Wildfires transform forests into mosaics of vegetation. What, where, and which plants thrive depends on when and how severely a fire affects different areas of a forest. Such heterogeneity in the landscape is essential for animal species that benefit from fire like woodpeckers.
The black-backed woodpecker (Picoides arcticus) lives in the coniferous forests of North America’s boreal-Mediterranean region. Thanks to a powerful and sharp bill, this bird can excavate nests inside the trunks of (mainly dead) trees, and those cavities will be re-used later by many species of birds, mammals, and invertebrates in fire-prone landscapes (22). The images show a male with the characteristic black plumage of his back that serves as camouflage against the dark bark of a dead tree three years after a wildfire in Montana (USA). Being omnivores, the diet of this bird largely relies on the larvae of woodboring coleoptera like jewell and longhorn beetles. These insects are abundant post-fire, the champion being the fire beetle (Melanophila spp.). The thorax of fire beetles is equipped with infrared-light receptors that can detect a wildfire from tens of kilometres away (23). These fascinating little beasts are the first to arrive at a burned forest and, of course, woodpeckers follow soon after. The preference of the blackbacked woodpecker for burned forests and their cryptic feathers and pyrophilic diet reflect a long evolutionary history in response to fires. Courtesy of Richard Hutto.
Anyone raised in rural areas will have vivid recollections of wildfires: the thick, ashy smell, the overcast sky on a sunny day, and the purring of aerial firefighters dropping water from their hanging tanks. The reality is that wildfires are natural events that shape biodiversity and ecosystem function (1) — to the extent that fire is intimately linked to the appearance and evolution of terrestrial plants (2). Since the Palaeolithic, our own species has used fire at will, to cook, hunt, melt metals, open cropland or paths, or tell stories in front of a hearth (3).
Where there are regular wildfires (fire-prone ecosystems), different areas of the landscape burn in different seasons and years under different weather patterns. Therefore, each region has a unique fire biography in terms of how frequently, how much, and how long ago wildfires occurred. All those factors interact will one another and with topography.
Thanks to the collaborative and evidence-driven foresight of my colleagues at PIRSA Biosecurity and Landscape Boards, I was recently involved in more research examining the most efficient, cost-effective, and humane ways to cull feral dear in South Australia. The resulting paper is now in review in NeoBiota, but we have also posted a pre-print of the article.
Feral deer are a real problem in Australia, and South Australia is no exception. With six species of feral deer in the country already (fallowDama dama, redCervus elaphus, hogAxis porcinus, chitalA. axis), rusaC. timorensis, and sambarRusa unicolor deer), fallow deer are the most abundant and widespread. These species are responsible for severe damage to native plants, competition with native animals, economic losses to primary industries (crops, pastures, horticulture, plantations), and human safety risks from vehicle collisions. Feral deer are also reservoirs and vectors of endemic animal diseases and have the potential to transmit exotic animal diseases such as foot-and-mouth. If left uncontrolled, within 30 years the economic impacts of feral deer could reach billions of dollars annually.
We’ve just published a paper in PLOS ONE showing high infant mortality rates are contributing to an incessant rise of the global human population, which supports arguments for greater access to contraception and family planning in low- and middle-income nations.
In the first study of its kind, we provide a compelling argument that the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals for reducing infant mortality can be accelerated by increasing access to family planning.
Although it sounds counterintuitive, higher baby death rates are linked to higher population growth because the more babies a women loses, the more children she is likely to have. Family planning, including access to quality contraception, enables women to plan pregnancies better and therefore reduce infant mortality to curb the so-called ‘replacement’, or ‘insurance’ effect.
We evaluated six conditions thought to influence a woman’s fertility — availability of family planning, quality of family planning, education, religion, mortality, and socio-economic conditions, across 64 low- to middle-income countries.
Not exactly a conservation topic, I know, but it does provide insights into how the ancestors of Indigenous Australians adapted to and thrived in a new and sometimes harsh landscape. The more I study elements of human ecology in deep time, the more awed I become at the frankly amazing capacity of First Peoples.
