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Wolves in sheep’s clothing: industrial lobbyists and the destruction of tropical forests

25 10 2010

As of this morning, a group of distinguished scientists (which I have had the honour of being invited to join) has released an Open Letter to be published in various media outlets worldwide. The letter addresses some of our major concerns over the misinterpretation of facts, and openly misleading statements, by proponents of deforestation in the Asian tropical region. Professor Bill Laurance, an old favourite on ConservationBytes.com, has led the charge and organised a most impressive and shocking list of assertions. I produce the letter below – I encourage all my readers to distribute it as far and wide as possible in the social media-verse.

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An Open Letter about Scientific Credibility and the Conservation of Tropical Forests

To whom it may concern:

As professional scientists employed by leading academic and research institutions, we are writing to alert the general public about some of the claims and practices being used by the World Growth Institute (WGI) and International Trade Strategies Global (ITS), and their affiliated leadership.

WGI and ITS operate in close association. ITS is owned by Alan Oxley, an Australian industrial lobbyist, former trade representative, and former Ambassador who also heads WGI. According to its website¹, ITS also has “close associations” with several politically conservative US think tanks, including the American Enterprise Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and the Heritage Foundation.

In our personal view, WGI and ITS — which are frequently involved in promoting industrial logging and oil palm and wood pulp plantations internationally — have at times treaded a thin line between reality and a significant distortion of facts. Specifically, we assert that: Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 26 Comments »
Tags: Alan Oxley, American Enterprise Institute, biodiversity, Climate Change Denial, Competitive Enterprise Institute, deforestation, Heritage Foundation, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, International Trade Strategies Global, Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, World Growth Institute
Categories : agriculture, Asia, Borneo, carbon, climate change, conservation, corruption, deforestation, environmental policy, habitat loss, Indonesia, Malaysia, oil palm, palm oil, poverty, propaganda, rain forests, Sarawak, South East Asia, tropical

Humans 1, Environment 0

27 09 2010

While travelling to our Supercharge Your Science workshop in Cairns and Townsville last week (which, by the way, went off really well and the punters gave us the thumbs up – stay tuned for more Supercharge activities at a university near you…), I stumbled across an article in the Sydney Morning Herald about the state of Australia.

That Commonwealth purveyor of numbers, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), put together a nice little summary of various measures of wealth, health, politics and environment and their trends over the last decade. The resulting Measures of Australia’s Progress is an interesting read indeed. I felt the simple newspaper article didn’t do the environmental components justice, so I summarise the salient points below and give you my tuppence as well. Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 10 Comments »
Tags: Australia, Australian Bureau of Statistics, environment, extinction, Greenhouse gas, Overfishing, statistics
Categories : Australia, carbon, conservation, ecosystem services, environmental policy, fish, fisheries, habitat loss, harvest, health, human overpopulation, IUCN, logging, mammal, pollination, Red List

Global erosion of ecosystem services

14 09 2010

A few months ago I was asked to give a lecture about erosion of ecosystem services to students in the University of Adelaide‘s Issues in Sustainable Environments unit. I gave that lecture last week and just uploaded a slidecast of the presentation (with audio) today.

I’ve reproduced the lecture here for your viewing pleasure. I hope you find the 45-minute presentation useful. Note that the first few minutes cover me referring to the Biodiversity film short that I posted not too long ago.

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CJA Bradshaw

Comments : 2 Comments »
Tags: ecosystem services, Education, environment, University of Adelaide, webinar
Categories : anthropocene, Australia, biodiversity, carbon, climate change, coasts, coral reefs, deforestation, disease, ecosystem services, environmental policy, extinction, fire, fisheries, flood, fragmentation, governance, habitat loss, harvest, health, human overpopulation, illegal fishing, kelp, logging, marine protected area, MPA, pollination, predator, protected area, Red List, seagrass, shark, The University of Adelaide, threatened species, water

100 actions to slow biodiversity loss

19 08 2010

I received an email a few days ago from Guillaume Chapron of the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (Sveriges lantbruksuniversitet) asking me to promote his ‘Biodiversity 100‘ campaign on ConservationBytes.com. I think it’s an interesting initiative, and so I’ll gladly spread the word.

Teaming up with George Monbiot of The Guardian, the Biodiversity 100 campaign seeks to encourage scientists and others to compile a list of 100 tasks that G20 governments should undertake to prove their commitment to tackling the biodiversity crisis.

Dr. Chapron writes: Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 4 Comments »
Tags: biodiversity, Biodiversity 100, climate change, conservation, conservation biology, Ecosystem, Endangered species, environment, George Monbiot, Guillaume Chapron, integral fast reactor, nuclear energy, The Guardian
Categories : biodiversity, carbon, carbon trading, climate change, conservation, deforestation, environmental policy, environmental science, fisheries, habitat loss, harvest, health, human overpopulation, marine protected area, protected area, restoration

Who are the world’s biggest environmental reprobates?

5 05 2010

Everyone is a at least a little competitive, and when it comes to international relations, there could be no higher incentive for trying to do better than your neighbours than a bit of nationalism (just think of the Olympics).

We rank the world’s countries for pretty much everything, relative wealth, health, governance quality and even happiness. There are also many, many different types of ‘environmental’ indices ranking countries. Some attempt to get at that nebulous concept of ‘sustainability’, some incorporate human health indices, and other are just plain black box (see Böhringer et al. 2007 for a review).

With that in mind, we have just published a robust (i.e., to missing data, choices for thresholds, etc.), readily quantifiable (data available for most countries) and objective (no arbitrary weighting systems) index of a country’s relative environmental impact that focuses ONLY on environment (i.e., not human health or economic indicators) – something no other metric does. We also looked at indices relative to opportunity – that is, looking at how much each country has degraded relative to what it had to start with.

