As climate change gains momentum, so does the drought that is gripping the great American West. States such as California and Colorado are vivid examples of what a mega-drought can do to entire ecosystems and entire communities. Both states are experiencing their worst wildfires on record and there is little moisture, or hope, on the horizon.

It’s bad enough that we are losing forests at a record pace, but we also are losing biodiversity that will never return. We also are dumping scarce water resources on these fires in a futile attempt to save property. It’s a formula for an ongoing ecological disaster that threatens food and water supplies for millions of people.

Sustainable solutions will not be easy, but forest landscape restoration (FLR) must begin immediately.

FLR prioritizes both biodiversity conservation and human livelihoods. It also is an economic development strategy that can generate thousands of jobs.

FLR is about using land sustainably in a variety of ways, such as new tree plantings, protected wildlife reserves, regenerated forests, ecological corridors, agroforestry, riverside plantings to protect waterways, managed plantations, and agriculture.

This mosaic of interacting land uses takes place within and across entire landscapes – a scale where ecological, social and economic priorities can be balanced.

Forest restoration tailors to the local context using a variety of approaches. It relies on stakeholders to identify restoration objectives, and to draw on the latest science, best practices, and traditional and indigenous knowledge to choose intervention types.

For example, one country may only want to strengthen ecosystem resilience by increasing forest connectivity and diversity. Yet, a neighboring country might prioritize carbon sequestration and water protection, planting trees for climate change mitigation and carbon credits and to protect rivers from sedimentation.

FLR is a process. It seeks to regain, improve and maintain a degraded or deforested landscape’s vital ecological and social functions in the long-term, and build its resilience to ecological and societal changes.

For example, the Bonn Challenge is one program that promotes the restoration of forests and degraded land. Its goal is to bring 150 million hectares of degraded and deforested landscapes into restoration by 2020 and 350 million hectares by 2030. Launched by the Government of Germany and IUCN in 2011, the Challenge surpassed the 150-million-hectare milestone for pledges in 2017. Currently, more than 70 pledgers from more than 60 countries are restoring 210 million hectares of degraded and deforested lands.

The program responded to the urgent issue of land degradation affecting over 3 billion people and over 30 percent of Earth’s arable land. It works with countries, organizations and private entities to pledge and achieve ambitious targets to restore degraded and deforested lands. The great American West and other regions of the world must embrace these conservation concepts for survival.

We align our work with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Aichi Biodiversity Targets, the Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) goal, and the Paris Climate Change Agreement – all together providing a roadmap for a sustainable planet. 


To achieve these goals, we rely on a flexible, nuanced approach to restoration called forest landscape restoration (FLR).

FLR restores ecological integrity while enhancing human wellbeing.

On September 2, 2020, the Bonn Challenge hosted a global event celebrating the first milestone year of the Bonn Challenge and the enormous impact of the forest landscape restoration movement. Global leaders and restoration champions will celebrate the diversity of benefits that FLR brings and call for increased global commitments from governments to reach the 2030 target of 350 million hectares under restoration, in advance of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. Influencers and spokespeople included Bianca Jagger, Dr. Bruno Oberle (Director General, IUCN), Jochen Flasbarth (State Secretary, BMU), and thousands of other government ministers, indigenous leaders, youth activists and restoration champions.

“FLR harnesses the power of nature to provide benefits to people’s livelihoods, improve access to essential resources, create and restore habitats for countless species, and store vast amounts of carbon to help mitigate climate change,” said Dr. Bruno Oberle Director General of the IUCN. “IUCN has remained a global leader on FLR both politically and technically, and has implemented projects and initiatives in more than 40 countries.

As governments and organizations are rethinking how we work with and exist in nature in a post-COVID world, the Bonn Challenge’s achievements provide a very timely demonstration of the potential of Nature-based Solutions to address society’s problems.”

IUCN and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) coined the term forest landscape restoration in 2000 as a framework for managing landscapes, complementing both forest conservation and sustainable management. Since then, FLR has evolved into a powerful nature-based solution, transforming landscapes and the lives of people worldwide.

