20 Actions
Desertification and climate change is happening so fast, we need action on the ground. Enough seminars, talks, talks, talks.
20.1 Analysis
I remember thinking, in the 1970s, that once people became aware of the ecological crisis — disappearing species, polluted rivers, poisoned air — that the necessary changes would be simple to achieve. Humanity only had to curb industrial waste and destruction, preserve wilderness for other species, put limits on our consumption, stabilize human population, and just be smart about how to live on Earth without destroying it.
Of course, I was naive to think any of that would be easy. Since that time, human population has doubled, consumption of material resources has quadrupled, biodiversity collapse has accelerated, and after 34 international climate meetings, we are emitting more carbon than ever before. Meanwhile, we have not exactly ended war, vanquished racism, nor achieved gender or economic parity. Even worse, giant corporate interests actively work to halt and reverse any ecological regulation on industrial activity.
Our emotional responses to crisis evolved over millennia, primarily to meet immediate needs, perhaps to benefit our tribe or community, not necessarily to solve complex, multi-dimensional, long-term dilemmas. Our ideas about “solutions” tend to be linear, short-term, and linked to a perception of simple cause and effect. Our educational institutions encourage this linear thinking about problems and solutions. Meanwhile, our social and ecological challenges are systemic, multidimensional, and complex.
Living ecosystems are dynamic, always changing, and possess qualities such as thresholds, cascades, feedback loops, tipping points, lags, and generally unintended consequences to input. Maybe we need to learn more about how change actually occurs in nature, not just in our imaginations or in our engineering dissertations.
20.2 Actionism
Any activist group needs a sound theory of change and a clear strategy for gaining influence.
20.3 Bankrolling
Bankrolling is about making finance institutions responsible for the environmental impacts of what they finance.
20.3.1 Bankrolling Plastics
Banks are failing to address the global plastic-pollution crisis, having provided $1.7 trillion in financing to packaging companies, retailers and related businesses.
The banks haven’t put in place due-diligence processes for packaging companies or made funding contingent on policies that reduces plastic and favors recycling over virgin plastics.
Banks are currently not taking any responsibility to understand, measure or reduce the impacts of their loans within the plastics value chain. By indiscriminately funding actors in the plastics supply chain, banks have failed to acknowledge their role in enabling global plastic pollution.
Banks need to mitigate their role in enabling plastic pollution in a number of ways – for example, by aligning their lending portfolios with public policy on plastic reduction, reusability and recycling, and ceasing the financing of new plants that use virgin feedstock to produce single-use plastic packaging.
20.4 Bankrolling Extinction
Memo
It is clear banks do not consider themselves responsible or liable for biodiversity impacts caused by their lending activities
In 2019 the world’s largest banks invested more than USD 2.6 trillion (equivalent to Canada’s GDP) in sectors governments and scientists agree are the primary drivers of biodiversity destruction.
The financial sector is bankrolling the mass extinction crisis, while undermining human rights and indigenous sovereignty.
We are currently in the midst of a mass extinction event. Termed the ‘Anthropocene Extinction’, this is the first of its kind to be caused by humans. Humans have impacted nearly every corner of the planet and are approaching planetary boundaries which could take millions of years to recover from. 1 Scientists are warning of ‘biological annihilation’. 2 While governments and companies have been the focus of attention on this issue, actors in the finance sector have largely evaded scrutiny until recently.
The report calls for:
- Banks to disclose and radically reduce their impact on nature and stop finance for new fossil fuels, deforestation, overfishing and ecosystem destruction.
-Governments to stop protecting banks’ role in biodiversity destruction and rewrite the rules of finance to hold banks liable for the damage caused by their lending.
- People everywhere to have a say in how their money is invested, and a right to stop banks from causing serious harm to people and planet.
We cannot rely on banks to find the answer. We need a radical overhaul of how our financial system creates liability, accountability, and responsibility to protect and restore nature.
To prevent extinction, banks have to stop funding it.
