–

We feel we have to set the record straight after some of our (Bradshaw’s) comments were taken grossly out of context, or not considered at all (Ritchie’s). A bubbling kerfuffle in the media over the last week compels us to establish some facts about dingoes in Australia, and more importantly, about how we as a nation choose to manage them.

A small article in the News Ltd. Adelaide Advertiser appeared on 11 May in which one of us (Bradshaw) was quoted as advocating the removal of the dingo fence because it was not “cost effective” (sic). Despite nearly 20 minutes on the telephone explaining to the paper the complexities of feral animal management, the role of dingoes in suppressing feral predators, and the “costs” associated with biodiversity enhancement and feral control, there wasn’t a single mention of any of this background or justification.

Another News Ltd. article denouncing Ritchie’s work on the role of predators in Australian ecosystems appeared in The Weekly Times the day before, to which Ritchie responded in full.

So it’s damage control, and mainly because we want to state categorically that our opinion is ours alone, and not that of our respective universities, schools, institutes or even Biosecurity SA (which some have claimed or insinuated, falsely, that we represent). Biosecurity SA is responsible for, inter alia, the dingo fence in South Australia. Although our opinions differ on its role, we are deeply impressed, grateful and supportive of their work in defending us from biological problems.

It is probably surprising to most Australians that introduced species (and the mismanagement thereof) in this country have devastated many elements of our native ecosystems. With over 20 million pigs, 18 million cats, 7 million foxes, 2 million goats, 1 million camels, 300,000 swamp buffalo, 200,000 deer (from six species) and millions of rabbits, our native biodiversity has suffered immensely. Indeed, Australia has the worst record for mammal extinctions in the world, mainly due to foxes and cats.

Furthermore, pigs, camels, buffalo and goats have heavily damaged millions of square kilometres of outback Australia. Even in northern Australia, where deforestation has been relatively light compared to the south, native animals are on the decline in part from introduced species. And guess what? We are no closer to controlling them now than anytime in our past.

So why do we invest billions of dollars in feral animal control and the subsequent recovery plans for endangered wildlife using the same techniques for decades, when a more proactive and natural alternative exists? It’s a solution mired in controversy because it involves yet another “introduced” predator – the dingo.

The dingo has long evoked fear and loathing in the hearts of Australians. Ever since we learnt that it was introduced around 4000 years ago by Southeast Asian visitors to our northern shores, we have developed an irrational opinion that this sheep-killing, baby-stealing, thylacine- and devil-displacing feral from Asia is a menace that should be eradicated at all costs.

But when you look at the evidence, you are compelled to question that image. Despite some high-profile incidences of attacks on humans, they are perhaps one of the least-dangerous species to humans in Australia. The entirely coincidental disappearance of thylacines (Tasmanian tigers) and devils from mainland Australia when the dingo appeared also ignores that the climate was changing and Aboriginal populations began booming at the same time.

So, what did we do? We built a fence, of course! Over 5500 km long and possibly the world’s longest human-built structure, the dingo fence is a monument to predator xenophobia. Its role is controversial, because while it certainly has prevented an influx of a large number of dingoes into southern and eastern Australia, it has also seen a proliferation of competing native (kangaroos) and non-native (rabbits) herbivores where dingoes are absent or in low abundance.

While the roughly $10 million it costs each year to maintain the fence is lower than the cited $48 million per year pastoralists claim to lose to “wild dogs”, these costs don’t include the labour-intensive and expensive additional poisoning that accompanies the fencing. And poisoning is not the answer either. In addition to killing non-target native species, baiting dingoes might in fact result in increased dingo densities due to social breakdown of the pack, resulting in increasing attacks on stock, not to mention a higher likelihood of hybridisation with feral dogs. Baiting also leads to more juvenile dingoes. These less-efficient predators tend to target calves more than adult dingoes do.

And of course the “costs” also don’t include the unquantifiable costs to our biodiversity. How many millions per year do we spend on native species recovery, and how many billions are lost from depleted ecosystem services?

There’s also the issue of the fence’s effectiveness – today dingoes are penetrating farther and farther south due to camel damage to the fence itself, and other weaker areas where dingoes can penetrate.

It turns out that the dingo is in fact a sorely under-utilised weapon in our feral-animal arsenal. Pretty much everywhere we’ve looked across Australia, when dingoes are abundant, foxes and cats aren’t, and native marsupials are. It’s called the “mesopredator” effect, and highlights the important role of predators in maintaining healthy ecosystems.

There are other advantages to dingoes that might not seem obvious. Dingoes reduce herbivore densities and this can reduce the effects of climate change-induced drought by increasing available plant cover. Dingoes can also benefit graziers by providing more vegetation to produce stronger, healthier cattle that can resist attack (indeed, dingoes prefer more passive prey such as kangaroos).

Unfortunately, most pest management in Australia lacks an integrated approach. We remove foxes, and cats increase; we remove cats, and rabbits increase. We remove dingoes, and we have more herbivore competition problems. This inefficient hopping from one single-species crisis to the next is, we argue, a waste of money and time. It lacks a long-term vision.

We need to recognise that species interact along complex pathways, and so the entire system should be managed as a whole (indeed, integrated pest management is advocated in many areas by our own government biosecurity experts). Worldwide, the release of mesopredators after the persecution of higher-order predators is now demonstrating many adverse consequences for biodiversity and economics, from sharks, rays and scallops in the Gulf of Mexico, from lynx, foxes and hares in Finland, from coyotes, cats and birds in America, to our own dingo-cat-fox-marsupial problem.

So with too many herbivores, too many mesopredator foxes and cats, and costly management, why don’t we let the dingoes do the work for us? If we focus on ecological function, then dubious labels of good/bad or native/feral become irrelevant. The loss of mainland predators such as devils, thylacines and marsupial lions means that the dingo is our one last hope to restore some ecological balance to our country’s highly disrupted ecosystem. Indeed, the solution is readily available and staring us in the face, if only we had the courage to employ it.

It is interesting that the Weekly Times held a poll asking readers to vote “yes” or “no” to the reintroduction of devils and dingoes to manage pest species; just before the poll closed, nearly 80 % had said “yes”. Clearly, sectors of the Australian community are receptive, including many pastoralists.

Of course, stock losses will always remain a concern, because sheep and dingoes will never co-exist in harmony. However, advances in trialling guardian dogs show immense promise in this regard, even for remote and large stock populations. Indeed, guardian dogs have even been successful in Namibia to protect stock from leopards.

We should shift our investment in pest control: let’s help graziers trial new and more effective solutions. The process will be slow and guarded, but we should be focussing on long-term solutions, instead of costly, questionably effective and ecologically myopic single-species interventions. In light of these arguments, each Australian should ask the question: is the dingo fence worth it?

