A solution to biodiversity loss

Posted on 26 January, 2020 by alloporus

Robert Watson, former chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (UN-IPBES) wrote a piece incredulous as to why we are ignoring biodiversity loss when…

It is central to development, through food, water and energy security. It has significant economic value, which should be recognised in national accounting systems. It is a security issue in so far as loss of natural resources, especially in developing countries, can lead to conflict. It is an ethical issue because loss of biodiversity hurts the poorest people, further exacerbating an already inequitable world. And it is also a moral issue, because we should not destroy the living planet.
Robert Watson

In short, biodiversity has near uncountable economic, ethical, and moral value and its loss places everyone’s security at risk.

This is all true.

Only the following requirements described by the FAO, a sister agency to IPBES, are also true.

In order to maintain human food supply at or close to demand, global food production will have to increase by an average of 2% per annum across all commodities, but especially grains and meat, for the next 30 years.
Food & Agriculture Organisation

In short, a second agricultural revolution.

Whilst Robert Watson’s statement that biodiversity “is central to development, through food, water and energy security” the scale of that development — 2% per annum for 30 years — will inevitably put biodiversity at risk.

Alright. This is a difficult conundrum, a wicked problem even.

The resource with great value must be mobilised to keep everyone secure and in doing so that resource is depleted.

It is time to accept that this is wicked and try to find solutions.

Here is a simple one.

By 2025, increase soil carbon levels by 1% in all soils.

The only places where you shouldn’t try to do this is where the soil is inherently or no longer capable of retaining another 1% of carbon.

Everywhere else do what you can to raise the level of soil carbon. This means more ground cover, deeper-rooted perennials, restoration and rehabilitation of natural vegetation in and on the margins of the production systems, shifts to less intensive cropping systems, minimum or zero tillage wherever possible, capture and return of organic wastes and by-products,

What would happen?

Well, around 15.5 gigatons of C would be sequestered into soil organic matter. That is equivalent to 173% of annual greenhouse gas emissions of 33.1 billion tCO2e in 2018, not a panacea for climate change because it would be a one off, but very useful.

Source: Ontl, T. A. & Schulte, L. A. (2012) Soil carbon storage. Nature Education Knowledge 3(10):35

But that’s not the real benefit.

Runoff would decrease and water use efficiency of vegetation would improve due to better soil structure and water retention.

Nutrient use efficiency would increase because soil carbon, especially soil organic carbon, drives the soil biology that mediates most nutrient exchange between soil and plant roots.

So overall agricultural production would increase. Not by the 2% per annum for 30 years that we need to feed the world but part the way there, but close enough for the shortfall to be made covered by intensification and innovation.

Biodiversity would benefit too. Perhaps not enough to save the iconic species, that will need complementary conservation actions of the type proposed for nearly a century, but enough to maintain the core of biodiversity services that impact global security.

Why not people?

Please post answers to why not.

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When to change business-as-usual

Posted on 19 January, 2020 by alloporus

In the First World War, the first tanks appear on the battlefield. They were fearsome things in their day, able to repel machine guns and straddle trenches to fire down on the occupants. No matter they were slow and easily picked off by artillery.

Their biggest weakness was their means of communication: carrier pigeons. Business-as-usual was to write a short message and attach it to the leg of a bird that may or may not make its way back to base, a none too helpful one-way message.

In the Second World War, tanks had moved on. Radios replaced the pigeons but they had no off switch and so the entire brigade heard the screams of the crews consumed by fire when their coffin on tracks was hit. It must have been horrendous.

Modern tanks all have GPS, are tracked to the millimetre and second, carry multiple comms backups and yet are still vulnerable to anti-tank grenades delivered old-school.

Soon enough drone tanks will become business-as-usual. Unmanned killing machines without feelings or fear.

Everything evolves.

What worked yesterday may not today.

There are two reasons for this.

The first is that there is a good chance that something better, more fit for purpose, has appeared through the human addiction to innovation and being smart. A new way of doing whatever it is gets invented out of curiosity or profit that is way better than business-as-usual.

The second reason is that there is no such thing as usual. If you have been around long enough you know what I mean. Nature, people, commerce, tanks, whatever it is, today’s circumstances are not the same as yesterday’s and tomorrow is yesterday today.

When change is everywhere and inevitable, business-as-usual is the least effective idiom we have.

It should be business-as-change.

Instead, we latch onto BAU believing in it. It is the system that works right now so why change it. This is the common paradigm of ‘if it ain’t broke’ and is actually fine if it ain’t. The problem is that we don’t always know if the system is broken or not, especially when usual activities are slowly changing the conditions, as happens in agriculture.

In a few instances, business-as-usual may be the only option because it is not possible to change.

Those early tanks had pigeons because there was nothing else. In a famous example, the tanks won a battle and punched a hole in the enemy lines but the infantry commanders didn’t know and by the time they found out the enemy had regrouped. At the time there was no better way to communicate.

Modernity has a few of these scenarios still where we actually are stuck because there is, as yet, nothing better.

