Interdisciplinarity, critical thinking, and leadership development needed in conservation education to tackle Asia’s biodiversity crises

Biodiversity conservation, while a complex global endeavour, often requires locally appropriate solutions to be effective. Education plays a key role in mainstreaming biodiversity in society by influencing knowledge, perceptions, and attitudes towards conservation, which in turn form the foundations for pro-environment behaviour change at both the individual and collective levels. Asia is a diverse continent that contains tremendous variation in natural and social characteristics; at the same time, Asia supports some of the most threatened ecosystems and species in the world and has experienced high levels of biodiversity loss. We argue that the current environmental and conservation training across diverse Asian contexts is inadequate to meet the complex, interdisciplinary and inter-sectoral challenges that conservation here faces. The education needed to nurture the next generation of conservationists and enable them to tackle environmental challenges unique to Asian countries are currently lacking in three critical aspects: interdisciplinarity, critical thinking, and leadership. We draw on our experiences as wildlife conservation researchers and practitioners who are from and work in Asia to explore opportunities for improving conservation education in higher education and advance degree courses in environmental and conservation sciences.