The biodiversity crisis—or more bluntly, the Sixth Great Extinction—has become a bit of a theme on my newsletter, Just Two Things. And this can be thought of as a companion to the post published here yesterday.

The New Scientist has a piece (which seems to be outside of its paywall) on what to do to start repairing some of the damage to nature. It’s an urgent task. This is they way it sets the scene:

The numbers are stark, whichever ones you choose. More than 70 per cent of ice-free land is now under human control and increasingly degraded. The mass of human-made infrastructure exceeds all biomass. Humans and domesticated animals make up more than 90 per cent of the mammalian mass on the planet. Our actions threaten about a million species – 1 in 8 – with extinction (see “Biodiversity: A status report“).

All that has happened in a blink of an eye, geologically speaking. “If you compare Earth’s history to a calendar year, we have used one-third of its natural resources in the last 0.2 seconds,” [UN Secretary-General Antonio] Guterres said in Paris.

The Great Restoration

The good news—if it can be called ‘good’—is that although we don’t have much time, the situation isn’t yet catastrophic. There are things that can be done, provided we start now. (And how many times does this need to be said?) We need to turn the ‘Great Acceleration’ in our plundering of nature into a ‘Great Restoration.’

The ‘rescue plan for nature’ has a number of elements.

First, we need to expand the amount of ‘protected land’ that is given over to nature. There’s history here, and it’s not encouraging. The Convention of Biological Diversity [CBD] (a UN body) met in Aichi in Japan in 2010 and agreed to protect 17% of land and freshwater and 10% of oceans by 2020. The actual numbers are 15% and 7.5%, but the protected areas are small and often poorly manager. The science says we need to ramp this up to 30% on land and sea: 30 by ‘30 (2030) is the new target. 

Rewilding

The second building block is restoration. This can range from passive rewilding—just getting out of the way—to active engineering of entire landscapes with mass planting of trees, reintroduction of species, removal of alien species, and of intrusive infrastructure such as dams. It can be done badly, of course, but we now know a lot about how to do it well:

“We have decades of experience with restoration” [according to Tim Chistoperson of UNEP]. “We know enough. We don’t know everything, and we will find out more as we go along. But we know enough to get started. It’s one of those situations where you can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”

Good returns

The headline target is to restore 2% of the Earth’s land surface over the next decade—an area about the size of India. The upfront cost is of the order of $1 trillion, but the returns are high. It seems that countries are already committed to this.

Third, we need better biodiversity targets. These are up for agreement at the 2021 meeting of the CBD in China. Again, the upfront costs are high—$700 billion—but the returns are good. “Every dollar spent will accrue between $3 and $75 of economic benefits from ecosystem goods and services,” says Elizabeth Mrema, the CBD’s executive secretary.

Climate change

The final element here is that biodiversity and climate change are closely linked. We won’t succeed at one without succeeding at the other. And for the first time, the political will seems to be there, with support from financial institutions such as the World Bank.

The New Scientist article doesn’t mention it, but it’s also exactly the right time to be investing in projects with high upfront costs and strong rates of return. Globally, we are awash with money, interest rates are underwater, and capital investment is a perfect vehicle to support economic recovery from the pandemic.

A version of this post first appeared on my Substack newsletter Just Two Things.

It came as a bit of a shock to open a government news release that reads more like an editorial in the Ecologist, but I think it’s an indication of the speed at which the landscape is changing here. The news release was about the Dasgupta review into the economics of biodiversity, which was published last week. Its author, Partha Dasgupta, is a vastly respected Indian-British economist based at Cambridge University.

Future generations

It’s a massive report—600 pages—and I’m not going to pretend that I have read it all. Fortunately it comes with successively more compact versions: a 100-page “abridged” monograph and a short ‘headline messages’ document. (Both pdfs.) There’s also a concise summary here.

Institutional failure

• “Our unsustainable engagement with Nature is endangering the prosperity of current and future generations.
• “At the heart of the problem lies deep-rooted, widespread institutional failure.
• “The solution starts with understanding and accepting a simple truth: our economies are embedded within Nature, not external to it.
  • “(i) Ensure that our demands on Nature do not exceed its supply, and that we increase Nature’s supply relative to its current level.
  • “(ii) Change our measures of economic success to guide us on a more sustainable path.
  • “(iii) Transform our institutions and systems – in particular our finance and education systems – to enable these changes and sustain them for future generations.

Heading for the mainstream

The first is that the report comes with some handy visuals. This one, above, is effectively an agenda for change. Dasgupta’s emphasis on changing the metrics and institutions that are shaping the system reminds me of Donella Meadows’ famous list of “places to intervene in a system”. Dasgupta is aiming towards the top of the list. 

