Abstract
Unmanned aerial vehicles, or ‘drones’, appear to offer a flexible, accurate and affordable solution to some of the technical challenges of nature conservation monitoring and law enforcement. However, little attention has been given to their possible social impacts. In this paper, I review the possible social impacts of using drones for conservation, including on safety, privacy, psychological wellbeing, data security and the wider understanding of conservation problems. I argue that negative social impacts are probable under some circumstances and should be of concern for conservation for two reasons: (1) because conservation should follow good ethical practice; and (2) because negative social impacts could undermine conservation effectiveness in the long term. The paper concludes with a call for empirical research to establish whether the identified social risks of drones occur in reality and how they could be mitigated, and for self-regulation of drone use by the conservation sector to ensure good ethical practice and minimise the risk of unintended consequences.
Highlights
Unmanned aerial vehicles, or ‘drones’, are rapidly gaining in popularity as nature conservation tools
The material reviewed in this paper demonstrates that the use of drones for conservation comes with the risk of negative social impacts
Drones have the potential to generate a range of negative social impacts
Summary
‘drones’, are rapidly gaining in popularity as nature conservation tools. Drones used for conservation are very likely to collect information about people that could be used to identify them and what they are doing— in the case of law enforcement applications, this is the deliberate intention.
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