We combined new models of demography and wayfinding based on geographic inference to show the scale of the challenges faced by the ancestors of Indigenous people making their mass migration across the supercontinent more than 60,000 years ago.
The ancestors of Aboriginal people likely first entered the continent 75,000–50,000 years ago from what is today the island of Timor, followed by later migrations through the western regions of New Guinea.
This pattern led to a rapid expansion both southward toward the Great Australian Bight, and northward from the Kimberley region to settle all parts of New Guinea and, later, the southwest and southeast of Australia.
We did this research under the auspices of the ARCCentre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage (CABAH) and including international experts in Australia and the United States to investigate the most likely pathways and the timeframe needed to reach population sizes able to withstand the rigours of their new environment.
By combining two existing models predicting the routes these First Peoples took – ‘superhighways’ – and the demographic structure of these first populations, we were able to estimate the time for continental saturation more precisely. The new research has just been published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews.
Based on detailed reconstructions of the topography of the ancient continent and models of past climate, we developed a virtual continent and programmed populations to survive in and move successfully through their new territory.
Navigating by following landscape features like mountains and hills and knowing where to find water led to successful navigation strategies. The First Peoples of Australia soon passed along cultural knowledge to subsequent generations facilitating the peopling of the whole continent.
Each organism has a limit of tolerance to cold and hot temperatures. So, the closer it lives to those limits, the higher the chances of experiencing thermal stress and potentially dying. In our recent paper, we revise gaps in the knowledge of tolerance to high temperatures in cold-blooded animals (ectotherms), a diverse group mostly including amphibians and reptiles (> 16,000 species), fish (> 34,000 species), and invertebrates (> 1,200,000 species).
As a scientist, little is more self-realising than to write and publish a conceptual paper that frames the findings of your own previous applied-research papers. This is the case with an opinion piece we have just published in Basic and Applied Ecology1 — 10 years, 4 research papers2-5 [see related blog posts here, here, here and here], and 1 popular-science article6 after I joined the Department of Biogeography and Global Change (Spanish National Research Council) to study the thermal physiology of Iberian lizards under the supervision of Miguel Araújo and David Vieites.
Iberian lizards for which heat tolerance is known (varying from 40 to 45 °C)
[left, top to bottom] Iberian emerald lizard (Lacerta schreiberi, from Alameda del Valle/Madrid) and Geniez’s wall lizard (Podarcis virescens, Fuertescusa/Cuenca), and [right, top to bottom] Algerian sand racer (Psammodromus algirus, Navacerrada/Madrid), Andalusian wall lizard (Podarcis vaucheri, La Barrosa/Cádiz), Valverde’s lizard (Algyroides marchi, Riópar/Albacete), and Cyren’s rock lizard (Iberolacerta cyreni, Valdesquí/Madrid). Heat-tolerance data deposited here and used to evaluate instraspecific variation of heat tolerance3,4. Photos: Salvador Herrando-Pérez.
In our new paper, we examine how much we know and what areas of research require further development to advance our understanding of how and why the tolerance of ectotherm fauna to high environmental temperature (‘heat tolerance’ hereafter) varies within and across the Earth’s biomes. We focus on data gaps using the global database GlobTherm as a reference template (see Box 1 below).
Our three main tenets
1. Population versus species data: Most large-scale ecophysiological research is based on modelling one measurement of heat tolerance per species (typically representing one population and/or physiological assay) over hundreds to thousands of species covering broad geographical, phylogenetic, and climatic gradients.
But there is ample evidence that heat tolerance changes a lot among populations occupying different areas of the distribution of a species, and such variation must be taken into account to improve our predictions of how species might respond to environmental change and face extinction.
The Faculty for Mathematics and Natural Sciences of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (HU Berlin), Geography Department, has an open position for a tenure-track professorship in Conservation and Development.