“We are living through unprecedented times due to the Coronavirus pandemic, but Covid-19 is not the only threat we face in the world today,” said Bianca Jagger, IUCN’s Ambassador for the Bonn Challenge. “Climate change has become an existential threat. The restoration of degraded and deforested lands is not simply about planting trees. People and communities are at the heart of the restoration effort, which transforms barren or degraded areas of land into healthy, fertile working landscapes.”

The Bonn Challenge has proven to be a key vehicle for climate change mitigation and adaptation, addressing land degradation, and for conserving and restoring biodiversity. The great American West should embrace this concept immediately.

Click here for more information about the Bonn Challenge and FLR.

Sacred Seedlings is a global initiative to support forest conservation, reforestation, urban forestry, carbon capture, sustainable agriculture and wildlife conservation. Sustainable land management is critical to the survival of entire ecosystems. Sacred Seedlings is a charitable division of Crossbow Communications.

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No continent will be struck as severely by the impacts of climate change as Africa. Given its geographical position, the continent will be particularly vulnerable due to the considerably limited adaptive capacity, and exacerbated by widespread poverty.

Climate change is a particular threat to continued economic growth and to livelihoods of vulnerable populations. Its farmers’ dependence on rainfall, its weak infrastructure and its lack of social safety nets will add momentum to the problems caused by climate change.

Africa has done little to cause global warming, but it is already facing the worst effects of climate change, including drought, flooding, desertification and land degradation. By 2020, between 75 and 250 million people on the continent will be exposed to increased water stress. In some countries, crops could be reduced by up to 50 percent, due to drought.

Temperature increases in the region are projected to be higher than the global mean temperature increase; regions in Africa within 15 degrees of the equator are projected to experience an increase in hot nights as well as longer and more frequent heat waves.

Global warming of 2˚C would put more than 50 percent of the continent’s population at risk of undernourishment. It’s estimated that climate change will lead to an equivalent of 2 percent to 4 percent annual loss in GDP in the region by 2040. As endangered species go extinct, tourism will collapse. Assuming international efforts keep global warming below 2°C the continent could face climate change adaptation costs of $50 billion per year by 2050.

According to the IPCC, projections show that the western Sahel region will experience the strongest drying, with a significant increase in the maximum length of dry spells. The IPCC expects Central Africa to see a decrease in the length of wet spells and a slight increase in heavy rainfall.

If the Kilimanjaro ecosystem collapses, millions of people will be displaced and many endangered species will be pushed to the brink of extinction.

West Africa has been identified as another climate-change hotspot, with climate change likely to lessen crop yields and production, with resultant impacts on food security.

Southern Africa will also be affected. The western part of Southern Africa is set to become drier, with increasing drought frequency and number of heat waves toward the end of the 21st century.

A warming world will have implications for precipitation. At 1.5° C, less rain would fall over the Limpopo basin and areas of the Zambezi basin in Zambia, as well as parts of Western Cape in South Africa.   

But at 2° C, Southern Africa is projected to face a decrease in precipitation of about 20 percent and increases in the number of consecutive dry days in Namibia, Botswana, northern Zimbabwe and southern Zambia. This will cause reductions in the volume of the Zambezi basin projected at 5 percent to 10 percent.

If the global mean temperature reaches 2° C of global warming, it will cause significant changes in the occurrence and intensity of temperature extremes in all sub-Saharan regions.

West and Central Africa will see particularly large increases in the number of hot days at both 1.5° C and 2° C. Over Southern Africa, temperatures are expected to rise faster at 2° C, and areas of the southwestern region, especially in South Africa and parts of Namibia and Botswana, are expected to experience the greatest increases in temperature.

Perhaps no region in the world has been affected as much as the Sahel, which is experiencing rapid population growth, estimated at 2.8 percent per year, in an environment of shrinking natural resources, including land and water resources.

Inga Rhonda King, President of the UN Economic and Social Council, a UN principal organ that coordinates the economic and social work of UN agencies, told a special meeting at the UN that the region is also one of the most environmentally degraded in the world, with temperature increases projected to be 1.5 times higher than in the rest of the world.

Largely dependent on rain-fed agriculture, the Sahel is regularly hit by droughts and floods, with enormous consequences to people’s food security. As a result of armed conflict, violence and military operations, some 4.9 million people have been displaced this year, a threefold increase in less than three years, while 24 million people require humanitarian assistance throughout the region.

