In March 1987, six giant pandas rescued from the wild became the founding population of a new breeding center outside Chengdu, China. None of them could simply be released back into a forest, because the forest a wild panda needs was itself disappearing under logging and farmland.
If a species' habitat is vanishing, does breeding more of them in captivity actually save it?
Neither answer on its own is enough. A captive population that keeps growing but never has anywhere wild left to go is a permanent zoo exhibit, not a saved species. Habitat protection with no way to rebuild crashed numbers quickly is often too slow on its own. Chengdu's answer was to run both at once: breed pandas in captivity while Chinese authorities expanded and connected wild reserves, so that a growing captive population and a recovering wild habitat could eventually meet in the middle. Statement 3.3.3 calls this a mixed conservation approach, and giant pandas are a named example of it.
- Founded in March 1987 with just 6 giant pandas rescued from the wild.
- Now the largest facility of its kind in the world; more than 200 giant pandas have been bred there since its founding.
- Runs alongside China's network of wild panda reserves and a 1998 nationwide logging ban in panda habitat, the in situ side of the same overall strategy, covered on 3.2 Human Impact on Biodiversity.
Sources: Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding; Wikipedia, "Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding."
Why we conserve: five kinds of argument
Arguments for preserving a species or habitat are not all the same kind of argument. There are five: aesthetic (the value of beauty and inspiration), ecological (the value of ecosystem services a species or habitat provides), economic (ecotourism revenue, genetic resources, and natural capital), ethical (whether a species has a right to exist regardless of its usefulness to humans), and social (the goods, services, jobs, and well-being conservation provides to people). A single conservation campaign usually leans on several of these at once, but knowing which is which matters for evaluating how convincing an argument actually is to a particular audience.
Practice: classify each justification for panda conservation by which of the five argument types it makes.
Panda-watching tourism and licensed panda imagery generate substantial revenue for Chinese conservation programs and local economies.
Protecting panda forest habitat also protects the watershed services and carbon storage that mountain forest provides downstream.
Pandas have a right to continue existing regardless of whether they are useful to people in any measurable way.
Reserve staffing, ranger training, and breeding-center jobs give surrounding communities stable income tied to the panda's survival.
Many people find giant pandas simply beautiful and want future generations to be able to see one.
Ex situ and in situ conservation
Conservation strategies split along a basic line: is the species being conserved inside or outside its natural habitat? Ex situ conservation happens outside the species' natural habitat, and tends to be species-based. In situ conservation happens within the species' natural habitat, and tends to be habitat-based.
Ex situ conservation
In situ conservation
Quick check. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault stores frozen seed samples from crop varieties around the world inside a mountain in the Arctic, far from any of the farms those seeds originally came from. Is this ex situ or in situ conservation?
A mixed approach: combining habitat and species measures
Sometimes a single strategy is not enough, and conservation programs deliberately combine habitat-based and species-based measures. A mixed approach usually invokes a flagship species (a charismatic species used to raise funding and public support) or a keystone species (a species whose presence has an outsized effect on the rest of its ecosystem) to justify protecting an entire habitat or landscape.
The giant panda is both. It is a flagship species, globally recognizable and able to attract funding no obscure species could, and its forest habitat supports countless other species that benefit from the same protection. The Chengdu breeding base handles the ex situ half of the strategy; China's expanding network of panda reserves, connected by habitat corridors and backed by the 1998 logging ban, handles the in situ half. Neither alone would have been enough. The wild population trend that resulted, a 17% rise between the 2003 and 2014 national censuses and a 2016 downlisting from Endangered to Vulnerable, is covered in full on 3.2 Human Impact on Biodiversity.
Quick check. Why combine captive breeding with wild habitat protection for pandas, rather than relying on just one?
The Convention on Biological Diversity
The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) is a United Nations treaty, ratified by 193 parties, that addresses both species-based and habitat-based conservation at once. It commits countries to develop national strategies for conserving and sustainably using biological diversity, and works to identify protected marine areas that fall outside any single nation's jurisdiction.