Starting as soon as possible. This is a Junior Professorship (W1 level, 100%) with a tenure track to a permanent professorship (W2 level, 100%). To verify whether the individual performance meets the requirements for permanent employment, an evaluation process will be opened not later than four years of the Junior Professorship. Tenure track professors at the HU Berlin are expected to do research and teaching, as well as to be active in university administration, in the promotion of young scientists, and in acquiring leadership and management skills. The concrete requirements out of the framework catalogue will be specified in the course of the appointment process.
We seek candidates with an outstanding research record in biodiversity conservation and sustainable development, with experience in working in the Global South. Successful candidates are rooted in conservation science and must have a doctoral degree in conservation science, development geography, environmental science, political ecology or related fields. We expect a demonstrated ability to work interdisciplinary, across the social and natural sciences to understand conservation challenges and and develop solutions.
We seek individuals with the vision, leadership and enthusiasm to build an internationally recognised research program. We expect collaboration with other research groups at the department, at HU Berlin and beyond, and a commitment to promoting a positive, diverse, and inclusive institutional culture. Experience in translating conservation science into action and/or work at the science/policy interface are beneficial.
We offer a tenure-track position in an international, young and vibrant department with an excellent scientific and education track record. The successful candidate will join an interdisciplinary group of faculty focused on human-environment relations, global change, and sustainability.
The salary will be according to W1 level, and after successful tenure evaluation W2 level. Employment at HU Berlin offers all benefits of the German public service system, including health insurance, an attractive pension plan, and social benefits.
Flooding in the Murray-Darling Basin is creating ideal breeding conditions for many native species that have evolved to take advantage of temporary flood conditions. Led by PhD candidate Rupert Mathwin, our team developed virtual models of the Murray River to reveal a crucial link between natural flooding and the extinction risk of endangered southern bell frogs (Litoria raniformis; also known as growling grass frogs).
Southern bell frogs are one of Australia’s 100 Priority Threatened Species. This endangered frog breeds during spring and summer when water levels increase in their wetlands. However, the natural flooding patterns in Australia’s largest river system have been negatively impacted by expansive river regulation that some years, sees up to 60% of river water extracted for human use.
Our latest paper describes how we built computer simulations of Murray-Darling Basin wetlands filled with simulated southern bell frogs. By changing the simulation from natural to regulated conditions, we showed that modern conditions dramatically increase the extinction risk of these beloved frogs.
The data clearly indicate that successive dry years raise the probability of local extinction, and these effects are strongest in smaller wetlands. Larger wetlands and those with more frequent inundation are less prone to these effects, although they are not immune to them entirely. The models present a warning — we have greatly modified the way the river behaves, and the modern river cannot support the long-term survival of southern bell frogs.’
Following my annual tradition, I present the retrospective list of the ‘top’ 20 influential papers of 2022 as assessed by experts in Faculty Opinions(formerly known as F1000). These are in no particular order. See previous years’ lists here: 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, and 2013.
Climate change is one of the main drivers of species loss globally. We know more plants and animals will die as heatwaves, bushfires, droughts and other natural disasters worsen.
But to date, science has vastly underestimated the true toll climate change and habitat destruction will have on biodiversity. That’s because it has largely neglected to consider the extent of “co-extinctions”: when species go extinct because other species on which they depend die out.
Our new research shows 10% of land animals could disappear from particular geographic areas by 2050, and almost 30% by 2100. This is more than double previous predictions. It means children born today who live to their 70s will witness literally thousands of animals disappear in their lifetime, from lizards and frogs to iconic mammals such as elephants and koalas.
But if we manage to dramatically reduce carbon emissions globally, we could save thousands of species from local extinction this century alone.
Ravages of drought will only worsen in coming decades. CJA Bradshaw
An extinction crisis unfolding
Every species depends on others in some way. So when a species dies out, the repercussions can ripple through an ecosystem.
