When I first worked in Madagascar in 2005, I was carrying out biodiversity surveys in little known forests, but by the time I left a decade later I was spending much more time working with rural farming and fisher communities that I was with the birds and the beasts. As much as I’d rather just count reptiles, I’d realised that no amount of ecological understanding or data would help conserve wildlife in the face of rapid deforestation, overfishing and other threats. To do that we first had to understand those threats, and that meant understanding the needs and livelihoods of local resource users. It meant entering the world of the social sciences.

My evolution from ecologist to interdisciplinary conservation scientist traces the path that conservation science itself has trodden over the last four decades. Since its origins in the early 1980s as the biocentric discipline of conservation biology, the field has incorporated methods and theory from economics, anthropology, psychology, political ecology and other social sciences, and flowered into the interdisciplinary disciple of conservation science. But while this blossoming of the conservation research has been well documented, we know little about the interdisciplinarity of the training we’re providing to the next generation of conservation scientists.

Suspecting that teaching may be lagging behind, I decided to quantify the extent to which undergraduate conservation degrees at UK universities were offering training beyond the hard sciences. I carried out a systematic web search to identify all degree programmes, and then carried out a simple text analysis of the online module descriptions, where available, to ascertain the extent to which they incorporated the social sciences.

The results came as something of a surprise, for both good and bad reasons. Initially, I was pleased to see the richness of undergraduate conservation degree programmes – I found 47 on offer at 39 higher education institutions, which is remarkable growth from the late 1990s when I myself was looking for a degree. In terms of the subjects these programmes covered, however, the results were a very mixed bag. The percentage of modules incorporating social science content ranged from 3.8% to 52.2% at different universities, but the mean across institutions was just 18.8% – less than one in five modules on offer contain any social science. Perhaps as worryingly, only 55% of programmes offered a module explicitly focusing on social or social science aspects of conservation, and only a single institution offered a module in social science research methods.

I was also surprised by the relatively low levels of explicitly conservation focused modules on offer across the programmes – this ranged from 4.7% to 44% of modules, with a mean of 22.5%. In fact, the bulk of modules on most courses comprised biology and ecology focused modules with no direct conservation component (mean of 46.2% of modules across programmes), suggesting that some conservation programmes may have sprouted from established biology or ecology programmes in response to student demand, but may differ little from them.

While it’s encouraging to see how widely available conservation degrees now are across UK higher education, it’s a worry that so many degrees lack much in the way of interdisciplinary content or training. Both conservation practice and conservation science have made enormous strides towards interdisciplinarity over the last few decades, but the training we are providing to students appears to be lagging behind. If conservation is to become truly interdisciplinary then we must ensure that interdisciplinarity is incorporated into conservation training from the earliest stages.  

The paper ‘Not teaching what we practice: undergraduate conservation training at UK universities lacks interdisciplinarity‘, is freely available as part of the Environmental Conservation Editors’ Choice collection.