Third, the obvious critique is that if we talk about “valuing” nature, and frame it as “natural capital” we’re inviting its destruction, as George Monbiot argued. The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. Dasgupta recognises the critique: The Review has developed the economics of biodiversity by viewing Nature in anthropocentric terms, but it has done this to argue the minimum case:

If … Nature should be protected and promoted even when valued solely for its uses to us, we would have even stronger reasons to protect and promote it if we were to acknowledge that it has intrinsic value. Many people, perhaps in all societies, locate the sacred in Nature. (Abridged Version, 80)

A version of this post appeared on my Substack newsletter Just Two Things.

I’ve written here before (a couple of times) about the accelerating disaster befalling the world’s fish, as a combination of market-driven greed, vastly improved technology, short-termism and weak governance combine to allow a vast amount of over-fishing.

Earlier this month (via an article in the Financial Times) I picked up on the latest annual State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture report, published by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation. The argument is summarised by the FT in one line: “too many countries have too many boats doing too good a job”. And while this is pretty much what it has said each year since 1994, this year the tone has changed. They’ve moved from palliative concern to something a little more strident, at least by the standards of international organisations.

Imminent danger of collapse
At the end of a several hundred page report, as they turn to the challenges facing the sector, they observe:

Through a combination of inadequate regulatory and monitoring capacity, misguided or misapplied policy aims and interventions, overcapitalization, and short term profit-seeking by fishing fleets, the global imbalance between stock levels and fishing capacity and effort has grown steadily, and the pressures on key stocks have become increasingly unsupportable.

The outcome, they say, is likely not to be good:

These analyses are troubling from a resource exploitation perspective and suggest a global system that is overstressed, reducing in biodiversity and in imminent danger of collapse.

A problem of economics
There are always dangers of reducing biodiversity issues to a set of assumptions about their underlying economics, but a large part of the fishing problem is a problem of economics: a combination of misguided policies, poor regulation, and unaligned incentives that both permit over-capture of fish and damage the world’s poorest who depend disproportionately on fish for a decenbt quality of diet. (Looked at close up, the fish crisis looks oddly like the financial crisis, where a similar set of issues play out to similar effect).

The FAO report, therefore, quotes some estimates from a joint study carried out by the the FAO and the World Bank:

It estimated global losses of net economic benefit of the order of US$50 billion, compared with first sale values of US$80 billion, resulting from a combination of excess capacity and effort, linked with capital and operating-cost subsidies. For 2003, “harmful” subsidies, acting primarily to perpetuate overfishing, were estimated at US$16.2 billion out of a total of US$27 billion a year globally.

At risk species triple in a decade
Some of the data is increasingly stark, to the point where – according to the respected International Union for Nature Conservation – the number of fish species on its ‘Red List’ as being at risk has climbed almost three-fold in a decade, from 742 (out of 10,359 species it evaluates) in 2002 to 2,041 in 2012. The IUNC also believes that we have already seen the extinction of one fish species – the Galapagos Damsel – through climate change effects. Marine protection areas do help sea fish, but we need far more of the ocean to be covered by them, but it’s harder to create such protection for freshwater fish. And of course, scarcity produces its own economic effects, as the FT article noted:

Some species, such as the bluefin tuna prized by sushi lovers, face a vicious circle: over-fishing makes them rarer, which forces up prices (one fish sold for a reported record $736,000 in Tokyo this year), which in turn spurs more fishing and the illegal catches that plague many fish stocks.

Meanwhile a simulation of the economics of North Sea fishing found that that less fishing would both increase profitability and sustainability:

A simulation of subsidy impacts in North Sea fisheries showed that, while removing subsidies might reduce total catch and revenue, overall profitability would increase, as would the total biomass of commercially important species.

Stronger language
The FT article quoted Richard Grainger, chief of the statistics and information service in the FAO’s fisheries and aquaculture department, as saying, “I think probably we’re using stronger language now because we have been saying a lot of the same things very gently for quite a while, and maybe having less impact than is required.”

But since economic arguments have little effect on economic actors (I’ll explain in a moment) it seems likely that the FAO’s change in language is intended more to influence policy makers. From the perspective of organisational change, we know from the literature (e.g. the work of John Kotter) that organisations wishing to act on change need to combine a vision of an alternative with a sense of urgency about why change needs to happen now. This sense of the urgency of change is what business leaders and strategists mean when they talk about a “burning platform“, something the business needs to make it jump as quickly as possible.