For example, consider what happens when a species goes extinct due to a disturbance such as habitat loss. This is known as a “primary” extinction. It can then mean a predator loses its prey, a parasite loses its host or a flowering plant loses its pollinators.
A real-life example of a co-extinction that could occur soon is the potential loss of the critically endangered mountain pygmy possum (Burramys parvus) in Australia. Drought, habitat loss, and other pressures have caused the rapid decline of its primary prey, the bogong moth (Agrotis infusa).
My definition of a ‘lab’ is simply a group of people who do the science in question — and people are a varied bunch, indeed. But I wager that most scientists would not necessarily give much dedicated thought to the diversity of the people in their lab, and instead probably focus more on obtaining the most qualified and cleverest people for the jobs that need doing.
For example, I have yet to meet an overtly racist, sexist, or homophobic scientist involved actively in research today (although unfortunately, I am sure some do still exist), so I doubt that lab heads consciously avoid certain types of people when hiring or taking on new students as they once did. The problem here is not that scientists tend to exclude certain types of people deliberately based on negative stereotypes; rather, it concerns more the subconscious biases that might lurk within, and about which unfortunately most of us are blissfully unaware. But all scientists must be aware of, and seek to address, their hidden biases.
It is time to place my cards on the table: I am a middle-aged, Caucasian, male scientist who has lived in socially inclusive and economically fortunate countries his entire life. As such, I am the quintessential golden child of scientific opportunity, and I am therefore also one of the biggest impediments to human diversity in science. I am not able to change my status per se; however, I can change how I perceive, acknowledge, and act to address my biases.
The earlier scientists recognise these challenges in their career, the more effective they will be.
I acknowledge that as a man, I am already on thin ice discussing gender inequality in science today, for it is a massive topic that many, far more qualified people are tackling. But being of the male flavour means that I have to, like an alcoholic, admit that I have a problem, and then take steps to resolve that problem. After all, privilege is generally invisible to those who have it. If you are a male scientist reading this now, then my discussion is most pertinent to you. If you are female, then perhaps you can use some of these pointers to educate your male colleagues and students.
There is now ample evidence that science as a discipline is just as biased against women as most other sectors of professional employment, even though things have improved since the bad old days of scientific old-boys’ clubs. Journals tend to appoint more men than women on their editorial boards, and that editors display what is known as homophily when selecting reviewers for manuscripts: the tendency to select reviewers of the same gender as themselves.
Likewise, experimental evidence demonstrates that scientists in general rate male-authored science writing higher than female-authored works, and that academic scientists tend to favour male applicants over females for student positions. In the United Kingdom, as I suspect is more or less the case almost everywhere else, female academics in science, engineering, and mathematics also tend to have more administrative duties, and hence, less time to do research; they also have fewer opportunities for career development and training, as well as earning a lower salary, holding fewer senior roles, and being less likely to be granted permanent positions.
The conservation, environment, and sustainability literature is rife with the term ‘collapse’, applied to concepts as diverse as species extinction to the complete breakdown of civilisation. I have also struggled with its various meanings and implications, so I’m going to attempt to provide some clarity on collapse for my own and hopefully some others’ benefit.
From a strictly ecological perspective, ‘collapse’ could be described in the following (paraphrased) ways:
abrupt transition of one ecosystem state to another, usually invoking the idea that something has declined in the process (species richness, beta diversity, functional diversity, trophic network connectance, trait volume, production, etc.);
But there is still nor formal definition of ‘collapse’ in ecology, as identified by several researchers (Keith et al. 2013; Boitani et al. 2015; Keith et al. 2015; Sato and Lindenmayer 2017; Bland et al. 2018). While this oversight has been discussed extensively with respect to quantifying changes, I can find nothing in the literature that attempts a generalisable definition of what collapse should mean. Perhaps this is because it is not possible to identify a definition that is sufficiently generalisable, something that Boitani et al. (2015) described with this statement:
“The definition of collapse is so vague that in practice it will be possible (and often necessary) to define collapse separately for each ecosystem, using a variety of attributes and threshold values
Despite all the work that has occurred since then, I fear we haven’t moved much beyond that conclusion.