This article was originally published at The Conversation.
Read the original article.

CJA Bradshaw & Euan Ritchie

In a similar vein, but something I’m not used to publishing on Conservation Bytes, my colleague Alejandro Frid requested I publish his essay here. I’m a firm advocate for standing up for evidence-based policy, and Alejandro (inspired by James Hansen), shows us how it’s done.

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I am addressing this letter to colleagues with research careers because I am compelled to share what I learned recently by crossing a new threshold. For years I have been talking and writing about the climate change crisis. As intellectually rewarding and therapeutic as it has been, these letters to government, meetings with Members of [the Canadian] Parliament, and articles for conservation-minded audiences have accomplished nothing of substance.

Others feel similarly. Prominent academics, fed up with governments that ignore science and heed the priorities of corporations, have turned to civil disobedience. James Hansen, a senior climate scientist with NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, led by example last year when he got himself arrested in front of the USA’s Whitehouse to protest the proposed Keystone Pipeline that would carry oil from the Alberta Tar Sands to the USA. That was his third arrest in three years; the previous two involved civil disobedience against the mining of coal, a huge contributor to greenhouse gases.

In the wake of Hansen’s arrests, on 05 May 2012, Mark Jaccard—a prominent economist, IPCC member, and professor at the Energy and Materials Research Group of Simon Fraser University—got himself arrested in White Rock, British Columbia, for blocking a coal train carrying US coal for export to China via British Columbia ports. There were 12 others with Jaccard, among them a man in his 80s, several men in their 60s and 70s, and a few youngsters like myself and my good friend Lynne Quarmby. Lynne happens to be chair of the Department of Molecular Biology at Simon Fraser University.

Shortly before the arrest, as we sat on the tracks, I told Jaccard that I had been teetering on the decision to come, but his announcement to participate sealed my decision. Jaccard replied that, given what he knew about the climate crisis and the consequences of inaction, it was impossible for him to not be here. He was echoing sentiments shared by all 13 of us on the tracks. Later, as we were released from jail, Jaccard wondered out loud whether the arrest would affect his ability to travel for work. Then he said something to the effect that, “You can forever come up with excuses, or you can get real and just do it.”

Civil disobedience has a long-standing tradition of enabling change. It goes back to at least the 18^th Century, when British citizens organized themselves to protest, continually for about 50 years, until British Slavery was abolished. In the early campaign stages abolition would have seemed as ludicrously impossible as abolishing fossil fuels today. Yet they did it. A precedent, perhaps, that if enough of us were to “get real”, fossil fuels could be abolished before runaway climate change becomes inevitable.

Our act of civil disobedience last Saturday went smoothly. The White Rock detachment of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police was a stellar example of decency and professionalism. They were honest communicators who fulfilled their obligations to public safety while allowing us to exercise our democratic rights.

Moments before the arrest, several of us spoke to the surrounding media and observers about intergenerational justice and the millions of people already suffering from climate change today. There were no hasty moves during the hand-cuffing and ride in the paddy wagon. There was no property or personal damage. There were only carefully crafted ideas and deeply held convictions. Fellow protester, Kevin Washbrook, said it best: ‘Saturday was a good day to be a Canadian citizen’.

Yet as buzzed as I am by the success, I am also overwhelmed by how much remains undone. All of you with science careers know what is wrong, what is at stake, and what needs to change. Civil disobedience is a personal choice which carries many potentially serious implications. It is not to be taken lightly. It is to be considered seriously by anyone who understands the current state of the world and the consequences of inaction.

Thanks for reading.

Alejandro Frid

Links to the motive behind the protest

• Letter to Warren Buffet
• Stop Coal – We did it

Media Links

• Anti-coal protesters arrested in White Rock
• Coal protesters arrested, fined $115 in White Rock train blockade
• You shall not pass: Activists to block Warren Buffett’s coal trains

–

Almost everything we own – our houses and cars and our very health – is insured. It works on a simple principal: the higher the risk, the higher the premium. It’s an age-old concept that ecological modelers have decided to apply to a new area: forest preservation.

A new proposal, published in the journal Conservation Letters, would create forest insurance to make the U.N. forest preservation program Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation, or REDD, more effective. REDD is generally supposed to function by paying developing countries to protect their forests in exchange for carbon pollution credits. Currently the program has 42 partner countries across the globe. The program is crucial to the fight against climate change since deforestation and forest degradation accounts for about 20 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and threatens biodiversity.

“REDD is a fantastic idea,” said Corey Bradshaw, director of ecological modeling at the University of Adelaide and co-author of the study. “You get a carbon advantage and biodiversity doesn’t get wiped out at the same time, it seems perfect.”

But it has a few major flaws that the insurance scheme, called iREDD, seeks to remedy.

REDD only works if the parties are honest and stick to the agreement. Bradshaw doesn’t have much faith that will happen. “If there’s a way to cheat, people will cheat. That’s the nature of all life, not just humans, but we excel at it,” he said. If, for example, a country is paid to conserve one forest but moves its deforestation efforts to an adjacent forest in order to get both money and timber, in terms of carbon offsets, that transaction was a failure. This phenomenon is called “leakage.”

Carbon-capture also only works if it’s maintained indefinitely. If a country accepts money for ten years and then cuts its forest the day after the agreement expires, then all of that conservation was for naught. This issue is called “permanence,” usually translated into an arbitrarily defined period of time set by countries in terms of decades or centuries.

Finally, there is the concept of additionality: there is no point in paying to protect forests that aren’t in danger of being cut. Bradshaw calls leakage, permanence and additionality, the “unholy trinity” of REDD.

In order to stifle the temptation to cheat, Bradshaw and his colleagues proposed translating ecosystem services (hard-to-quantify but impossible-to-live-without benefits like the water cycle, pollination and forest carbon capture and storage) into a format that the market could understand: the insurance industry. “This polices the system through a financial mechanism,” Bradshaw explained. “People have an incentive to do the right thing because they get more money at the end.”

How would such a system work?

Individual contractual agreements must be drafted between the buyer, or the party interested in carbon credits, and the seller, or the forest manager. The researchers propose setting a premium based on an assessment of risk. To quantify this, an outside broker would use a Likert scale to assess an area’s governmental reputation, management capabilities, monetary resources, community endorsement, and political buy-in. Once the risk ranking has been made, then a certain amount of the invested cash – generally no more than one-third – is used to purchase an insurance policy that scales to that agreed-upon risk, Bradshaw explains in his blog, Conservation Bytes. The amount is put into an insurance account, which collects interest over the project’s duration.

If the forest managers meet the agreed upon conservation goal — including monitoring to make sure there is no leakage and maintaining the project over the agreed upon permanence scale—at the end of the contract, the seller gets all the money from the insurance premium plus the interest gathered. (Even if a contract was set for 100 years, a decadal pay scheme could be set).

