Conservation’s Hot Topics of 2026: From Artificial Intelligence to Mirror Molecules
Forests, soil, plastic waste, war debris, and a darker ocean also appear on the annual ‘horizon scan’ addressing conservation priorities for the years ahead.
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The proliferation of artificial intelligence technologies, molecular manipulation, and literal sea changes are among the top issues a team of conservation experts anticipate will affect biodiversity in the year ahead and beyond, according to a study published this month in the scientific journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution.
The study, the latest in a series of “horizon scan” papers written annually since 2009, brings together insights from more than two dozen experts from around the world. Led by Cambridge University ecologist William Sutherland, the team identified 15 technological advances and societal trends that conservation scientists, policymakers, and practitioners would do well to keep an eye on as they work to protect biodiversity in the months and years ahead.
Tropical Forests Forever
Incredibly rich biodiversity hot spots and unparalleled contributors to climate stability, intact tropical forests are top priorities in global conservation efforts. Protecting them, however, is a challenge, as economic pressures push for destruction. A new plan called out in the horizon scan aims to succeed where others have not. International partners led by Brazil are establishing a $125 billion Tropical Forests Forever Facility investment fund, whose income will be used to reward countries in the tropics that protect forests. Benefits over current strategies include providing more self-determination to affected nations, supporting protection efforts by local residents, and improving transparency and alignment with goals. Whether the fund will be effective, however, will depend on how the rules are set and enforced and who bears the risks and costs.
Weight Loss = Biodiversity Win?
Increased use of drugs that mimic a hormone known as GLP-1 helps people to suppress their appetites and reduce consumption of food, especially beef and highly processed items. This in turn stands to reduce demand for cropland and pastures — and with it, pressure to clear biodiversity-supporting habitat, use water for irrigation, and deploy biodiversity-harming agricultural chemicals. Though the impact is not yet measurable on a global scale, continued growth in adoption of these medications could carry positive implications for protecting intact ecosystems and even rewilding current crop and pasture lands.
Slowing the Bloom
The timing of flowering in plants is important for synchronizing pollen and egg production with the seasonal presence of pollinating insects. It also helps protect plant reproduction from adverse weather and align crop production with seasonal human needs. As climate changes, weather aberrations are disrupting the environmental signals and circumstances plants use to determine when to flower and potentially the ability to produce an abundance of seeds. Screening some 16,000 chemical compounds, scientists have discovered a few that slow the process of flowering in plants. If applied judiciously, the authors of the horizon scan write, these could help threatened species reproduce, maintain crop productivity in the face of climate disruption, and reduce weed competition with desired crops — all with potential benefits to biodiversity.
Mining Meets Marine Microbes
What will happen to ocean ecosystems if and when deep-sea mining becomes big business? No one knows for sure — but with contracts in place for exploratory work at more than 30 sites around the world, we may soon find out. Some 560 square miles, or 1.5 million square kilometers, of deep seafloor and ocean ridges have been targeted for possible extraction of minerals, posing threats to the microbes that thrive in these deep-sea ecosystems and potential trickle-up risks to other life forms above them. Scientists are recognizing the urgency of better understanding the poorly studied communities at the bottom of the sea and developing strategies to maintain their function as mining plans proceed.
Micro AI
Advances in hardware and software are making it possible to create miniature devices that can tap into artificial intelligence independent of the internet and electrical grids. These “tiny machine learning” (TinyML) technologies could benefit biodiversity by helping people monitor wildlife in remote places, assess soils, detect disease-transmitting organisms, scout for poachers, and more. On the downside, such technologies would likely be more restricted than networked systems in their ability to store data, limiting the ability to preserve information and use it for comparative purposes.
Light-Powered Chips
A much-publicized downside to artificial intelligence is the amount of energy, water, and materials it demands. New optical chip technologies, which use characteristics of light rather than electricity to transfer information, stand to enhance energy efficiency and processing speed, and optical neural network technologies can accelerate processing even more. Application of the technologies not only holds potential to reduce AI’s demand for energy and other resources, it also could facilitate conservation monitoring in remote locations. That said, the horizon scan authors caution that it’s not clear whether even substantial efficiency gains will outpace or even keep pace with increased use of AI sufficiently to mitigate its adverse environmental impacts.
Digital Twins: Friend or Foe?
Increasingly sophisticated information systems are making it possible to run highly detailed models of current and future conditions that incorporate predictions about human behavior as well as physical settings. This could bring conservation benefits by providing realistic scenarios of possible outcomes of different actions that can then be used to guide decisions. On the flip side, the computational capacity required to produce them could bring adverse environmental impacts associated with increased use of energy and land. Such realistic prognostication could also adversely alter the behavior of financial markets and other real-life systems in unpredictable ways.