Changing the incentives
But the fleets of deep sea trawlers that are unsustainably fishing away our future fish stocks have no such platform. They are in a sector that is suffering from over-capacity, certainly, and profit is probably declining. But with the huge capital costs locked in the trawling fleet, it’s strategically better (from the narrow perspective of each individual fleet owner and manager – to hang in and try to outlast your competition. As in the old joke about the grizzly bear and the two hunters, they don’t have to outrun the grizzly bear; they just have to outrun each other. There’s a commercial and strategic value in being last person standing.

So it’s down to policy makers to create the burning platform for them, by imposing tougher fishing limits and enforcing them – and accepting (even making the case) that the jobs which are lost in the process are unsustainable, in most senses of the word. Smart policy makers could make the game more stretching by applying some game theory to change the incentives, such as higher rewards to those owners that quit the trawling business first. (Where does the money come from? From the public funds that are currently spent on “harmful” subsidies.) Otherwise, we have only more official hand-wringing to look forward to – and fewer and fewer species of fish.

The image at the top of this post, of the endangered bluefin tuna, is from earthrangers.com. It is used with thanks.

What does a post-industrial relationship with the land look like? There are emerging clues

Walking recently to the top of Sugar Loaf, the hill that overlooks Abergavenny, brought my grandfather to mind. He died about 20 years ago, and had a lifetime’s love of walking, though living in Co. Durham he was more a creature of the the Lakes and (especially) the Dales. He wouldn’t have thought much of the walk (barely an hour from car to trig point) or that we drove to the car park, about half of the distance from the A40 to the top, or even of our comfortable modern walking boots: he once told a cousin of my mother’s, after a day hiking together, that it wasn’t a real walk unless you had blood in your boots. So far, this perhaps sounds like a set of nostalgic North(East)ern cliches, but wrapped inside it is a set of questions about the land and our relation to it which are coming back into our minds at the end of the long ascendancy of industrialism.

My grandfather would have taken the bus to the junction from the A40 because he never owned a car. He was past 50 by the time the car became a mass consumer item, during the 1950s, and at that stage in his life was not well-off. But the journey was part of the distance between town and country, just as the effort of leaving the city was a demarcation for the ‘chain-gangs’ of the cycling clubs in the 1920s, ’30s, and later. The nature writer Jim Perrin has described that experience like this:

just take ourselves off, sleep rough at weekends and holidays among moors and hills that were a very cheap bus-ride away from the inner city where we lived. What we saw there was what we did not have in the close streets of the slums: trees, skies, clear rivers, space, unthreatened journeyings, a sense of an older landscape that had always been, from which we ourselves had come and to which we were now finding our ways back.

My grandfather’s attitude to the land, and his access to it, would have been different too, if only because the law on both land and access changed so much during his lifetime. He described himself as a ‘Christian socialist’, without ever defining either term too exactly, but would not have thought it right that God’s land was closed off by landowners. Interestingly, this argument surfaced quite strongly a decade ago in the debate in Scotland which paved the way for its Land Reform Act in 2003.

Alastair McIntosh has documented this well, in his fine Schumacher Briefing Rekindling Community, and elsewhere (opens pdf). This quote, from Dr. Alison Elliot of the Church of Scotland, from Rekindling Community, can stand here for the whole:

The Earth belongs to the Lord. The land itself is a gift from God. We are stewards of it, and the idea of somebody ‘owning’ it in the same way you own a bicycle is something that is deeply offensive to people who have that perspective on life and creation.

My grandfather would have cheered the ‘mass trespass‘ in 1932 at Kinder Scout in the Peak District by ‘the ramblers from Manchester way‘. And he would have felt vindicated by the post-war Act which created the National Parks, in 1949, which have proved to be one of the lasting institutions of that post-war settlement. Indeed, it is striking how resistant the idea of the National Parks have been to the last quarter-century of globalisation and pro-market politics; it happens that the last of the National Parks proposed in 1949, the South Downs, will finally be opened in March of this year. The coalition of conservators and radicals which promoted them has proved to be effective and enduring.

In some ways, this history is a partial answer to a question posed by Jim Perrin in a recent issue of new welsh review (the article itself is not online):

“What measure of compensation can be found in contemporary life for the loss of connection with the natural cycle which was woven through the whole fabric of natural life in the pre-industrial world”?

But it is only a partial answer. In other ways, for all of their virtues, the notion of the ‘national park’ represents the industrialisation of open space, the creation of an opposite of the city, a separate domain with its own boundaries and its own rules. It is a space in which the land is used to ‘produce’ leisure, just as the relationship to the land of the new urban food movements (for all of their virtues) is also a relationship of production. Putting a ‘value’ on nature may reduce depredation (but may also just give permission to depredators, who may think they’ve paid for the right to do it). Either way, it is essentially an industrial model in which land which can be demonstrated to produce value in terms of ‘eco-systems services’ has a higher price when it goes into a cost-benefit equation.

