Avoiding the REDD monster

22 01 2010

© Floog

A short post about a small letter that recently appeared in the latest issue of Conservation Biology – the dangers of REDD.

REDD. What is it? The acronym for ‘Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation’, it is the idea of providing financial incentives to developing countries to reduce forest clearance by paying them to keep them standing. It should work because of the avoided carbon emissions that can be gained from keeping forests intact. Hell, we certainly need it given the biodiversity crisis arising mainly from deforestation occurring in much of the (largely tropical) developing world. The idea is that someone pollutes, buys carbon credits that are then paid to some developing nation to prevent more forest clearance, and then biodiversity gets a helping hand in the process. It’s essentially carbon trading with an added bonus. Nice idea, but difficult to implement for a host of reasons that I won’t go into here (but see Miles & Kapos Science 2008 & Busch et al. 2009 Environ Res Lett).

Venter and colleagues in their letter entitled Avoiding Unintended Outcomes from REDD now warn us about another potential hazard of REDD that needs some pretty quick thinking and clever political manoeuvring to avoid.

While REDD is a good idea and I support it fully with carefully designed implementation, Venter and colleagues say that without good monitoring data and some well-planned immediate policy implementation, there could be a rush to clear even more forest area in the short term.

Essentially they argue that when the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012, there could be a 2-year gap when forest loss would not be counted against carbon payments, and its in this window that countries might fell forests and expand agriculture before REDD takes effect (i.e., clear now and avoid later penalties).

How do we avoid this? The authors suggest that the implementation of policies to reward early efforts to reduce forest clearance and to penalise those who rush to do early clearing need to be put in place NOW. Rewards could take the form of credits, and penalties could be something like the annulment of future REDD discounts. Of course, to achieve any of this you have to know who’s doing well and who’s playing silly buggers, which means good forest monitoring. Satellite imagery analysis is probably key here.

CJA Bradshaw
ResearchBlogging.orgOscar Venter, James E.M. Watson, Erik Meijaard, William F. Laurance, & Hugh P. Possingham (2010). Avoiding Unintended Outcomes from REDD Conservation Biology, 24 (1), 5-6 DOI: 10.1111/j.1523-1739.2009.01391.x

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Categories : agriculture, biosequestration, carbon, carbon trading, climate change, conservation, deforestation, environmental policy, habitat loss, logging, monitoring, tropical

Protecting Australian wilderness

1 10 2009

Today I highlight a new paper just out online in Diversity and Distributions by James Watson and colleagues: Wilderness and future conservation priorities in Australia. It’s certainly one for the Potential list.

KNP

Jim Jim Falls, Kakadu National Park

Australia has a pretty bad biodiversity conservation track record – we have some of the worst mammal extinction trends in the world, and we’ve lost at least 50 % of our forested area since European colonisation. Despite our relatively large system of parks and reserves, things aren’t going to well (even in the parks!).

Our rapidly expanding influence means that we have to start protecting larger and larger areas if we want to have any chance of slowing the modern extinction crisis. This means we have to go beyond dedicated biodiversity reserves and sequester more ‘wilderness’ (defined as “…large areas that have experienced minimal habitat loss“). Watson and colleagues therefore used Australia as a good example to determine the extent to which the national protected area network captures ‘wilderness’, and how Australia’s planned expansion of the reserve system will include ‘wilderness’ in the future.

Although there wasn’t much planning involved initially, Australia (like many other countries) started to take biodiversity conservation seriously in the mid-1990s, such that now we have about 11 % of our 7.7 million km2 land area within a National Reserve System. Planning didn’t feature heavily in the early years, but it has been embraced now by nearly all planning bodies within government.

© Wiley-Blackwell

© Wiley-Blackwell

Using estimates of the total wilderness area in Australia (Fig. a), Watson and colleagues determined how much was included in the Reserve System (Fig. b), and how this value changed between 2000 and 2006.

Of the 2.93 million km2 of wilderness (38 % of land area, mostly in northern and western Australia), only 14 % was protected in 2000. This value increased marginally to 19 % by 2006 as the size of the Reserve System itself increased by 37 % (i.e., from 652597 to 895326 km2).

Bottom line – our growth in reserve area didn’t really capture the necessary wilderness; instead, gains were made in areas largely modified by humans. Even where wilderness has been captured, it’s predominately in ‘multiple use’ regions (incorporating mining, forestry and grazing, for example).

This isn’t a bad thing really – by focussing on areas of high biodiversity value that are under relatively high threat embraces the biodiversity hotspot approach to conservation and emphasises restoration. This is, of course, needed. But not incorporating a wider component of the habitats within wilderness could bias conservation toward range-restricted species.