Hell, cutting down the trees in the bush block next to my property constitutes a wholesale ‘collapse’ of the microcommunity of species using that patch of bush. An asteroid hitting the Earth and causing a mass extinction is also collapse. And everything in-between.
But at least ecologists have made some attempts to define and quantify collapse, even if an acceptable definition has not been forthcoming. The sustainability and broader environment literature has not even done that.
In a newly announced partnership with Texas biotech company Colossal Biosciences, Australian researchers are hoping their dream to bring back the extinct thylacine is a “giant leap” closer to fruition.
Scientists at University of Melbourne’s TIGRR Lab (Thylacine Integrated Genetic Restoration Research) believe the new partnership, which brings Colossal’s expertise in CRISPR gene editing on board, could result in the first baby thylacine within a decade.
The genetic engineering firm made headlines in 2021 with the announcement of an ambitious plan to bring back something akin to the woolly mammoth, by producing elephant-mammoth hybrids or “mammophants”.
But de-extinction, as this type of research is known, is a highly controversial field. It’s often criticised for attempts at “playing God” or drawing attention away from the conservation of living species. So, should we bring back the thylacine? We asked five experts.
As is my tendency, I like to wade carefully into other disciplines from time to time to examine what components they can bring to the conservation table. I do not profess any sort of expertise when I do so, but if I require a true expert for research purposes, then I will collaborate with said experts.
I often say to my students that in many ways, the science of sustainability and conservation is more or less resolved — what we need now is ways to manage the human side of the problems we face. The disciplines that deal with human management, such as psychology, economics, political science, and sociology, are mainly pursuits of the humanities (have I just argued myself out of a job?).
On the topic of human psychology, I think most people involved in some way with biodiversity conservation often contemplate why human societies are so self-destructive. Even in the face of logic and evidence, people deny what’s going on in front of their eyes (think anti-vaxxers, climate-change denialists, etc.), so it should be no wonder why many (most?) people deny their own existential threats. Yet, it still doesn’t seem to make much sense to us until we put the phenomenon into a psychological framework.
My apologies here to actual psychologists if I oversimplify or otherwise make mistakes, but the following explanation has done a lot for me personally in my own journey to understand this conundrum. It is also a good way to teach others about why there is so much reticence to fixing our environmental problems.
The idea is a rather simple one, but it requires a little journey to appreciate. Let’s pop back to the 1970s with the publication of Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974 (ironically, two months after his own death). In this book, Becker examined the awareness of death on human behaviour and the strategies that we have developed to mitigate our fear of it. This particular quote sums it up nicely:
This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, and excruciating inner yearning for life and self expression — and with all this yet to die
Ernest Becker in The Denial of Death (1973)
The upshot is that we have evolved a whole raft of coping mechanisms to this personal existential dread. Some engage in overly hedonic pursuits to numb the anxiety; others try to “tranquillise themselves with the trivial”, essentially ignoring the terror, while others still manage the dread through religion and the hope of an existence beyond the mortal.
I seem to end up frequently explaining to students and colleagues that it’s a good idea to spend a good deal of time to make your scientific figures the most informative and attractive possible.
But it’s a fine balance between overly flashy and downright boring. Needless to say, empirical accuracy is paramount.
But why should you care, as long as the necessary information is transferred to the reader? The most important answer to that question is that you are trying to catch the attention of editors, reviewers, and readers alike in a highly competitive sea of information. Sure, if the work is good and the paper well-written, you’ll still garner a readership; however, if you give your readers a bit of visual pleasure in the process, they’re much more likely to (a) remember and (b) cite your paper.
I try to ask myself the following when creating a figure — without unnecessary bells and whistles, would I present this figure in a presentation to a group of colleagues? Would I present it to an audience of non-experts? Would I want this figure to appear in a news article about my work? Of course, all of these venues require differing degrees of accuracy, complexity, and aesthetics, but a good figure should ideally serve to educate across very different audiences simultaneously.