If, on the other hand, the forest managers violate the contract and clear-cut parts of the forest anyway, the sellers could be charged or the buyers could pull out and get all of their money back plus the premium.

If this system worked, it would provide a means to sequester more carbon to offset increasing anthropogenic emissions. The potential interested parties are extensive, including companies, countries, forest ministries, governmental departments, individuals and agencies like USAID. “This won’t completely solve the problem, but it would put dent in the way emissions are tracking,” Bradshaw said. “It’s just one of the many things we have to do to get our heads around climate change and do something about it.”

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Rachel Nuwer is a science journalist who writes for venues including the New York Times, ScienceNOW and Audubon Magazine. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. She tweets @RachelNuwer

Some of you might be aware that the Australian Commonwealth Government has just released its Draft National Wildlife Corridors Plan for public comment, but many of you might not really know what a ‘corridor’ constitutes.

Wildlife or biodiversity ‘corridors’ have been around for a long time, at least in terms of proposals. The idea is fairly simple to conceive, but very difficult to implement in practice.

At least for as long as I’ve been in the conservation biology biz, ‘corridors’ have been proffered as one really good way to make broad-scale landscape restoration plausible and effective for (mainly) forest-dwelling species which have copped the worst of deforestation trends around Australia and the world. The idea is that because of intense habitat fragmentation, isolated patches of primary (or at least, reasonably intact secondary) forest can be linked by planting some sort of long corridor of similar habitat between them. Then, all the little creatures can merrily make their way back and forth between the patches, thus rescuing each other from extinction via migration.

This appeals to a lot of people because it doesn’t necessarily require vast tracks of public or private land (makes the farmers happy, makes the urban sprawlers happy, keeps the greenies happy because it looks good for conservation, keeps the politicians happy because they don’t have to wade in and make unpopular decisions). Or at least, that’s the idea.

As it turns out, ‘connectivity’ per se between habitat patches is probably not quite as important as we once believed for population persistence. I’ve blogged before about several papers that have over-turned the ‘connectivity paradigm’ through experimental manipulation of microcosms (mini ecosystems), and coincidentally, I found another by Mike Bull & colleagues that just came out today in Austral Ecology showing that roadside vegetation corridors did little to explain variation in reptile abundance.

Why might this be the case? Many, many papers (including many of my own) now identify that population size and habitat quality are far more important for population persistence than connectivity per se. While we have also identified that isolated and small populations are more temporally variable (and hence, more prone to extinction), it seems like the evidence is mounting that just ensuring some degree of connectivity doesn’t really do what many think it should do in terms of reducing extinction risk.

So, what are the alternatives? Well, I still think connectivity needs to be endorsed to reduce overall fragmentation, but it must be done smartly and guided by the evidence-based principles of extinction biology. As mentioned above, the most important driver of extinction risk is population size, and as overall habitat area is increased, so too does population size. Thus, a thin thread of a corridor attaching fragments is insufficient – we should view these ‘corridors’ instead as patches themselves, with the aim to maximise their size (i.e., total area) instead of their connectivity enhancement per se. Think a big, fat chunk of restored habitat rather than a thin line of vegetation.

I’ve more or less indicated this to the Corridors Plan people in my submission, and I had the opportunity to meet with the committee a few weeks ago in Adelaide to reiterate my recommendations. Despite all the uncertainty about the true conservation effectiveness of wildlife corridors, we do know for certain that more area is better. Let’s at least follow this one principle.

CJA Bradshaw

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A group of environmental scientists say a problem-ridden economic model designed to slow deforestation can be improved by applying key concepts from the insurance industry.

REDD (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) is a UN-promoted scheme that allows countries to trade in carbon credits to keep forests intact. It is mainly targeted at developing nations where deforestation and exploitation are a major threat.

In a paper published online in the journal Conservation Letters, ecology researchers from Australia and South Africa argue that REDD projects can suffer from three major problems. They have proposed strengthening the scheme by using insurance policies and premiums, creating a new scheme known as iREDD.

“The idea of paying a nation to protect its forests in exchange for carbon pollution offsets can potentially reduce overall emissions by keeping the trees alive, and ensure a lot of associated biodiversity gets caught up in the conservation process,” says Professor Corey Bradshaw,, Director of Ecological Modelling at the University of Adelaide’s Environment Institute and a senior author of the paper.

“However, there are three main problems with REDD: these are known as leakage, permanence and additionality.”

Leakage - “This occurs because the original forest area that was targeted for protection under the agreement remains intact, but the deforestation that would have otherwise occurred merely gets shifted to an adjacent forest, so the net effect is the same. It results in biodiversity loss and no emissions reduction,” Professor Bradshaw says.

Permanence - “This problem occurs because there is no guarantee that your investment – the forest – remains intact for a sufficient period into the future to account for the carbon being offset.”

Additionality - “This a way of describing ‘what would have happened anyway’. In other words, if a particular area of forest was never targeted for deforestation, then being paid to maintain it is a false investment because the service was never in any real danger.”

Professor Bradshaw and colleagues from James Cook University and the University of Pretoria have suggested using a form of REDD ‘insurance policy’ (iREDD) to avoid these problems.

iREDD involves the buyer and seller together assessing the risk in a forest conservation project, agreeing on that risk and then purchasing an insurance policy scaled to that risk.

“iREDD can be used to ensure that both the seller and the buyer are protected. In this case, the seller represents those who manage the forests, and the buyer is the company, nation or individual who wishes to buy into the forest for its carbon offset potential.

“In this scheme, everyone wins,” Professor Bradshaw says.

“If the sellers fail, then the buyer is compensated and can invest elsewhere. If the sellers do well, they get more money. Most importantly, it increases the probability that atmospheric carbon will be reduced – or at the very least, the rate of emissions will be slowed – and the forest’s associated biodiversity will remain, protecting thousands of species against local extinction.”

Here’s another great post from Salvador Herrando-Pérez. It is interesting that he’s chosen an example species that was once (a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away) of great interest to me (caribou – see ancient papers a, b, c, d). But that is another story. Take it away, Salva.

