ROVING REPORTERS: Conservation needs less doom and more doing, says world-leading ecologist

As an authority on extinction, Stuart Pimm is sometimes asked by journalists about his personal response to what they imagine must be, surely, a depressing line of work: charting and seeking to understand the decline of vast numbers of species across the globe.

 “How the hell do you get up in the morning, Prof Pimm?” he asks, posing the existential question to himself in the hammy phrasings of some hardboiled hack.

“I get up in the morning,” says Pimm, supplying the answer, “because I know there’s something I can do about it.”

Doing something about it is what Pimm has come to stand for in a long and distinguished, globetrotting career in conservation which has bridged the worlds of research and activism.

And it’s a message he will be bringing to audiences at the 15th annual Oppenheimer Research Conference, taking place in Midrand from 7 to 9 October 2026.

Held under the theme “Connecting People, Places and Planet”, this year’s conference brings together more than 500 researchers, conservationists and policymakers to showcase how evidence-based science is driving practical change across the continent.

Pimm will deliver the opening plenary session of the conference, provocatively titled “Is Earth’s biodiversity really in peril?”

By video link from the gardens of North Carolina’s Duke University, where he’s professor of conservation ecology, and in his own writings, Pimm explained that while threats to our natural world are manifest, overstating these harms the cause. 

Indulging in doom-mongering, he said, while good for grabbing attention because it played on human psychology, fostered a sense of helplessness. What’s more, it discounted the successes conservationists had scored in many quarters, work which we should be building upon.  

Numbers game

In a recent op-ed for the influential Rewilding Institute, on whose leadership council he serves, Pimm stressed that biodiversity loss was unquestionably serious: Species were going extinct 1,000 times faster than they should. But he was critical of talk of irreversible crisis and imminent catastrophe, egged on, as he viewed it, by credulous use of biodiversity metrics like the Living Planet Index.

He noted the 2024 Living Planet Report quoted an average 73% decline in monitored vertebrate populations globally over the past 50 years, and said the figure was often cited as evidence that Earth had exceeded a safe operating space for biodiversity. 

“This statistic has become an influential driver of international policy mandates, including the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. It is used by dozens of conservation organisations worldwide, which collectively play key roles in setting current conservation priorities.” 

Yet this index, championed by the World Wildlife Fund and others, was “significantly flawed” and its widespread use “undermines the credibility of effective conservation”, he said.

Writing in Foreign Affairs, Pimm and Duke colleague John Gittleman took supporters of the Living Planet Index to task for linking the index to the planetary boundaries concept and arguing, in a piece of circular reasoning, that we had already moved beyond a safe zone for nature and were in a downward spiral.

“The underlying data doesn’t support such a catastrophic feedback loop,” said Pimm and Gittleman. 

Playing biNGO

Conservation funding was another Pimm peeve. 

If the world was to achieve the 30-by-30 target (protecting 30% of land and sea by 2030), how we finance it required scrutiny. “It’s more complicated than just throwing money at it,” he said. 

International aid agencies were already spending about $1-billion a year in the Global South, but it was unclear whether the money was being used wisely, said Pimm, calling for better monitoring.

While he saluted some initiatives like African Parks, the park management and finance NGO, whose reports, he said, spelt out what they were spending on and where, Pimm was less complimentary of others. 

“The big conservation groups, we call them the ‘biNGOs’, have budgets of a quarter, to a third, to in one case over a billion dollars. We’d like to know where that money’s going, and it’s sometimes very hard to find out,” he said.

Apocalypse not yet

But wasn’t there the danger that in criticising certain conservation entities and pouring cold water on catastrophe narratives, Pimm was giving ammunition to those who sought to discredit real concerns about biodiversity loss, freeing themselves to exploit the planet’s resources?

He agreed there was a risk. However, he countered that the greater risk lay in giving credence to the “absolutely not true” view that we’ve passed some critical tipping point, “that we’re all going to hell”.

Pimm – a recipient of the International Cosmos Prize (2019), the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement (2010) and the Dr AH Heineken Prize for Environmental Sciences (2006) – would prefer us to focus on conservation successes and what we could learn from these.

A fan, he confirmed, of the fruity English liqueur with which he shares a name, Pimm strikes one as a glass-half-full sort of chap. He speaks warmly of a number of organisations that were doing valuable conservation work, including his own NGO, Saving Nature, which were buying up bits of land all over the world to link fragmented or isolated reserves to form more viable ranges for wildlife, helping head off extinctions. 

He was also anxious to disabuse a widespread ignorance of Africa. This included misconceptions about its sheer size, as well as notions that it was the “dark continent”, backward in conservation and, in other respects, a shambles.

“People tend to think of Africa as a place that’s gone to hell – all the wildlife are disappearing, and it’s really pretty awful. That’s bad in several ways, but it tends to lead to a sense of despair,” he said.

In this regard, proponents of the Living Planet Index again come in for a kicking. 

‘Complete rubbish’

“They have a graph that shows wildlife populations declining year after year. To plot this graph, they have a little icon of an elephant going down, down, down, down. The only problem with that is it’s complete rubbish.

“If you look at what’s happening in southern Africa… everywhere south of the middle of Tanzania, southwards, that area, bigger than the continental US, holds 75% of the world’s elephants. And we have more elephants now than we did 25 years ago.”

This was not to deny that Africa faced serious problems, but rather to guard against blanket denunciations that discouraged good work, while distracting attention from areas requiring concerted attention.

On that score, Pimm said west Africa was in deep trouble, having lost a lot of its wildlife. He suggested that big organisations focus serious resources there – and on specific spots elsewhere on the continent under severe threat. 