The CBD's Nagoya Protocol, adopted in 2010 and in force since 2014, addresses a problem the original treaty left unresolved: when a pharmaceutical or agricultural company profits from a genetic resource, a rainforest plant compound or a crop variety, discovered using the traditional knowledge of an indigenous or local community, who is entitled to a share of that benefit? The Nagoya Protocol establishes a legal framework requiring fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising from the use of genetic resources, protection against the uncompensated extraction of biological wealth from the countries and communities that steward it.
The CBD is not CITES. The CBD is a broad framework treaty about conserving biological diversity and sharing the benefits of genetic resources fairly. CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, is a narrower treaty focused specifically on regulating and restricting the international trade of endangered species and their parts. A country can be fully compliant with one and still fall short on the other.
Practice: classify which agreement each scenario describes.
A pharmaceutical company must share profits with the community whose traditional knowledge led it to a rainforest plant compound.
Customs officials seize an illegal shipment of ivory crossing an international border.
193 countries commit to developing national strategies for conserving and sustainably using their biological diversity.
- Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding: official base information; Wikipedia.
- Convention on Biological Diversity: CBD Secretariat, cbd.int.
- Nagoya Protocol: CBD Secretariat factsheet; entered into force 12 October 2014.
- IB Environmental Systems and Societies Guide, first assessment 2026, Topic 3, Subtopic 3.3, statements 3.3.1-3.3.4.
Habitat conservation strategies
Habitat conservation protects a species by protecting the natural environment it depends on. Some habitats can simply be left alone once protected; others are the product of a particular disturbance history and will change into something else entirely without continued active management. A third option, an ecosanctuary, uses pest-exclusion fencing to physically remove invasive predators from a defined area, allowing native species to be reintroduced.
Active management: lowland heathland, UK
- Heathland is not a stable end point of succession. Left alone, it succeeds into scrub and then woodland within a few decades, and the specialist heathland species it supports (Dartford warblers, sand lizards, ling heather) are lost along the way.
- Conservation grazing, controlled burning, and periodic scrub clearance are used to hold the habitat at the heathland stage deliberately, arresting succession rather than letting it proceed.
- Stop the management and the heathland disappears within a generation, an unusually direct illustration of how "protected" does not always mean "left untouched."
Ecosanctuary: Zealandia, Wellington
- A 225-hectare valley in Wellington, New Zealand, enclosed since 1999 by an 8.6-kilometer pest-exclusion fence built to keep out 14 introduced species, including rats, stoats, and possums.
- With introduced predators excluded, kiwi, tuatara, and takahe have been reintroduced and now breed successfully inside the fence.
- Native birds bred inside Zealandia have since spread out into surrounding Wellington suburbs, a "halo effect" extending the sanctuary's benefit beyond its fence line.
Surrounding land use and distance from urban centers both shape how well a conservation area functions: a reserve embedded in farmland or a growing city faces pressures a remote reserve does not.
Practice: classify each scenario by which habitat conservation approach it best illustrates.
Rangers use controlled burning and grazing every few years to stop a lowland heath turning into scrub and then woodland.
A predator-exclusion fence around a mainland valley lets kiwi and tuatara be reintroduced for the first time in over a century.
A remote old-growth rainforest reserve needs no ongoing management once logging and hunting are banned inside its boundary, because rainforest is already the stable end point of succession there.
Designing nature reserves and national parks
Effective conservation in a reserve or national park depends on understanding both the biology of the species it protects and how the size and shape of the protected area itself affects that protection. Small or narrow reserves have a high ratio of edge to interior, and conditions near the edge, light, wind, temperature, and human disturbance, differ from the interior in ways that can degrade habitat quality along the whole boundary. This is the edge effect. Isolated reserves also cut populations off from one another; wildlife corridors, strips of habitat connecting separate reserves, allow individuals, and their genes, to move between them.
UNESCO Biosphere Reserves formalize this design problem into three zones:
- Supports the largest overland mammal migration on Earth: roughly 2 million wildebeest, along with large populations of zebra, gazelle, and their predators, moving across the ecosystem each year.