We used the following metrics to create a combined environmental impact rank: natural forest loss, habitat conversion, fisheries and other marine captures, fertiliser use, water pollution, carbon emissions from land-use change and threatened species.

The paper, entitled Evaluating the relative environmental impact of countries was just published in the open-access journal PLoS One with my colleagues Navjot Sodhi of the National University of Singapore (NUS) and Xingli Giam, formerly of NUS but now at Princeton University in the USA.

So who were the worst? Relative to resource availability (i.e,. how much forest area, coastline, water, arable land, species, etc. each country has), the proportional environmental impact ranked (from worst) the following ten countries:

Singapore
Korea
Qatar
Kuwait
Japan
Thailand
Bahrain
Malaysia
Philippines
Netherlands

When considering just the absolute impact (i.e., not controlling for resource availability), the worst ten were:

Brazil
USA
China
Indonesia
Japan
Mexico
India
Russia
Australia
Peru

Interestingly (and quite unexpectedly), the authors’ home countries (Singapore, Australia, USA) were in either the worst ten proportional or absolute ranks. Embarrassing, really (for a full list of all countries, see supporting information). Read the rest of this entry »

Comments : 15 Comments »
Tags: biodiversity, conservation, countries, environmental impact, ranking, science
Categories : Asia, Australia, carbon, China, conservation, corruption, deforestation, environmental policy, environmental science, exploitation, fisheries, habitat loss, harvest, human overpopulation, Indonesia, Malaysia, Russia, The University of Adelaide, threatened species, USA

New April Issue of Conservation Letters out now

22 04 2010

Low intensity fire in a longleaf pine-wiregrass system

Another great line up of papers has just come out in the April Issue of Conservation Letters:

CJA Bradshaw

Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags: biodiversity, conservation, conservation letters, science
Categories : biodiversity, carbon, carbon trading, climate change, conservation, coral reefs, fisheries, fragmentation, rain forests, REDD, seagrass

Cartoon guide to biodiversity loss VI

26 01 2010

The continuing saga of laughing at our own lunacy (see previous cartoon entries here).

CJA Bradshaw

Comments : 1 Comment »
Tags: biodiversity cartoon, conservation
Categories : biodiversity, carbon, carbon trading, cartoon, climate change, conservation

Avoiding the REDD monster

22 01 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Comments : 5 Comments »
Tags: biodiversity, conservation, deforestation, REDD, Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation, science
Categories : agriculture, biosequestration, carbon, carbon trading, climate change, conservation, deforestation, environmental policy, habitat loss, logging, monitoring, tropical

Carbon = biodiversity

21 12 2009

I’ve decided to blog this a little earlier than I would usually simply because the COP15 is still fresh in everyone’s minds and the paper is now online as an ‘Accepted Article’, so it is fully citable.

The paper published in Conservation Letters by Strassburg and colleagues is entitled Global congruence of carbon storage and biodiversity in terrestrial ecosystems is noteworthy because it provides a very useful answer to a very basic question. If one were to protect natural habitats based on their carbon storage potential, would one also be protecting the most biodiversity (and of course, vice versa)?

Turns out, one would.

Using a global dataset of ~ 20,000 species of mammal, bird and amphibian, they compared three indices of biodiversity distribution (species richness, species threat & range-size rarity) to a new global above- and below-ground carbon biomass dataset. It turns out that at least for species richness, the correlations were fairly strong (0.8-ish, with some due to spatial autocorrelation); for threat and rarity indices, the correlations were rather weaker (~0.3-ish).

So what does this all mean for policy? Biodiversity hotspots – those areas around the globe with the highest biodiversity and greatest threats – have some of the greatest potential to store carbon as well as guard against massive extinctions if we prioritise them for conservation. Places such as the Amazon, Borneo Sumatra and New Guinea definitely fall within this category.

However, not all biodiversity hotspots are created equal; areas such as Brazil’s Cerrado or the savannas of the Rift Valley in East Africa have relatively lower carbon storage, and so carbon-trading schemes wouldn’t necessarily do much for biodiversity in these areas.

The overall upshot is that we should continue to pursue carbon-trading schemes such as REDD (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) because they will benefit biodiversity (contrary to what certain ‘green’ organisations say about it), but we can’t sit back and hope that REDD will solve all of biodiversity’s problems world wide.

CJAB

Strassburg, B., Kelly, A., Balmford, A., Davies, R., Gibbs, H., Lovett, A., Miles, L., Orme, C., Price, J., Turner, R., & Rodrigues, A. (2009). Global congruence of carbon storage and biodiversity in terrestrial ecosystems Conservation Letters DOI: 10.1111/j.1755-263X.2009.00092.x

Comments : 2 Comments »
Tags: biodiversity, carbon, conservation, conservation letters, science
Categories : biocarbon, biodiversity, biosequestration, carbon, carbon trading, climate change, conservation, deforestation, ecosystem services, habitat loss, hotspot, protected area, Red List, threatened species

Scoping the future threats and solutions to biodiversity conservation

4 12 2009

Way back in 1989, Jared Diamond defined the ‘evil quartet’ of habitat destruction, over-exploitation, introduced species and extinction cascades as the principal drivers of modern extinctions. I think we could easily update this to the ‘evil quintet’ that includes climate change, and I would even go so far as to add extinction synergies as a the sixth member of the ‘evil sextet’.

But the future could hold quite a few more latent threats to biodiversity, and a corresponding number of potential solutions to its degradation. That’s why Bill Sutherland of Cambridge University recently got together with some other well-known scientists and technology leaders to do a ‘horizon scanning’ exercise to define what these threats and solutions might be in the immediate future. It’s an interesting, eclectic and somewhat enigmatic list, so I thought I’d summarise it here. The paper is entitled A horizon scan of global conservation issues for 2010 and was recently published online in Trends in Ecology and Evolution.