20.7 Conservation
Guardian
About 17% of land and inland water ecosystems and 8% of marine areas are within formal protected areas, with the total coverage increasing by 42% since the beginning of the last decade, according to the Protected Planet report by the UN Environment Programme (Unep) and International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
The Protected Planet report is the final report card on Aichi Target 11 – the global 10-year target on protected and conserved areas. The UN calculated that 16.64% of land and inland waters has been protected to date but concluded that governments had met the 17% target because of a lag in reporting on data. The 17% ambition was just one of seven parts of Aichi Target 11. Governments have not fully met any of the 20 Aichi biodiversity targets agreed in Nagoya, Japan, in 2010.
Despite making significant progress, the report warns, a third of key biodiversity areas lack any coverage, connectivity between areas protected for nature remains poor and gaps remain in the quality of conservation work.
20.7.1 Communal Conservation
Nijhuis
In southern Africa in the 1980s, some conservationists recognised that parks and reserves, many created by colonial governments, had divided subsistence hunters and farmers from much of the wildlife that had long sustained them – and which, in some cases, they’d managed as a commons for generations. The resulting lack of local support meant that even the best-patrolled park boundaries were vulnerable to incursions by human neighbours, people unlikely to tolerate – much less protect – the large, sometimes troublesome species that ranged beyond even the largest reserves.
20.7.2 Nashulai
In Kenya, communities are starting to rethink wildlife conservation. Traditional methods often meant moving indigenous people from their land to make way for protected areas and wildlife. Nashulai, on the edge of Kenya’s world famous Maasai Mara National Reserve, wants to change that. It’s a conservancy where humans and animals live side-by-side, reviving ancient practices.
Capitalism has never saved anything and will never save anything. So if you move from sustainable livelihoods to capitalism where you seek growth and profit, it costs something. If you manage your lands for sustainable production and other livelihoods, you will end up with a beautiful ecosystem. Good grass shared by wildlife, animals coming through, your livestock coming through. You will end up with something beautiful. Then invite tourists to come and enjoy that.
20.7.4 Conservation Trends
Biological Conservation Issues (The Guardian)
Emerging Global Biological Conservation Issues (article) (pdf)
20.7.5 Legacy Landscapes Fund
Guardian
A new public-private scheme backed by the German government to provide long-term funding for biodiverse areas in developing countries is launched on Wednesday. Known as the Legacy Landscapes Fund (LLF), it aims to provide stable financing for at least 30 conservation areas by the end of this decade to pay for park rangers, support surrounding communities and maintain infrastructure. Under the 30x30 initiative, more than 50 countries have committed to protect almost a third of the planet by 2030.
Through public and private donors, the LLF aims to become one of the biggest nature conservation foundations in the world, with $1bn (£700m) of capital by 2030. Pilot projects in Angola, Indonesia and Bolivia are among those selected for the launch.
Stefanie Lang, executive director of the LLF, said: “It’s much easier to find funding for something spectacular like a rhino introduction than operational costs for monitoring and law enforcement. That is the gap the fund wants to close: establish something that ensures funding for perpetuity.”
It is not just about creating new areas. It’s the identification and full recognition for existing areas that might be governed by indigenous peoples, local communities and private actors. That is going to be the key to the future.
20.8 Restoration
On 5 June – World Environment Day – the UN will launch its Decade on Ecosystem Restoration
Ecosystem restoration will be the key to success or failure over the coming decades. It takes many forms, depending on the ecosystem and how badly degraded it is. At one end of the spectrum is passive rewilding, which simply means getting out of the way and letting nature do its thing.
Small-scale rewilding projects such as at Oostvaardersplassen in the Netherlands, where an area of reclaimed polder land has been given over to nature, have shown the way, but the ambition must grow – and is growing. In Europe, the biggest project aims to leave some 35,000 square kilometres of Lapland in northern Sweden and Norway to rewild. In North America, the Wildlands Network aims to link up protected areas in “wildways” in which animals can freely roam spanning Canada, the US and Mexico.
At the other end of the restoration spectrum is active engineering of entire landscapes with mass tree planting, removal of alien species and damaging infrastructure such as dams, and reintroductions of species. This can be done. South Korea adopted an active reforestation policy in the 1950s following the Korean War. The total volume of wood in the country’s forests increased from some 64 million cubic metres in 1967 to 925 million cubic metres in 2015, and forests now cover some two-thirds of the country. The Green Belt Movement founded in Kenya by Nobel peace laureate Wangari Maathai has planted tens of millions of trees across Africa, and inspired many similar projects.
