The Conguillío Statement on the values and responsibilities of ecologists: preprint

Amid global environmental crises threatening the survival of many species, including our own, a diverse group of scientists from 15 countries and members of 16 professional and academic societies, concerned, with the current global environmental crisis met in February 2024 to address the urgent need to reflect on, and identify, our core values and responsibilities as individual professionals and as academic societies. We invited fellow professionals to join this conversation and we share here the result of this discussion, which was informed by: i) our professional experiences; ii) a scoping review of the mission and vision statements of 73 professional ecological societies from across the globe, including codes of ethics and statements of values for researchers and professionals, and several statements that other professions use to guide their practice (Ortiz et al. 2024 and references therein); and iii) direct conversations with people facing environmental crises in the vicinity of Conguillío National Park, in Chile, where our meeting was held.

We, the authors, are mostly from Oceania, Europe, and North and South America, living and working in different social-environmental conditions. We have been trained in universities, and for most of us, English became, at some point, the language of instruction. Our areas of expertise include biology, ecology, forestry, conservation, and other natural sciences, as well as social sciences and humanities. In our disciplines, some of us are researchers, practitioners, educators, policy and decision-makers, communicators, advocates, and activists. And while we share a passion for a sustainable world, and envision a better one, our perspectives alone are not enough. We need and encourage other voices and perspectives in this pursuit.