- The core zone protects this migration and its predators largely undisturbed; the surrounding buffer and transition zones are managed for grazing, tourism, and community development consistent with the UN's sustainable development goals.
Sources: UNESCO Man and the Biosphere Programme; Serengeti-Ngorongoro Biosphere Reserve documentation.
Quick check. A long, narrow strip reserve and a compact, circular reserve both protect the same total area. Which suffers more from edge effects, and why?
Rewilding
Rewilding restores natural ecological processes by stepping back rather than intervening. Methods include reintroducing apex predators and other keystone species, reconnecting fragmented habitat across large areas, ending agriculture and resource harvesting on the land, and generally minimizing human influence so natural processes can resume on their own.
- Founded in 1987 at 109 hectares and grown since through further land purchases to roughly 1,250 hectares of regenerating native forest today.
- Botanist Hugh Wilson has run the reserve for decades on a philosophy of minimal intervention: instead of clearing gorse, an introduced shrub usually treated as a weed, Hinewai lets it stand as a nurse crop.
- Gorse grows fast and forms a dense canopy that shelters native tree seedlings from wind, frost, and browsing animals while they establish. Once the native trees grow tall enough to overtop it, they shade the gorse out and it dies back on its own, leaving native forest behind.
Sources: Hinewai Reserve, hinewai.org.nz; Banks Peninsula Conservation Trust.
Quick check. Why does Hinewai deliberately leave gorse standing instead of clearing it?
Conservation within a safe operating space
Conservation and regeneration measures at individual, collective, national, and international levels are not just about saving particular species. Collectively, they are what would be needed to reverse biodiversity decline enough to bring humanity back within the biodiversity planetary boundary, one of the boundaries defining a safe operating space for humanity.
The loss of biosphere integrity boundary, its extinction-rate and HANPP thresholds, and the "7 of 9 boundaries transgressed" figure are covered in full on 1.3 Sustainability and 3.2 Human Impact on Biodiversity. Every strategy on this page, from ex situ breeding to rewilding, is one of the tools available for pulling that boundary back toward a safe range.
Perspectives shape which strategy gets chosen
The success of a conservation strategy depends on more than ecology: community support, funding, education, appropriate legislation, and scientific research all matter, and so does environmental justice, who bears the cost of a conservation decision and who was consulted before it was made. Underneath all of this, a society's dominant environmental value system shapes which strategies even get proposed. A more ecocentric perspective values biodiversity intrinsically and tends to favor low-intervention, in situ strategies: protect the habitat and step back. A more anthropocentric or technocentric perspective values biodiversity for its usefulness to humans and tends to favor scientific, managed interventions: zoos, gene banks, and ecotourism.
Practice: sort each strategy by which perspective it fits more naturally.
A former farm is left to regenerate with no human management beyond removing the original fences.
A national gene bank freezes seed and tissue samples from endangered crop varieties in case they are needed for future breeding programs.
Wolves are reintroduced to a national park, and managers then step back to let predator-prey dynamics rebalance the ecosystem without further intervention.
A breeding program airlifts individual rhinos between countries to maximize genetic diversity within an enclosed population.
Rangers set carefully timed prescribed burns to restore the exact fire pattern that occurred naturally before humans suppressed wildfire in the area.
1.1 Perspectives covers environmental value systems in full. For a Discuss question on ethics and conservation, examiners reward breadth across ethical positions (deep green ecocentrism, deontology, consequentialism, virtue ethics) linked explicitly to conservation strategies (in situ versus ex situ measures, flagship and keystone species, botanic gardens, zoos, CITES, seed banks), not a list of value systems with no strategy attached to each one.
- Lowland heathland management: standard UK conservation practice, Natural England and equivalent bodies.
- Zealandia: visitzealandia.com; sciencelearn.org.nz.
- Serengeti-Ngorongoro Biosphere Reserve: UNESCO Man and the Biosphere Programme.
- Hinewai Reserve: hinewai.org.nz; Banks Peninsula Conservation Trust.