In no particular order or relative rank, Sutherland and colleagues list the following 15 ‘issues’ that I’ve broadly divided into ‘Emerging Threats’ and ‘Potential Solutions’:

Emerging Threats

Microplastic pollution – The massive increase in plastics found in the world’s waterways and oceans really doesn’t have much focus right now in conservation research, but it should. We really don’t know how much we’re potentially threatening species with this source of pollution.
Nanosilver in wastewater – The ubiquity of antimicrobial silver oxide or ions in products these days needs careful consideration for what the waste might be doing to our microbial communities that keep ecosystems alive and functioning.
Stratospheric aerosols – A simultaneous solution and threat. Creating what would in effect be an artificial global cooling by injecting particles like sulphate aerosols into the stratosphere might work to cool the planet down somewhat. However, it would not reduce carbon dioxide, ocean acidification or other greenhouse gas-related changes. This strikes me as a potential for serious mucking up of the global climate and only a band-aid solution to the real problem.
Deoxygenation of the oceans – Very scary. Ironically today I was listening to a talk by Martin Kennedy on the deep-time past of ocean hypoxia and he suggests we’re well on our way to a situation where our shelf waters could essentially become too anoxic for marine life to persist. It’s happened before, and rapid climate change makes the prospect plausible within less than a century. And you thought acidification was scary.
Changes in denitrifying bacteria – Just like we’re changing the carbon cycle, we’re buggering up the nitrogen cycle as well. Changing our water bodies to nitrogen sources rather than sinks could fundamentally change marine ecosystems for the worse.
High-latitude volcanism – One of these horrible positive feedback ideas. Reducing high-latitude ice cover exposes all these slumbering volcanoes that once ‘released’, start increasing atmospheric gas concentrations and contributing to faster ice melt and sea level rise.
Trans-Arctic dispersal and colonisation – Warming polar seas and less ice mean fewer barriers to species movements. Expect Arctic ecosystems to be a hotbed of invasion, regime shifts and community reshuffling as a result.
Invasive Indo-Pacific lionfish – Not one I would have focussed on, but interesting. These spiny, venomous fish like to eat a lot of other species, and so represent a potentially important invasive species in the marine realm.
REDD and non-forested ecosystems – Heralded as a great potential coup for forest preservation and climate change mitigation, focussing on maintaining forests for their carbon sequestration value might divert pressure toward non-forested habitats and ironically, threaten a whole new sphere of species.
International land acquisition – Global financial crises and dwindling food supplies mean that governments are acquiring more and more huge tracts of land for agricultural development. While this might solve some immediate issues, it could potentially threaten a lot more undeveloped land in the long run, putting even more pressure on habitats.

Potential Solutions

Synthetic meat – Ever thought about eating a sausage grown in a vat rather than cut from a dead pig? It could become the norm and a way of reducing the huge pressure on terrestrial and aquatic systems for the production of livestock and fish for human protein provision.
Artificial life – Both a risk and a potential solution. While I’ve commented before on the pointlessness of cloning technology for conservation, the ability to create genomes and reinvigorate species on the brink is an exciting prospect. It’s also frightening as hell because we don’t know how all these custom-made genomes might react and transform naturally evolved ones.
Biochar – Burn organic material (e.g., plant matter) in the absence of oxygen, you get biochar. This essentially sequesters a lot of carbon that can then be put underground. The upshot is that agricultural yields can also increase. Would there be a trade-off though between land available for biochar sequestration and natural habitats?
Mobile-sensing technology – Not so much a solution per se, but the rapid acceleration of remote technology will make our ability to measure and predict the subtleties of ecosystem and climate change much more precise. A lot more work and application required here.
Assisted colonisation – I’ve blogged about this before. With such rapid shifts in climate, we might be obliged to move species around so that they can keep up with rapidly changing conditions. Many pros and cons here, not least of which is exacerbating the invasive species problems around the globe.

Certainly some interesting ideas here and worth a thought or two. I wonder if the discipline of ‘conservation biology’ might even exist in 50-100 years – we might all end up being climate or agricultural engineers with a focus on biodiversity-friendly technology. Who knows?

CJA Bradshaw

Sutherland, W., Clout, M., Côté, I., Daszak, P., Depledge, M., Fellman, L., Fleishman, E., Garthwaite, R., Gibbons, D., & De Lurio, J. (2009). A horizon scan of global conservation issues for 2010 Trends in Ecology & Evolution DOI: 10.1016/j.tree.2009.10.003

Comments : 12 Comments »
Tags: biodiversity, conservation, horizon scanning, science
Categories : acidification, agriculture, alien species, aquaculture, Arctic, biocarbon, biodiversity, biosequestration, carbon, carbon trading, climate change, cloning, conservation, deforestation, environmental engineering, fish, fisheries, habitat loss, invasive species, marine, pollution, research, threatened species, trophic cascades

Greenwash, blackwash: two faces of conservation evil

21 11 2009

Beware false prophets, and especially those masquerading as conservationists (or at least ‘green’) when they are not, in fact, doing anything for conservation at all. But this blog site isn’t about typical greenie evil-corporation-making-a-mess-of-the-Earth sermons (there are plenty of those); it’s instead about real conservation science that has/should/could have a real biodiversity benefits. This is why I highlight the bitey and the toothless together.