Climate change is already considered a threat multiplier, exacerbating existing problems, including conflicts. Ibrahim Thiaw, special adviser of the UN Secretary-General for the Sahel, says the Sahel region is particularly vulnerable to climate change, with 300 million people affected.

Drought, desertification and scarcity of resources have led to heightened conflicts between crop farmers and cattle herders, and weak governance has led to social breakdowns, says Mr. Thiaw. The shrinking of Lake Chad is leading to economic marginalization and providing a breeding ground for recruitment by terrorist groups as social values and moral authority evaporate.

Deforestation in Africa

Africa’s forests are part of the solution. Forests cover nearly 20 percent of the African continent, including the world’s second-largest tropical rainforest, the Congo Basin forest, which is known as the lungs of Africa.

Since forests absorb and sequester tons of carbon dioxide, which would otherwise trap heat in the atmosphere, they are one of the primary tools for climate change mitigation. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that by 2050, forest cover must increase by more than 10 million sq. kilometers to stabilize global temperatures. The UN has recommended reforesting the Kilimanjaro ecosystem. Sacred Seedlings and its partners in Kenya and Tanzania have plans to tackle the job.

But Africa’s forests are under threat. Huge tracts of the continent’s rich forests and grasslands are destroyed for industrial and infrastructural development. Rural communities are also clearing land for settlement and subsistence farming rapidly. This shift in land-use fragments wildlife habitats and restricts the movement of certain species.

For rural small-scale farmers, this involves learning new sustainable farming techniques that ensure higher crop yields, promote soil health, retain water and ultimately increase incomes.

We train and organize groups to develop alternative livelihoods from non-timber forest products, including beekeeping. By providing alternatives to communities reliant on forests, we help to protect key forest resources while providing benefits to communities.

By 2030 water scarcity will impact as much as two-thirds of Africa. Reforestation initiatives can help recover Africa’s lost forests.

In southern Tanzania, organizations such as African Wildlife Federation have supported water user associations with training to manage their water resources, restore riverine forest areas, demarcate riverine boundaries, and assess the quality and flow of their rivers with affordable tools that involve all members of the community. This is just one component of the watershed management plans that are designed with the input of multiple local stakeholders in line with national policies and natural resource management goals.

AWF also equips Maasai households in northern Tanzania’s Manyara Ranch with tools to harvest rainfall — instead of digging shallow wells or scooping riverbeds — transforming how communities access water in semi-arid landscapes. In some cases, solutions are simple. In many cases, they aren’t.

Climate justice and basic human solidarity demand international cooperation to contain these risks.

Climate change provides African governments with an added incentive to put in place policies that are long overdue – and to demonstrate leadership on the international stage. This is already happening: countries such as Ethiopia, Kenya and Rwanda have already developed climate-resilient strategies to reduce poverty, raise productivity and cut emissions.

Climate change demands that we rethink the relationship between energy and development. This is crucial in sub-Saharan Africa, where 621 million people lack access to electricity. The carbon-intensive energy systems that drive our economies have set us on a collision course with our planetary boundaries. Now we have an opportunity in Africa to avoid that collision. The Africa Progress Report, 2015, Power, People, Planet: Seizing Africa’s Energy and Climate Opportunities, identifies a range of practical measures for supporting low-carbon development while expanding power generation and accelerating progress towards universal access to energy. It also sets out an agenda for the Paris climate summit, linking international action to African strategies for climate-resilient development.

Five key steps for achieving climate justice for Africa:

Phase out fossil fuel subsidies: Many rich countries say they want a climate deal. But at the same time they spend billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money subsidising the discovery of new coal, oil and gas reserves. These governments should be pricing carbon out of the market through taxation, not subsiding a climate catastrophe. G20 countries should set a timetable for phasing out fossil fuel subsidies, with a ban on exploration and production subsidies by 2018.

Clean up climate finance: Africa is poorly served by a climate finance system with as many as 50 funds operating under a fragmented patchwork of mechanisms that does little to bring in private investment. Funding for adaptation must be increased and consolidated. Facilities for financing mitigation and supporting low-carbon development – notably the Clean Technology Fund and the Scaling Up Renewable Energy in Low Income Countries Programme – should be restructured to be more responsive to Africa’s needs and opportunities.