- IB Environmental Systems and Societies Guide, first assessment 2026, Topic 3, Subtopic 3.3, statements 3.3.5-3.3.9.
Reading secondary data on a rewilding project
Application of skills: use secondary data from databases and monitoring reports to assess the success of a rewilding project.
Knepp Estate in West Sussex, England, has published wildlife monitoring data every year since rewilding began in the early 2000s. From 2007 to 2018, its annual Breeding Bird Survey walked two fixed transects, one in the estate's northern block (Transect A) and one in the southern block (Transect B), and estimated bird territories along each from repeat visits (a territory required evidence such as a singing male present on two or more visits, territorial behavior, alarm calls, or adults carrying food or nesting material). Turtle dove territories were recorded only on Transect B: the same twelve-year survey recorded none at all on Transect A. The chart below plots the Transect B count, so it shows a recovery within that surveyed corridor, not a total for the whole estate. Knepp's later published figures, for 2020, 2021, and 2024, are not from that same transect either: the 2021 count is explicitly stated to cover 1,100 acres of the Southern Block, a far larger area, but Knepp's own reporting does not state the exact survey area behind the 2020 and 2024 figures. No figure has been published for 2019, 2022, or 2023.
The green line plots one consistent measurement, the same transect walked every year from 2007 to 2018. The three gold points are not connected to it or to each other, because Knepp's own published reporting does not confirm they all cover the same area as one another. Reading the gold points as a straight continuation of the green line would overstate how much the population itself grew.
Quick check. The count jumps from 3 in 2018 (fixed transect) to 23 in 2020 (area not stated), roughly sevenfold. What is the most defensible conclusion?
Quick check. Which best describes what the 2020, 2021, and 2024 figures show happening to Knepp's turtle dove numbers?
Quick check. Knepp's parallel Transect A survey, in the estate's northern block, recorded zero turtle dove territories throughout 2007-2018, the same years the chart above covers for Transect B. What does this add to a fair reading of the chart?
When comparing counts across years in secondary data, check whether the source actually confirms the survey method stayed the same, rather than assuming it did. Knepp states the 2021 turtle dove count covered a specific 1,100-acre area, clearly larger than the 2007-2018 transect, but does not state the area behind its 2020 and 2024 figures at all, so none of the three can be safely read as a direct continuation of the transect-era trend line. Within the later figures alone, three data points still cannot prove a trend will continue: a single-year dip or plateau after rapid growth is common in recovering populations and does not by itself signal decline. The same caution applies to geographic scope, not just time: this chart plots one transect in the estate's southern block, and the parallel Transect A survey in the northern block recorded zero turtle dove territories across the same twelve years. A recovery in one surveyed corridor is not the same claim as a species recovering across the whole estate.
Spotting a leading question in an ecotourism survey
Application of skills: use questionnaires to assess the impact of ecotourism or the values that it promotes.
A questionnaire designed to assess ecotourism's impact on a local community only produces useful data if its questions are neutral. A leading question is worded in a way that pushes the respondent toward a particular answer, and any conclusion drawn from it is unreliable. Decide whether each sample question below is well designed or leading.
"How much do you agree that ecotourism has ruined this area?"
"In the past year, has your household's income from tourism-related work increased, decreased, or stayed the same?"
"Don't you think protecting wildlife matters more than tourist convenience?"
- Knepp Estate turtle dove survey counts, 2007-2018 (fixed transect): Knepp Estate Breeding Bird Survey 2018 (Paul James), knepp.co.uk.
- Knepp Estate turtle dove survey counts, 2020 and 2024 (area not stated): Knepp Estate, "Two decades of rewilding: a review" (January 2026), knepp.co.uk.
- Knepp Estate turtle dove survey count, 2021 (1,100 acres of the Southern Block): Knepp Estate, "Turtle Doves," knepp.co.uk.
- IB Environmental Systems and Societies Guide, first assessment 2026, Topic 3, Subtopic 3.3, application of skills.