Perrin’s answer to his own question instead looks at our experience of nature.

The key vocabulary here is: contact, connection, relationship … there is rigour, rurality, discomfort, patience, application necessary to be on close terms with nature. Dipping in and out of scenery or tarns, imposing patterns of attention deficit culture … these are not enough.

For McIntosh, answering the question goes back to how reintegrate the land into community, which he sees as being rooted equally in ‘soil, soul and society’. This ‘triune’ basis of community – the three elements are intertwined – are ‘community with nature; community with the divine; and community with one another”. My grandfather, who lived in a village and was also an active volunteer throughout his life, would have understood this formulation intuitively, in a heartbeat. I understand it too, of course, but only rationally, and that’s what we’ve lost in the half a century between him and me. If our species has a long-term future, I suspect that recovering that lost visceral sense of the worth of the land and the soil is a critical task for the next half a century. My grandchildren will need their boots.

The picture of Sugar Loaf is from the photostream of Helen James, and is used here with thanks.

British retailers hand out an estimated 13 billion free plastic bags every year, they’re used for an average 12 minutes each, they take between 500-1,000 years to decay, and they break down (‘photo-degrade’) in smaller parts, which are still toxic. But the significant adverse effect is on other wildlife. Modbury, the Devon village which became the first place in the UK to ban plastic bags, puts it like this:

In the UK at least 200 million plastic bags end up as litter on our beaches,streets and parks ever year. When a plastic bag enters the ocean it becomes a harmful piece of litter. Manymarine animals mistake plastic bags for food and swallow them, with painfuland often fatal consequences.

It’s not a coincidence that Rebecca Hosking, who started that campaign, was (and is) a wildlife photographer who had watched the damage done when birds and sealife, as well as land mammals, eat plastic bags, or get entangled in them. These pictures are all from the Modbury site, which also has some short films.

In order: deer rooting around on a rubbish tip (in India); a crane which has wrapped itself in a plastic bag; and the slightly grisly contents of the stomach of a dead Minke whale washed up in France.

The picture of the minke whale stomach is also used on the Claire Morsman’s ‘sociable guerilla bagging‘ site, Morsbags. It uses an ‘open knowledge’ approach to sharing bag patterns to encourage people to make their own fabric bags and use them instead of plastic bags. [Update: an interesting blog post on making a morsbag.] She was inspired to launch it after finding a dead seagull on a beach in Devon with its legs trapped in a plastic bag. Morsbags lists the contents of the whale’s stomach:

• 1 pastic/aluminium crisp packet
• 2 English supermarket carrier bags
• 7 various coloured plastic bag bits
• 7 transparent plastic bags
• 1 food packaging wrapper.

Clearly government advisers such as Chris Coggins are right to say that supermarkets need to do a lot more about packaging. But when the British Retail Federation complains about including plastic bags in the Climate Change Bill, they are on tricky ground. It’s hard for people, in their day-to-day lives to do things which are respectful of other species. Not using plastic bags is an important symbolic gesture.

In short, the 300+ scientists who contributed suggested that the condition of land, sea, air and rivers have all deteriorated in the last 20 years, to a point where economies are likely to be threatened (or to put it another way, the free ride of the markets on the biospehere is about to hit its limits). Some quick headlines:

• We have 15.7 hectares per person but are using 21.9 – broadly confirming the calculations of others – such as the Global Footprint Network – that we are more than 30% above the carrying capacity of the planet
• Climate change is now ‘drastic and unequivocal’, and drastic steps are needed to curtail it: “Fundamental changes in social and economic structures, including lifestyle changes, are crucial if rapid progress is to be achieved”.
• Irrigation is reducing the quantity and quality of water flows for food, while fertilisers are causing contamination. Desertification is destroying soil quality. The scientists put their hopes in GM food.
• Fresh water shortages will become critical: by 2025 1.8 billion people will suffer severe shortages
• Species are becoming extinct one hundred times faster than in any fossil record – we are likely to be heading for the sixth “great extinction”.

If the conculsions seem like yet another extreme environmental report, Mark Henderson, the science editor of The Times, argued that they had emerged from a process that is geared to caution. In other words: be afraid.

It was compiled by a group of more than 380 scientists, all leading figures in fields such as climate science, ecology, fisheries or land use, subdivided into ten expert groups that prepared the chapters. Some 157 of these were appointed by 48 governments – and were thus unlikely to adopt an extreme position.

