The Center for Conservation Biology [CCB] was established by Paul Ehrlich in the Department of Biological Sciences at Stanford University in 1984. Its mission is to promote human well-being by developing a scientific basis for managing Earths life-support systems and helping arrest environmental deterioration. In so doing it fosters wide collaboration with other scientists, social scientists, journalists, and representatives of NGOs, Federal and State agencies, and the business community. The CCB disseminates its findings widely.
In pursuit of this mission, the CCB conducts scientific and policy research to build a sound basis for the conservation, management, and restoration of Earths biotic resources, to evaluate factors that are leading to the human predicament [declining environmental security, increasing inequity] and to find practical solutions to that predicament. Its research integrates biological with economic, anthropological, legal, and other social science perspectives.
The CCBs scientific research addresses both broad and highly specific problems, such as finding ways to enhance the capacity of human dominated landscapes to supply benefits to society, fostering understanding of species extinction susceptibility, or providing tools to predict human impacts on species assemblages.
The CCBs policy research focuses on big picture issues, including characterizing the impacts on the environment of human population growth and patterns of consumption, the role of equity in sustaining environmental quality, and the influence of human activities on the epidemiological environment.
A major portion of the CCBs effort is aimed at communicating the results of our research beyond the scientific community to conservation practitioners [e.g., reserve managers and land planners], to the private sector and government, and to the public at large.