The sixth set of biodiversity cartoons for 2020. See full stock of previous ‘Cartoon guide to biodiversity loss’ compendia here.
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Cartoon guide to biodiversity loss LXIII
26 10 2020
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Tags: biodiversity, climate change, climate emergency, conservation, corporate responsibility, decline, Emissions, environment, Global warming, greenwashing, human population, sustainability
Categories : biodiversity, climate change, climate shift, conservation, decline, human overpopulation, sustainability
Grand Challenges in Global Biodiversity Threats
8 10 2020
Last week I mentioned that the new journal Frontiers in Conservation Science is now open for business. As promised, I wrote a short article outlining our vision for the Global Biodiversity Threats section of the journal. It’s open-access, of course, so I’m also copying here on ConservationBytes.com.
Most conservation research and its applications tend to happen most frequently at reasonably fine spatial and temporal scales — for example, mesocosm experiments, single-species population viability analyses, recovery plans, patch-level restoration approaches, site-specific biodiversity surveys, et cetera. Yet, at the other end of the scale spectrum, there have been many overviews of biodiversity loss and degradation, accompanied by the development of multinational policy recommendations to encourage more sustainable decision making at lower levels of sovereign governance (e.g., national, subnational).
Yet truly global research in conservation science is fact comparatively rare, as poignantly demonstrated by the debates surrounding the evidence for and measurement of planetary tipping points (Barnosky et al., 2012; Brook et al., 2013; Lenton, 2013). Apart from the planetary scale of human-driven disruption to Earth’s climate system (Lenton, 2011), both scientific evidence and policy levers tend to be applied most often at finer, more tractable research and administrative scales. But as the massive ecological footprint of humanity has grown exponentially over the last century (footprintnetwork.org), robust, truly global-scale evidence of our damage to the biosphere is now starting to emerge (Díaz et al., 2019). Consequently, our responses to these planet-wide phenomena must also become more global in scope.
Conservation scientists are adept at chronicling patterns and trends — from the thousands of vertebrate surveys indicating an average reduction of 68% in the numbers of individuals in populations since the 1970s (WWF, 2020), to global estimates of modern extinction rates (Ceballos and Ehrlich, 2002; Pimm et al., 2014; Ceballos et al., 2015; Ceballos et al., 2017), future models of co-extinction cascades (Strona and Bradshaw, 2018), the negative consequences of invasive species across the planet (Simberloff et al., 2013; Diagne et al., 2020), discussions surrounding the evidence for the collapse of insect populations (Goulson, 2019; Komonen et al., 2019; Sánchez-Bayo and Wyckhuys, 2019; Cardoso et al., 2020; Crossley et al., 2020), the threats to soil biodiversity (Orgiazzi et al., 2016), and the ubiquity of plastic pollution (Beaumont et al., 2019) and other toxic substances (Cribb, 2014), to name only some of the major themes in global conservation.
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Tags: Complex systems, Frontiers in Conservation Science, global conservation, publishing, threatened species
Categories : agriculture, anthropocene, biodiversity, carbon, climate change, connectivity, conservation, conservation biology, decline, deforestation, development, disease, ecology, economics, ecosystem, ecosystem services, environmental economics, environmental policy, environmental science, exploitation, extinction, governance, habitat loss, harvest, health, human overpopulation, investment, modelling, science, science writing, scientific publishing, scientific writing, sustainability, threatened species
New journal: Frontiers in Conservation Science
29 09 2020
Several months ago, Daniel Blumstein of UCLA approached me with an offer — fancy leading a Special Section in a new Frontiers journal dedicated to conservation science?
I admit that my gut reaction was a visceral ‘no’, both in terms of the extra time it would require, as well as my autonomous reflex of ‘not another journal, please‘.
I had, for example, spent a good deal of blood, sweat, and tears helping to launch Conservation Letters when I acted as Senior Editor for the first 3.5 years of its existence (I can’t believe that it has been nearly a decade since I left the journal). While certainly an educational and reputational boost, I can’t claim that the experience was always a pleasant one — as has been said many times before, the fastest way to make enemies is to become an editor.
But then Dan explained what he had in mind for Frontiers in Conservation Science, and the more I spoke with him, the more I started to think that it wasn’t a bad idea after all for me to join.
