Where to next? The future of insect conservation

Abstract

It is a brave, but possibly foolish, person who thinks they can predict the future with any confidence. The American businessman and writer Peter F. Drucker once suggested that 'trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window'. Nevertheless, attempting to foresee problems in order to prepare for them and deal better with their consequences is good discipline for any applied science, but perhaps especially for nature conservation given that it is so dependent upon extraneous influences. This is borne out by the current emphasis on 'horizon scanning' for future environmental and conservation issues (Sutherland et al. 2009, 2010).