBS) describes a gradual change the landscape (Figure 1), but modified forests (eg timber in the accepted norms for the condition of the natural forests) gradually expanded across the landscape with each environment due to lack of past information or lack of passing generation, and by the year 2000, most old-growth experience of past conditions forests had been transformed into human-modified ones • Consequences of SBS include an increased tolerance for (Figure 1), establishing a new norm. In the field of psy- progressive environmental degradation, changes in people’s expectations as to what is a desirable state of the natural chology, SBS is also referred to as “environmental genera- environment (ie one that is worth protecting), and the tional amnesia” (Kahn 2002), whereby each generation establishment and use of inappropriate baselines for nature grows up being accustomed to the way their environment conservation, restoration, and management looks and feels, and so, in a system experiencing progres- • Researchers and policy makers must focus more attention sive impoverishment, they do not recognize how degraded and effort on understanding and planning how best to limit and reduce SBS it has become over the course of previous generations. Simply put, SBS involves a gradual change in the accepted norms for the condition of the natural environ- 1Department of Ecosystem Studies, Graduate School of Agricultural ment due to a lack of experience, memory, and/or and Life Sciences, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan knowledge of its past condition. This implies that with *([email protected]); 2Environment and Sustainability ongoing global and regional deterioration in the natural Institute, University of Exeter, Penryn, UK environment, our baseline standards for environmental www.frontiersinecology.org © The Ecological Society of America M Soga and KJ Gaston Shifting baseline syndrome health will continue to decline, which represents an 223 enormous challenge for the conservation, restoration, and management of that environment. Despite this prog- nosis, however, environmental scientists have to date paid markedly little attention to SBS, and although evi- dence of the occurrence of this phenomenon is rapidly accumulating, its nature (especially causes and conse- quences) and extent are still poorly understood. Whereas SBS is likely to be associated with a wide range of current global environmental issues, such as defaunation (Lotze and Worm 2009; Corlett et al. 2013), loss of natural habitats and processes (Humphries and Winemiller 2009), and increased levels of pollution (Lyytimäki 2013), debate on this topic has thus far largely centered on fisheries (Sáenz-Arroyo et al. 2005; Ainsworth et al. 2008; Lozano- Montes et al. 2008). Moreover, little dis- cussion has focused on how SBS is best prevented or lim- ited. In this review, we present evidence of SBS; describe a conceptual framework for understanding its causes, consequences, and implications; and make several strate- gic recommendations required to reduce and ultimately reverse SBS. We also outline several key areas of future research that could improve understanding of SBS. For this overview, we did not perform a formal systematic literature search because research on this topic is too fragmented and transdisciplinary (appearing in multiple Figure 1. Six hundred years of change in the forest environment guises) for such an approach to be feasible. The material of Japan. (a) The compositional change in the types of forests we draw on was identified through a purposefully broad (old- growth, coppice, modified, and planted forests). A modified search (using a combination of Web of Science, Google natural forest is a natural forest with clearly visible human Scholar, and Google) of both peer- reviewed literature activities, such as saw- timber natural forest and abandoned and other sources to minimize publication bias. coppice. (b) The composition of the forest environment at five different time points, consisting of 0, 1, 5, 10, and 20 generations back from the present; the period of one generation J Evidence was defined as 30 years. Reproduced with permission from There is an increasing body of empirical evidence that Yamaura et al. (2012). indicates the occurrence of SBS, the majority of which comes from fisheries science (Figure 2). For example, less aware of changes in the abundance of common bird in the Raja Ampat archipelago of Eastern Indonesia, species over the past 20 years than were older residents which has experienced a precipitous decline in biodi- (Figure 3a). In the Beni, Bolivia, where rapid defaunation versity over the past 30 years, Ainsworth et al. (2008) has occurred due to deforestation, habitat degradation, and observed that younger fishers were able to recall less hunting, Fernández- Llamazares et al. (2015) observed that past abundance of wildlife than older fishers and there- the perceived number of locally extinct tree and fish spe- fore perceived a lower degree of population decline cies, along with the magnitude of changes in composition (Figure 2, a–d). In the upper Gulf of California, Mexico, of local wildlife (birds and game vertebrates), were lower where a marked depletion of fish stocks has occurred for younger respondents than for older ones (Figure 3, due to intense fishing and habitat degradation, Sáenz- b–e). In the Seward Peninsula, Alaska, where rapid envi- Arroyo et al. (2005) reported that the number of fishing ronmental change in a hydrological system is occurring (eg sites and fish species that younger fishers said were groundwater re- charge and river run- off), Alessa et al. depleted was approximately one-quarter of that reported (2008) found that younger people were less aware of by older fishers (Figure 2, e and f). Likewise in Tanga, changes in the availability of the local water resource and Tanzania, Katikiro (2014) showed that, compared to in water quality (Figure 3, f and g). Finally, Herman- older fishermen, younger fishers were less likely to Mercer et al. (2016), who conducted interviews among perceive that the current size of the fish catch has indigenous communities in subarctic Alaska, reported that declined and that fish stocks are being overexploited. the levels of respondents’ perceptions of climate change Evidence of SBS has also been documented