With the slow (painfully, inadequately, insufficiently slow) maturation of environmental awareness and the rising plight of biodiversity in general (including our own health and prosperity), it has become almost chic to embrace a so-called ‘green’ perspective. This approach has blown out into a full-scale business model where in many wealthier nations especially, it’s just plain good business to attract the green-conscious consumer to buy more ‘environmentally friendly’ products. Problem is, so many of these products are the farthest thing from green you can imagine (see examples here, here & here). This stimulated the environmentalist Jay Westerveld to coin the term greenwashing in 1986. Greenwashing is basically defined as activities that misleadingly give the impression of environmentally sound management that thereby deflect attention away from the continued pursuit of environmentally destructive activities.

Well, not that the problem has disappeared, or even dissipated (if anything, it’s growing), but I don’t want to focus on that here. Instead, I want to highlight a recent paper in which I was involved that outlines too how environmental groups can be guilty of almost the same sin – claiming businesses, practices, individuals, corporations, etc. are far more environmentally destructive than they really are. This, we termed blackwashing.

The paper by Koh and colleagues entitled Wash and spin cycle threats to tropical biodiversity just came out online in the journal Biotropica, and therein we describe the greenwashing-blackwashing twin conservation evils using the oil palm controversy as an excellent example case. Just in case you didn’t know, much of the tropical world (especially South East Asia) is undergoing massive conversion of native forests to oil palm plantations, to the overwhelming detriment of biodiversity. I’ve covered the issue in several posts on ConservationBytes.com before (see for example Tropical forests worth more standing, Indonesia’s precious peatlands under oil palm fire & More greenwashing from the Malaysian oil palm industry).

Briefly, we demonstrate how the palm oil industry is guilty of the following greenwashes:

Palm oil plantations are safe for tropical biodiversity – They are most definitely not (see Fitzherbert et al. 2008, Koh & Wilcove 2008, Brüle & Eltz 2009, Danielson et al. 2009, Venter et al. 2009)
Oil palm is planted forest – It is not, either in terms of the amount of carbon it sequesters or the biodiversity it supports (see above point).
Native forest conversion no longer occurs – An outright lie (Chazdon 2008, Butler 2008).

On the either side, various environmental groups such as Greenpeace, have promoted the following blackwashes:

Orang-utan will be extinct imminently – A gross exaggeration, although something we believe is eventually possible.
Avoided deforestation schemes (e.g., REDD) will crash carbon-trading – Again, even economists don’t believe this.

For details, see the paper online.

Now, I’d probably tend to believe some of the less outrageous claims made by some environmental groups because if anything, the state of biodiversity is probably overall worse than what most people realise. However, when environmental groups are exposed for exaggerations, or worse, lies, then their credibility goes out the window and even those essentially promoting their cause (e.g., conservation biologists like myself) will have nothing to do with them. The quasi-religious zealotry of anti-whaling campaigns is an example of a terrible waste of funds, goodwill and conservation resources that could be otherwise spent on real conservation gains. Instead, political stunts simply alienate people who would otherwise reasonably contribute to improving the state of biodiversity. Incidentally, an environmental advocacy group in Australia emailed me to support their campaign to highlight the plight of sharks. I am a firm supporter of better conservation of sharks (see recent paper and post about this here). However, when I read their campaign propaganda, the first sentence read:

“Almost 90 % of sharks have been wiped out“

I immediately distanced myself from them. This is a blatant lie and terrible over-exaggeration. Ninety per cent of sharks HAVE NOT been wiped out. Some localised depletions have occurred, and not one single shark species has been recorded going extinct since records began. While I agree the world has a serious shark problem, saying outrageous things like this will only serve to weaken your cause. My advice to any green group is to get your facts straight and avoid the sensationlist game – you won’t win it, and you probably won’t be successful in doing anything beneficial for the species you purport to save.
CJA Bradshaw

Koh, L., Ghazoul, J., Butler, R., Laurance, W., Sodhi, N., Mateo-Vega, J., & Bradshaw, C. (2009). Wash and Spin Cycle Threats to Tropical Biodiversity Biotropica DOI: 10.1111/j.1744-7429.2009.00588.x

Comments : 13 Comments »
Tags: biodiversity, blackwashing, conservation, greenwashing, science
Categories : Asia, carbon, conservation, corruption, deforestation, environmental policy, Indonesia, Malaysia, oil palm, palm oil, propaganda, rain forests, Sarawak, South East Asia

How to restore a tropical rain forest

6 11 2009

Here’s a little story for you about how a casual chat over a glass of wine (or many) can lead to great scientific endeavours.

A few years ago I was sitting in the living room of my good friends Noel Preece and Penny van Oosterzee in Darwin chatting about life, the universe, and everything. They rather casually mentioned that they would be selling their environmental consulting company and their house and moving to the Queensland rain forest. Ok – sounded like a pretty hippy thing to do when you’re thinking about ‘retiring’ (only from the normal grindstone, at least). But it wasn’t about the easy life away from it all (ok, partially, perhaps) – they wanted to do something with their reasonably large (181 ha), partially deforested (51-ha paddock) property investment. By ‘something’, I mean science.

So they asked me – how would we go about getting money to investigate the best way to reforest a tropical rain forest? I had no idea. As it turns out, no one really knows how to restore rain forests properly. Sure, planting trees happens a lot, but the random, willy-nilly, unquantified ways in which it is done means that no one can tell you what the biggest biodiversity bang for your buck is, or even if it can compete on the carbon sequestration front.

Why carbon sequestration? Well, in case you’ve had your head up your bum for the last decade, one of the major carbon mitigating schemes going is the offset idea – for every tonne of carbon you emit as a consumer, you (or more commonly, someone else you pay) plant a certain number of trees (because trees need carbon to grow and so suck it out of the atmosphere). Nice idea, but if you deforest native ecosystems just to bash up quick-growing monoculture plantations of (usually) exotic species with little benefit to native biota, biodiversity continues to spiral down the extinction vortex. So, there has to be a happy medium, and there has to be a way to measure it.