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Tags: biodiversity, conservation, Frontiers in Conservation Science, multidisciplinary, Scientific journal
Categories : biodiversity, climate change, conservation, conservation biology, conservation ecology, decline, development, ecology, economics, ecosystem, ecosystem services, environmental policy, environmental science, extinction, genetic diversity, genetics, habitat loss, human overpopulation, human-wildlife conflict, impact, implementation, invasive species, investment, management, population viability analysis, poverty, prioritisation, research, restoration, science, scientific publishing, scientific writing, sustainability, threatened species, translocation
Extinction Anxiety
21 05 2020Earlier this week, the SBS show The Feed did a short segment called ‘Extinction Anxiety’ where I talked with host Alice Matthews about biodiversity extinctions. Given that it has so far only been available in Australia, I made a copy here for others to view.
For more information on the state of global biodiversity, see this previous post.
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Tags: biodiversity, extinction, extinction anxiety, extinction rate, mass extinctions
Categories : agriculture, anthropocene, biodiversity, biowealth, climate change, conservation, deforestation, development, environmental policy, evolution, exploitation, extinction, fragmentation, habitat loss, harvest, human overpopulation, invasive species, logging
Never let a good crisis go to waste
11 05 2020
First published in the Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere Blog on 5 May 2020.
by Professor Dan Blumstein (University of California at Los Angeles), Professor Paul Ehrlich (Stanford University), and Corey Bradshaw (Flinders University)
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Winston Churchill’s words have never been more important than today as we experience the society- and life-changing consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The extent and severity of the disease is a result of ignoring decades of warnings by scientists about the general deterioration of humanity’s epidemiological environment, and specific warnings about confining live, wild animals in markets. The situation was made even more lethal by ignoring the warnings from epidemiologists and disease ecologists once it became clear that an imminent pandemic most likely arose from this practice. Many countries, including the United States, are still ignoring those warnings and the required actions to lessen the impact.
Accordingly, we should ask ourselves, “what else are we missing?” What other huge problems are hiding in plain sight where science could guide policy to avoid catastrophic future failures? For instance, there are two principal health threats that must be addressed immediately, and we must strike while the iron is hot.
The overuse of antibiotics in agriculture will cause widespread deaths from formerly treatable bacterial diseases because of the evolution of antibiotic resistance in microbes. The evolution of resistance is well-known, predictable, and obvious — not in retrospect, but now. By feeding antibiotics to otherwise healthy livestock, animals can be housed in higher densities and they grow faster. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: agriculture, biodiversity loss, climate change, COVID-19, covid19, disease, Extinctions, Global warming, human disease, pandemic, reset, sars-cov2, wet markets
Categories : agriculture, Australia, biodiversity, climate change, conservation, disease, environmental policy, exploitation, habitat loss, health, human overpopulation, livestock, logging
Shifting from prevention to damage control
5 05 2020
Back in March this year before much of the world morphed into the weirdness that now dictates all facets of life, I wrote an update for the Is This How You Feel project led by Joe Duggan.
It was an exercise in emotional expression not necessarily grounded in empiricism. But in that particular piece, I had written the following line:
Few scientists in my field are still seriously considering avoidance of environmental collapse; instead, the dominant discourse is centred on damage control.
But is this correct? Is this how most scientists in conservation feel today? In a way, this post serves both as a rationale for my expectation, and as a question for the wider community.
My rationale for that contention is that it is undeniable that biodiversity is going down the toilet faster than even some of the most pessimistic of us could have predicted. We are without doubt within the sixth mass extinction event every experienced on the Earth for at least the last 600 million years.
Yet, there have never been more conservation biologists and practitioners. There have never been more international treaties and accords that expressly aim to protect biodiversity.
To assert that we have failed is unhelpful fatalism, yet it cannot be ignored that biodiversity’s predicament and those charged with turning around its fate are not exactly replete with successes. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: Anthropocene, biodiversity, conservation, emotional state, fatalism, future, mass extinction, Sixth Mass Extinction
Categories : anthropocene, biodiversity, climate change, conservation, conservation biology, environmental policy, extinction, human overpopulation
Cartoon guide to biodiversity loss LX
8 04 2020The third set of biodiversity cartoons for 2020 (plus a video treat). See full stock of previous ‘Cartoon guide to biodiversity loss’ compendia here.
