The God Species: How Humans Really Can Save the Planet...

(#litres_trial_promo) Recently ecologists working in the crater of a single extinct Papua New Guinean volcano found 16 new frogs, three new fish, a giant bat and giant rat; luckily a BBC camera crew was on hand to record each unique moment of discovery.

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But who cares anyway? Here’s Marcel Berlins, columnist on the Guardian: ‘I passionately believe in saving the whale, the tiger, the orang-utan, the sea turtle and many other specifically identified species. What I do not accept is the general principle that all species alive today should carry on existing forever. We have become so attuned to treating every diminution of animals, insects, birds or fish with concern that we have forgotten to explain why we think it so terrible.’ Warming to his argument, Berlins concludes: ‘How many mammal species can you think of? Can the remainder be that important? Can their loss matter that much, to you or to the world? Of course we must fight hard to retain as many species as we can; but it isn’t a tragedy if we lose quite a few along the way.’

Berlins’s common-sense argument is a reasonable one, and its answer not as obvious as one might expect. After all, the biosphere has lost woolly mammoths, Tasmanian tigers and countless other charismatic species already, and yet the world goes on turning. Environments we previously assumed were pristine, like the Amazonian rainforest or the Siberian tundra, now turn out to be more of a product of human engineering than we once thought – and their vanished mega-fauna have left little identifiable trace, and certainly not one that affects our current lives from day to day. Indeed, most people are unaware that the Quaternary Megafaunal Extinction even happened, and view the disappearance of the mammoth as an interesting but still unsolved mystery, if they think about it at all. Does it really matter if the thinning-out process accelerates a little more?

There are some good utilitarian arguments to show why destroying biodiversity is not a good idea. The biologist E. O. Wilson tells a story of how a small tree in a remote swamp forest in Borneo yielded an effective drug against HIV – except that when collectors returned to the same spot a second time they found the tree had been cut down, and no more could be found.

(#litres_trial_promo) (Happily for AIDS sufferers, a few remaining specimens were eventually located in the Singapore Botanic Garden.) Who knows which tangled Amazonian vine might one day deliver a cure for cancer? But this is only part of the story, for it is ecosystems in their entirety that are valuable and irreplaceable as much as the individual species they contain. Biodiversity loss is a planetary boundary of the utmost importance not because killing off species is morally wrong, but because a healthy diversity of living organisms is essential for ecosystems to function properly.

Living systems keep the air breathable and water drinkable for themselves and us, but to continue to perform these vital services they need to retain their complexity, diversity and resilience. Once humans start to pick off component parts, an ecosystem may appear to function as normal for a while – until some unpredictable tipping point is reached, and collapse occurs. Conceptually this is a bit like the game of Jenga, where wooden blocks are built together in a tower and pieces removed from underneath one by one by each player. Needless to say, whoever removes the crucial ‘keystone’ piece that topples the tower loses. The lesson of Jenga is an important one, because it shows that there is no single keystone: each removed block makes the tower less and less stable, but no one knows in advance which piece will lead the tower to collapse.

Keystone predators are particularly important to ecosystems. In the marine realm, great sharks – like tiger, hammerhead, bull and thresher sharks – have in recent years been mercilessly targeted worldwide: their numbers have plunged by up to 99.99 per cent in some seas.

(#litres_trial_promo) On the eastern North American coast, rays are no longer being eaten by the vanished sharks, and have increased their numbers as a result. They in turn eat scallops and oysters, destroying the formerly productive scallop fishery.

(#litres_trial_promo) The process is known as a ‘trophic cascade’ and is now understood to be a fundamental part of ecological dynamics. An ecosystem shift can be irreversible: the Newfoundland cod, whose numbers collapsed because of overfishing in 1992, are unlikely ever to return in substancial numbers. Cod larvae are eaten by smaller fish and crustaceans like lobsters (once kept in check by more numerous adult cod), which dominate the ecosystem instead.

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For land-based ecosystems apex predators are just as important. In Yellowstone, the reintroduction of wolves in 1995 has allowed the regrowth of native aspen trees for the first time in half a century. This is because elk populations are now being controlled by wolf predation, preventing overgrazing and allowing trees to recover.

(#litres_trial_promo) In nearby Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming small birds like the gray catbird and MacGillivray’s warblers may depend for their survival on wolves, recently reintroduced to the area after an absence of 75 years. Both birds flourish in riverside willows: but the willows, like Yellowstone’s aspens, were being overgrazed by hungry moose. In places where predators are still absent, expensive management schemes have to artificially keep down the populations of deer and other grazing herbivores – a service that wolves perform for free.

