Clara Rowe is the Founder of Restor. She was a keynote speaker during the last I4N marketplace in Morges (CH). This is her call to action for nature.
I recently took a walk with Sofia Carmo. In 2017, her hometown Pedrogao in Portugal was devastated by forest fires. It burned for eight days. It killed 66 people, and it injured more than 200. It's always hard to attribute a specific cause to any given fire, but we know that climate conditions drive the most disastrous fires. And we also know that those conditions are becoming more frequent as we increasingly modify ecosystems and the climate. In Pedrogao, extensive plantations of nonnative eucalyptus turned dry after an early summer heat wave. After the fire communities and Pedrogao mourned. And they also asked, what's next?
Sofia Carmo, who was a forest engineer by training, took the lead. She was really determined to drive a restoration effort that would create a more diverse and resilient landscape and minimize the chances of another catastrophic fire. So she met with landowners to discuss options, hoping to find allies.
But she was mostly met with a business as usual attitude. They told her they were planning to plant eucalyptus again because it grows fast and they can sell it easily. So Sophia has spent the last two years on a two pronged strategy: 1/ She's looking for local markets for native species like cork and oak so that there's an economically viable alternative to nonnative eucalyptus. 2/ She is working with communities and school groups to reforest public areas with native species and educate the next generation about the importance of sustainability.
Sofia's struggles are emblematic of the biodiversity crisis and the intertwining challenges of addressing biodiversity loss and climate change.
As we see with monoculture eucalyptus in Pedrogao, the dominant human tendency over history has been to simplify nature, to simplify ecosystems.
We take a single species whose value we understand as standalone, and we propagate this via monoculture, often at the expense of everything else. As an example, let’s take the representation of a tropical rainforest. Now, let's take a species that we humans have come to love: banana. We take it and we multiply it and we build out a simple monoculture. We do the same thing with wheat from native grasslands or soy from savannahs, or cotton from shrublands. And as the world finally wakes up to climate change, we're actually doing the same thing with nature-based carbon. We're focusing on the carbon sequestration potential of trees at the expense of bio diverse and resilient ecosystems. This tendency for simplification is compounded by a growing population and rising standards of living. All these things that we know, and it's having a devastating impact on biodiversity.
Biodiversity is this near-infinite network of interactions between species, where every species needs other species to survive. I would say that our grade school classes are probably enough to intuitively understand the consequences of biodiversity loss. But for those of you who like numbers, I'll give you a few. Today, we are losing species about a thousand times faster than historic baselines. About 75% of natural land has been degraded and only 3% of land left is fully intact. And almost half of planted forests around the world are monoculture to the detriment of local biodiversity and the people who depend on it.
As we enter the anthropocene and we try to stave off the six mass extinction, it's becoming incredibly clear biodiversity is necessary for planetary resilience. This means that we have to conserve what we have left and we have to restore much of what we've lost.
It does not mean returning all of the world to a pre-human state, but it does mean changing how we interact with and value nature. Conservation and restoration can take many forms and many ecosystems, from protecting native habitats or setting aside degraded ecosystems so that they can come back on their own to sustainably managing natural ecosystems for our own use, to bringing more trees or cover crops into agriculture through agroforestry or sustainable agriculture. The restoration of forest ecosystems alone has the potential to prevent up to 60% of species that we're on track to lose, improve food security for over a billion people. And when it's done responsibly, it can also sequester about 30% of the carbon that we have accumulated in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution. But how can we unlock this potential at scale? How can we make nature the economically viable option?
The good news is that our economic system is beginning to learn how to internalize the externalities that have been ignored. We're beginning to value nature for more of its components and for the interaction of those components. I'll give you a few examples. We see some consumers who are starting to make decisions and pay premiums for things like shade grown coffee, which are bringing biodiversity back and supporting people. And with the emergence of concepts like Co-benefits for nature-based carbon offsets we're increasingly seeing traction.
We urgently need to accelerate this transition so that we value the complexity of nature, which is ultimately what is building stability and resilience. And my personal opinion is that a key metric of success will be when we come to value carbon as a co-benefit of nature. 100% of our economy is 100% dependent on nature. So for nature's sake, for our own, it's time to act on that.
Clara Rowe, November 2022.
Restor is a global network of actors working together to advance critical nature-based solutions. Restor enables the exchange of data, local knowledge, and funds between them.