© Wiley-Blackwell

© Wiley-Blackwell

Watson and colleagues therefore make a number of recommendations:

  1. We should strive to quantify and map spatially the  important ecological and evolutionary processes that drive the distribution and abundance of biodiversity so they can be explicitly incorporated into reserve area prioritisations.
  2. We should focus on predicting the magnitude and distribution of future threats and incorporate them into the spatial prioritisation framework.
  3. We should incorporate realistic constraints (e.g., financial costs) into prioritisation.
  4. We need to map and analyse a range of social and economic factors that define opportunities for conservation in conjunction with information on conservation values, threats and costs.

The bottom line is that we need to find a better balance between planning that protects threatened species and ecosystems in already highly fragmented (threatened) landscapes, and planning that protects large areas of wilderness that still contains most of its conservation values (wilderness). We’re getting there, but slowly, and hopefully in time to save our remaining threatened species from extinction.

CJA Bradshaw

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ResearchBlogging.org

Watson, J., Fuller, R., Watson, A., Mackey, B., Wilson, K., Grantham, H., Turner, M., Klein, C., Carwardine, J., Joseph, L., & Possingham, H. (2009). Wilderness and future conservation priorities in Australia Diversity and Distributions DOI: 10.1111/j.1472-4642.2009.00601.x


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Categories : Australia, biodiversity, biogeography, conservation, environmental policy, habitat loss, planning, prioritisation, protected area, reserve

Conservation Scholars: Daniel Pauly

3 12 2008

This series on ConservationBytes.com takes a page out of our book Tropical Conservation Biology (Sodhi, Brook & Bradshaw) – therein we produced a series of ‘Spotlights’ describing the contributions of great thinkers to conservation science. Each highlight of a Conservation Scholar includes a small biography, a list of major scientific publications and a Q & A on the person’s particular area of expertise.

Our seventh Conservation Scholar is Daniel Pauly…

Biography

After completing my doctorate studies in Germany in 1979, I spent many years at the International Centre for Living Aquatic Resource Management (ICLARM), then in Manila, Philippines, where I developed methods for tropical fish stock assessment, which I applied and taught in many tropical developing countries. I became a Professor at the University of British Columbia’s Fisheries Centre in 1994, and its Director in 2004. My scientific focus has mainly been on the management of fisheries and ecosystem modelling, comprising over 500 contributions to peer-reviewed journals, authored and edited books, reports and popular articles. The concepts, methods and software I have (co-)developed are in use throughout the world. This applies notably to the ecosystem modelling approach incorporated in the Ecopath software, to FishBase, the online
encyclopaedia of fishes, and the global mapping of fisheries trends. My work has received numerous awards, notably the Cosmos Prize (2005, Japan) and the Volvo Environment Prize (2006, Sweden). Profiles on me and my work were published in Science on 19 April 2002, Nature on 2 January 2003, The New York Times on 21 January 2003, and in other publications.

Major Publications

Questions and Answers

1. Which type of fisheries – commercial, recreational or artisanal – represents the greatest exploitative threat to tropical marine ecosystems?

All fisheries have the potential of depleting the resources they exploit. Industrial fisheries, however, are extremely effective at what they do, and they have over a short period a devastating effect on their resource base.

2. What fisheries management practices can be used to counter the phenomenon you have described as ‘fishing down marine food webs’?

Establishing large marine protected areas, and strict controls over the remaining, fished areas.

3. Why are freshwater and lacustrine systems so sensitive to human-induced environmental change?

Because they are small systems compared to the reach of our industries (fishing, pollution, habitat modification, etc). The oceans are larger, and hence the human impacts appeared later.

4. How effective are marine protected areas (MPAs) in conserving tropical biodiversity, and should alternative solutions also be pursued?

MPAs should never be seen as sufficient by themselves. Conventional management is needed too.

5. How can scientists work to overcome misconceptions in policy and public perception that arise from the ’shifting-baseline’ syndrome?

We should use old records and data routinely, and always refer to the earliest time for which data are available. They should use a wide range of data, not only those compatible with the model currently fashionable.

CJA Bradshaw

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(with thanks to Navjot Sodhi, Barry Brook, Ward Cooper, Wiley-Blackwell and Daniel Pauly for permission to reproduce the text – buy your copy of Tropical Conservation Biology here)


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Categories : coasts, conservation, conservation scholars, decline, extinction, fish, fisheries, harvest, human overpopulation, marine protected area, protected area