However, it is not only predators that count. Bottom-up interference can also dramatically destabilise an ecosystem. In the early 1980s a new pathogen appeared in the Caribbean near the mouth of the Panama Canal, wiping out sea urchin populations with extraordinary virulence: within a year 98 per cent of the urchin population was gone, in what is still the worst recorded die-off of any marine animal in history. Because urchins are herbivorous grazers they perform an important function on reefs, keeping the corals clear of algae and seaweed that would otherwise choke the reef systems. Without them, the corals lacked protection, and within a year reefs from Jamaica to the coast of Venezuela disappeared under a thick layer of green slime.

(#litres_trial_promo) After a decade, just 5–10 per cent of the original coral cover was left,

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(#litres_trial_promo) A whole marine ecosystem had irreversibly collapsed because of the removal of one of its key components.

Functioning ecosystems need not just a varied number of species, but also – just as crucially – habitat. Humans have disturbed, fragmented or ploughed up huge areas of the planet’s terrestrial surface. But there is a direct correlation between biodiversity and land area: the smaller the remaining fragment, the fewer species it can support. This so-called ‘species–area relationship’ was illustrated by a massive – though unintentional – field experiment beginning in 1986, when a gigantic hydroelectric dam was built in the jungles of Venezuela. When the lake behind the dam began to fill, the rising tide turned a hilly area of four thousand square kilometres into isolated islands, each with its tropical forest plant and animal species cut off by the surrounding waters. Some of the new islands were very small, just an acre or two in size, whilst others were relatively large, with areas of 150 hectares or more. As you might expect, the smallest islands lost the most biodiversity – three quarters of their original complement – due to their small areas. All islands, large and small, lost their top predators: the jaguar, puma and harpy eagle. But the species that did survive quickly became more abundant as both competition for food and predation ceased abruptly. Some islands were overrun by leaf-cutting ants. One, having housed a large herd of capybaras as the waters rose, ended up as little more than bare ground covered by capybara dung. On some islands, monkeys decimated bird populations, whilst on others rodent populations increased 35-fold.

(#litres_trial_promo) In all cases, complex and formerly diverse ecosystems were torn apart and thrown into chaos.

From these and many other examples, ecologists now understand a fundamental principle of biodiversity: that the greater the diversity of species, the more resilient and stable an ecosystem can be. The same, of course, applies to the biosphere as a whole. We are only just beginning to realise all the myriad ways that different species act unconsciously together to keep this planet habitable and its climate tolerable. Might there be some kind of global ‘tipping point’ – like the ones that were passed in the Newfoundland cod fishery and the Caribbean coral reefs – where some kind of irreversible global ecosystem shift takes place? This is the possibility that the planetary boundary on biodiversity is intended to prevent: it is now absolutely clear that the Earth’s living biosphere depends fundamentally on the maintenance of a broad level of species diversity. If the Sixth Mass Extinction is allowed to continue – or still worse, accelerate further – then the chance of a global-scale ecosystem collapse can only continue to grow. the price of pandas

The current crisis in biodiversity tells us loud and clear that conventional approaches to conservation have failed. ‘Paper parks’ – named but barely protected – in developing countries are routinely violated by poachers and loggers. What areas are set aside for nature reserves are too small and too fragmented. At sea fishermen compete with each other in a global race to the bottom, knowing that if they do not catch the last bluefin tuna, someone else will. No wonder the 2010 Global Biodiversity Outlook report is full of ominous words and phrases like ‘serious declines’, ‘extensive fragmentation and degradation’, ‘overexploitation’ and ‘dangerous impacts’. To meet the planetary boundary, we need to make urgent changes in policy.

Biodiversity loss is fundamentally an enormous market failure, because the people that profit from destroying biodiversity are not generally the same people who lose out when the rainforests, mangroves and coral reefs are finally gone. When palm-oil companies move into the last remnants of rainforest in Borneo, the biofuels they sell deliver benefits to shareholders and foreign consumers, but local people are the losers, as are all the rest of us because of the destructive impact on the world’s climate and ecosystems. Our chief task today is to design systems that value nature in a direct and marketable sense and deliver hard cash to those who are in a position to protect ecosystems in a reasonably intact state. What is needed is not more moralising, but more money.

This kind of talk makes many environmentalists queasy. Greens generally view biodiversity conservation as a moral cause, and any discussion of financial mechanisms and marketing schemes arouses strong and principled opposition. Why should any other species, each with just as much right to occupy this living Earth as us, be forced to ‘pay its way’? This objection is understandable but wrong-headed: what I am proposing is not a liquidation of nature to make money, but using money simply as a convenient means to safeguard its protection. Money is a measure of value: put a price on wild animals and plants and we will put a value on them too. This is a pragmatic strategy, only to be used in desperation because the others have failed.