– 

–Figure 1. Caribou (reindeer) are ungulates weighing up to ~ 100 kg. They live in tundra and taiga in Finland, Greenland, Finland, Norway, Mongolia, Russia, Canada and USA (extinct in Sweden). The species is globally stable (‘Least Concern’, IUCN Red List), but the subspecies of woodland caribou (Rangifer tarandus caribou) is threatened in North America. Schneider and colleagues’ 7 study encompasses ~ 3,000 individuals in 12 herds (75 to 450 individuals per herd), occupying ~ 100.000 km2 of conifer forest and peatland (3,000 to 19,000 km2 per herd). Two ecotypes are recognized regionally22, namely migratory mountain herds (mostly from mountains and foothills in west-central Alberta), and non-migratory boreal herds (mostly from peatlands in central and northern Alberta). The photo shows a group of caribous grazing on subalpine vegetation from Tonquin Valley, Jasper National Park (Alberta, Canada). Photo courtesy of Saakje Hazenberg.–

As conservation biology keeps incorporating management and economical principles from other disciplines, it stumbles with paradoxes such that investing on the most threatened components of biodiversity might in turn jeopardize the entire assets of biodiversity.

At the end of 2011, newspapers and TVs echoed an IUCN report cataloguing as ‘extinct’ or ‘near extinct’ several subspecies of rhinos in Asia and Africa. To many, such news might have invoked the topic: “how badly governments do to protect the environment”. However if, to avoid those extinctions, politicians had to deviate funds from other activities, what thoughts would come to the mind of workers whose salaries had to be frozen, school directors whose classroom-roof leakages could not be repaired (e.g., last winter at my niece’s school in Spain), colonels whose last acquisition of ultramodern tanks had to be delayed, or our city council’s department who had to cancel Sting’s next performance.

Thus, there are three unquestionable facts regarding species conservation:

1. the protection of species costs money;
2. governments and environmental organisations have limited budgets for a range of activities they deem necessary; and
3. our way of conserving nature is failing because, despite increasing public/private support and awareness, the rate of destruction of biodiversity is not decelerating^1,2.

One of the modern debates among conservationists pivots around how to use resources efficiently^3-6. Schneider and colleagues⁷ have dealt with this question for woodland caribou (Rangifer tarandus) in Canada. A total of 18 populations of this ungulate persist in the Canadian province of Alberta, all undergoing demographic declines due to mining extractions (oil, gas and bitumen), logging and wolf predation. The species is listed as ‘threatened’ regionally and nationally. The Alberta Caribou Recovery Plan (2004-2014) is attempting to protect all herds. Under such a framework, Schneider et al.⁷ predicted that woodland caribou would be regionally extirpated in less than a century.

Furthermore, they estimated the costs of making each herd viable (Fig. 1), with a triple revelation. To save all herds from extinction would need ~ CA$150,000 million (beyond the available budget). The most threatened herds are among the most expensive to protect (within present management approach). Some herds would be secured through modest investment for two decades. Overall, their study suggests that Alberta’s woodland caribou would be eligible for triage, i.e., at the subpopulation level⁸.

–Figure 1. Estimated budgets to protect 12 of the 18 woodland caribou herds in Alberta (Canada)7. In the graph, herds are ordered (left to right) from (current) increasing threat (estimated as time until herd size is < 10 individuals given current population size and decline rates). Bar height is proportional to the magnitude of investment needed to avoid population extirpation (bar tops show investment amounts in millions of Canadians dollars [M$], and investment periods in years). Conservation measures include forest restoration (bar subsection = M$), habitat protection with zero exploitation of natural resources (100xM$), and wolf control (M$). For instance, Cold Lake (CL) and Athabasca River East (ESAR) herds are among the most threatened populations and require considerable costs for 36 years; Richardson (RICH) and Athabasca River West (WSAR) herds could be recovered in 25-27 years at a relatively high price; and A la Peche (ALP) and Redrock-Prairie Creek (RRPC) herds would be viable in 7-21 years with minimal cost. The observed differences reflect contrasting fertility/survival rates, spatial distributions, and industrial developments across herds and habitat ranges. By applying principles of triage, managers would establish a sequence of herd-by-herd investment to maximize the total number of viable herds in the future. This is not to say that triage is infallibly objective, because it relies on heavy computation, numerous assumptions, and multiple predictors. Thus, Wasser et al.19 have used resource-selection models to show that wolves might target mainly deer to the east of Athabasca River where Schneider et al.7 considered wolf culling to alleviate predation on caribou; further caveats address assumptions and methods to calculate population growth rates20-22.–

‘Triage’ means to classify cases by order of treatment given finite resources⁹. This French concept originated in emergency medicine (e.g., during wars, environmental catastrophes, etc.), in situations where shortage of resources prevents everybody’s treatment, each wounded individual requires immediate care, and the probability of survival (according to lesion severity and therapy complexity) varies among individuals.

Let’s imagine that the war-wounded soldiers and civilians are caribou populations, or species sharing forests and savannas with rhinos, or habitats and countries for which WWF scrutinises its funding. Triage in medicine and conservation biology are similar in that both aim to maximise the number of survivors. Nevertheless, in a situation of emergency, medical triage would mean not treating a moribund individual in the first place if the resources at hand could compromise the survival of other individuals, whereas in conservation biology moribund populations/species/habitats often attract the majority of funding^10,11.

Those who defend the application of triage schemes in conservation biology argue that to protect all biodiversity is impossible, that prediction of management costs and protection success rates should determine what to conserve (e.g., ^12,13), and that relative evidence for different extinction/viability scenarios could motivate further funding from governments and sponsors¹⁴. Those who object to triage qualify it as defeatist and immoral because the sacrifice of some components of biodiversity is proposed as a conservation strategy, which could arm unscrupulous politicians and business people against investment to prevent extinctions (e.g., allowing eradication of large predators blamed for cattle kills), and because it ignores the science underlying conservation efforts that make the most progress (arguably) when confronted with imminent extinctions^15,16.

The ongoing controversy juggles ethical and financial matters. An alien visiting the Earth (and equipped with more common sense [“sound and prudent judgment based on a simple perception of the situation or facts”] than the human race) would find it astonishing that the countries which rule the world’s economy invest less on protecting the planet than on destroying it (armament), or searching for new planets (astronautics). Let alone the surmounting evidence that biodiversity and habitat losses ruin ecosystem services (pollination, fisheries, carbon sequestration, etc.) that are vital for human survival, and that well-planned conservation programs can yield nothing but outstanding revenues¹⁷

So the protection of (perhaps most of) all biodiversity is technically possible at a reasonable price (e.g., ¹⁸), but certainly sounds chimerical given the dominating political status quo of indefinite economic growth which, in practice, still externalizes the monetary value of biodiversity. In the short-term, environmental managers faced with limited resources already do practice triage routinely, even if implicitly and intuitively (like protecting what is most threatened). Therefore, the explicit incorporation of triage strategies in environmental policy  and management has the valuable virtue of converting conservation planning to a quantifiable (and potentially more objective) process.