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Tags: biodiversity, climate change, climate emergency, collapse, conservation, COVID-19, environment, Global warming, sustainability
Categories : biodiversity, carbon, cartoon, climate change, climate shift, ecosystem services, extinction, fire, human overpopulation, human-wildlife conflict
Projecting global deaths from covid19
18 03 2020
I know that it’s not the best way to project expected deaths from a pandemic disease, but being something of a demographer, I just couldn’t help myself.
I therefore took the liberty of punching in some basic probabilities into our world population model to see how many people could potentially die from covid19. But this is not an epidemiological model, so I’m probably vastly over-estimating the total death rates.
Nonetheless, the results were revealing.
I first took the expected mortality by age class based on the Chinese data so far. I then assumed a worst-case scenario of a 60% infection rate (i.e., 3 out of 5 of us will eventually catch the virus). I assumed these values across the entire globe (not taking into account greater or lesser susceptibility or probability of death among countries or regions).
I also considered two more scenarios: (i) double the mortality rate (in each age class), and (ii) the disease outbreak lasting two years instead of just one.
The graph below shows the four different outcomes based on these scenarios relative to the baseline (no covid): Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: corona, corona virus, covid19, deaths, disease, epidemiology, modelling, mortality, population model, predictions, sars-cov2
Categories : conservation, disease, human overpopulation, population dynamics
How I feel now about climate change
10 03 2020
‘Bleak No. 2’ by David Vogler
Five years ago I was asked by a researcher at the Australia National University, Joe Duggan, how I ‘felt’ about climate change.
This was part of an original initiative that put a human face on the scientists working on elements of one of society’s greatest existential threats.
Thus, Is This How You Feel? became a massive success in terms of bringing to the world the idea that scientists are also deeply affected by what they see happening around them.
Five years later, Joe asked me and all the other scientists who participated to provide an update on how we feel.
Here’s what I wrote: Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: anger, climate disruption, democracy, depression, desperation, emotions, feelings, Global warming, plutocracy, politics
Categories : Australia, biodiversity, climate change, conservation, corruption, development, economics, Endarkenment, environmental policy, exploitation, governance, human overpopulation, recovery, science, sustainability
What is a ‘mass extinction’ and are we in one now?
13 11 2019(reproduced from The Conversation)
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For more than 3.5 billion years, living organisms have thrived, multiplied and diversified to occupy every ecosystem on Earth. The flip side to this explosion of new species is that species extinctions have also always been part of the evolutionary life cycle.
But these two processes are not always in step. When the loss of species rapidly outpaces the formation of new species, this balance can be tipped enough to elicit what are known as “mass extinction” events.
Read more: Climate change is killing off Earth’s little creatures
A mass extinction is usually defined as a loss of about three quarters of all species in existence across the entire Earth over a “short” geological period of time. Given the vast amount of time since life first evolved on the planet, “short” is defined as anything less than 2.8 million years.
Since at least the Cambrian period that began around 540 million years ago when the diversity of life first exploded into a vast array of forms, only five extinction events have definitively met these mass-extinction criteria.
These so-called “Big Five” have become part of the scientific benchmark to determine whether human beings have today created the conditions for a sixth mass extinction.
An ammonite fossil found on the Jurassic Coast in Devon. The fossil record can help us estimate prehistoric extinction rates. Corey Bradshaw, Author providedComments : 1 Comment »
Tags: Anthropocene, extinction, mass extinction, mass extinction event, speciation
Categories : biodiversity, climate change, climate shift, conservation, conservation biology, decline, deforestation, development, ecology, evolution, extinction, extinction debt, extinction vortex, habitat loss, harvest, human overpopulation, invasive species, living dead, speciation, sustainability, synergies, threatened species
The politics of environmental destruction
22 10 2019
You’d think I’d get tired of this, wouldn’t you? Alas, the fight does wear me down, but I must persist.
My good friend and colleague, the legendary Professor Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University, as well as his equally legendary wife, Anne, will be joining us in Adelaide for a brief visit during their annual southern migration.
Apart from just catching up over a few good bottles of wine (oh, do those two enjoy fine wines!), we have the immense privilege of having Paul appear at two events while he’s in town.