But how can the value of natural systems be quantified, let alone brought into the market? A possible approach is to try to assign an imputed shadow price to the ecosystem services – fresh water, clean air, recreational benefits and so on – that different habitats deliver. One study suggests a value of $200,700 per square kilometre for ‘high-biodiversity wilderness areas’, whilst another finds that ‘endemic bird areas’ might be worth $88,710 per square kilometre.

(#litres_trial_promo) The imputed value of coral reefs – as destinations for tourism, nurseries for commercially valuable fish and shoreline protectors against storms, for example – has ranged from $100,000 to $600,000 per square kilometre.

(#litres_trial_promo) The values of individual species have also been quantified, based on estimates from public surveys of ‘willingness to pay’ to prevent their elimination. Using this methodology (and in 2005 US dollars) the Eurasian red squirrel is worth $2.87; the California sea otter $36.76; the giant panda $13.81; the Mediterranean monk seal (almost extinct): $17.54; the blue whale: $44.57; the brown hare: $0.00; the Asian elephant: $1.94; the Northern spotted owl: $59.43; and the loggerhead sea turtle: $16.98.

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One team of scientists, led by Robert Costanza – a member of the planetary boundaries expert group – even went so far as to publish an aggregate monetary value of the whole biosphere. There is a conceptual flaw in this, as many have pointed out, because the human economy is a subset of the natural biosphere and could not in any conceivable way replace it. As one environmental scientist sniffed: when it comes to pricing the biosphere as a whole, ‘there is little that can usefully be done with a serious underestimate of infinity.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Even so, Costanza and colleagues came up with a precise figure for ‘the total economic value of the planet’ of $33 trillion per year (as compared with a total global GNP of, when the paper was written in 1997, $18 trillion).

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The problem with these figures however is not that they are too precise but that they are not real. No one pays anyone else $33 trillion a year to protect the planet from destruction, nor are any of us actually forking out $17.54 to keep Mediterranean monk seals from going extinct. Yet in a globalised capitalist economy actual, real-world revenue flows are essential if they are to compete with the commercial drive that is destroying and displacing the remaining bits of natural ecosystem worldwide. Mangroves may be valuable as protection against storms and shelter for fish, but someone needs to be paid to look after them if they are not to be chopped down to make way for lucrative shrimp farms. In other words, a financial constituency needs to be created that has a vested interest in protecting its assets – assets that are, in this case, natural rather than commercial capital.

The starting point for this process has to be valuing natural capital. As Pavan Sukhdev, lead author of the 2010 The Economics of Ecosystems & Biodiversity (TEEB) report, is fond of saying: ‘You cannot manage what you do not measure.’ One of the report’s key recommendations is that the present system of national accounts should be ‘rapidly upgraded to include the value of changes in natural capital stocks and ecosystem service flows’. The TEEB report consciously encourages the use of banking and accounting terminology with regard to biodiversity: its authors have launched a ‘Bank of Natural Capital’ website to encourage wider awareness of the ideas it raises. This even extends to proposing an ‘internal rate of return’ for ecosystems, which varies from 40 per cent for woodlands to 50 per cent for tropical forests to 79 per cent for better-managed grasslands.

(#litres_trial_promo) ‘The flows of ecosystem services can be seen as the “dividend” that society receives from natural capital,’ the TEEB Synthesis Report suggests.

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If this all sounds rather capitalistic, it is worth noting that the biggest losers from the current largely unregulated and unquantified degradation of natural capital are the world’s poor. The TEEB report stresses that forests and other natural ecosystems make an enormous contribution to the so-called ‘GDP of the poor’ (up to 90 per cent) and that conservation efforts can therefore directly contribute to poverty reduction. In contrast, one estimate of the ‘environmental externalities’ (the off-balance sheet costs offloaded onto the environment) of the world’s top 3,000 listed companies totals around $2.2 trillion annually.

(#litres_trial_promo) All of this value is going into the pockets of corporate shareholders, where it is unlikely to benefit the poor. Moreover, insisting that natural systems are priceless, as many campaigners do, is in practice akin to setting their effective price at zero. The language and practices of economics may offer the strongest tools today for use in nature conservation.