Salvador Herrando-Pérez

–

References

1. Butchart, S. H. M. et al. Global biodiversity: indicators of recent declines. Science 328, 1164-1168, doi:10.1126/science.1187512 (2010)
2. Stokstad, E. Despite progress, biodiversity declines. Science 329, 1272-1273, doi:10.1126/science.329.5997.1272 (2010)
3. Parr, M. J. et al. Why we should aim for zero extinction. Trends Ecol Evol 24, 181-181, doi:10.1016/j.tree.2009.01.001 (2009)
4. Marris, E. What to let go. Nature 450, 152-155, doi:10.1038/450152a (2007)
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6. Bottrill, M. C. et al. Finite conservation funds mean triage is unavoidable. Trends Ecol Evol 24, 183-184, doi:10.1016/j.tree.2008.11.007 (2009)
7. Schneider, R. R., Hauer, G., Adarnowicz, W. L. & Boutin, S. Triage for conserving populations of threatened species: The case of woodland caribou in Alberta. Biol Conserv 143, 1603-1611, doi:10.1016/j.biocon.2010.04.002 (2010)
8. McDonald-Madden, E. V. E., Baxter, P. W. J. & Possingham, H. P. Subpopulation triage: how to allocate conservation effort among Populations. Conserv Biol 22, 656-665, doi:10.1111/j.1523-1739.2008.00918.x (2008)
9. Kennedy, K., Aghababian, R. V., Gans, L. & Lewis, C. P. Triage: Techniques and applications in decisionmaking. Ann Emerg Med 28, 136-144, doi:10.1016/s0196-0644(96)70053-7 (1996)
10. McIntyre, S., Barrett, G. W., Kitching, R. L. & Recher, H. F. Species triage – seeing beyond wounded rhinos. Conserv Biol 6, 604-606, doi:10.1046/j.1523-1739.1992.06040604.x (1992)
11. Wilson, H. B., Joseph, L. N., Moore, A. L. & Possingham, H. P. When should we save the most endangered species? Ecol Lett 14, 886-890, doi:10.1111/j.1461-0248.2011.01652.x (2011)
12. Ferraro, P. J. & Pattanayak, S. K. Money for nothing? A call for empirical evaluation of biodiversity conservation investments. PLoS Biol 4, 482-488, dpi:E105, doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0040105 (2006)
13. Wilson, K. A. et al. Conserving biodiversity efficiently: What to do, where, and when. PLoS Biol 5, 1850-1861, dpi:e223, doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0050223 (2007)
14. Bottrill, M. C. et al. Is conservation triage just smart decision making? Trends Ecol Evol 23, 649-654, doi:10.1016/j.tree.2008.07.007 (2008)
15. Noss, R. F. Conservation or convenience? Conserv Biol 10, 921-922, doi:10.1046/j.1523-1739.1996.10040921.x (1996)
16. Pimm, S. L. Against triage. Science 289, 2289, doi:10.1126/science.289.5488.2289 (2000)
17. Balmford, A. et al. Economic reasons for conserving wild nature. Science 297, 950-953, doi:10.1126/science.1073947 (2002)
18. James, A., Gaston, K. J. & Balmford, A. Can we afford to conserve biodiversity? BioScience 51, 43-52, doi:10.1641/0006-3568(2001)051[0043:cwatcb]2.0.co;2 (2001)
19. Wasser, S. K., Keim, J. L., Taper, M. L. & Lele, S. R. The influences of wolf predation, habitat loss, and human activity on caribou and moose in the Alberta oil sands. Front Ecol Environ 9, 546-551, doi:10.1890/100071 (2011)
20. Boutin, S. et al. Why are caribou declining in the oil sands? Front Ecol Environ 10, 65-67, doi:10.1890/12.wb.005 (2012)
21. Wasser, S. K., Keim, J. L., Taper, M. L. & Lele, S. R. To kill or not to kill – that is the question. Front Ecol Environ 10, 67-68, doi:10.1890/12.wb.006 (2012)
22. Sorensen, T. et al. Determining sustainable levels of cumulative effects for boreal caribou. J Wildl Manage 72, 900-905, doi:10.2193/2007-079 (2008)

Before I had a good grasp of extinction dynamics, I wouldn’t have attributed much import to the role of roads in conservation. I mean, really, a little road here and there (ok, even a major motorway) couldn’t possibly be a problem? It’s mostly habitat destruction itself, right?

Not exactly. With our work on extinction synergies, I eventually came to realise that roads are some of the first portals to the devastation to come.

Figure 1. (A) A large population within unmodified, contiguous habitat fluctuates near full carrying capacity (K). (B) When habitat is reduced (e.g. 50% area loss), total abundance declines accordingly. (C) All remaining fragmented subpopulations have limited connectivity, implying much greater extinction risk than that predicted for the same habitat loss in less fragmented landscapes.

It sort of works like this (see Fig. 1 from our paper in Trends in Ecology and Evolution). Instead of destroying habitats (forests, reefs, grasslands, savannas, etc.) systematically (i.e., in large, contiguous blocks – Fig. 1B), we tend to fragment landscapes into many disconnected patches (Fig 1C). The vehicle by which we do this in terrestrial (especially forest) ecosystems is with roads connecting the matrix. As in turns out, instead of reducing biodiversity by the proportion of primary habitat lost (in this case, by 50 %), the multi-patch type of fragmentation leads to a much larger proportional biodiversity loss. This is because of the interactive effects of piecemeal fragmentation: roads between patches facilitate human and other predator access to areas previously isolated, micro-climatic changes resulting from a high proportion of ‘edge’ habitats can alter suitability, and invasive species have many more pathways by which they can spread.

But the role of roads in extinctions has long been recognised. I’m probably most familiar with Bill Laurance‘s work on Amazonian roads being responsible for massive fragmentation in the tropics. It also so happens that there’s an entire field of ‘road ecology research’ that probably didn’t even register on most conservation radars prior to the last few decades.

The reason I’m raising this topic now is that I’ve just stumbled across an interesting online paper in Trends in Ecology and Evolution by Lesbarrères¹ & Fahrig entitled Measures to reduce population fragmentation by roads: what has worked and how do we know? And these Canadians should know a thing or two about road-driven habitat fragmentation – Canada has now some of the most fragmented portions of the boreal forest, with < 40 % of its area considered ‘contiguous’ (i.e., not bisected by roads).

The authors talk about so-called ‘ecopassages’, which have been put in place in many road developments to mitigate wildlife ‘conflict’, such as crossing structures (bridges, underpasses, etc.) that are supposed to link habitats bisected by roads too difficult to cross safely for most species. Their main point is, however, that most of these lack any real scientific rigour in either testing their effects (do they actually work?), or even planning them from the outset. The authors go on to give a detailed description about how road developments should design transportation networks with wildlife connectivity in mind prior to building, and that rigorous scientific protocols should be developed to test their effectiveness. Fair cop.