I’m really only going to be talking about the second of the two events (the first is a Science Meets Parliament gig with me and many others at the South Australia Parliament on 12 November): a grand, public lecture and Q&A session held at Flinders University on Wednesday, 13 November.
Haven’t heard of Paul? Where have you been hiding? If by some miracle you haven’t, here’s a brief bio:
Paul Ehrlich is Bing Professor of Population Studies Emeritus, President of the Center for Conservation Biology, Department of Biology, Stanford University and Adjunct Professor, University of Technology, Sydney. He does research in population biology (includes ecology, evolutionary biology, behavior, and human ecology and cultural evolution). Ehrlich has carried out field, laboratory and theoretical research on a wide array of problems ranging from the dynamics and genetics of insect populations, studies of the ecological and evolutionary interactions of plants and herbivores, and the behavioral ecology of birds and reef fishes, to experimental studies of the effects of crowding on human beings and studies of cultural evolution, especially the evolution of norms. He is President of the Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere and is author and coauthor of more than 1100 scientific papers and articles in the popular press and over 40 books. He is best known to his efforts to alert the public to the many intertwined drivers that are pushing humanity toward a collapse of civilization – especially overpopulation, overconsumption by the rich, and lack of economic, racial, and gender equity. Ehrlich is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Entomological Society and the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics, and a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He is a Foreign Member of the Royal Society, an Honorary Member of the British Ecological Society and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society. Among his many other honours are the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Crafoord Prize in Population Biology and the Conservation of Biological Diversity (an explicit replacement for the Nobel Prize); a MacArthur Prize Fellowship; the Volvo Environment Prize; UNEP Sasakawa Environment Prize; the Heinz Award for the Environment; the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement; the Heineken Prize for Environmental Sciences; the Blue Planet Prize; the Eminent Ecologist award of the Ecological Society of America, the Margalef Prize in Ecology and Environmental Sciences, and the BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Ecology and Conservation Biology. Prof Ehrlich has appeared as a guest on more than 1000 TV and radio programs; he also was a correspondent for NBC News. He has given many hundreds of public lectures in the past 50 years.
I hope your jaw just dropped.
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Tags: Anthropocene, climate change, climate disruption, environment, Flinders University, Paul Ehrlich, politics, public event, public lecture
Categories : anthropocene, Australia, biodiversity, biowealth, celebrity, climate change, conservation, conservation biology, conservation scholars, corruption, decline, deforestation, development, economics, ecosystem, ecosystem services, education, Endarkenment, environmental economics, environmental policy, ethics, exploitation, extinction, extremism, Flinders University, food, governance, habitat loss, health, human overpopulation, impact, investment, media, pollution, poverty, science, science communication, South Australia, sustainability, synergies, threatened species, toxification
Environmental damage kills children
1 10 2019Yes, 
it’s a provocative title, I agree. But then again, it’s true.
But I don’t just mean in the most obvious ways. We already have good data showing that lack of access to clean water and sanitation kills children (especially in developing nations), that air pollution is a nasty killer of young children in particular, and now even climate change is starting to take its toll.
These aspects of child health aren’t very controversial, but when we talk about the larger suite of indicators of environmental ‘damage’, such as deforestation rates, species extinctions, and the overall reduction of ecosystem services, the empirical links to human health, and to children in particular, are far rarer.
This is why I’m proud to report the publication today of a paper on which I and team of wonderful collaborators (Sally Otto, Zia Mehrabi, Alicia Annamalay, Sam Heft-Neal, Zach Wagner, and Peter Le Souëf) have worked for several years.
I won’t lie — the path to publishing this paper was long and hard, I think mainly because it traversed so many different disciplines. But we persevered and today published the paper entitled ‘Testing the socioeconomic and environmental determinants of better child-health outcomes in Africa: a cross-sectional study among nations‘* in the journal BMJ Open.