Fiber Optic Drone Debris
Thousands of miles of fiber optic cables litter the ground in the Russia-Ukraine conflict zone. Deposited when jettisoned from drones or by drones that crash, the cables — which aid in communication between controllers and devices — pose threats to wildlife through entanglement and chemical and microplastic contamination. And it’s not just Ukraine: As drones become more widely deployed for both war and peaceful pursuits, the prospect for harm spreads to new venues and new biodiversity hot spots. Efforts to produce biodegradable alternatives and/or clean up cables before they accumulate could help reduce the adverse effects on birds, mammals, and other life forms.
Dry Land – Getting Drier
Recent studies cited by the horizon scan revealed that the amount of moisture in the world’s soils — particularly in southern South America and central North America, Africa, and Asia — has been declining, likely due to climate change. Because organisms who live in or grow from soil depend on moisture for life, the change stands to destabilize ecosystems. The problem could interact with land use trends in complex ways — potentially worsening as climate mitigation efforts increase vegetation and/or encouraging additional land conversion to agriculture as reduced water availability worsens conditions for crops. To date this water loss is estimated to have caused the world’s oceans to rise more than a centimeter; it’s likely to only become more severe if today’s climate change trajectory continues.
Messing With Soil Microbes
A growing trend around the world involves injecting fungi that associate with plant roots into agricultural soils to boost crop health and productivity while minimizing use of harmful pesticides and fertilizers. However, the efficacy of this approach as currently practiced is suspect, and unintended consequences are unknown. Even as the practice grows, the jury is still out regarding implications for sustainable agriculture, soils, and ecosystem health.
From Plastic Waste to Good Taste?
The ubiquitous use of plastic has produced literal mountains and oceans of plastic waste — and there’s no end in sight as the durable material builds up faster than recycling opportunities arise. But a new opportunity to use it to help mitigate another environmental challenge could hold promise for reducing the threat of plastic to wildlife and their habitats. Researchers have discovered a way to feed one type of plastic, polyethylene terephthalate, to bacteria that in turn can be processed into a nutritious food for people or livestock. Bringing this innovation to scale and expanding it to encompass other plastics could reduce both plastic waste and pressure to clear biodiversity-rich lands for food production.
Now You Seaweed, Now You Don’t
Diverse species of macroalgae, aka seaweed, are linchpin elements of marine ecosystems around the world. They also face multiple threats, including climate change, overgrazing, commercial farming, and a lack of sustainable management. As a result, their overall extent, currently covering more area than coral reefs and coastal wetlands together, is expected to decline even as their range expands poleward. Insufficient attention to understanding and managing marine macroalgae, the horizon scan warns, bodes poorly for the future of these ecosystem superstars and the biodiversity they support.
Darkness in the Depths
Earth’s oceans are getting darker, and that could spell trouble for the creatures who call them home. Satellite data recently revealed that in 2003, light penetrated 21% farther beneath the surface of the water than it did in 2022. Possible causes for the decline include increased nutrient and particulate inputs and changes in water circulation, surface temperature, and sea ice. Although the implications for ocean ecosystems are unknown, scientists are concerned that the loss of light could alter the ability of phytoplankton to capture sunlight and so to serve as the food base for zooplankton, fish, and other marine creatures.
All Eyes on the Southern Ocean
What’s up with the Southern Ocean? For decades, surface waters were becoming less saline. But about a decade ago, satellite imaging began to show an increase in salinity, and no one knows why. The surprising shift may exacerbate polar ice melting and is expected to alter circulation of water in the oceans and the trajectory of climate change in unknown ways. These changes, the horizon scan warns, are likely to affect species, ecosystems, and the ability of people — particularly those of island nations — to adapt to climate change.
Mirror Life
Some biological molecules, such as proteins and nucleic acids, have “handedness” – they can exist in forms that are mirror images of each other. Life systems that have evolved to build, work with, and demolish molecules of one handedness may be unable to deal with the other, even though they are composed of the same kinds of atoms arranged in the same order. The ability to synthesize molecules — and potentially entire cells — that mirror natural ones offers both opportunity and threat. Such innovations could be exceptionally durable and help prevent adverse immune reactions. However, they could also interact with and potentially confound evolved biological processes, to the detriment of humans and ecosystems alike.
Read about last year’s horizon scan, addressing threats such as PFAS chemicals, increased wood consumption, and water shortages — as well as several conservation opportunities.
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