So I said to Penny and Noel “Why don’t we bash together a proposal and get some experts in the field involved and submit it to the Australian Research Council (ARC) for funding?” They thought that was a smashing idea, and so we did.

Fast forward a few years and … success! The Thiaki Project was born (‘Thiaki’ is the name of the Creek flowing through the property north of Atherton – seems to be of Greek origin). We were extremely lucky to find a new recruit to the University of Queensland, Dr. Margie Mayfield (who worked previously with Paul Ehrlich), who was not only an expert in the area of tropical reforestation for biodiversity, she also had the time and energy to lead the project. We garnered several other academic and industry partners and came up with a pretty sexy experiment that is just now getting underway thanks to good old Mr. ARC.

The project is fairly ambitious, even though the experiments per se are fairly straight forward. We’re using a randomised block design where we are testing 3 tree diversity treatments (monoculture, 1 species each from 6 families, and 5 species each from those same 6 families) and two planting densities (high and low). The major objective is to see what combination of planting density and native tree species provides the most habitat for the most species. We’re starting small, looking mainly at various insects as they start to use the newly planted blocks, but might expand the assessments (before planting and after) to reptiles, amphibians and possibly birds later on.

But we’re not stopping there – we were fortunate enough to get get a clever soil scientist, Dr. David Chittleborough of the University of Adelaide, involved so we could map the change in soil carbon during the experiment. Our major challenge is to find the right combination of tree species and planting techniques that restore native biodiversity the most effectively, all the while maximising carbon sequestration from the growing forest. And of course, we’re trying to do this as most cost-effectively as we can – measuring the relative costs will give landowners contemplating reforestation the scale of expenditures expected.

I’m pretty proud of what Margie, Noel, Penny and the rest of the team have accomplished so far, and what’s planned. Certainly the really exciting results are years away yet, but stay tuned – Thiaki could become the model for tropical reforestation worldwide. Follow the Thiaki Project website for regular updates.

I’d also love to recreate the Thiaki Project in southern Australia because as it turns out, no one knows how to maximise biodiversity and carbon sequestration for the lowest cost in temperate reforestation projects either. All we need is a few hundred hectares of deforested land (shouldn’t be hard to find), about $1 million to start, and a bit of time. Any takers?

CJA Bradshaw

Comments : 13 Comments »
Tags: biodiversity, carbon sequestration, conservation, offsets, Queensland, reforestation, restoration, science, Thiaki Project
Categories : Australia, biocarbon, biodiversity, biosequestration, carbon, carbon trading, climate change, conservation, deforestation, ecosystem services, rain forests, reforestation, restoration, southern Australia, The University of Adelaide

Fragmen borealis: degradation of the world’s last great forest

12 08 2009

I have the dubious pleasure today of introducing a recently published paper of ours that was at the same time both intellectually stimulating and demoralising to write. I will make no apologies for becoming emotionally involved in the scientific issues about which my colleagues and I write (as long as I can maintain with absolute sincerity that the data used and conclusions drawn are as objectively presented as I am capable), and this paper probably epitomises that stance more than most I’ve written during my career.

The topic is especially important to me because of its subtle, yet potentially disastrous consequences for biodiversity and climate change. It’s also a personal issue because it’s happening in a place I used to (many, many years ago) call home.

Despite comprising about a third of the world’s entire forested area and harbouring some of the lowest human densities anywhere, the great boreal forest that stretches across Alaska, Canada, Scandinavia and a huge chunk of Russia is under severe threat.

Surprised that we’re not talking about tropical deforestation for once? Surprised that so-called ‘developed’ nations are pilfering the last great carbon sink and biodiversity haven left on the planet? If you have read any of the posts on this blog, you probably shouldn’t be.

The paper today appeared online in Trends in Ecology and Evolution and is entitled Urgent preservation of boreal carbon stocks and biodiversity (by CJA Bradshaw, IG Warkentin & NS Sodhi). It’s essentially a review of the status of the boreal forest from a biodiversity perspective, and includes a detailed assessment of the degree of its fragmentation, species threat, climate- and human-influenced disturbance regime, and its carbon sequestration/emission status. I’ll summarise some of the main findings below:

Russia contains ~53 % of the boreal forest, followed by Canada (25 %), USA (18 %, mostly in Alaska), Sweden (2 %) and Finland and Norway (~1 % each); there are small areas of boreal forest in northern China and Mongolia.
Fire is the main driver of change in the boreal forest. Although clearing for logging and mining abounds, it pales in comparison to the massive driver that is fire.
There is evidence that climate change is increasing the frequency and possibly extent of fires in the boreal zone. That said, most fires are started by humans, and this is particularly the case in the largest expanse in Russia (in Russia alone, 7.5 and 14.5 million hectares burnt in 2002 and 2003, respectively).
While few countries report an overall change in boreal forest extent, the degree of fragmentation and ‘quality’ is declining – only about 40 % of the total forested area is considered ‘intact’ (defined here as areas ≥ 500 km², internally undivided by things such as roads, and with linear dimensions ≥ 10 km).
Russian boreal forest is the most degraded and least ‘intact’, and has suffered the greatest decline in the last few decades compared to other boreal countries.
Boreal countries have only < 10 % of their forests protected from wood exploitation, except Sweden where it’s about 20 %.
There are over 20000 species described in the boreal forest – a number much less than that estimated for tropical forests even of much smaller size.
94 % of the 348 IUCN Red Listed boreal species are considered to be threatened with extinction, but other estimates from local assessments compiled together in 2000 (the United Nations’ Temperate and Boreal Forest Resources Assessment) place the percentages of threatened species up to 46 % for some taxa in some countries (e.g., mosses in Sweden). The latter assessment placed the Fennoscandian countries as having the highest proportions of at-risk taxa (ferns, mosses, lichens, vascular plants, butterflies, birds, mammals and ‘other vertebrates’), with Sweden having the highest proportion in almost all categories.
Boreal forest ecosystems contain about 30 % of the terrestrial carbon stored on Earth (~ 550 Gigatonnes).