A further 1,000 scientists took part as peer-reviewers, poring over the conclusions in the areas of their expertise to challenge any misleading claims. A total of more than 13,000 comments on the draft of the full report, and 3,000 comments on the summary for decision-makers, were recorded and considered by the expert groups writing each chapter.

The result of such a process is that conclusions have tended to err on the side of caution. Only claims that have reasonably robust support in published scientific literature have been made, and wilder hypotheses have been rejected. The report’s alarming conclusions appear rather more compelling in this light.

One of the interesting things about such reports is that they now seem to be producing a cultural response. I’ve been reading The World Without Us, a book by a journalist, Alan Weisman, which imagines in careful detail what would happen if the human species disappeared from the earth in short order. It is an elaborate thought experiment which makes such a disappearance seem – bluntly – no bad thing, certainly in the first half of the book.

And George Monbiot – in contrast – has picked up on the mirror image; a novel in which, instead of there being biosphere and no humans, there are humans and no biosphere. ”

Cormac McCarthy’s book The Road considers what would happen if the world lost its biosphere, and the only living creatures were humans, hunting for food among the dead wood and soot. Some years before the action begins, the protagonist hears the last birds passing over, “their half-muted crankings miles above where they circled the earth as senselessly as insects trooping the rim of a bowl.” McCarthy makes no claim that this is likely to occur, but merely speculates about the consequences.”

Such extreme metaphors are signs that people are trying to find the stories which will communicate the danger of the situation in a way which might be understood viscerally rather than intellectually. But – and this is only one example – having heard a UK government minister explain today why the continued expansion of Heathrow is necessary (if we don’t other people will, unless there’s a European-wide agreement) one can’t help but feel that even extreme stories aren’t going to have sufficient impact.

If it was done by design, the Great Designer must be looking on and thinking that testing the model by putting one of the most rapacious primates in charge maybe wasn’t so intelligent after all.

Other posts on biodiversity and resource use include “Gone into ecological debt for the year”, “Visualising consumption“, “Climate change impact on UK biodiversity” and “Britain’s carbon emissions – rising” not falling

Clive has 10 ‘provocations’ – some more sensible than provocative, in truth – to improve the UK’s land use strategy. I’m not going to summarise the points but one interesting observation: something approaching 87% of the land in England is green space’ – but when polled (as they were for the Barker Review a majority believe that more than 50% of Englan’s land space is developed. Which may inflect any debate on land use in a way that is potentially counter-productive.

I mentioned last week the climate change maps from the French researchers CIRED, which show the type of weather we can expect in 2071 on probablistic trends. This week environmental researchers released a study analysing shifts in animal and bird patterns in the UK.

The MONARCH report (it’s one of those dreadful ‘clever’ EU research acronyms) was the result of seven years of study and looked at likely biodiversity impacts through focussing on 120 threatened species through to the 2080s. 32 were studied in depth. It was launched by Natural England this week. 90% of the species studied will be significantly affected; some will suffer more because of fragmented habitat; and there could be quite significant geographical shifts. The south of England, for example is likely to lose the song thrush (but gain more stag beetles).

Copies of the report can be downloaded from the UKCIP Publications page. (Free registration usually required).

Acknowledgements of Birds of Britain – the monthly web magazine for bird watchers – as the source of the picture.

ST Trend Alert: Bee Concerned

Bees are disappearing, deserting their hives in what is being called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). While some experts dispute the likely long term nature of the problem, one official from the Department of Agriculture in Florida asked, ‘ Are honey bees the canary of the coalmine? ‘ If the answer is yes, we may be facing a fundamental threat to our food supply chain.

The problem has been building for a while. By 2006, bee loss on the west coast of America was estimated at 60% and on the east coast at nearly 70%. A similar picture is emerging in Europe. And that is on top of a 50% decline in overall numbers over the last 50 years .

Why is this important?

Bees do not just make honey. They account for about 80% of all insect crop pollination. [With fewer bees] at best, prices would sky rocket; at worst, many fresh foods would simply disappear, and with them the livelihoods of hundreds of rural communities.

The potential cause of CCD is hotly debated. Whatever the cause, if we do not heed the canary and change our ways if need be, then we may be facing not only a much less varied diet, but changed landscapes and rural poverty on an enormous scale.
Sheila Moorcroft , Research Director, Shaping Tomorrow

The evidence on the benefits of trees is well-summarised on a webpage maintained by Warwick District Council. Research by Kuo and Sullivan found that crime rates and domestic violence are reduced by as much as 50% in urban areas with a high proportion of trees.