Professor Dame Georgina Mace CBE
Image by Seirian Summer
Professor Dame Georgina Mace, who has died at the age of 67, was one of the most influential conservation biologists of recent decades. She rose to international prominence in the late 1980s through her leadership of the process to reform the basis for categorising species on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Once in charge of the process, she proposed radical changes, the most fundamental being that species could only be listed in one of the threatened categories (Critically Endangered, Endangered, Vulnerable) if they satisfied certain quantitative criteria (related to parameters such as population size, trend, fragmentation, etc). Put another way, under the new system nobody would be allowed to lobby “their” species into the category they wanted; instead they had to provide quantitative evidence, which would be publicly available and could be contested by others. It seems strange, over 30 years later, that the “red listing” of a species would happen any other way from what she proposed, but at the time Georgina’s ideas were revolutionary. Not only was her proposal ground-breaking in terms of scientific rigour; it also threatened old (mostly male) power structures that took decisions on red listing behind closed doors. Initially Georgina worked with Russell Lande on the new system, and with him she authored the seminal 1991 paper in Conservation Biology [1]. This was one of the most impactful scientific papers on conservation ever published.
Georgina led a small team that built on her 1991 proposal to develop a full set on categories and criteria for the IUCN Red List which was then tested on over 2,000 species across the taxonomic spectrum, leading to revisions and re-testing until the new IUCN system was formally adopted in 1994. A further revision was approved in 2001, and this is the system still in use by IUCN today. The task of reforming the IUCN Red List system was extraordinarily difficult (both scientifically and politically), and it is remarkable that it ever succeeded. It could never have happened without Georgina. She was somehow the perfect person to carry out this almost impossible task. She had the initial idea to develop the quantitative criteria based on extinction risk theory and the intellectual rigour to develop a scientifically credible system. She had the personality that allowed her to defend the scientific integrity of the system against all attempts by vested interests (and there were many) to water it down or make shabby compromises. Nearly everyone who fought against her radical proposals to reform the IUCN Red List eventually became supporters. Her authority came from her intellect, personality and integrity – she was a natural, humble leader.
It is hard to overstate how much impact the IUCN Red List has had over the subsequent years. As of September 2020, a total of 120,271 species had been assessed for the IUCN Red List. Many more are in the pipeline. There are national red lists in over 100 countries. The Red List is used worldwide as an indicator of biodiversity trends so that governments can determine whether or not they are achieving the conservation targets (generally not). It is used by many donors to inform funding decisions (influencing hundreds of millions of US dollars annually). Conservation agencies use the Red List for planning. The corporate sector and financial institutions use the Red List to avoid carrying out or financing development or infrastructure projects that will harm threaten species. The Red List helps to shape policy development and legislation at local to global scales.
Georgina Mace was born in the London Borough of Lewisham in 1953. She graduated in zoology from the University of Liverpool in 1975, and obtained her doctorate on the evolutionary ecology of mammals at the University of Sussex in 1979. After several post-doctoral positions, she held senior jobs with the UK Zoo Federation and the Zoological Society of London (where she eventually led the Institute of Zoology), before taking professorships first at Imperial College London and lastly at University College London.
As time went by, her interests broadened. In additions to various positions she held in IUCN, she led the biodiversity input into the influential Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, completed in 2005. She played a critical role in promoting and guiding the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES – founded in 2012) – notably she co-chaired the working group on the IPBES conceptual framework, and served as overall editor of successive IPBES global assessments (2013-2018). She was prominent on the scientific committee of DIVERSITAS, and was its chair from 2012 to 2014. She was the first female President of the Society for Conservation Biology (2007-2009). Through these roles she had significant influence on the development of biodiversity-related policies, both nationally and internationally.
In the UK, she was one of the driving forces behind the Making Space for Nature report headed by Professor Sir John Lawton. The review was ostensibly set up to look at whether or not UK wildlife sites are capable of responding and adapting to the growing challenges of climate change and other demands on our land. However, under Georgina’s influence it ranged more widely, noting the insufficiency and haphazard characteristics of such sites and highlighting the need for future enhancements to convert these into a coherent network of nature habitats.
At the same time Georgina was playing a seminal role in the influential UK National Ecosystem Assessment (UK-NEA) which both highlighted the degradation of the UK’s natural capital resources to date and the potential for policy either to drive improvement or to permit further degradation in the future. Perhaps the most fundamental and long-lasting contribution of the NEA was her development of a ‘natural capital framework’ for bringing the environment into conventional economic decision-making, a project which Georgina refined over successive years [2]. This work resulted in a major and last-minute rewriting of the 2011 Environment White Paper with its key commitment that “The Government wants this to be the first generation to leave the natural environment of England in a better state than it inherited.” This undertaking, not just to halt decline but to reverse the trends of the past century has had a profound effect upon the direction of travel for environmental policy to date.
