Center for Conservation Biology

Description

The Center for Conservation Biology's Mission:
 
To conduct research and broad policy research and public outreach on the future of biodiversity and Earth’s life-support systems, and on harmonizing conservation and human well-being.
 

Our History and Activities

The Center for Conservation Biology (CCB) was established by Prof. Paul R. Ehrlich in the Department of Biology at Stanford University in 1984 and is directed by Prof. Gretchen C. Daily.  In pursuit of its mission, the CCB conducts interdisciplinary research to build a sound basis for the conservation, management, and restoration of biodiversity and ecosystem services, to evaluate factors that are leading to declining environmental security and increasing inequity, and to find practical solutions to that predicament.  Our research integrates biological and natural sciences with economic, anthropological, institutional, and other social science perspectives.

• The CCB’s scientific research addresses both broad and highly specific problems, such as finding ways to enhance the capacity of human dominated landscapes to supply benefits to society, fostering understanding of species’ extinction susceptibility, providing tools to predict human impacts on ecosystem services, and developing an integrated theory of cultural evolution.
• The CCB’s policy research focuses on “big picture” issues, including characterizing the impacts on the environment of human population growth and patterns of consumption, the role of equity in sustaining environmental quality, the influence of human activities on the epidemiological environment, and how cultural evolution works and can be redirected toward preserving biodiversity and providing a sustainable society.
• A major portion of the CCB’s effort is aimed at communicating the results of our research beyond the scientific community to conservation practitioners (e.g., reserve managers and land planners), to the private sector and government, and to the public at large.