Broadscale conservation is the process of taking conservation principles beyond the borders of protected areas and into the wider landscape or seascape, and thus integrating them into mainstream society. While protected areas (national parks, nature reserves etc) remain essential tools for conservation, they are generally too small, isolated and fragile to protect biodiversity on their own.

Mainstreaming conservation often starts with attempts to strengthen protected area networks through the use of conservation corridors and buffer zones but inevitably it also has to grapple with the role of managed landscapes in biodiversity conservation.

It also requires working out how a mosaic of different management interventions – from strict protection to intensive use – can together provide a range of necessary outputs including biodiversity conservation and sustainable development.

Conscious scaling up of conservation efforts has already resulted in increasing expertise in planning ideal landscapes for biodiversity. But there is still much to learn about how to implement such ideas in practice, including particularly how to manage the negotiation and trade-offs that are inevitable when biodiversity concerns have to be catered for alongside other legitimate and sometimes conflicting interests.

Conservation institutions are learning to work with new partners, ranging from local communities to transnational companies.

Key priorities at present are: learning the policy and technical skills to work at larger scales; findings ways to measure whether or not a collection of different management and policy interventions across a landscape is being successful in conserving biodiversity; understanding different aspects of environmental and social quality; and developing and assembling tools and methodologies that can help to achieve these ambitious aims. Efforts are made more important and more difficult by the rapid environmental change being caused by global warming.

In this rapidly developing field, radical thinking and a willingness to take risks are both necessary precursors to success.