A Global Mitigation Hierarchy for Nature Conservation

Efforts to conserve biodiversity comprise a patchwork of international goals, national-level plans, and local interventions that, overall, are

failing. We discuss the potential utility of applying the mitigation hierarchy, widely used during economic development activities, to all negative

human impacts on biodiversity. Evaluating all biodiversity losses and gains through the mitigation hierarchy could help prioritize consideration

of conservation goals and drive the empirical evaluation of conservation investments through the explicit consideration of counterfactual

trends and ecosystem dynamics across scales. We explore the challenges in using this framework to achieve global conservation goals, including

operationalization and monitoring and compliance, and we discuss solutions and research priorities. The mitigation hierarchy’s conceptual

power and ability to clarify thinking could provide the step change needed to integrate the multiple elements of conservation goals and

interventions in order to achieve successful biodiversity outcomes.