Glossary
- Ex situ conservation
- Conservation of a species outside its natural habitat, tending to be species-based: zoos, botanic gardens, seed banks, and CITES-regulated breeding programs.
- In situ conservation
- Conservation of a species within its natural habitat, tending to be habitat-based: national parks, nature reserves, and wildlife sanctuaries.
- Flagship species
- A charismatic, widely recognizable species used to raise funding and public support for a broader conservation program.
- Keystone species
- A species whose presence has an outsized effect on the rest of its ecosystem relative to its abundance.
- Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD)
- A UN treaty, ratified by 193 parties, addressing both species-based and habitat-based conservation and the fair sharing of benefits from genetic resources.
- Nagoya Protocol
- A supplementary agreement to the CBD, in force since 2014, requiring fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising from the use of genetic resources.
- Ecosanctuary
- A protected area enclosed by pest-exclusion fencing to physically remove invasive predators, allowing native species to be reintroduced.
- Edge effect
- The altered environmental conditions, light, wind, temperature, and disturbance, found near a habitat's boundary, which degrade habitat quality most in reserves with a high perimeter-to-area ratio.
- Wildlife corridor
- A strip of habitat connecting otherwise separate protected areas, allowing individuals and their genes to move between populations.
- Pristine core
- The undisturbed central zone of a biosphere reserve, surrounded by a managed buffer zone and a sustainably used transition zone.
- Rewilding
- Restoring natural ecological processes by minimizing human intervention: reintroducing keystone species, reconnecting habitat, and ending agriculture or harvesting on the land.
- Positive feedback loop HL
- A feedback mechanism in which a change amplifies itself further; in rewilding, enhanced growth, reproduction, and survival can reinforce further ecosystem recovery.
- Alternative stable state HL
- A distinct, self-sustaining configuration a community can settle into, made possible when a positive feedback loop pushes a system away from its previous equilibrium.
- Ecotourism
- Tourism based on experiencing natural environments and wildlife, capable of funding conservation and generating local income, but also capable of negative societal and ecological impacts.
- IB Environmental Systems and Societies Guide, first assessment 2026, Topic 3, Subtopic 3.3.
Test Yourself is coming soon for this subtopic
Practice questions and markschemes for this page are still being written. Check back once they have been added.
What makes a conservation organization effective?
Success in conserving or restoring biodiversity through international, governmental, and non-governmental organizations depends on their use of media, the speed of their response, the diplomatic constraints they operate under, the financial resources available to them, and their political influence. Two cases already met on this site, one succeeding and one struggling, show how directly those factors decide the outcome.
WWF and the giant panda
- Media: WWF adopted the panda as its logo when it was founded in 1961, inspired by Chi-Chi, a giant panda at London Zoo. An instantly recognizable, universally appealing symbol gave the organization a media advantage from day one.
- Speed and political influence: WWF built a long-running partnership directly with the Chinese government, which had both the authority and the motivation to enact a nationwide logging ban and expand protected reserves.
- Financial resources: A globally recognizable flagship species made panda conservation an unusually easy cause to fundraise for.
- Diplomatic constraints: Low. Conservation aligned with the interests of a single, powerful national government rather than requiring coordination across competing states.
CITES and the vaquita
- Media: The vaquita is rarely seen and poorly known to the public, a far weaker media asset than the panda.
- Speed: CITES sanctions against Mexico for failing to control illegal totoaba fishing were not imposed until 2023, years after the vaquita population had already collapsed toward single digits.
- Diplomatic constraints: High. Enforcement requires coordinated action across Mexico, the United States, and China, where illegal demand for totoaba swim bladders originates, and confronts organized transnational criminal networks.
- Financial resources and political influence: Limited relative to the scale of the smuggling networks involved, and enforcement competes with other domestic priorities in Mexico.
Both cases involve committed conservation organizations and formal international agreements. The difference in outcome traces almost entirely to the five factors listed above, not to how much anyone involved cared about the species.
The same five factors apply to any conservation program's effectiveness, not just these two. Consider the California condor, brought to the brink of extinction in the 1980s: all 27 remaining wild birds were captured into a US captive-breeding program in 1987, and by 2025 the total population, wild and captive, had grown to more than 600.