Drive Africa’s low-carbon energy transition: African governments, investors, and international financial institutions must significantly scale up investment in energy – especially renewable energy – to unlock Africa’s potential as a global low-carbon superpower. A ten-fold increase in power generation is required to provide all Africans with access to electricity by 2030. This would reduce poverty and inequality, boost growth, and provide the climate leadership that is sorely missing at the international level. Africa’s innovative ‘energy entrepreneurs’ are already seizing the investment opportunities across the continent.

Leave No One Behind: Africa’s energy systems are inefficient and unjust. They provide subsidized electricity for the wealthy, unreliable power supplies for firms and very little for the poor. Governments should act to achieve universal access to energy by 2030, which means providing access for an additional 645 million people through connections to the grid or decentralized mini-grid or off-grid provision. Every government should map the populations that lack access and identify the most effective routes for delivery.

Better and more accessible energy can also power up Africa’s agriculture. Governments should work with the private sector to develop the innovative business models needed to deliver affordable energy to people who live on incomes of less than $2.50 a day – a market opportunity worth $10 billion a year.

Adopt new models of planned urbanization: As the world’s most rapidly urbanizing region, Africa has opportunities to develop more compact, less polluted cities, alongside safer and more efficient public transport. Economies of scale and rising urban incomes have the potential to expand opportunities for providing renewable energy and achieving universal access to basic services.

Linking African cities to the growing range of global city networks, including the “C40” group of cities, could unlock new opportunities for exchanging knowledge, building capacity and providing finance. Governments, multilateral agencies and aid donors should work together to strengthen the creditworthiness of cities, while developing innovative partnerships for clean energy.

Increasing peak temperatures and heat waves will reduce the habitability of some cities, causing outright migration to other urban centers as discussed above, though likely slowing the ongoing rate of in-migration as well. Because Africa’s physical geography tends not to encourage large coastal populations, sea level rise is not likely to be as significant a force in migration as expected in some other regions, though local exceptions may exist including in Egypt and Ghana.

More significant climate related population shifts can be expected from rural to urban areas. We know already that significant rural-to-urban migration in Africa can occur in response to low rainfall, for example as occurred during the Sahelian drought of the 1970s when farmers moved southwards to urban centers. The potential for future movement is substantial, since more than half of Africa’s population is still engaged directly in agriculture and more than 60 percent of the people still reside in rural areas.

However, the propensity to migrate from rural to urban areas is a function of multiple variables including but not limited to socio-economic status, group affiliation, and urban opportunity. In some cases, only the financially well off may be able to use migration as an adaptive response to worsening environmental conditions, because migration is costly. In other cases, women and men with high social capital may pool their household resources to create financial buffers significant enough to mitigate the impact of environmental changes that might otherwise have pushed them to migration.

A key question is whether the increased competition for resources and new patterns of interaction caused by these changes will lead to increased levels of conflict. If history is our guide, increased conflict is unavoidable.

As Kofi Annan, chair of the Africa Progress Panel states, “Countries like Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda and South Africa are emerging as front-runners in the global transition to low carbon energy. Africa is well positioned to expand the power generation needed to drive growth, deliver energy for all and play a leadership role in the crucial climate change negotiations.”

It’s time to raise the global ambition, setting a course that avoids climate disaster and showcasing Africa’s pathway for a future powered by an inclusive low-carbon energy. We have stakeholders across Africa who are ready to start tomorrow.

Sacred Seedlings is a global initiative to support forest conservation, reforestation, urban forestry, carbon capture, sustainable agriculture and wildlife conservation. Sustainable land management is critical to the survival of entire ecosystems. Sacred Seedlings is a charitable division of Crossbow Communications. We seek sponsors, donors and volunteers.

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Americans William Nordhaus and Paul Romer, pioneers in adapting the western economic growth model to focus on environmental issues and sharing the benefits of technology, won the 2018 Nobel Economics Prize.

In a joint award that turned the spotlight on a rapidly shifting global debate over the impact of climate change, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the duo’s work was helping to answer basic questions over how to promote long-term, sustainable prosperity.