Warmer temperatures have predisposed coniferous forest in western Canada to a severe outbreak of mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae) extending over > 13 M ha. © BC Ministry For Range/L. Maclaughlan

Mass insect outbreaks killing millions of trees across the entire boreal region are on the rise.
Although considered in the past as a global carbon sink, recent disturbances (e.g., increasing fire and insect outbreak) and refinements of measurement mean that much of the area is probably a carbon source (at least, temporarily).
A single insect outbreak in western Canada earlier this decade thought to be the direct result of a warming planet contributed more carbon to the atmosphere than all of that country’s transport industry and fire-caused release combined.
Current timber harvest management is inadequately prepared to emulate natural fire regimes and account for shifting fire patterns with climate change.
No amount of timber management can offset the damage done by increasing fire – we must manage fire better to have any chance of saving the boreal forest as a carbon sink and biodiversity haven.

Those include the main take-home messages. I invite you to read the paper in full and contact us (the authors) if you have any questions.

CJA Bradshaw

Full reference: Bradshaw, CJA, IG Warkentin, NS Sodhi. 2009. Urgent preservation of boreal carbon stocks and biodiversity. Trends in Ecology and Evolution DOI: 10.1016/j.tree.2009.03.019

Comments : 11 Comments »
Tags: biodiversity, boreal forest, carbon sequestration, conservation, science
Categories : Arctic, biodiversity, biosequestration, boreal, Canada, carbon, climate change, conservation, deforestation, environmental policy, Finland, fire, fragmentation, governance, habitat loss, harvest, logging, Norway, protected area, reforestation, reserve, Russia, Sweden, temperate, USA

Ray of conservation light for Borneo

25 07 2009

This was the most interesting 20 minutes I’ve spent in the last wee while.

Up until just now, I had never heard of Willie Smits or what he’s been doing in Indonesia. I’ve been fairly hard on Indonesia in some of my papers and blog posts because of the ecological tragedy taking place there. I’ve focussed on the immense rate and extent of deforestation, the oil palm explosion, peatland destruction and air pollution arising from runaway fires there – I have thus far ignored any real positives because I didn’t really believe there were any.

Then I saw Smits’ TED talk. Two words – very impressed. I usually enjoy and even barrack for TED talks, and this is no exception.

This man and his organisation have really been applying a great deal of the research mentioned on ConservationBytes.com, as well as collecting data proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that if you integrate people’s needs with those of biodiversity, you can restore not only entire ecosystems, you can make humans benefit immensely in the process. A chronic pessimist, I can scarcely believe it.

He talks about a whole-system approach where agriculture, full rain forest restoration, climate control, carbon sequestration, monitoring and local governance all work together to turn once bare, fire-prone, species-poor deforested grasslands into teaming jungles that support happy, healthy, wealthy and well-governed human communities. Please watch this.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

more about “Willie Smits restores a rainforest – TED Talks“, posted with vodpod

CJA Bradshaw

Comments : 7 Comments »
Tags: biodiversity, Borneo, conservation, orangutan, TED, Willie Smits
Categories : agriculture, Asia, biodiversity, biosequestration, Borneo, carbon, conservation, deforestation, ecosystem, ecosystem function, ecosystem services, fire, governance, Indonesia, investment, Malaysia, oil palm, palm oil, poverty, rain forests, recovery, reforestation, restoration, South East Asia, tropical

Global conservation priorities based on human need

13 07 2009

A paper recently posted online in Conservation Letters caught my eye as a Potential on ConservationBytes.com.

Gary Luck and colleagues’ paper Protecting ecosystem services and biodiversity in the world’s watersheds is a novel approach to an admittedly problematic aspect of conservation biology – global prioritisation schemes. While certainly coming in as a Conservation Classic, the first real global conservation prioritisation scheme (Myers and colleagues’ global biodiversity hotspots) was rather subjective in its approach, and many subsequent schemes have failed to reproduce the same kinds of priorities (the congruency problem). I’m certainly not knocking biodiversity hotspots because I believe it was one of the true paradigm shifts in conservation biology, but I am cognisant of its limitations.

Another big problem with conservation prioritisation schemes is that they are a hard sell to governments – how do you convince nations (especially poor ones) to forgo the immediate gains of resource exploitation to protect what many (incorrectly and short-sightedly) deem as irrelevant centres of biotic endemism?

Well, Luck and colleagues have taken us one step closer to global acceptance of conservation prioritisation schemes by basing this latest addition on ecosystem services. In their paper they divided the world by catchments (watersheds) and then estimated the services of water provision, flood prevention and carbon storage that each provides to humanity. Water provision was a estimated as a complex combination of variables that together can be interpreted as the capacity of ecosystems to regulate water flows and quality that benefit humans (e.g., influencing seasonal water availability or nutrient levels). Flood mitigation was estimated as the system’s capacity to reduce the impact of floods on communities, and carbon storage was estimated as the system’s capacity to uptake carbon in soils and vegetation.

In general, the catchments in need of the highest priority protection were found in the poorest areas (namely, South East Asia and Africa) because their protection would be the least costly and benefit the most people. Luck and colleagues are therefore the first to incorporate cost–benefit trade-offs explicitly in developing global priorities for protecting ecosystem services and biodiversity. I take my hat off to them for a modern and highly relevant twist on an old idea. Great paper and I hope people take notice.