A sub-question worth asking here is whether you think a colleague would use your figure in one of their presentations. Think of the last time you made a presentation and found that perfect figure that brilliantly portrays the point you are trying to get across. That’s the kind of figure you should strive to make in your own research papers.
I therefore tend to spend quite a bit of time crafting my figures, and after years of making mistakes and getting a few things right, and retrospectively discovering which figures appear to garner more attention than others, I can offer some basic advice about the DOs and DON’Ts of figure making. Throughout the following section I provide some examples from my own papers that I think demonstrate some of the concepts.
tables vs. graphs — The very first question you should ask yourself is whether you can turn that boring and ugly table into a graph of some sort. Do you really need that table? Can you not just translate the cell entries into a bar/column/xy plot? If you can, you should. When a table cannot easily be translated into a figure, most of the time it probably belongs in the Supplementary Information anyway.
Now that Clarivate, Google, and Scopus have recently published their respective journal citation scores for 2021, I can now present — for the 14th year running on ConvervationBytes.com — the 2021 conservation/ecology/sustainability journal ranks based on my journal-ranking method.
Like last year, I’ve added a few journals. I’ve also included in the ranking the Journal Citation Indicator (JCI) in addition to the Journal Impact Factor and Immediacy Index from Clarivate ISI, and the CiteScore (CS) in addition to the Source-Normalised Impact Per Paper (SNIP) and SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) from Scopus.
I therefore present the new 2021 ranks for: (i) 106 ecology, conservation and multidisciplinary journals, (ii) 27 open-access (i.e., you have to pay) journals from the previous category, (iii) 64 ‘ecology’ journals, (iv) 32 ‘conservation’ journals, (v) 43 ‘sustainability’ journals (with general and energy-focussed journals included), and (vi) 21 ‘marine & freshwater’ journals.
Remember not to take much notice if a journal boasts about how its Impact Factor has increased this year, because these tend to increase over time anyway What’s important is a journal’s relative (to other journals) rank.
The other day I was asked to do an interview for a South Korean radio station about the declining-population “crisis”.
Therein lies the rub — there is no crisis.
While I think the interview went well (you can listen to it here), I didn’t have ample time to flesh out my arguments; I’ve decided to put them down in more detail here.
Probably the most important aspect that I didn’t even get a chance to cover is that globally, our economic system is essentially broken because we are forced to exist inside a paradigm that erroneously assumes Earth’s resources are infinite. They are not, as the global ecological footprint clearly shows.
To slow and perhaps even reverse climate change, as well as mitigate the extinction crisis underway, we are obliged to reduce consumption globally. Shrinking human populations will contribute to that goal (provided we simultaneously reduce per-capita consumption).
But that argument, no matter how defensible, is still not even remotely appreciated by most people. It is the aim of only a minority, most of whom have very little political power to engender change.
The reason for the hyped-up panic generally comes down to the overly simplistic ‘dependency ratio‘, which has several different forms but generally compares the number of people in the labour force against those who have retired from it. The idea here is that once the number of people no longer in the labour force exceeds the number of those in the labour force, the latter can no longer support the entirety of the former.
This simplistic 1:1 relationship essentially assumes that you need one person working to support one retired person. Errrh. Right. Let’s look at this in more detail.
This week I’m going to discuss national indices of economic performance and prosperity. There are indeed some surprises.
But standard metrics of economic performance at the national level almost universally fail to encapsulate the sustainable economic prosperity of its citizens. One could, for example, simply list the ‘wealthiest’ nations according to simple economic turnover by employing the standard, but wholly unsatisfactory metrics of gross domestic product (GDP) and gross national income (GNI). Even most economists admit that GDP and GNI are dreadful measures of ‘wealth’, and the differences between them are largely immaterial.