Practice: classify each fact about the condor recovery program by which of the five factors it illustrates.
By 1987, the last 27 California condors left on Earth were all captured into captivity at once, a "down to the last birds" story that drew national media attention.
The US Fish and Wildlife Service authorized the entire program under the Endangered Species Act, without needing agreement from any other national government.
San Diego Zoo and Los Angeles Zoo committed dedicated breeding facilities and staff to the program for decades, later joined by the Peregrine Fund and Oregon Zoo.
Because the whole wild population was brought into captivity in a single decision, breeding could begin immediately instead of waiting years for further study.
Positive feedback loops in rewilding
A positive feedback loop is a change that amplifies itself further, rather than being corrected back toward its starting point. In a rewilding project, enhanced growth, reproduction, and survival at one point in the food web can trigger a self-reinforcing chain of further ecosystem recovery. A positive feedback loop strong enough can push a community toward an alternative stable state, a distinct, self-sustaining configuration the ecosystem settles into rather than reverting to its original one.
Practice: click the steps below in the order that lets a positive feedback loop build on itself.
Rewilding has both benefits and limitations: Knepp Estate
Knepp Estate in West Sussex, England, converted 3,500 acres of struggling intensive farmland into England's first major lowland rewilding project in the early 2000s, introducing free-roaming grazing animals (longhorn cattle, Exmoor ponies, Tamworth pigs, and red and fallow deer) as proxies for extinct native megafauna and then stepping back from active management.
- Turtle dove territories on Knepp's Transect B rose from 2 in 2008 to a peak of 23 in 2020, with 22 recorded in 2024, a species in steep national decline elsewhere in Britain.
- Purple emperor butterflies, once considered a rare woodland specialist, now number among the largest populations in the United Kingdom; 283 individuals were counted in a single day in 2025.
- Knepp recorded England's first wild-hatched white stork chicks in roughly 600 years, and Sussex's first wild-living beavers in around 400 years.
- Butterfly species richness in monitored areas of the estate has risen by 107% since 2005.
Sources: Knepp Estate, "Two decades of rewilding: a review" (January 2026), knepp.co.uk; Rewilding Britain.
These are measurable gains, but rewilding at this scale is not a cost-free choice. Knepp's 3,500 acres were previously farmed for food; taking productive land out of agricultural production at a time of ongoing debate over national food security is a trade-off, not a side issue. Rewilding income at Knepp now depends heavily on wild-meat sales, glamping, and safari-style tourism, a funding model that is harder to replicate on land without Knepp's location and visitor appeal. There is also a live debate over how "wild" a rewilded landscape managed with introduced livestock breeds really is, since none of Knepp's grazing animals are the actual extinct megafauna, aurochs and wild boar, that once shaped this landscape.
Quick check. What is the main land-use argument raised against large-scale lowland rewilding projects like Knepp?
Quick check. Knepp's income now depends heavily on wild-meat sales, glamping, and safari-style tourism. What limitation does this funding model create for applying Knepp's approach elsewhere?
Assessing whether a restoration project actually succeeded
Claiming a conservation project "succeeded" is not a single yes-or-no judgement. It can be reviewed at three separate levels: did the measures succeed as planned; was the project well received by the communities affected by it; and was this actually the best way to conserve nature, compared to the alternatives. A project can pass one test and fail another.
- Launched in 2001 on 2,000 hectares of grassland left barren by mining and repeated fires, land many considered ecologically unrecoverable.
- Around 100 local workers began the restoration in partnership with roughly 600 Dayak families, planting over 1,000 native tree species using mycorrhizal fungi to accelerate soil recovery.
- The site now supports over 1,200 tree species, 137 bird species, and 9 primate species, and functions as forest habitat and a release site connected to orangutan rehabilitation.
- Restored forest cover has improved local protection from fire and increased the supply of clean drinking water to more than 30,000 people in surrounding towns.