Any scaled-up restoration needs to be ecologically sound. It is not just planting trees everywhere, particularly in places where trees didn’t belong in the first place, like grasslands or wetland. That will be detrimental to biodiversity.
The headline target of the UNEP initiative is to restore 3.5 million square kilometres of land over the coming decade – slightly more than the size of India, or just over 2 per cent of the world’s land surface.
20.8.1 Natural regeneration
Tropical forests have the potential to almost fully regrow if they are left untouched by humans for about 20 years. This is due to a multidimensional mechanism whereby old forest flora and fauna help a new generation of forest grow – a natural process known as “secondary succession”.
More than 90 researchers from all over the world came together to analyse exactly how tropical forest regrowth takes place. They pored over data about forest recovery from three continents, 77 sites and 2,275 plots of land in the Americas and West Africa. From there, they evaluated 12 specific criteria, such as the soil, plant functioning, ecosystem structure and biodiversity, and more. They then modelled this data – without which they would have had to wait for over 100 years to see this happen in the real world – with a technique called chronosequencing, allowing them to infer long-term trends in forest recovery.
The researchers looked in particular at what happens to tropical forest land that has been used for agriculture or farming and is then abandoned after a couple of seasons. They found that the old forest portion – including some fertile soil, any residual trees, seed banks and maybe stumps that can resprout – created a nourishing, interconnected ecosystem for new forest to start to grow.
The researchers found that different aspects take, respectively, more or less time to recover to the levels of “old forest” before it was used. Soil takes an average of 10 years to recover to its previous status, plant community and animal biodiversity take 60 years, and overall biomass takes a total of 120, according to their calculations.
But overall, tropical forests can get back to roughly 78% of their old-growth status in just 20 years.
These are calculations, and one of the constraints of chronosequence-based analyses is that every location analysed is assumed to have the same history and successional dynamics.
“The secondary forests are like teenagers. They soak up carbon like crazy and they empty your fridge,”
A lot of the promises that have been made about planting trees in order to restore forests across the world are unrealistic. Most of the time, 30%-50% of those trees die, and they only pertain to a couple of species that cannot mimic the natural biodiversity of forests.
Use natural regrowth where you can and plant actively and restore actively where you need to. There’s a case-by-case approach, and this all depends on the local conditions and also on the local needs of the people because they live in these landscapes.
20.8.2 Regreening Sinai
The Weather Makers
Chop down the trees, destroy the ecosystem, and the rains disappear; restore the ecosystem, make a wetter landscape, and the rains come back.
Discussion about the climate crisis has predominantly focused on fossil fuels and greenhouse gases; now, we’re coming to realise that the other side of that coin is protecting and replenishing the natural world. There is no better mechanism for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than nature, but in the past 5,000 years, human activity has reduced the Earth’s total biomass by an estimated 50%, and destroyed or degraded 70% of the world’s forests.
There is evidence that the Sinai once was green – as recently as 4,500 to 8,000 years ago. Cave paintings found there depict trees and plants. Records in the 1,500-year-old Saint Catherine’s monastery, near Mount Sinai, tally harvests of wood. Satellite images reveal a network of rivers flowing from the mountains in the south towards the Mediterranean.
What turned the Sinai into a desert was, most likely, human activity. Wherever they settle, humans tend to chop down trees and clear land. This loss of vegetation affects the land’s ability to retain moisture. Grazing animals trample and consume plants when they try to grow back. The soil loses its structure and is washed away
Regreening the Sinai is to some extent a question of restarting that “water begets water” feedback loop. After restoring Lake Bardawil, the second phase is to expand and restore the wetlands around it so as to evaporate more moisture and increase biodiversity. The Sinai coast is already a major global crossing point for migratory birds; restored wetlands would encourage more birds, which would add fertility and new plant species.