“By saying everything is bad, they are being let off the hook, allowing them to work everywhere and not worry about how successful they are going to be. 

“It says, ‘Give us money and we’ll spend it all over Africa’. That’s not well thought out, and it cannot be fulfilled.”

Ties to the south

He reckoned his southern African colleagues, and many others, were doing a “reasonably good job” of protecting their wildlife.

Pimm has a strong commitment to the region, particularly South Africa, and speaks from long, first-hand knowledge of conservation in the country.

He was among prominent international scientists who boycotted South Africa during apartheid. But early in the democratic era he accepted an invitation to come to the country from Rudi van Aarde, the late conservationist and University of Pretoria (Tuks) professor. 

Pimm recalled that first visit, in 1996, as “a major changing point in my life”. It included time in Kruger National Park and being struck by South Africa’s “spectacular wildlife” and the realisation there was a “lot of science I could do, that could help the management choices” facing the region.

He remembered his first work with South African colleagues, nearly 30 years ago, helping to analyse the data and make the case for taking down the fence between Kruger and what is now the Limpopo National Park in Mozambique.

“That was very controversial, but we succeeded. We need to connect our parks together. Those are the kinds of challenges that we have, rather than saying it’s just terrible. Saying it’s just terrible doesn’t get you anywhere.” 

“I felt, and still feel, I can make a difference, helping build a multicultural, multilingual South Africa,” Pimm said.

In 2024 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Tuks for his contribution to conservation, including lifelong work studying biodiversity and preventing extinctions. 

Pimm is now looking forward to his next working visit to the country. 

Tantalising

He is excited about joining a team fitting elephants with radio collars. “A lot of those kinds of skills are very impressive – the guy in the helicopter, the guys on the ground. I just sit there and watch these guys in awe,” he said.

Pimm continued to serve as an extraordinary professor at Tuks’ Conservation Ecology Research Unit. It was founded by his friend, Van Aarde, who dedicated many years to studying elephants, concluding that contraceptives were an impractical way to control their numbers in places like Kruger, and that elephants needed room to roam.

It’s a view Pimm shares and he supports efforts to extend elephant ranges and connect populations by establishing transfrontier parks and corridors. 

“There are challenges that we know we need to solve. We know we need to connect elephant populations,” he said, enthusing about “Kasane-to-Crooks’ Corner”, a mooted wildlife corridor. 

If it came to be, the corridor would connect Botswana’s Chobe National Park with Kruger’s northern extremity, where South Africa, Zimbabwe and Mozambique meet. It would link several other national parks along the way too, including Hwange and Mapungubwe, a tantalising prospect.

“Is it possible? Some of the land is private, some of the land is already protected. Can we begin to think about doing conservation in southern Africa on that scale? That is a bigger, ambitious way to solve the problem of people saying we have too many elephants. I don’t think we have too many elephants. The problem is that we’ve got to give elephants freedom to roam.”

Call of the wild

Pimm has a love for creatures, great and small, but makes no apologies for his fascination with big, charismatic species. “Elephants are the most wonderful things to watch,” he said. Besides research and efforts to connect populations being valuable, the work contributed to a broader understanding of ecology and benefited a host of other species along the way.

He came to a career in biology, and subsequently conservation, thanks to family camping and hiking holidays in the beautiful, northern parts of their native Derbyshire, England.

“My parents encouraged me to explore the natural world, so I was collecting fossils, identifying plants and identifying birds from an early age,” he recalled.

Pimm has an enduring interest in birds (mockingbirds, cardinals and a ruby-throated hummingbird were about him in the Duke gardens during our interview, he told us). 

“There are few better entryways into studying biodiversity than birds. It’s an incredible way of understanding what’s around us, and the changes in what’s around us.”

As a fanatical birdwatcher, the young Pimm was drawn to Oxford University and its famous centre for ornithology, the Edward Grey Institute. Later, an overland summer expedition took him to Afghanistan, sparking an interest in desert ecology. This led him to New Mexico and a PhD on the subject. 

Then, in 1978 at the age of 29, things took a turn from more purely academic study to activism. In Hawaii to study ecology, but while indulging his twitcher side, Pimm learnt that a number of the birds in the field guide, published only a few years earlier, had gone extinct – or were about to. 

“It shocked the hell out of me,” he said. “I was challenged in a lot of different ways, but one of them was just simply a moral, almost religious way of feeling that here we have this beautiful planet, and we’re trashing it so badly that species are going extinct.”

Can do

Pimm quoted John 3:16, perhaps the most famous verse in the Gospels, which in its original Greek speaks of a Divine love for all creation, worthy of the greatest sacrifice.

“And that raises the question: ‘What are you, Stuart Pimm, doing about it?’

“I didn’t want to be a scientist who, 50 years later, was proud of a lot of scientific papers, but had watched the world go to pot.”

In some ways Pimm wished he had started earlier with his conservation work, but was also happy that his career as a scientist equipped him with “the skills to make a difference, and the responsibility to do so”.

“What I try to instil in my students in Africa and elsewhere is: Pick good problems. Look for issues where your science, skill and passion can make a difference to the world.”

These were lessons we could all draw on – and good reasons to get up in the morning.

“Everything is not rosy,” he says. “But I nonetheless remain convinced that there’s an awful lot of things we can accomplish,” he said. DM

This story was produced by Roving Reporters in collaboration with Jive Media Africa, the science communication partner to Oppenheimer Generations Research and Conservation.

Professor Stuart Pimm’s presentation at the Oppenheimer Research Conference, taking place in Midrand from 7 to 9 October, will be live-streamed at this link: ORC 2026.