CJA Bradshaw

Comments : 1 Comment »
Tags: biodiversity, conservation, priority, research, science
Categories : Africa, carbon, climate change, conservation, conservation biology, ecosystem services, environmental policy, investment, planning, poverty, prioritisation, protected area, South East Asia, threatened species, water

June Issue of Conservation Letters

6 06 2009

Quick off the mark this month is the new issue of Conservation Letters. There are some exciting new papers (listed below). I encourage readers to have a look:

Policy Perspectives

Briggs, SV. Priorities and paradigms: directions in threatened species recovery

Rosen, T, A Bath. Transboundary management of large carnivores in Europe: from incident to opportunity

Letters

Kellner, JB, A Hastings. A reserve paradox: introduced heterogeneity may increase regional invasibility

Venter, O et al. Carbon payments as a safeguard for threatened tropical mammals (blog post)

Underwood, EC et al. Evaluating conservation spending for species return: a retrospective analysis in California

Halpern BS et al. Mapping cumulative human impacts to California Current marine ecosystems

CJA Bradshaw

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Tags: biodiversity, conservation, science
Categories : Asia, Borneo, carbon, carbon trading, climate change, coasts, conservation, deforestation, environmental policy, exploitation, fish, fisheries, governance, habitat loss, harvest, Indonesia, invasive species, investment, management, marine, marine protected area, oil palm, palm oil, predator, recovery, research, reserve, South East Asia, threatened species

Tropical forests worth more standing

4 06 2009

Keeping with the oil palm theme…

A paper just published online in Conservation Letters by Venter and colleagues entitled Carbon payments as a safeguard for threatened tropical mammals gets my vote for the Potential list.

We’ve been saying it again and again and again… tropical forests, the biodiversity they harbour and the ecosystem services they provide are worth more to humanity than the potential timber they represent. Now we find they’re even worth more than cash crops (e.g., oil palm) planned to replace them.

A few years ago some very clever economists and environmental policy makers came up with the concept of ‘REDD’ (reducing carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation), which is basically as system “… to provide financial incentives for developing countries that voluntarily reduce national deforestation rates and associated carbon emissions below a reference level”. Compensation can occur either via grant funding or through a carbon-trading scheme in international markets.

Now, many cash-greedy corporations argue that REDD could in no way compete with the classic rip-it-down-and-plant-the-shit-out-of-it-with-a-cash-crop approach, but Venter and colleagues now show this argument to be a bit of a furphy.

The authors asses the financial feasibility of REDD in all planned oil palm plantations in Kalimantan – Indonesia’s part of the island of Borneo in South East Asia. Borneo is also the heart of the environmental devastation typical of the tropics. They conclude that REDD is in fact a rather financially competitive scheme if we can manage to obtain carbon prices of around US$10-33/tonne. In fact, even when carbon prices are as low as US$2/tonne (as they are roughly now on the voluntary market), REDD is still competitive for areas of high forest carbon content and lower agricultural potential.

But the main advantage isn’t just the positive cash argument – many endangered mammals (and there are 46 of them in Kalimantan) such as the South East Asian equivalent of the panda (the orang-utan – ‘equivalent’ in the media-hype and political sensitivity sense, not taxonomic, of course) and the Bornean elephant (yes, they have them) are currently found in areas planned for plantation. So saving the forest obviously saves these and countless other taxa that only exist on this highly endemic island. Finally, Venter and colleagues found that where emission reductions were cheapest, these are also areas with higher-than-average densities of endangered mammals, suggesting that REDD is a fantastic option to keep developing countries in the black without compromising their extensive species richness and endemism.

Brilliant. Now if we can just get the economists and pollies to agree on a REDD model that actually works.

CJA Bradshaw

Comments : 5 Comments »
Tags: biodiversity, conservation, science, tropical forests
Categories : agriculture, Asia, biodiversity, Borneo, carbon, carbon trading, climate change, conservation, deforestation, ecosystem services, environmental economics, environmental policy, habitat loss, harvest, Indonesia, investment, oil palm, palm oil, tropical

Indonesia’s precious peatlands under oil palm fire

31 05 2009

A small opinion piece about to be published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment (June 2009 issue) discusses a major concern we (Lian Pin Koh, Rhett Butler and I) have with Indonesia’s decision to allow peatlands less than 3 m deep to be converted to oil palm. Is nothing immune to the spread of this crop (see previous posts here and here on oil palm plantations)?

Why is this such a big deal? Well, we list five main reasons why it’s a bad idea for Indonesia, the world in general and biodiversity:

Peatlands are amazing carbon sinks, so their destruction necessarily equates to a large release of carbon into the atmosphere (Page et al. 2002)
Tropical peatlands take a hell of a long time to generate – 100s to 1000s of years (Chimner and Ewel 2005)
Tropical peatlands harbour a massive biodiversity, but they are still poorly described and their ecosystems only superficially understood
The burning of peatlands to provide the conditions necessary to plant oil palm will contribute to the massive ‘haze’ problem in South East Asia (Lohman et al. 2007)
The decision goes against the principles of ‘reducing carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation‘ (REDD), which means it will be more difficult to implement carbon trading schemes that intrinsically value intact forests

More detail can be found in the Write Back piece that will be published shortly in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. For more information on oil palm and its conservation implications, see the following:

Koh, LP, DS Wilcove. 2008. Is oil palm agriculture really destroying tropical biodiversity? Conservation Letters 1: 60-64
Fitzherbert, EB, MJ Struebig, A More, F Danielsen, CA Brühl, PF Donald, B Phalan. 2008. How will oil palm expansion affect biodiversity? Trends in Ecology and Evolution 23: 538-545
Koh, LP, DS Wilcove. 2009. Oil palm: disinformation enables deforestation. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 24: 67-68
Butler, RA, LP Koh, J Ghazoul. 2009. REDD in the red: palm oil could undermine carbon payment schemes. Conservation Letters 2: 67-73
Koh, LP, P Levang, J Ghazoul. 2009. Designer landscapes for sustainable biofuels. Trends in Ecology and Evolution DOI: 10.1016/j.tree.2009.03.012

CJA Bradshaw

Comments : 5 Comments »
Tags: biodiversity, conservation, oil palm, science
Categories : Asia, biocarbon, biodiversity, biosequestration, carbon, carbon trading, climate change, conservation, deforestation, fire, habitat loss, Indonesia, oil palm, palm oil, tropical

The non-human view of the (real) world

21 05 2009

cokebottleglasses We all have a distorted view of the planet. Our particular experiences, drives, beliefs and predilections all taint our ability to perceive and interpret our world objectively and rationally.

