DOC67.28
Resolution (RES 67.1)
IUCN Guidelines for Reintroductions and other Conservation Translocations Background Humans have moved organisms between sites for their own purposes for millennia. This has yielded benefits for humankind, but in some cases has led to disastrous impacts. IUCN stated its perspective on such moves with its 1987 Position Statement on the Translocation of Living Organisms. Subsequently, the Species Survival Commission’s Reintroduction Specialist Group developed policy guidelines that were approved by IUCN’s Council in 1995 and published in 1998 as the IUCN Guidelines for Reintroduction. The Guidelines were short and practical in focus and have been used by other SSC Specialist Groups to derive more detailed guidelines for their own taxa and purposes. In 2010 guidelines were deemed to need review and revision and the new guidelines were now adopted by IUCN/SSC Steering Committee on 5th September 2012 (annexed to this RES 67.1).
The 67th WAZA Annual Conference NOTES that guidelines of 1998 were based on a relatively small body of experience: the last 20 years have seen an explosion of reintroduction effort, experience and thinking and development of theory, UNDERSTANDS that reintroduction now has to be seen as merely one operation within a spectrum of ‘conservation translocations’; reintroduction is now seen less as the return of a single species but more as part of the restoration of habitats and ultimately restoration of ecosystem services, ACKNOWLEDGES that today far more is known about how animals perceive their world and respond to it: hence, there is greater emphasis in the new Guidelines on welfare and on the importance of social behaviour and relationships in reintroduction design and, indeed, their success rate. FURTHER ACKNOWLEDGES the increasing rate and complexity of global change, including habitat loss, species declines, biological invasions and climate change that suggest entry into an age of “ecological surprises” where management solutions based on historical precedent may not always be adequate for future biodiversity conservation needs APPLAUDES the IUCN/SSC to the effort of making the new guidelines “future-proof” by emphasizing the assessment of risk and our level of uncertainty in our ecological knowledge; the history of invasive species is directly relevant, encouraging extreme caution; hence, the tone of the Guidelines is precautionary, have a wider scope and encourage consideration of alternative solutions to a translocation. 1. WELCOMES the revision of the 1998 IUCN Guidelines for Reintroduction, now called “IUCN Guidelines for Reintroductions and other Conservation Translocations” 2. RECOMMENDS that WAZA members shall pay attention to the “IUCN Guidelines for Reintroductions and other Conservation Translocations” as part of their conservation activities