Alloporus contends that this is actually quite rare. More often business-as-usual is our mantra because it is the easiest path or the path that is familiar. And so we stick with it instead of asking for change towards something better.

Herein is the challenge.

A lot of what we do today under the guise of commerce for profit justified by its familiarity is actually killing the goose. We are mining our soils, clearing vegetation that provides services, changing the climate and simplifying nature every chance we get to the extent that business-as-usual in our agricultural systems will send us broke and starve half the world.

Fortunately, there are better ways already available. Most of the environmental challenges we face can either be fixed, mitigated or adapted to but not, repeat not, under BAU.

When to change business-as-usual is right now.

Post script

Since this post was first drafted more than 5 million hectares of forest in NSW have been burned in large and voracious bushfires.

The extent and severity of this disturbance to mostly wild forest systems is new, at least to the historical record. It might have happened in the distant past but nothing like it recently.

The fires will have knocked back animal pests and weeds to levels not imagined under business-as-usual control.

It is a challenge with many native animals lost but also a massive opportunity to create a better place for the survivors.

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Happy New Year

Posted on 10 January, 2020 by alloporus

What an end to 2019.

Where I live there is a drought that is deep and wide. It is the biggest drought on record in Australia, the place renown as a parched land.

In our neighbourhood, the rainfall for the past two calendar years was less than half the longterm average. This means the soil is bone dry, the trees are gasping for some moisture, and the leaves and twigs they have shed in profusion are like tinder.

No surprise then that we have been ringed by bushfire since the beginning of December. When we are not on alert for the flames we are trying not to breathe in the smoke.

At the time of writing some 5 million hectares of NSW has burned including a huge swath of forest, some 512,000 hectares, to our north and an active fire still heading our way from the south.

Across the country, the area burned in this one fire season is 10.7 million hectares, an area bigger than Portugal.

Alloporus has written about bushfire before — Bushfire in our backyard — after we experienced one in 2013.

This is something else altogether.

The fires this year have made headlines around the world, devasted local communities and changed forever the lives of the people in them. Over 20 people have died and some 1,823 homes have been destroyed and already some 8,985 insurance claims lodged.

And it is still going.

It could be the end of January or later before significant rain — the kind that puts fires out — is likely to fall across many parts of the country.

There is some good news. The community has rallied. People have helped each other and the, mostly volunteer, firefighters have gone above and beyond and beyond again to tirelessly protect lives and property.

These fine people are remarkable as are those who lead them. The fire chiefs and local coordinators have put the politicians to shame with their calm and steady leadership.

All of the emergency services personnel are legends.

Compared to these people the politicians, especially the prime minister, need to take a very hard look at themselves and then do the honourable thing and resign. But we’ll leave that conversation to twitter.

Here is a practical point.

There is an ecological reality from the extent of these fires.

A large proportion of many forested areas have burnt all at once. This is not what we understand happens. We think that forests burn in a mosaic leaving patches, even small ones, unburnt in most fires. These unburnt areas are refuges for animals and sources of seed and dispersal for plants. They also hold reservoirs of source populations for the other 99% of biodiversity that we don’t normally think about — microbes, fungi and invertebrates.

When the whole forest burns, all 500,000+ hectares of it near us, there are far fewer, if any, refugia. The source populations of many organisms are gone. The likelihood for local extinctions of many species is very high. Not the iconic koala of course, despite what you will read, but a host of far more useful organisms.

Then we see that these big forests are all burning at the same time. Here is the extent for southern NSW on the 7 January 2020, green areas are the larger patches of native vegetation and most of them are shaded as a fire scar.

The forest patches left unburnt are mostly small or isolated or intermingled with human habitation. The large, wild areas needed by many sensitive species burned, often intensively.

This is an ecological step change.

The pattern of disturbance (fire) is now more widespread, intense and all at the same time.

This will have any number of effects on the ecology of Australia’s southeastern forests. The regeneration will happen as it always does. But the plants were stressed by extended drought before the fires, the burns were mostly intense and so we cannot expect the vegetation to recover to its former state even though many of the trees and shrubs will miraculously resprout with epicormic growth and the seed bank will flourish in the ash beds, if and when it rains.

If the recovery effort for the ecology that will be tasked once the people are back on their feet must accept that what was before is no more. The future forests will be different. For a start, they will need to be resilient to this kind of disturbance on a much more regular basis.

Of course, this sort of fire season will have happened before. Not in the memory of the western settlers perhaps but no doubt the ancestors of the first peoples witnessed something like it. But only rarely. The climate record suggests this type of event is possible. What will be interesting is if it happens again and again. That the ecology has not seen before.

So not so much of a Happy New Year here.

We have experienced a step-change though. One that does not happen very often when the scale of a disturbance to the natural world is so wide and so deep that it changes the ecology.

There is an opportunity in such a change.

We can get rid of old and unhelpful conservation paradigms like our desperate focus on the rare things and look to resilience for the goods and service we need from nature whilst helping it protect itself from its own powers of destruction.

That’s it for now but we’ll come back to our need for dominion again soon.

Hope you have a Happy New Year and all your resolutions hold.