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Tags: air pollution, breastfeeding, child health, children, corruption, diarrhoea, ecosystem services, environmental degradation, food supply, governance quality, health investment, human overpopulation, infectious disease, injury, Millennium Development Goals, over-population, paediatrics, pulmonary diseae, sanitation, stunting, Sustainable Development Goals, United Nations, water, wealth, World Health Organization
Categories : Africa, agriculture, anthropocene, biodiversity, biowealth, carbon, climate change, conservation, conservation biology, corruption, deforestation, demography, development, economics, ecosystem services, environmental Kuznets curve, environmental science, exploitation, extinction, food, function, governance, habitat loss, harvest, health, human overpopulation, investment, livestock, logging, modelling, pollution, poverty, Red List, societies, sustainability, threatened species, toxification, water
Increasing human population density drives environmental degradation in Africa
26 06 2019
Almost a decade ago, I (co-) wrote a paper examining the socio-economic correlates of gross, national-scale indices of environmental performance among the world’s nations. It turned out to be rather popular, and has so far garnered over 180 citations and been cited in three major policy documents.
In addition to the more pedestrian ranking itself, we also tested which of three main socio-economic indicators best explained variation in the environmental rank — a country’s gross ‘wealth’ indicator (gross national income) turned out to explain the most, and there was no evidence to support a non-linear relationship between environmental performance and per capita wealth (the so-called environmental Kuznets curve).
Well, that was then, and this is now. Something that always bothered me about that bit of research was that in some respects, it probably unfairly disadvantaged certain countries that were in more recent phases of the ‘development’ pathway, such that environmental damage long since done in major development pulses many decades or even centuries prior to today (e.g., in much of Europe) probably meant that certain countries got a bit of an unfair advantage. In fact, the more recently developed nations probably copped a lower ranking simply because their damage was fresher.
While I defend the overall conclusions of that paper, my intentions have always been since then to improve on the approach. That desire finally got the better of me, and so I (some might say unwisely) decided to focus on a particular region of the planet where some of the biggest biodiversity crunches will happen over the next few decades — Africa.
Africa is an important region to re-examine these national-scale relationships for many reasons. The first is that it’s really the only place left on the planet where there’s a semi-intact megafauna assemblage. Yes, the great Late Pleistocene megafauna extinction event did hit Africa too, but compared to all other continents, it got through that period relatively unscathed. So now we (still) have elephants, rhinos, giraffes, hippos, etc. It’s a pretty bloody special place from that perspective alone.
Elephants in the Kruger National Park, South Africa (photo: CJA Bradshaw)
Then there’s the sheer size of the continent. Unfortunately, most mercator projections of the Earth show a rather quaint continent nuzzled comfortably in the middle of the map, when in reality, it’s a real whopper. If you don’t believe me, go to truesize.com and drag any country of interest over the African continent (it turns out that its can more or less fit all of China, Australia, USA, and India within its greater borders).
Third, most countries in Africa (barring a few rare exceptions), are still in the so-called ‘development’ phase, although some are much farther along the economic road than others. For this reason, an African nation-to-nation comparison is probably a lot fairer than comparing, say, Bolivia to Germany, or Mongolia to Canada.
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Tags: Africa, agriculture, carbon emissions, deforestation, development, ecological footprint, ecology, environmental performance, environmental sustainability, human population, human population growth, megafauna, sustainability, sustainable development
Categories : Africa, agriculture, anthropocene, biodiversity, biowealth, carbon, cattle, conservation, corruption, deforestation, development, economics, environmental Kuznets curve, environmental policy, environmental science, exploitation, extinction, food, governance, habitat loss, human overpopulation, livestock, logging, mammal, management, modelling, poverty, protected area, societies, sustainability, threatened species, vegetation
Influential conservation ecology papers of 2018
17 12 2018
For the last five years I’ve published a retrospective list of the ‘top’ 20 influential papers of the year as assessed by experts in F1000 Prime — so, I’m doing so again for 2018 (interesting side note: six of the twenty papers highlighted here for 2018 appear in Science magazine). See previous years’ posts here: 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, and 2013.
- Global warming transforms coral reef assemblages — The authors report an unprecedented, regional-scale shift in the composition of coral assemblages, reflecting markedly divergent responses to heat stress by different taxa.
- Mammal diversity will take millions of years to recover from the current biodiversity crisis — … highlights the impending catastrophe that human activity is bringing to the planet, not only due to climate breakdown … but also potential loss of mammalian diversity.
- Protect the last of the wild — … highlights the potentially irreversible impact humans have had on the planet, to the extent that only ~ 20% remains as wilderness.