Enter science.

Science, in all its manifestations, aims, outcomes and applications, is united by one basic principle: to reduce human subjectivity. Contrary to popular belief, science isn’t a ‘thing’; and it’s certainly not a belief system. It isn’t even a philosophy (although there are several different major branches of the philosophy of science). It is, put way too simplistically, a method that attempts to isolate pattern from noise and objectivity from desire. It’s by no means a perfect system because human subjectivity can still creep in even when we make our best attempts to avoid it, but it’s the best system we have. Chances are too that if you’ve made a mistake and haven’t been as objective as you could have been, some other scientist will come along and rip down your house of cards. Two steps forward and one step back. That’s science.

So, where am I going? You might have seen this before, but I thought it worthwhile reproducing some of the images from Daniel Dorling, Mark Newman and Anna Barford’s The Atlas of the Real World: Mapping the Way We Live (Thames & Hudson 2008). There are some fascinating images of the world map that alter the ‘volume’ of a country relative to a particular resource use or conservation measure. The example shows the use of coal power, ecological footprint, forest depletion, water depletion, waste recycled, extinct species, species at risk, plants at risk, mammals at risk (check out the IUCN Red List for the last 4 categories), greenhouse gas emissions, energy depletion, and biocapacity. Check out your country and see how well or poorly you’re doing relative to the rest of the world.

CJA Bradshaw

Comments : 3 Comments »
Tags: conservation, resource use, science, threatened species
Categories : biodiversity, carbon, conservation, deforestation, impact, pollution, science, threatened species, water

Climate change’s ugly cousin – biodiversity loss

17 05 2009

“…nobody puts a value on pollination; national accounts do not reflect the value of ecosystem services that stop soil erosion or provide watershed protection.“

Barry Gardiner, Labour MP for Brent North (UK), Co-chairman, Global Legislators Organisation‘s International Commission on Land Use Change and Ecosystems

Last week I read with great interest the BBC’s Green Room opinion article by Barry Gardiner, Labour MP in the UK, about how the biodiversity crisis takes very much the back seat to climate change in world media, politics and international agreements.

He couldn’t be more spot-on.

I must stipulate right up front that this post is neither a whinge, rant nor lament; my goal is to highlight what I’ve noticed about the world’s general perception of climate change and biodiversity crisis issues over the last few years, and over the last year in particular since ConservationBytes.com was born.

Case in point: my good friend and colleague, Professor Barry Brook, started his blog BraveNewClimate.com a little over a month (August 2008) after I managed to get ConservationBytes.com up and running (July 2008). His blog tackles issues regarding the science of climate change, and Barry has been very successful at empirically, methodically and patiently tearing down the paper walls of the climate change denialists. A quick glance at the number views of BraveNewClimate.com since inception reveals about an order of magnitude more than for ConservationBytes.com (i.e., ~195000 versus 20000, respectively), and Barry has accumulated a total of around 4500 comments compared to just 231 for ConservationBytes.com. The difference is striking.

Now, I don’t begrudge for one moment this disparity – quite the contrary – I am thrilled that Barry has managed to influence so many people and topple so effectively the faecal spires erected by the myriad self-proclaimed ‘experts’ on climate change (an infamous line to whom I have no idea to attribute states that “opinions are like arseholes – everyone’s got one”). Barry is, via BraveNewClimate.com, doing the world an immense service. What I do find intriguing is that in many ways, the biodiversity crisis is a much, much worse problem that is and will continue to degrade human life for millennia to come. Yet as Barry Gardiner observed, the UK papers mentioned biodiversity only 115 times over the last 3 months compared to 1382 times for climate change – again, that order-of-magnitude disparity.

There is no biodiversity equivalent of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (although there are a few international organisations tackling the extinction crisis such as the United Nation’s Environment Program, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and the International Union for Conservation of Nature), we still have little capacity or idea how to incorporate the trillions of dollars worth of ecosystem services supplied every year to us free of charge, and we have nothing at all equivalent to the Kyoto Protocol for biodiversity preservation. Yet, conservation biologists have for decades demonstrated how human disease prevalence, reduction in pollination, increasing floods, reduced freshwater availability, carbon emissions, loss of fish supplies, weed establishment and spread, etc. are all exacerbated by biodiversity loss. Climate change, as serious and potentially apocalyptic as it is, can be viewed as just another stressor in a system stressed to its limits.

Of course, the lack of ‘interest’ may not be as bleak as indicated by web traffic; I believe the science underpinning our assessment of biodiversity loss is fairly well-accepted by people who care to look into these things, and the evidence spans the gambit of biological diversity and ecosystems. In short, it’s much less controversial a topic than climate change, so it attracts a lot less vitriol and spawns fewer polemics. That said, it is a self-destructive ambivalence that will eventually come to bite humanity on the bum in the most serious of ways, and I truly believe that we’re not far off from major world conflicts over the dwindling pool of resources (food, water, raw materials) we are so effectively destroying. We would be wise to take heed of the warnings.

CJA Bradshaw