Conservation in Africa: exploring the impact of social, economic and political drivers on conservation outcomes

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) houses some of the globe's most valuable biodiversity-including charismatic megafauna, a great diversity of birds, endemic plants and ecological processes. But it also remains one of the most economically impoverished regions of the planet, introducing significant social, political, and economic challenges to conserving biodiversity while enhancing human well being. Much of the conservation effort in Africa has focused on biological diversity through the establishment of parks and protected areas to house endangered or valuable species. More recently, the efforts in SSA have begun to focus on ecosystem services-the goods and services (such as, e.g., clean water, disease regulation, sacred places) ecosystems and their resident species can deliver to humans. Many of the most significant impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem services, however, or from domains and influences not traditionally explored or addressed by the conservation community. This special issue of Environmental Research Letters focuses on the social, economic, and political drivers of conservation outcomes in Africa, with a particular focus on sub-Saharan Africa. It explores the status of conservation in Africa, and examines how long-term environment and human-environment interactions can shape biodiversity distributions and conservation outcomes with emphasis on how institutions (governance); private investment (e.g., mineral exploitation, trade in ivory); foreign investment (aid, poverty alleviation); the status of women; wealth and wealth inequality; urbanization; civil conflict; and climate change can affect conservation-outcomes in Africa.