But these imputed values need to be translated into real monetary worth if the natural assets that generate them are to be properly protected. One of the most promising ways of doing this is known as ‘payments for ecosystem services’ – designing revenue streams that go to communities and landowners who need to be persuaded to keep wetlands and forests intact. In Mexico the annual rate of deforestation has been halved since a 2003 law allowed a portion of water charges to be paid out to landowners willing to preserve forest lands and reduce agricultural clearances. So far 1,800 square kilometres of forest have been protected at a cost of $300 million, both safeguarding biodiversity and reducing greenhouse gas emissions to the tune of 3.2 million tonnes.

(#litres_trial_promo) In the Maldives, whose government I work for as an environmental adviser, one of the schemes under consideration is a levy on diving trips to fund the creation and policing of marine parks. Thus those who benefit from biodiversity – the foreign tourists who marvel at the reef sharks, manta rays and myriad of brightly coloured reef fish that swim around Maldivian coral atolls – can be asked to pay to conserve it.

In other countries, ‘biodiversity credits’ are being designed that might offer a revenue stream rewarding those who protect and manage biodiverse habitats. In New South Wales, the state govern-ment’s environment department has set up a ‘BioBanking’ scheme where developers and landowners can trade biodiversity offsets. Some private companies have been making similar pioneering moves: in Borneo the local government has partnered with the Australian company New Forests to provide an income for the protection of its 34,000-hectare Malua Forest Reserve. Both individuals and businesses can purchase ‘Biodiversity Conservation Certificates’ that represent the ‘biodiversity benefits of 100 square metres of protection and restoration of the Malua Forest Reserve’ – habitat for ‘endangered wild orangutans as well as gibbons, clouded leopards, pygmy elephants, and over 300 species of birds’, according to the Malua BioBank website.

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As with carbon offsets, aimed at mopping up an equivalent amount of greenhouse gases to those unavoidably released elsewhere, a partnership between businesses, governments and conservationist groups is currently developing the concept of biodiversity offsets. Their goal is to design offsets that compensate for biodiversity impacts arising from business activities like mining and dam-building, potentially raising considerable sums to protect and enhance ecosystems elsewhere. To count as offsets, schemes must be additional to what would otherwise have happened, provide benefits that last as long as the damage they are intended to address, and deliver equitable outcomes that bring benefits to local people and communities. In addition, offsets are recognised as only being appropriate as a last resort: the so-called ‘mitigation hierarchy’, in order of importance, is avoid, minimise, restore, and only then offset.

(#litres_trial_promo) Like achieving carbon neutrality, the principle of ‘no net loss’ of biodiversity – or even better, ‘net positive impact’ – should and hopefully soon will become part of mainstream business practice.

Protecting natural systems can provide value for money even in the most direct sense. Creating marine protected areas enhances fish stocks, providing benefits both to biodiversity and fishermen in neighbouring areas. The World Bank and UN Food and Agriculture Organisation have estimated that $50 billion is lost each year in terms of economic benefits that could be realised if the world’s fisheries were managed sustainably.

(#litres_trial_promo) It may seem counter-intuitive, but a reduction of fishing effort could lead to an increase in overall fish catch. This is a matter of life and death for the over 1 billion mainly poor people who are dependent on fish for their primary source of protein, and whose coastal fisheries have often been scoured out by foreign trawlers from rich nations whose own seas are exhausted.

But voluntary measures will only achieve so much. For biodiversity protection to really work, and for the funds to flow, it needs to be given the force of law. Here too recent progress gives cause for some qualified optimism. The Convention on Biological Diversity, long the poor relation of the Convention on Climate Change, enjoyed a boost in October 2010 with the agreement by world governments of a ‘Strategic Plan’ for the decade to 2020, intriguingly subtitled ‘Living in harmony with nature’. The Plan directs governments to mainstream biodiversity concerns ‘throughout government and society’, and to take ‘direct action … to restore biodiversity and ecosystem services’ by ‘means of protected areas, habitat restoration, species recovery programmes and other targeted conservation interventions’.

(#litres_trial_promo) These requests are still voluntary at the international level, but national governments are encouraged to turn them into law to ensure that companies, individuals and institutions take biodiversity seriously.

Perhaps just as importantly, a new scientific body is being established, aiming to provide the same expert advice on biodiversity as the IPCC does on climate change. The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) could help finally put this issue at the top of the international scientific and policy agenda, compiling data and producing landmark reports that can inform the efforts of governments and other policymakers.

Biodiversity is an issue whose time has come. All we need to do now is figure out how to pay for it. Remember, all it will cost to save the tiger from extinction is a mere $82 million a year. Rather than passively lamenting its demise, we need to roll up our sleeves and start raising funds. If you do only one thing after reading this chapter, join this effort today.

Chapter Three

The Climate Change Boundary