Sources: Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation; Scientific American, "Regrowing Borneo's Rainforest, Tree by Tree."
Applying the three-level framework: the measures largely succeeded as planned, barren land became functioning forest supporting measurable biodiversity. The project appears well received by local communities, built through direct partnership with 600 Dayak families rather than imposed on them, and it delivered a tangible community benefit, clean water, alongside its ecological goal. Whether it was the single best way to conserve Borneo's rainforest is a harder claim to settle: it restored land already stripped of forest rather than preventing the ongoing clearance covered in 3.2's palm oil case, so it addresses the consequences of deforestation more than its cause.
Practice: classify each claim about Samboja Lestari by which level of the three-part test it addresses.
Barren grassland now supports over 1,200 tree species, 137 bird species, and 9 primate species.
The restoration was carried out in direct partnership with roughly 600 local Dayak families, rather than imposed on them from outside.
The project restores land that has already been cleared, rather than preventing the ongoing palm oil clearance still happening elsewhere in Borneo.
3.2 Human Impact on Biodiversity covers the palm oil expansion driving Bornean deforestation and orangutan decline in full. Restoration projects like Samboja Lestari and the drivers of ongoing forest loss are two sides of the same island's story.
Ecotourism as a conservation strategy: Costa Rica
Ecotourism can increase local communities' economic stake in biodiversity, generating income and funding protection, but it can also create negative societal and ecological impacts of its own. Costa Rica is the most commonly cited national-scale example of ecotourism used deliberately as a conservation strategy.
- Forest cover fell from roughly 75% of the country in 1940 to as low as 21% by the mid-1980s under heavy agricultural clearance.
- Forestry Law 7575 (1996) restricted deforestation, and Costa Rica's Payment for Environmental Services (PES) program, introduced in 1997, began paying landowners directly to maintain and regenerate forest instead of clearing it, funded in part by a national fuel tax.
- Forest cover recovered to roughly 54-57% by 2021, even as the population grew from 2.7 million to over 5 million and GDP per capita more than tripled.
- Tourism, overwhelmingly nature-based, now generates around $4 billion a year, more than 8% of GDP, and employs roughly 200,000 people, making it the country's largest source of foreign exchange.
Sources: World Bank, "Costa Rica's Forest Conservation Pays Off"; Earth.org, "How Costa Rica Reversed Deforestation."
Rising land values around popular parks and beaches, driven partly by tourism and foreign-owned ecolodge and resort development, have pushed many Costa Rican farming families out of areas they once owned, and popular parks such as Manuel Antonio face chronic overcrowding that strains the very ecosystems tourists come to see.
Quick check. How did Costa Rica's Payment for Environmental Services program directly change the economic incentive to deforest?
Quick check. Rising land values around popular parks like Manuel Antonio have pushed many farming families out of areas they once owned. What kind of impact is this?
HL practice
Running total: 0 / 10
Explain, with reference to named organizations, why conservation efforts for the giant panda succeeded faster than efforts to save the vaquita.
Self-marked score: 0 / 4
Evaluate the claim that rewilding is a more effective conservation strategy than actively managed habitat conservation.
Check your answer against this markscheme. Each side is capped at 3 marks.
Case that rewilding is more effective
Case that actively managed conservation is more effective
Score: 0 / 6
There is no single correct side. A strong answer recognizes that the better strategy depends on the specific habitat and conservation goal in question before reaching a stated judgement.
- WWF panda logo history: WWF; Logo Design Love.
- CITES and vaquita enforcement: CITES Secretariat; Center for Biological Diversity.
- California condor recovery: US Fish and Wildlife Service, "2025 California Condor Population Status Report"; Los Angeles Zoo.
- Knepp Estate: Knepp Estate, "Two decades of rewilding: a review" (January 2026), knepp.co.uk; Rewilding Britain.
- Samboja Lestari: Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation; Scientific American.
- Costa Rica: World Bank; Earth.org.
- IB Environmental Systems and Societies Guide, first assessment 2026, Topic 3, Subtopic 3.3, statements 3.3.10-3.3.14.