Romer, of New York University’s Stern School of Business and best known for his work on endogenous growth – a theory rooted in investing in knowledge and human capital – said he had been taken by surprise by the award, but offered a positive message.

“I think one of the problems with the current situation is that many people think that protecting (the) environment will be so costly and so hard that they just want to ignore them,” he told a news conference via telephone.

“We can absolutely make substantial progress protecting the environment and do it without giving up the chance to sustain growth.”

Hours before the award, the United Nations panel on climate change said society would have to radically alter the way it consumes energy, travels and builds to avoid the worst effects of global warming.

U.S. President Donald Trump has repeatedly called climate change a hoax, and last year announced that he would withdraw the United States from a global pact to combat it reached in 2015 – calling the deal’s demands for emissions cuts too costly.

Nordhaus, a Professor of Economics at Yale University, was the first person to create a quantitative model that described the interplay between the economy and the climate, the Swedish academy said.

“The key insight of my work was to put a price on carbon in order to hold back climate change,” Nordhaus was quoted as saying in a Yale publication this year. “The main recipe …is to make sure governments, corporations and households face a high price on their carbon emissions.”

Nobel committee chair Per Stromberg told Reuters Monday’s award was honoring research into the negative effects of growth on the climate and to make sure that this economic growth leaves prosperity for everyone.

Romer had shown how economic forces govern the willingness of firms to innovate, helping some societies grow many times faster than others. By understanding which market conditions favor the creation of profitable technologies, society can tailor policies to promote growth, the academy said.

Romer’s career has taken him outside the academic world. While on leave from the Stern School, he served as chief economist and senior vice president at the World Bank until early this year. His work on endogenous growth theory is not universally admired.

Fellow Nobel economics Laureate Paul Krugman told the New York Times in 2013 that too much of it involved “making assumptions about how unmeasurable things affected other unmeasurable things.”

Worth 9 million Swedish crowns ($1 million), the economics prize was established in 1968. It was not part of the original group of five awards set out in Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel’s 1895 will.

Read The Full Story About The Economics of Climate Change

Sacred Seedlings is a global initiative to support forest conservation, reforestation, urban forestry, carbon capture, sustainable agriculture and wildlife conservation. Sustainable land management is critical to the survival of entire ecosystems. Sacred Seedlings is a charitable division of Crossbow Communications. We seek sponsors, donors and volunteers.

The post The Economics Of Climate Change appeared first on Sacred Seedlings.

Though his business card says Director of Forest Carbon Science at The Nature Conservancy, Bronson Griscom introduces himself as an ecological accountant. Griscom radiates an optimism somewhat rare in seasoned environmentalists, especially when he discusses the “carbon economy” of nature: the everyday role that trees, grasslands and coastal habitats play in the carbon cycle.

Griscom can measure the carbon impact of logging in old growth forests, or how well different forest ecosystems work as sinks for absorbing and storing carbon from the atmosphere. He helps link our economy with the economy of the biosphere.In recent decades, forest use—Griscom’s area of expertise—has been widely studied for its climate impacts. Forest loss accounts for 8 to 10 percent of carbon emissions globally; tropical rainforests like the Amazon have become almost synonymous with land conservation, largely because they work as massive carbon sinks and are home to many of the world’s indigenous people and endangered species.

But other global ecosystems and managed lands—from farmlands and peatlands to seagrass and tidal marshes—have garnered less attention from climate regulators, both as a source of emissions and a potential mitigation solution. In fact, until recently no one had ever integrated the raw data on all the carbon that all ecosystems were already sequestering, and what the potential was for increasing carbon storage among all these habitats together, as Griscom and his team studied.

“I thought we would review a few papers and take an average to answer the question,” he says. “We were shocked to find that important gaps remained in answering the question: how much can lands contribute to solving climate change? So we took it upon ourselves to convene a large group of scientists across 15 research institutions to take a comprehensive look at this question.”

Answering that question became the highest priority for Bronson’s team, and the foundation for what has become the most comprehensive study on the role that nature can play in keeping global temperature increases to 2°C or below. They found that, with the right management, nature can play a bigger role than we realized.

Natural climate solutions offer up to 37 percent of the mitigation needed between now and 2030 to keep global temperature rise below 2°C.