Top 5 ‘wealthiest’ nations according to per-capita gross national income: Qatar, Macao, Singapore, Kuwait, Luxembourg.
It is probably easier to view GDP as a speedometer, for it measures the speed with which an economy is contributing to the generation of goods and services (i.e., economic turnover), but it does not measure the loss of biodiversity, ecosystem services, and other environmental assets such as forests and mined resources, it does not measure the build-up of greenhouse gases or hormone-mimicking toxic chemicals, nor does it take depreciation of physical capital in our society’s infrastructure in account. As it turns out, GDP actually rises following environmental disasters such as a major oil spill because of the jobs created to clean up the mess, but it does not measure in any way the economic advantage of growing produce in your garden because the goods are not ‘traded’ in the standard market.
Nor does GDP account for the disparity in wealth among a nation’s citizens, so even though most people might be poor, the existence of even a handful of billionaires can in fact raise a country’s GDP. The GDP metric is so unappealing that even the World Bank has tried to come up with better ways to measure wealth. Although it still falls short of measuring true wealth, ‘total wealth’ — measured as the present (discounted) value of future consumption that is ‘sustainable’ — tries to take into account a country’s present wealth minus damage to its non-renewable stock that is currently being exploited unsustainably (e.g., forests). As such, economic policies based on total wealth would be better able to ensure the long-term sustainability of a nation by including the ‘stock’ of existing capital that includes natural capital.
Top 5 ‘wealthiest’ nations according to per-capita total wealth: Norway, Qatar, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Kuwait.
I’ll preface this post with a caveat — the data herein are a few years old (certainly pre-COVID), so things have likely changed a bit. Still, I think the main message holds.
That last observation is important because there are really two main ways to quantify a country’s environmental performance. First, there is its relative environmental damage, which essentially means what proportion of its own resources a country has pilfered or damaged. This type of measure standardises the metrics to account for the different areas of countries (e.g., Russia versus Singapore) and how much of, say, forests, they had to start with, and what proportion of them they have thus far destroyed.
Looking at it this way, small countries with few large-scale industries came out in the lead as the least-damaged environmentally — the least environmentally damaged country according this metric is Cape Verde (followed by Central African Republic, Swaziland, Niger, and Djibouti).
However, another way to look at it is how much of the overall contribution to the world’s environmental damage each country is responsible, which of course implies that the countries with the highest amounts of resources damaged in absolute terms (i.e., the biggest, most populous ones) disproportionately contribute more to global environmental damage.
Using this absolute metric, the countries with the greatest overall damage are Brazil (largely due to the destruction of the Amazon and its other forests), the USA (for its greenhouse-gas emissions and conversion of its prairies to farmland), and China (for its water pollution, deforestation, and carbon emissions). On the flip side, this means that the smallest countries with the fewest people are ranked ‘better’ because of their lower absolute contribution to the world’s total environmental damage.
Looking more closely at how countries do relative to each other using different and more specific measures of environmental performance, the best-known and most-reported metric is the ecological footprint. This measures the ecological ‘assets’ that any particular population of people requires to produce the natural resources it consumes and to absorb its wastes.
Wildfires transform forests into mosaics of vegetation. What, where, and which plants thrive depends on when and how severely a fire affects different areas of a forest. Such heterogeneity in the landscape is essential for animal species that benefit from fire like woodpeckers. Anyone raised in rural areas will have vivid recollections of wildfires: the…
From time to time I turn my research hand to issues of invasive species control, for example, from manipulating pathogens to control rabbits, to island eradication of feral cats and pigs, to effective means to control feral deer. Not only do invasive species cost well over $1.7 trillion (yes, that’s trillion, with 12 zeros) each…
We’ve just published a paper in PLOS ONE showing high infant mortality rates are contributing to an incessant rise of the global human population, which supports arguments for greater access to contraception and family planning in low- and middle-income nations. In collaboration with Melinda Judge, Chitra Saraswati, Claire Perry, Jane Heyworth, and Peter Le Souëf…
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