However true these pleas and recommendations are, I still think the paper misses the main point (and it has a decidedly North American bias) – why do we need so many roads in the first place? Indeed, in most places in the world now, finding primary habitats is difficult enough, so surely we can be a bit cleverer about putting fewer roads in places where they are not strictly needed?

The point is that roads are generally very bad, not just because they impede connectivity, but because they open up a Pandora’s box of conservation nightmares still to come. Still, forcing road-network planners to consider these issues pre- and post-development can only do good.

CJA Bradshaw

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¹Interesting to note that this surname is remarkably close to ‘les barrières’ in French, meaning ‘barriers’ or ‘fences’. How appropriate!

Yet the events of 01 April 2012 are real*. Humans suddenly became intelligent.

In an unprecedented emergency UN session this morning, all the world’s countries pledged to an immediate wind-down of the fossil-fuel economy and promised to invest in a rational combination of nuclear and renewable energy sources. Some experts believe the pledge would see a carbon-neutral planet by 2020.

Additionally, the session saw a world-wide pledge to halt all deforestation by 2013, with intensive reforestation programmes implemented immediately.

Family planning would be embraced worldwide, with a concerted effort to see the human population plateau by 2070, and begin declining to a stable 2 billion by 2300.

Further, ecosystem services, including inter alia global-scale carbon taxes, water trading, pollination valuation and nutrient cycling, are to be set up immediately within standard commodities trading.

Perhaps most stunning of all was the complete rejection of economic growth for a sustainable ‘steady-state‘ model.

Some well-known politicians and celebrities had almost nothing to say, for a change.

My baker, a brilliant artisan, yet nearly unknown to most of the planet, had one of the most insightful comments regarding today’s events:

“Well, there you go. And I thought humanity was f*&k#d”.

CJA Bradshaw

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*Not

In yet another move to expose and shame the greedy developers behind another massive (and superlatively greenwashed) oil palm development in the tropics (see our previous Open Letter), Bill Laurance and Josh Linder have organised another Open Letter from some of the world’s top conservation scientists (again, I count myself fortunate to be included in that group) denouncing the project. The press release is below, followed by the letter itself:

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Eleven of the world’s top scientists have produced an open letter to the public urging the Cameroon government to stop a giant oil palm plantation that they say will threaten some of Africa’s most important protected areas.

The project, sponsored by a subsidiary of U.S. agribusiness giant Herakles Farms in collaboration with a U.S. nonprofit organization, All for Africa, would span 70,000 hectares (154,000 acres), an area nearly the size of New York City.

“It’s simply frightening in scope,” said Thomas Struhsaker, a leading expert on African primates and rainforest ecology at Duke University in North Carolina, USA, who has worked in the region for nearly a half-century.

The project would destroy a critical forested area that currently links five national parks or protected areas in Cameroon, say the scientists.

“These forests are vital for wildlife, including the African elephant, chimpanzee and drill, all threatened or endangered species,” said anthropologist Joshua Linder of James Madison University in Virginia, USA, who has helped coordinate the protest. “These animals rely on the forests that would be destroyed to survive and move among the parks.”

“This area is a biodiversity hotspot, some of the world’s most biologically important real estate,” said tropical ecologist William Laurance of James Cook University in Australia, who studies threats to wildlife in the Congo Basin.

“There’s no way a project like this would be allowed in most countries, because the price for biodiversity is just too high,” said Laurance.

The project has been promoted in Cameroon as environmentally sustainable, but the scientists heatedly disagree. “Those promoting this project are misleading everyone—especially the people and government of Cameroon,” said Linder. “They claim the forests they want to clear are mostly logged and degraded, but we’ve shown clearly that they include lots of tall, dense forest that’s vital for wildlife and nature conservation.”

“You can’t just cut the heart out of this area and then expect everything to be fine,” said Struhsaker. “If this project proceeds the parks will become islands, surrounded by a hostile sea of oil palm.”

“In addition to clearing a huge area of forest, a project like this will attract thousands of immigrants and increase demand for bushmeat hunting,” said Linder. “For many species that will be the death knell.”

Co-signers of the Open Letter include scientists at leading universities in the USA, Australia, Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands.

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An Open Letter about the Environmental and Social Impacts of a Massive Oil Palm Development in Cameroon

To whom it may concern:

As established scientists with leading academic and research institutions around the world, we would like to express deep concerns about a proposed, massive oil palm development in Cameroon, Africa.

SG Sustainable Oils Cameroon, a subsidiary of American agribusiness corporation Herakles Farms, in collaboration with the American non-profit All for Africa, are planning a 70,000-hectare oil palm plantation in southwestern Cameroon. Having examined this project in detail, we question many of the claims and practices of the project proponents, especially their insistence that the “plantations will follow the highest environmental and social standards, complying fully with Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil [CJAB note: see our paper on the RSPO] Principles & Criteria.”¹ We believe that this plantation violates important RSPO rules and standards, and will have serious negative impacts on the biodiversity and people of southwestern Cameroon. Specifically, we assert that:

• The area proposed for the plantation, the Cross-Sanaga forest, is of exceptional ecological richness and diversity². This region, which occurs along the Cameroon-Nigeria border, has been recognized as a global center of biodiversity by the World Wide Fund for Nature³ and Conservation International⁴. Many groups of diverse and endemic species, such as primates, amphibians, birds, butterflies, and vascular plants⁵, would be imperilled by the vast plantation project.
• The proposed plantation is located within an ecologically vital area—one of the largest surviving tracts of lowland forest in the Gulf of Guinea. Moreover, the plantation would encompass virtually the entire area linking five crucial protected areas in the region: Korup National Park, Bakossi National Park, Banyang Mbo Wildlife Sanctuary, Nta Ali Forest Reserve and Rumpi Hills Forest Reserve. Its development would fragment the regional landscape and completely isolate the surrounding protected areas. Management plans for Korup National Park⁶ and Nta Ali Reserve⁷ have indicated that many animals, such as the threatened African elephant and chimpanzee and the endangered drill, actively use the proposed plantation area to forage and move among these protected areas.
• The project proponents have allegedly abused or violated Cameroon law⁸ by clearing forest and developing oil palm nurseries between January and June 2011, prior to submitting an Environmental and Social Impact Assessment to the Cameroon Government or obtaining a required Certificate of Environmental Conformity. Additionally, a Cameroon nongovernmental organization filed a motion in Cameroon courts to halt the proponents from continuing to remove forest and expanding their oil palm nurseries⁹. The courts sided with the plaintiff and ordered an immediate halt to the proponent’s illegal activities. The proponents have ignored this injunction, which remains in effect today, and are continuing to clear native forest and develop their nurseries.
• In February 2012 another Cameroon nongovernmental organization published a detailed critique of the proponent’s proposed plantation in February 2012 and presented the report in a press conference in Cameroon¹⁰. It cites many legal problems and ultimately claims that the establishment convention signed between the proponents and the Cameroon government violates Cameroon and international law.
• The proponents have clearly violated the guidelines of the RSPO, of which they are active members. They failed to submit a High Conservation Value Forest assessment to the RSPO prior to commencing clearing forest between January and June 2011, as evidenced by ground and aerial images taken of the nursery sites.
• The proposed plantation overlaps with the buffer zone around Bakossi National Park. According to the proponent’s sustainability guide¹¹, “The company has set aside 3-kilometre buffer zones between the national parks and the area to be developed”. However, maps in their Environmental and Social Impact Assessment indicate only a 100 metre-wide buffer zone adjacent to Bakossi National Park.
• The proponents have seriously misrepresented the state of the forests within their proposed plantation area and have misled the public into believing it unsuitable for most wildlife species. They claim that the “vast majority of the concession is secondary and degraded forest”¹² and that the concession area was selected because it was located on “land that had been previously logged.”¹³ According to their own maps¹⁴, however, the vast majority of the Mundemba-Toko sector of the concession has never been logged. Based on 2008 satellite images, 56 % of the proposed concession area in Ndian Division is dense native forest¹⁵. Furthermore, satellite images reveal that 71 % of the proposed oil palm concession has at least 70 % forest cover, a similar proportion to that of Korup National Park. Aerial photos of the Talangaye nursery taken in February 2012 show that even in the previously selectively logged areas, the surrounding forest is dense with a tall canopy.
• The proposed plantation, which foresees hiring 7000-8000 workers, will lead to substantial immigration into the plantation area. This will significantly increase demands for bushmeat, leading to increased hunting pressure in the surrounding protected areas. One of the most critical threats to biodiversity from large-scale development projects, such as the proposed plantation, is the increased bushmeat hunting in surrounding areas stemming from the influx of migrant workers^16,17,18. The proponents have very little experience working in west and central Africa and have failed to provide a sufficient mitigation plan to control the hunting, consumption, and trade of illegal bushmeat within their concession.
• The proponents’ Environmental and Social Impact Assessment, including their analysis of High Conservation Value Forest, were poorly conducted and failed to evaluate adequately the flora and fauna of the proposed plantation area and the ecological and social impact of the plantation. The proponents used inadequate sampling techniques, surveying plants and animals for only 22 days during the rainy season, when it is difficult to detect animals. They surveyed less than 0.003 % of the concession area, an area far too small to provide a representative sample. Therefore, their conclusions reached regarding the state of the forest or the putative absence of threatened plant or animal species cannot be supported. Cameroonian and international scientists have sent letters to the Cameroon government detailing these and other concerns about the plantation and the problems with its Environmental and Social Impact Assessment.
• The nonprofit group All for Africa has seriously misled the public about the environmental benefits of the project. They have claimed that the oil palm plantation would help mitigate the effects of climate change by absorbing carbon dioxide. All for Africa failed to tell their donors that the project would remove large expanses of dense, high-canopy forest to plant oil palms, resulting in substantial carbon dioxide and particulate emissions. Oil palm plantations can only have a benefit in slowing climate change if they do not promote deforestation, especially in tropical regions where forests store large quantities of carbon¹⁹.
• The proponents have ignored a growing local opposition to their project. Letters from villages and local cultural organizations, representing hundreds to thousands of individuals, have decried the activities of the proponents. They cite an alarming lack of transparency; a lack of free, prior, and informed consent of local communities; the illegal demarcation and clearing of land; and the biological, economic, and cultural importance of the forests as reasons for opposing the proposed project.

Oil palm development is now one of the major threats to biodiversity in Southeast Asia and is quickly emerging as a threat in the Amazon and tropical Africa^20,21. We do not dispute that when oil palm plantations are established on previously deforested or abandoned lands and do not degrade nearby biologically rich areas, their environmental costs can be acceptable. The project proponents, however, have located their concession in the midst of a biodiversity hotspot on land that buffers and provides vital support functions to Korup and Bakossi National Parks, Rumpi Hills Forest Reserve, and Banyang Mbo Wildlife Sanctuary.

We have provided strong evidence that the project proponents have violated guidelines of the RSPO, skirted or allegedly violated Cameroonian law, and failed to take into account strong local opposition to their project. They also have distorted or misrepresented information about their proposed plantation and its impact on regional biodiversity and people. As such, we respectfully urge the RSPO to reject the proponents’ request for certification.

If the proponents fail effectively to address our concerns and comply with RSPO principles and criteria, we ask that the proponents be removed as an active RSPO member. In our view as leading environmental and social scientists and development experts, the RSPO should use the proponents’ case to send a clear message to agribusiness companies seeking to develop RSPO-certified oil palm plantations in Africa – that gross violations of RSPO guidelines and national and international laws will not be tolerated. Furthermore, we urge the Government of Cameroon to void the proponents’ Environmental and Social Impact Assessment and prohibit their further activities in Cameroon until these pressing concerns are resolved.

Thank you for your attention to our considered requests and recommendations.

Sincerely,

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References

1. “Herakles Farms Develops Sustainable Palm Oil Plantations in Cameroon and Ghana,” Press Release, Herakles Farms, 15 June, 2011.
2. Oates, J.F., Bergl, R.A., Linder, J.M., 2004. Africa’s Gulf of Guinea Forests: Biodiversity Patterns and Conservation Priorities. Advances in Applied Biodiversity Science, number 6. Conservation International, Washington D.C.
3. URL
4. URL
5. Bergl, R.A., Oates, J.F., and Fotso, R. 2007. Distribution and protected area coverage of endemic taxa in West Africa’s Biafran forests and highlands. Biological Conservation 134: 195-208.
6. MINEF. 2003. A Management Plan for Korup National Park and Its Peripheral Zone. Government of Cameroon.
7. MINEF. 2001. Management Plan for Nta-Ali Forest Reserve.
8. Procedures for the Conduct and Approval of Environmental Impact Assessments and Environmental Audits, Cameroon Ministry of Environment and Protection of Nature, April 2010.
9. High Court of Ndian Division, Mundemba, Ruling No. HCN/003/2011/1M/2011.
10. Nguiffo, S. and Schwartz, B. 2012. Herakles’ 13th Labour? A Study of SGSOC’s Land Concession in South-west Cameroon. Center for the Environment and Development.
11. Herakles Farms Sustainability Guide: Best Practices for Sustainable Oil Palm Cultivation and Palm Oil Processing, 2012.
12. Summary Report of ESIA and HCV Assessments SG Sustainable Oils Cameroon: Nguti, Mundemba & Toko Subdivisions Republic of Cameroon.
13. SG Sustainable Oils Environmental Social Impact Assessment. Submitted by H&B Consulting, August 2011.
14. SG Sustainable Oils Environmental Social Impact Assessment. Submitted by H&B Consulting, August 2011.
15. Letter from the PSMNR-SWR co-coordinator to SG Sustainable Oils, 27 September 2010.
16. Noss, A.J. 1997. Challenges to nature conservation with community development in central African forests. Oryx 31: 180-188.
17. Oates, J.F. 1999. Myth and Reality in the Rain Forest: How conservation Strategies are Failing in West Africa. University of California Press, Berkeley.
18. Poulsen, J.R., Clark, C.J., Mavah, G., Elkan, P.W. 2009. Bushmeat supply and consumption in a tropical logging concession in northern Congo. Conservation Biology 23: 1597-1608.
19. Gibbs, H.K. et al. 2008. Carbon payback times for crop-based biofuel expansion in the tropics: the effects of changing yield and technology. Environmental Research Letters 3:34001.
20. Butler, R.A. and Laurance, W.F. 2009. Is oil palm the next emerging threat to the Amazon? Tropical Conservation Science 2: 1-10.
21. Wilcove, D.S. and Koh, L.P. 2010. Addressing the threats to biodiversity from oil-palm agriculture. Biodiversity and Conservation 19: 999-1007.