- A final warning to planet Earth — Scientists have issued numerous warnings to politicians and to the general population, but to little avail: the consumerism show must go on!
- The cognition of ‘nuisance’ species — … discuss[es] the underlying cognitive abilities that may explain [invasive species] thriving in human-modified environments and then discuss[es] how this knowledge could be used to control such species.
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Tags: biodiversity hotspots, biodiversity loss, climate breakdown, climate change, cognition, coral reefs, disease, fieldwork, Fish, fisheries, fishing impacts, Great Barrier Reef, killer whales, mammals, nuisance species, plastics, predators, productivity, richness-productivity relationship, sharks, Species richness, wild areas
Categories : anthropocene, aquaculture, Australia, biodiversity, biowealth, carbon, climate change, climate shift, community ecology, connectivity, conservation, conservation biology, conservation ecology, coral reefs, decline, deforestation, demography, ecology, economics, ecosystem, ecosystem function, ecosystem services, environmental policy, environmental science, exploitation, extinction, extinction debt, fish, fisheries, food, fragmentation, function, habitat loss, harvest, human overpopulation, invasive species, management, marine, marine protected area, modelling, pollination, pollution
Primate woes where the oil palm grows
16 08 2018
A new article just published in PNAS reveals how future expansion of the palm-oil industry could have terrible consequences for African primates.
Researchers from the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, CIRAD, Liverpool John Moores University, and ETH Zurich searched for “areas of compromise” combining high oil palm suitability with low primate vulnerability, as possible locations where to accommodate new oil-palm plantations while reducing detrimental effects on primate populations.
Results show that there is small room for compromise. In fact, potential areas of compromise are rare across the whole African continent, covering a total extent of 0.13 Mha of land highly suited to oil palm cultivation where primate vulnerability is low, rising to just 3.3 Mha if all land with at least minimum suitability to grow oil palm is taken into account.
Palm oil production is steadily rising, and expected to accelerate in response to growing world’s population, with future demand driven not only by the food industry, but also by the biofuel market. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: Africa, agriculture, biodiversity, deforestation, oil palm, palm oil, sustainability
Categories : Africa, agriculture, biodiversity, carbon, conservation, deforestation, ecosystem services, environmental policy, extinction, food, fragmentation, habitat loss, human overpopulation, IUCN, modelling, oil palm, palm oil, prioritisation, rain forests, threatened species
How to feed the world without costing the Earth
5 07 2018
I’m excited to announce the upcoming public lecture by world-renowned sustainability scientist, Professor Andrew Balmford, at Flinders University on 17 July 2018.
Andrew is Professor of Conservation Science and a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award holder at the Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, and is on sabbatical at University of Tasmania until December 2018. His main research interests are exploring how conservation might best be reconciled with land-demanding activities such as farming, quantifying the costs and benefits of effective conservation, and examining what works in conservation. In his book Wild Hope (Chicago University Press), he argues that cautious optimism is essential in tackling environmental challenges. Andrew helped establish the Student Conference on Conservation Science, and Earth Optimism.
Professor Balmford will be presenting his seminar “How to feed the world without costing the Earth” (hosted by the Ecology & Evolution Research Group) at the Bedford Park Campus of Flinders University in South Lecture Theatre 1, from 12:00-13:00 on 17 July 2018. All are welcome.
Abstract: Globally, agriculture is the greatest threat to biodiversity and a major contributor to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. How we choose to deal with rising human food demand will to a large degree determine the state of biodiversity and the wider environment in the 21st century. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: Adelaide, agriculture, Andrew Balmford, biodiversity loss, extinction, Flinders University, food, land sharing, land sparing, lecture, presentation, seminar, sustainability, University of Cambridge
Categories : agriculture, biodiversity, conservation, conservation biology, conservation ecology, conservation scholars, food, human overpopulation
Our global system-of-systems
28 02 2018
I’ve just read an excellent paper that succinctly, eloquently, and wisely summarised the current predicament of our highly interconnected, global, complex adaptive system (i.e., our environment).
If you are new to the discussions around state shifts, hysteresis, tipping points, and system collapse, there might be a lot in the new paper by Philip Garnett of the University of York that you could find intimidating (and not just because of the complexity of the concepts he discusses). If you are more up-to-date on these discussions, I highly recommend reading this paper for distilling some of the more pertinent questions.