The paper offers a comprehensive roadmap for reducing carbon emissions through nature. The study is the culmination of a partnership between the Conservancy and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation that brought together more than two-dozen leading natural scientists and economists from fifteen research, educational and private institutions around the world.

The land-use sector is currently responsible for a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions. But this new study shows that this could change—and with concerted global action on land use over the next decade, nature can be a significant part of the climate solution.

The analysis found that the total biophysical potential for natural climate solutions while still taking account of food production needs is as much as 23.7 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year—approximately 30 percent more than previous, less comprehensive estimates.

In addition, the study’s economic analyses show that half of these natural climate solutions (11.3 billion tons CO2e) offer cost-effective mitigation opportunities, because they cost less than the future impacts of climate change, expected to cost society more than $100 per ton of CO2 in the atmosphere. These cost-effective NCS mitigation options offer up to 37 percent of mitigation needed between now and 2030 to keep global temperature rise below 2°C —the widely recognized target of the Paris Climate Agreement.

Natural Climate Solutions

To synthesize the research, Griscom and his team developed a framework to distill the world’s “natural climate solutions”—the proven ways of storing and reducing carbon emissions in forests, grasslands (including agricultural and rangelands) and wetlands—into a taxonomy of 20 specific pathways that account for the full climate potential of nature.

In addition to covering three biomes, the pathways also look at different practices across a variety of economic scenarios that mitigate climate change, including the implementation of low-cost opportunities only ($10 per tonne CO2e or less).

Another striking aspect of these pathways is the additional benefits they provide. Most nature climate solutions—if effectively implemented—also offer water filtration, flood buffering, improved soil health, protection of biodiversity habitat, and enhanced climate resilience.

“The approach is synergistic,” says Justin Adams, managing director for Global Lands at the Nature Conservancy. “We can hit multiple targets of the UN Sustainable Development Goals if we get this right.”

There is, however, a catch: The world must act soon.

Assuming current business-as-usual trajectories, increased emissions entering the atmosphere, coupled with continued environmental degradation, will lessen the impact that nature can have. If natural climate solutions are mobilized over the next 10 to 15 years, they could provide 37 percent of the needed mitigation for global climate targets. But if action is delayed until after 2030, that number drops to 33 percent, and drops again to only 22 percent after 2050.Over the past two years, the world experienced unprecedented global climate momentum.

In September 2015, international leaders adopted the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals, which aim to fight poverty, promote sustainability and address climate change. Shortly after, nearly 200 countries came together in Paris to adopt the world’s largest ever international climate treaty.

And despite recent setbacks, including the United States announcing its intention to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, many countries have moved forward implementing voluntary measures to limit emissions. And while natural climate solutions are part of many countries’ pledges, there remains a gap between promised action and realized climate progress.

“Natural climate solutions are available now, are cost effective and greatly benefit communities,” said Justin Adams.

As they are currently written, the Paris Agreement pledges still fall short, likely keeping warming around 4°C. Every five years, international representatives and negotiators will meet to ramp up ambition, but the current timeline for countries to end their reliance on fossil fuels while still maintaining development and economic growth does not align with what is needed to achieve climate stability. Barring a technological miracle, the world likely needs more time than it realistically has to move to full economic decarbonization.

“There’s a growing recognition that to get to below 2°C, we need to actively drawdown carbon from the atmosphere,” Adams says. “And while there’s lots of interest and investment in new technology solutions to capture and store carbon, this is new, experimental technology. Trees and other plants, meanwhile have already perfected this process over hundreds of millions of years of evolution—we’re unlikely to see a better carbon capture and storage technology than that which nature provides.”

This makes the findings from the 20 pathways particularly important: they provide a scalable near-term option that, combined with fossil fuel emission reductions, can put the planet on a 2° path by 2030. If world leaders hold off on concurrently investing in nature now, emerging technology will have to play an exponentially larger role in reducing emissions later on. “That’s a gamble on the future that can be prevented today,” Adams says.

“The rapid deployment of clean energy technologies currently being witnessed is truly inspiring, and we absolutely must press forward with the deployment of renewables, electric cars, energy efficiency and other methods for fossil fuel reduction,” Adams adds. “But we also need to see a similar level of investment in natural solutions, which are available now, are cost effective and greatly benefit communities.”

