Did you know: Values, not Science alone, will decide the fate of South Africa’s species of special concern

The World is racing against time. Our biodiversity, our ecological inheritance, has been and remains in rapid decline. We know the science. For a species to persist, for biodiversity to thrive, we need more births and less deaths of a large diversity of indigenous species, especially our endemic species, those that only occur in South Africa. We understand the trends. And yet, the gap between what species need to survive and what our human systems negatively impact continues to widen.

This is not a knowledge gap. It is a value gap.

It sits between conservation strategy and everyday needs of South Africans. Between what we say we protect and how we live, work, trade, and govern our future and our landscapes these species depend on. Science can tell us what is happening. But it cannot, on its own, determine what society chooses to care about.

For Species of Special Concern (SoSC), like the Rhino’s, African penguin, Wattled Crane, Western Leopard Toad, Cape Parrot, Geometric tortoise, Fynbos, or Grasslands, that choice is decisive.

 

Why Humans Only Value What Is Almost Gone

A deeply human pattern underpins many of today’s environmental crises. We mobilise to recognise value only at the point of loss or we are negatively impacted. Till then, it is taken for granted, hidden. Languages are mourned when the last speakers remain. Cultural practices are rediscovered once they have eroded. Species suddenly become priceless when only a handful survive or when their absence has a knock-on effect that compromises humanity’s prosperity. 

Conservation follows the same tragic arc. Action accelerates not when decline begins, but when extinction feels imminent. Unfortunately, this apathetic response seems to be pathological in the human experience. Furthermore, “conservation” is this noble cause that “others” do, and not what we all do. For there to be a change in values, this needs to change. 

 

The Dynamics Behind Delayed Care

Several forces reinforce this pattern.

First is perceived abundance bias. As long as species decline quietly, out of sight and beyond daily experience, they are assumed to be secure. Ecological erosion happens slowly, invisibly, until collapse becomes dramatic and undeniable. Our scientists reveal the trend, so we can act sooner rather than later. Solutions take time. Therefore the earlier the detection, the sooner we can act to mitigate the risk or develop resilience to survive the inevitable. 

Second is temporal discounting. Conservation costs are immediate and tangible. Benefits are long-term and uncertain. Protecting wetlands today competes with social demands, political cycles, and economic development pressure. Crisis tomorrow, paradoxically, feels easier to justify than prevention today.

Third, conservation value is often selective and anthropocentric. Charismatic, symbolic, or economically visible species attract attention, while ecologically critical but less visible species, or systems, are aesthetically valued, but tangibly ignored until recovery becomes nearly impossible.

The result is a global pattern of reactive conservation where emergency rescue is the norm instead of sustained prevention stewardship. We mobilise to save what we are about to lose but do not mobilise to preserve what is valuable for future generations. By the time species reach critically low numbers, genetic diversity is lost, ecosystems unravel, and recovery becomes exponentially harder and more expensive.

This is a failure of how value is recognised.

 

A Global Shift: From Rescue and Prevention to Values Evolution

In response, conservation thinking is slowly shifting, from heroic last-minute saves to early, deliberate attempts to reshape values.

Early-intervention frameworks such as Sustainable Development Plans, Green Transitions Plans, Biodiversity Action Plans, and species recovery strategies seek to enable early detection of decline, define thresholds, and trigger sustained response action for collapse prevention. The goal is no longer emergency response, but sustained care. Furthermore, the idea that conservation happens instead of development is problematic. It removes the possibility for harmonious ecosystems-resilience economies coexistence design, which the predominant economic value system logics do not seem to be able to uphold. 

Place-based approaches reinforce this shift. Initiatives like Key Biodiversity Areas and Other Effective Area based Conservation Measures prioritise securing ecosystems in economically productive landscapes through improved stewardship while populations are still viable, recognising that harmonising economic activities and critical habitats early is far more effective than reconstructing them later.

Ex-situ conservation has also been reframed. Seed banks, gene banks, and captive breeding programmes are increasingly used as insurance mechanisms, not desperate last resorts. This reflects a move from reaction to precaution, so that while coexistence is being figured out, species have not been lost and the diversity of life, the beauty of life, persists. 

At the same time, conservation planning is becoming more adaptive and locally grounded. Species decline for specific reasons, overexploitation, pollution, habitat fragmentation, climate stress, and solutions must be equally targeted, with solutions co-designed with the communities most affected and who affect the species most.

Crucially, conservation is now being woven into economic and policy systems. Conservation finance, market incentives, protected area expansion, and governance reform all aim to make early action rational, not exceptional.

However, despite these gains, achieving real harmony will need more. This is just the start. We know the problem and have options to solve it. Now to see which solutions work. 

Towards Species Recovery: South Africa Case Studies

There is a need to shift attention toward changes in behaviour, relationships, and social norms through community stewardship. Our nature is our ward, and every citizen enjoying the beauty of our country is a warden. Conservation of species needs every South African to play their part. The first step is to become interested in moving beyond being aware to help someone else solve the problem. How can you help solve the problem?

 

Case 1: WWF’s Five-Point Rhino Strategy

WWF employed a rhino strategy combining science, enforcement, diplomacy, and community partnership. But its real power was in shifting norms:

• Law enforcement systemically affects poaching value systems
  
• Habitat range expansion reframes land as shared custodianship to promote net population growth
  
• Demand reduction exploration reveals and challenges consumption norms globally
  
• Policy coordination aligns institutions
  
• Community benefits transform wildlife from criminalised survival opportunity to sustainable development asset
  

This is not just species management, it is social, economic and institutional systemic societal and governance change. Each leverage point must work in support of the other. As a collective, a net is idealised. So there are ideas for solutions. It is the implementation of the whole where it needs work. 

 

Case 2: West Coast Rock Lobster

Here, ecological collapse intersects with high international demand, poor local regional economic development, poverty, organised crime, and climate stress. Technical tools, shortened seasons, Total Allowable Catch setting and policies, and enforcement, struggle because underlying incentives remain misaligned.

Without predominant-economic-value-system enabled, poverty reducing, livelihoods conservation rules compete with survival imperatives. 

 

Case 3: The Abalone Crisis

Abalone represents a perfect storm of crime, market demand, governance gaps, and ecological fragility. Recovery efforts now include:

• International trade controls
  
• Deep quota cuts
  
• Specialist enforcement
  
• Market support for legal harvesters
  
• Multi-stakeholder coordination
  

Yet success ultimately depends on shifting norms around illegality, consumption, and stewardship, locally and internationally. No enforcement regime can compensate for large scale, international, values that normalise long term extinction for the sake of short term consumption. 

 

Why This Matters

Species of Special Concern are more than conservation priorities. They are tests of who we are becoming as a society.

Their survival tells us whether, as a society concerned about our collective future:

• Can we listen to each other to find harmony, so that those, or that, dependent on that harmony, flourish too
• Can we protect our National Pride for us and future generations
• environmental and social science is to be trusted
  
• behaviour can shift
  
• institutions can cooperate
  
• communities have real alternatives, but must be pragmatic, and equitable
  
• collective good happens
  

The true success is not in a few passionate leaders protecting our natural heritage. It is reframing species recovery as a shared national responsibility, rooted in ubuntu values and pride.

Disclaimer: This blog is a strategic reflection on the work done by remarkable leaders in South Africa navigating wicked problem contexts. It is not the work of Telos Terra. It is a recognition of what normative change solutions look like. The intention of this opinion piece is to support think tanks to question, explore, develop, and rehearse alternative ways to solve stuck, persistent, problems on the journey to achieving normative goal change.