Georgina’s leadership of the NEA conceptual framework also resulted in an explicit acknowledgement by the Government that addressing the decline in natural capital was first and foremost an economic problem. This led to the creation of the Natural Capital Committee (NCC), of which Georgina was a founder member, reporting not to the environmental arm of Government but rather to HM Treasury; the first of its kind in the world. Georgina’s crystal-clear analysis of the intimate and inseparable relationship between the economy and environment led to a steady stream of policy innovations of which perhaps the most prominent came with the NCC’s recommendation to Government that it required a 25 Year Environment Plan (25YEP). Winning cross-party support, the principle of a 25YEP was accepted by the Government in 2017, which then asked the NCC to advise on the content of such a policy. Georgina’s influence here was again seminal resulting in the recommendation of 14 actions and targets, 11 of which were incorporated into the Government’s 25YEP published in 2018 with the remainder being currently implemented. Georgina’s legacy impact on UK policy is still playing out with those 25YEP principles underpinning the Agriculture and Environment Bills currently progressing through Parliament.
Despite all these successes and the very significant impact of her work, in her final years Georgina frequently expressed frustration that governmental commitments and policies were not stemming the tide of biodiversity loss at both national and global scales. She felt that the level of ambition of efforts to conserve and restore nature was grossly inadequate. So she threw her energy into becoming a driving force in the “bending the curve” initiative. She was first author of “Aiming higher to bend the curve of biodiversity loss” in Nature Sustainability in 2018 [3]; and in Nature, published just nine days before her death, was “Bending the curve of terrestrial biodiversity needs an integrated strategy” [4]. We can only hope that her push for greater ambition in global biodiversity targets will be seen in the outcomes of the 2021 negotiations under the Convention on Biological Diversity, and matched with the political commitment necessary to – in her own words – bend the curve.
Georgina had a lasting impact through her students, many of whom went on to hold critical positions in academia or conservation. The commentaries on social media tell a consistent picture – that Georgina never considered herself to be too busy or too important to spend time helping seemingly unimportant people. She was a very stable person and was always sure of the ground on which she stood. She was not plagued by self-doubt. If you thought that she was wrong on something, she might change her mind as a result of rigorous, intellectual debate. But she could never be intimidated – something certain (invariably older male) scientists discovered to their cost! She always spoke softly, in measured tones. She was always respectful of those who disagreed with her. She was kind and treated everyone well. And she had a wicked sense of humour. Georgina’s respectful and quietly funny approach won her countless supporters. She had a way of putting complex scientific principles into pithy statements that could resonate with the political process. And her transparent integrity made her a trusted advisor.
Georgina quite often spoke about her family (husband Rodrick, children Kate, Emma and Ben and granddaughter Harriet Georgina). After her passing it emerged that – in her humility – she never really let on to them that she was a giant in conservation and conservation science. Because she was comfortable with herself, she didn’t need to show off to others. In many ways, she was extraordinarily uncomplicated – but also brilliant, insightful, persistent, committed, strong, kind, funny and humble. We and many others miss her hugely
Ian Bateman and Simon Stuart
October 2020
References
- Mace, G.M. and Lande, R. (1991) Assessing Extinction Threats: Toward a Reevaluation of IUCN Threatened Species Categories. Cons. Biol. 5, 148-152
- Bateman, I.J. and Mace, G.M. (2020) The natural capital framework for sustainably efficient and equitable decision making, Nature Sustainability, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-020-0552-3 SharedIt link: https://rdcu.be/b5vJI
- Mace, G.M., Barrett, M., Burgess, N.D., Cornell, S.E., Freeman, R., Grooten, M. and Purvis, A. (2018) Aiming higher to bend the curve of biodiversity loss. Nature Sustainability 1: 448-451.
- Leclère, D., Obersteiner, M., Barrett, M., Butchart, S.H.M., Chaudhary, A., De Palma, A., DeClerck, F.A.J., Di Marco, M., Doelman. J.C., Dùˆrauer, M., Freeman, R., Harfoot, M., Hasegawa, T., Hellweg, S., Hilbers, J.P., Hill, S.L.L., Humpenöder, F., Jennings, N., Krisztin, T., Mace, G.M., Ohashi, H., Popp, A., Purvis, A., Schipper, A.M., Tabeau, A., Valin, H., van Meijl, H., van Zeist, W.-J., Visconti, P., Alkemade, P., Almond, R., Bunting, G., Burgess, N.D., Cornell, S.E., Di Fulvio, F., Ferrier, S., Fritz, S., Fujimori, S., Grooten, M., Harwood, T., Havlík, P., Herrero, M., Hoskins, A.J., Jung, M., Kram, T., Lotze-Campen, H., Matsui, T., Meyer, C., Nel, D., Newbold, T., Schmidt-Traub, G., Stehfest, E., Strassburg, B.B.N., van Vuuren, P., Ware, C., Watson, J.E.M., Wu, W. and Young, L. 2020 Bending the curve of terrestrial biodiversity needs an integrated strategy. Nature 585: 55