Sacred Seedlings is a global initiative to support forest conservation, reforestation, urban forestry, carbon capture, sustainable agriculture and wildlife conservation. Sustainable land management is critical to the survival of entire ecosystems. Sacred Seedlings is a charitable division of Crossbow Communications. We seek sponsors, donors and volunteers.

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Some of the world’s most iconic ecosystems are collapsing due to climate change and human encroachment, which, in turn, is contributing to more climate change. Collapse of one ecosystem will contribute to the collapse of the next. As human refugees escape one danger zone, they will contribute to the creation of the next collapse. It’s a very high stakes version of the domino effect. Momentum is the enemy.

The Great Barrier Reef, for example, is under assault from ocean acidification. The Amazon rainforest has been suffering from deforestation for years and now a wicked drought is adding to the momentum of its downfall, while threatening the lives of millions of people downstream. To combat such climate-related threats, we need to stop the encroachment and expedite the healing, according to findings published in the journal Science.

“We show that managing local pressures can expand the ‘safe operating space’ for these ecosystems. Poor local management makes an ecosystem less tolerant to climate change and erodes its capacity to keep functioning effectively,” the study’s lead author Marten Scheffer, chair of the Department of Aquatic Ecology and Water Quality Management at the Netherlands’ Wageningen University, said in a press release.

The research team examined Spain’s Doñana wetlands, the Amazon rainforest and the Great Barrier Reef. While many ecosystems are indeed important to the environment and to their local people, these ecosystems in particular have a global importance.

Coral reefs have gained a lot of attention recently due to the effect of ocean acidification – the increase in acidic waters due to buildup of atmospheric carbon dioxide – that have led to extensive bleaching events. Worse still, studies have shown that ocean acidification is eating away at the structural integrity of these unique marine animals, causing coral to become more susceptible to both predators and disease.

In fact, the Great Barrier Reef’s growth rate has plummeted by 40 percent since the mid-1970s.

But overfishing, nutrient runoff and unprecedented amounts of dredging are exacerbating these climate change-related threats. By eliminating these stressors, the Great Barrier Reef may have a chance in our warming world.

However, like corals reefs, rainforests and wetlands around the world are also under increasing pressure from both climate change and local threats.

Such local threats include nutrient runoff from the use of agricultural fertilizers and urban wastewater, which is degrading water quality in the Doñana wetlands in southern Spain. This, in turn, is causing toxic algal blooms that endanger the ecosystem’s biodiversity.

A warming climate could encourage more severe blooms, causing losses of biodiversity, researchers say. This ecosystem is a vital wintering site for waterfowl – hosting over half a million birds – and home to numerous unique invertebrate and plant species.

“Local managers could lessen this risk and therefore boost the wetlands’ climate resilience by reducing nutrient runoff,” explained co-author Andy Green, a professor at the Doñana Biological Station.

To reduce nutrient runoff, he added, managers could reduce fertilizer use, improve water treatment plants, and close illegal wells that are decreasing the flow of clean water to these wetlands.

When it comes to the Amazon rainforest, rising temperatures and severe dry spells, along with deforestation, are major threats to its survival.

This deadly combination could turn the ecosystem into dry, fire-prone and species-poor woodland. The United Nations has pledged to end deforestation completely by 2030, which no doubt would help. But researchers also recommend curtailing canopy damage from logging and speeding up forest regeneration. These management efforts could protect the forest from fire and maintain regional rainfall, helping the Amazon to thrive and better resist climate change.

“Local management options are well understood and not too expensive. So there is really no excuse for countries to let this slip away, especially when it comes to ecosystems that are of vital importance for maintaining global biodiversity,” Scheffer pointed out.

“All three examples play a critical role in maintaining global biodiversity. If these systems collapse,” he added, “it could mean the irreversible extinction of species.”

Sacred Seedlings is a global initiative to support forest conservation, reforestation, urban forestry, carbon capture, sustainable agriculture and wildlife conservation. Sustainable land management is critical to the survival of entire ecosystems. Sacred Seedlings is a charitable division of Crossbow Communications. We seek sponsors, donors and volunteers.

The post Ecosystems Collapsing As Climate Changes appeared first on Sacred Seedlings.