I’m sure that most of my readers will have come across the term ‘REDD‘ (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation), which is the clever idea of trading carbon credits to keep forests intact. As we know, living forests can suck up a lot of carbon from the atmosphere (remember your high school biology lesson on photosynthesis? Carbon dioxide in. Oxygen out), even though climate change is threatening this invaluable ecosystem service. So the idea of paying a nation (usual a developing country) to protect its forests in exchange for carbon pollution offsets can potentially save two birds with one feeder – reducing overall emissions by keeping the trees alive, and ensuring a lot of associated biodiversity gets caught up in the conservation process.

The problem with REDD though is that it’s a helluva thing to bank on given a few niggly problems essentially revolving around trust. Ah yes, the bugbear of any business transaction. As the carbon credit ‘buyer’ (the company/nation/individual who wishes to offset its carbon output by ‘buying’ the carbon uptake services provided by the intact forest), you’d want to make damn sure that all the money you spend to offset your carbon actually does just that, and that it doesn’t just end up in the hands of some corrupt official, or even worse, used to generate industry that results in even higher emissions! As the buyer, of course you want to entice investors to give you lots of money, and if you bugger up the transaction (by losing the resource you are providing), you’re not likely to have any more investors coming knocking on your door.

Enter the unholy trinity of leakage, permanence and additionality.

This horrible jargon essentially describes the REDD investment problem:

1. LEAKAGE is the unanticipated increase in emissions outside an avoided-deforestation (REDD) project’s accounting boundary. In other words, the original forest area that was targeted for protection under the agreement remains intact, but the deforestation that would have otherwise occurred merely gets shifted to an adjacent forest, so the net effect is the same (i.e., no emissions reduction).
2. PERMANENCE is ensuring that your investment (i.e., the forest) remains intact for a sufficient period into the future to account for the carbon being offset by the buyer.
3. ADDITIONALITY is a more esoteric concept which is basically an opaque way of describing ‘what would have happened anyway’. In other words, if a particular area of forest was never targeted for deforestation, then being paid to maintain it is a false investment because the service was never in any real danger.

Ok. Imagine you’re a legislator and you have to ensure that both buyer and seller don’t do something dodgy and fall into one or all of the leakage, permanence or additionality pitfalls. Sounds like a terrible, and possibly impossible, job. How do you police it? How long is ‘permanent’? How do you prove ‘what would have happened anyway’?

So you can imagine this unholy trinity has crashed rather a lot of proposed REDD projects, and even killed off ones that had been underway for some time. Like communism, it’s a great idea, but REDD is nearly impossible to make work in the real world for many of the same reasons communism fails – human greed and short-sightedness.

Enter one biodiversity-carbon trader (Penny van Ooosterzee), one ecological economist (James Blignaut) and one conservation ecologist (me) to fix the problem. I am proud to introduce the very fresh, new paper called ‘iREDD hedges against avoided deforestation’s unholy trinity of leakage, permanence and additionality’ soon to appear as an accepted article on the Conservation Letters website. I am particularly proud of this paper because it provides some tangible, real-world and economic ways forward for solving another problem in the biodiversity-conservation sphere. It’s also my first real delve into ecological economics (thanks, James).

So, Penny really came up with the idea of exposing the sometimes ridiculous restraints imposed by the unholy trinity, suggesting that in many places, leakage at least can work in the opposite direction – that is, protection becomes contagious and instead of just shifting the deforestation activity elsewhere, more people want more forest protected after a successful REDD programme is implemented. Our point here is that imposing such pie-in-the-sky constraints to avoid leakage and ensure permanence and additionality is actually doing more harm than good because so many programmes fail even to get started.

The second half of the paper though is really the crux of this post, and the most elegant (he states humbly) part of the proposed system. ‘iREDD’ essentially stands for ‘insurance-based’ REDD. James and I came up with the idea while sharing a berth in a Yangtze River cruise ship during a rather novel World Health Organization workshop.

iREDD basically works like this. Prior to any money changing hands, the buyer and seller enlist the services of an insurance broker to set a premium based on an a priori assessment of any problems that might be associated with leakage, permanence and additionality. Here, a Likert scale is used to assess the proposal based on five criteria:

1. governance structures – Are the institutions of good repute? Do they have a good business history?
2. management plans – Are the plans to manage the REDD forest of sufficient detail to account for unforeseen events?
3. project liquidity – Do the institutions involved have enough cash flow to make sure they can meet the objectives of the management plan?
4. acceptance – Is the project acceptable to the communities in the region? Do other groups endorse it?
5. political buy-­in – Does the project fall within the long-term plan of the relevant government agencies? Does it conflict with any?

Once the ranking has been made, then a certain component of the invested cash is used to purchase an insurance policy that scales to the identified (and agreed-upon) risk. If the seller (i.e., the recipients of the funds and managers of the forest) fail to keep the forest intact, or are hit by devastating forest fires or political unrest, then the buyer receives at least part of the premium as an insurance pay-out. If, however, the sellers are true to their word (contractual obligations), the premium and its interest are paid to them in addition to the monies originally invested.

In other words, everyone wins. If the sellers fail, then the buyer is compensated and can invest elsewhere. If the sellers do well, they get more money. Most importantly, it increases the probability that atmospheric carbon will be reduced (or at least, the rate of emissions slowed) and the forest’s associated biodiversity will remain.

iREDD – remember that name. If you desire a pre-print copy of paper before it comes out online, please use the form here (bottom of page) to request one.

CJA Bradshaw