The essence of the paper is that our global environment (Earth) is one giant, complex system made up of interacting sub-systems. We can think of these as a giant, interconnected network of nodes and connections (often called ‘edges’) between them. If you do ecological network theory, then you know what I’m talking about.
What’s particularly fascinating to me is that Philip Garnett is not an environmental scientist; in fact, he’s a a lecturer in Operations Management and Business Analytics (although he does have a background in genetics and biology) who specialises in complex systems theory. In fact, much of his paper uses socio-economic examples of system complexity and collapse, yet the applications to environmentalism in general, and to ecological integrity in particular, are spot on.
Comments : 3 Comments »
Tags: alternative stable states, Anthropocene, collapse, Complex systems, complex systems theory, ecological networks, hysteresis, quasi-stability, systems theory, tipping points
Categories : biodiversity, climate change, connectivity, conservation, ecology, ecosystem function, extinction, extinction debt, human overpopulation, sustainability, trophic cascades
Human population growth, refugees & environmental degradation
7 07 2017
The global human population is now over 7.5 billion, and increasing by about 90 million each year. This means that we are predicted to exceed 9 billion people by 2050, with no peak in site this century and a world population of up to 12 billion by 2100. These staggering numbers are the result of being within the exponential phase of population growth since last century, such that some 14% of all human beings that have ever lived on the planet are still alive today. That is taking into account about the past 200,000 years, or 10,000 generations.
Of course just like the Earth’s resources, human beings are not distributed equally around the globe, nor are the population trends consistent among regions or nations. In fact, developing nations are contributing to the bulk of the global annual increase (around 89 million per year), whereas developed nations are contributing a growth of only about 1 million each year. Another demonstration of the disparity in human population distributon is that about half of all human beings live in just seven countries (China, India, USA, Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Bangladesh), representing just one quarter of the world’s total land area. Read the rest of this entry »
Comments : 4 Comments »
Tags: Climate, climate disruption, conflict, degradation, density dependence, density feedback, environment, growth, Population, refugees, resources, war, warfare, World population
Categories : Africa, climate change, climate shift, conservation, deforestation, exploitation, food, human overpopulation
Not 100% renewable, but 0% carbon
5 04 2017
Anyone familiar with this blog and our work on energy issues will not be surprised by my sincere support of nuclear power as the only realistic solution to climate change in the electricity (and possibly transport and industrial heat) arena. I’ve laid my cards on the table in the peer-reviewed literature (e.g., see here, here, here, here, here & here) and the standard media, and I’ve even joined the board of a new environmental NGO that supports nuclear.
And there is hope, despite the ever-increasing human population, rising consumerism, dwindling resources, and the ubiquity of ideologically driven and ethically compromised politicians. I am hopeful for several reasons, including rising safety and reliability standards of modern nuclear technology, the continued momentum of building new fission reactors in many countries, and even the beginnings of real conversations about nuclear power (or at least, the first steps toward this) in countries where nuclear energy is currently banned (e.g., Australia). I’m also heartened by the fact that nearly every conservation scientists with whom I speak is generally supportive, or at least non-resistant, to the idea of nuclear power as part of the climate change solution. An open letter by our colleagues attests to this. In fact, every day that passes brings new evidence that we cannot ignore this solution any longer.
Even despite the evidence in support of implementing a strong nuclear component into climate change-mitigation strategies, one of the most frequent arguments for not doing so is that society can achieve all of its energy needs and simultaneously combat climate change by constructing 100% renewable-energy pathways. While it is an easy mantra to repeat because it feels right intrinsically to nearly everyone with an environmental conscience, as a scientist I also had to ask if such a monumental task is even technically feasible. Read the rest of this entry »
Comments : 16 Comments »
Tags: ancillary services, demand, dispatchability, energy, feasibility, greenhouse gas emissions, greenhouse gases, nuclear, nuclear energy, reliability, Renewable energy, renewables, viability
Categories : anthropocene, biodiversity, carbon, climate change, climate shift, conservation, conservation biology, deforestation, development, habitat loss, human overpopulation, modelling, science, sustainability, water
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