Peer-reviewed Journal Articles

The Moore Center for Science at Conservation International is one of the world’s premier conservation research institutes, producing and applying groundbreaking and policy-relevant research to help decision-makers protect nature. To date, Conservation International has published more than 1,100 peer-reviewed articles, many in leading journals including Science, Nature and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

On average, each of our scientific papers is cited more than 45 times by other scholars — a rate exceeding that of any other U.S. conservation organization as well as leading universities.

Here is an archive of our most recent research.

Water Indeed Has Many Values, but Context and Scale Are Key

Derek Vollmer

BioScience

January 19, 2022

In their recent Overview article, Jenkins and colleagues (2021) highlighted several important issues in the debate around water security—namely, that integrative approaches are needed to reflect the multiple values that communities place on water resources (Zeitoun et al. 2016). These include diverse cultural beliefs, human rights, environmental water needs and even the rights of rivers themselves (O'Donnell and Talbot-Jones 2018, Sadoff et al. 2020). Jenkins and colleagues proceed to illustrate their points by offering a global framework using a so-called planetary boundary for water (Gleeson et al. 2020) with various ceilings based on scenarios of environmental flows—the minimum amount of water left in rivers to maintain ecological functions—and floors based on human water needs, including for agriculture. However, it is hard not to see the authors being guilty of the very oversimplifications they were critical of earlier. First, the planetary boundary for water, although...