Search

Biodiversity is vital in the functioning of ecosystems, but it’s permanently being threatened by anthropic impacts derived from productive activities. Thus, conservation has become a global challenge. In Chile, the dissociation between economic activities and conservation has triggered numerous socio-environmental conflicts in recent decades. This work explores how different projects that give rise to these conflicts can represent an underestimated threat to biodiversity. We identified socio-environmental conflicts in Chile and their associated projects by carrying out an online review of 1035 news articles published between 2004 and 2018 using the key words “environmental conflict”. We selected articles describing a socio-environmental conflict between parties caused by a project or productive sector. Conflict-generating projects were classified by productive sector and capital origin. In addition, their geographical distribution with respect to High Conservation Value Areas (HCVAs, protected areas and priority sites for conservation) was determined. A total of 283 projects were identified from 14 different productive sectors, most of them related to energy and mining, which threaten biodiversity and human well-being mainly due to pollution and habitat destruction. Chilean companies finance most of the projects, but international companies finance over half of the energy and mining projects. Moreover, 37 % of the projects were located within HCVAs either for the establishment of future protected areas or where protected areas are currently established. As countries make new efforts to maintain and recover biodiversity, it is contradictory not to consider the threats posed by conflict-generating projects to key areas for conservation, both in public policies and in spatial planning instruments.

During the last two decades, online media have played an increasing role in modeling modern societies. However, their role to shape public perception of biodiversity conservation and their alignment with conservation policies have received little attention so far. We conducted an extensive qualitative assessment of the interest in biodiversity in online media in the case-study of Chile in order to identify the main topics that are covered and how they vary across time and geographic scale. We also compared national trends of biodiversity interest in Chile and other countries as a first assessment of the international situation. Regarding Chilean digital media, our results highlight that there is a diversification of the biodiversity-related topics in news articles when reducing geographic scale. Overall, regardless of the considered scale, conservation policies, biodiversity loss, environmental education and citizen participation represented over 60% of the topics covered by digital news articles. Regarding the 8 selected countries, biodiversity interest in digital media followed two contrasting inter-annual trends equally: on the one side, a growing coverage of biodiversity topics (Brazil, Colombia, France and Spain), and on the other side, a constant or decreasing interest in the other countries (Australia, Chile, Costa Rica and South Africa). Our analysis also indicates that national media interest in biodiversity is multifactorial and may strongly depend on the link a country has between its economy and natural resources, its political influence on the media and the holding of major environmental summits coupled with concrete political actions. Apparent disconnection of media and public interest observed on a continuous scale may indicate that other factors are prone to shape the public interest in biodiversity. This first assessment calls for further research, especially about the underlying processes driving changes in biodiversity interest, in order to implement effective conservation actions. It also invites conservation managers to diversify their conservation targets, taking into consideration biodiversity interest transmitted by media to wide audiences.