Eco-Machine
Tthe “eco machine” – a low-tech installation consisting of clear-sided water barrels covered by a greenhouse - basically a living technology. The principle is that water flows from one barrel to the next, and each barrel contains a mini ecosystem: algae, plants, bacteria, fungi, worms, insects, fish; like a series of manmade ponds. As the water flows, it becomes cleaner and cleaner. “You could design one that would treat toxic waste or sewage, or you could design one to grow food. They are solar-driven, and have within them a very large amount of biodiversity – in a sense, they reflect the aggregate experience of life on Earth over the last 3.5bn years.” In the Sinai, eco machines would be used to grow plants and to produce fresh water.
The water feeding the eco machine would be salt water, but the water that condenses inside would be fresh water, which can then be used to irrigate plants. If the structure is designed correctly, one would only need to drum on the outside to create an artificial “rain” inside. When the plants and the soil inside the greenhouse reach a certain maturity, they become self-sustaining. The greenhouse can then be removed and the process repeated in a different spot.
In the Sinai, the sediment from Lake Bardawil would be pumped up to the hills, 50km inland, where it would then trickle back down through a network of eco machines. The saltiness of the sediment is actually an asset, says Van Hout, in that it has preserved all the nutrients. Flushing them through the eco machines will “reactivate” them.
Loess Plateau
The Loess plateau was much like the Sinai: a dry, barren, heavily eroded landscape. The soil was washing away and silting up the Yellow river. Farmers could barely grow any crops. The plan to restore it was huge in scale but relatively low tech: planting trees on the hilltops; terracing the steep slopes (by hand); adding organic material to the soil; controlling grazing animals; retaining water. The transformation has been astonishing. Within 20 years, the deserts of the Loess plateau became green valleys and productive farmland
Costal Spain
Building on the Spanish coast was creating floods in Germany.
Climate Change
Another useful measure could be global temperature. In addition to sequestering carbon, green areas also help cool the planet. Deserts are heat producers, reflecting around 60% to 70% of the solar energy that falls on them straight back into the atmosphere. In areas covered by vegetation, much of that solar energy is instead used in evapotranspiration: the process of condensation and evaporation by which water moves between plants and the atmosphere. “If vegetation comes back, you increase cover, you reduce temperature, you reduce solar reflection, you start creating a stable climate,” says Van der Hoeven. “If we want to do something about global warming, we have to do something about deserts.”
Sinai
At present, the hot Sinai acts as a “vacuum cleaner”, drawing moist air from the Mediterranean and funnelling it towards the Indian Ocean. A cooler Sinai would mean less of that moisture being “lost”. Instead, it would fall as rain across the Middle East and north Africa, thus boosting the entire region’s natural potential. Van der Hoeven describes the Sinai peninsula as an “acupuncture point”: “There are certain points in this world where, if we accumulate our joint energy, we can make a big difference.”
UN
After decades of compartmentalising environmental issues and missing its own targets, the UN, too, has come to realise that the only viable solution is to do it all at once.
Ecosystem restoration is not a technical challenge; it’s a social challenge.
20.9 Legal
The EJ Atlas is a teaching, networking and advocacy resource. Strategists, activist organizers, scholars, and teachers will find many uses for the database, as well as citizens wanting to learn more about the often invisible conflicts taking place.
Please click the markers on the map for more information.
20.10 Conflict Atlas
El Pais
A sus 82 años, el economista catalán Joan Martínez Alier pasa cada mañana un par de horas revisando el Atlas de la Justicia Ambiental (EJAtlas) que comenzó con un equipo de trabajo en 2012. Ahora recoge casi 3.500 conflictos en el mundo que requieren de una defensa sólida para resolver problemas con las nucleares, de combustibles fósiles, de gestión de aguas y residuos, de extracción de minerales y materiales de construcción, o de amenaza a la vida de activistas o a la biodiversidad.
Su principal tesis consiste en demostrar que la economía industrial que rige el planeta es “entrópica” [que genera desorden], no circular: “La producción y el consumo se basa en buscar materias primas, recursos materiales y naturales que no se reciclan. El 90% de ellos se convierten en basura, se disipan en un mundo finito y se recurre de nuevo a la extracción para comenzar el proceso”, explica. Y en esta práctica de explotación radican los conflictos que después recogen en el atlas interactivo, donde se acumulan centenares de círculos de colores que los identifican por tipos. Destacan hasta ahora en la costa occidental de Sudamérica, el golfo de Guinea, los países del mar Mediterráneo y en el sudeste asiático.