The real causes of wildlife losses

Martin Hughes-Games (Why Planet Earth II should have been taxed, Guardian, 2/1/17) does well to deplore the appalling loss of wildlife in the last 40 years. See, for example, my posts on apes and wilderness.

But it is ridiculous to blame Attenborough's wonderful documentaries for this and little better to demand a special tax on wildlife programmes. The losses of habitats, creatures and species are due to forces much more powerful than TV programmes. They are due to the increasing numbers of people - us - and our ever increasing demands for land, energy and food, especially meat.

Innate factors account for some of this but much is due outdated nationalism and short-sighted commercialism. Nationalist politicians - themselves a growing breed! - see a large population as a mark of national vigour and a source of economic growth. They use the power of the state and the media to play on our emotions and if that fails they try to ban abortion and contraception.

Businesses seek their own growth by persuading us to be dissatisfied with our lives and, especially, our possessions and diets. They send us to the sales and our spending feeds the juggernaut that each year grabs more and more of the Earth's resources.

This is unsustainable. It will end.

The question is whether we can restrain the forces that demand insatiable growth before they trash the planet - and us with it. Unless we do, and soon, we can say goodbye to the beautiful wild things that Attenborough has documented.

And that requires politicians willing to say stop.

Relatives face extinction

There are seven species of great ape and four of these are close to extinction. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) classes the Eastern Gorilla, Western Gorilla, Bornean Orangutan and Sumatran Orangutan as Critically Endangered. That's one step short of extinct in the wild.

Another two - the Chimpanzee and Bonobo - are merely Endangered. 

The seventh great ape - Homo Sapiens - is increasingly numerous though whether our current numbers can be sustained is another matter.

The IUCN estimates the total number of chimps as 170,000 to 300,000 so there are more people in Enfield than there are chimps in the whole world. It estimates the number of bonobos at 30,000 to 50,000 so there are probably more children in Enfield than there are bonobos in the world.

Goodbye Jumbo?

Forest elephants could be nearly extinct in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) - the country that once held the largest population of this subspecies. A major study published in 2013 found that:

• Between 2002 and 2011 the number of forest elephants in the DRC fell by 62% and the area occupied by the elephants shrank by about 30%.
• Forest elephants have "likely declined to extremely low density over 75% of their potential
  range."
• About 95% of DRC’s forests are likely to be almost empty of elephants."
• [This] indicates a decline of more than 80% in less than 25 years which more than meets the Red Book criteria for listing a species as Critically Endangered.
• Large losses also occurred in Gabon - the country where the majority of forest elephants now live.

These declines are due, above all, to poaching - itself encouraged by the absence of law
enforcement and poor governance (including corruption). But the increasing human population and physical infrastructure, such as roads, are also significant.

A simple extrapolation would have made the species extinct in the DRC by 2015! Of course, that didn't happen  - or not yet - though poachers have continued to kill elephants.

The most effective remedial action is to end the trade in poached ivory. But a more recent study has shown that even if poaching stopped tomorrow, the forest elephants would not recover their numbers for many decades. Indeed, given the other factors it's highly unlikely that they ever will.

Wilderness lost

Australian researchers have found that about one tenth of the world's wilderness has been lost in the last twenty years. The lost area is over 3 million square kilometers and the losses have been greatest in South America (30%) and Africa (14%).

This is, unhappily, not a surprise. It's one of a series of recent studies that shows the increasing human dominance of the planet. Indeed, it's one of the less pessimistic. Taking the crude numbers it implies that some wilderness will last 200 years.

World Biodiversity on the slide

A recent major report in Science magazine by 23 scientists shows that biodiversity has fallen to dangerously low levels across two-thirds of the Earth’s surface. By ‘dangerously’ they mean likely to undermine the natural services, such as food production and waste disposal, on which we depend. The loss of biodiversity is mainly due to changes in land use.  

They authors found that original species are more than 14% less abundant as before we started changing the land and are at least 10% less abundant – the accepted warning level – over 90% of the Earth’s surface.

The authors further show that this is true for that 58% of the planet on which 71% of people live; so this is not a small issue for our species. 

Should we panic?

Probably not. The loss of biodiversity does not imply the immediate collapse of world farming (though there are certainly risks) or the pollution of all ours rivers. 

But, it will make the ecosystems more vulnerable to shocks such as the droughts, floods, storms, etc. that climate change will make increasingly common and severe. Over and over we’ve seen how areas of original habitat are reduced to patches in which all the species seem present. But after shocks, or just lapse of time, key species disappear. Though we don’t know the tipping points we do knows that they are there.

The changes in land use have neither stopped nor slowed. Neither will they stop whilst our numbers and impacts grow. The extrapolation is obvious: Further loss of habitat and biodiversity.

So though we shouldn’t panic we should ACT. We need to adopt genuinely sustainable policies – as the Green Party has always said.

Reference:

·         Title: Has land use pushed terrestrial biodiversity beyond the planetary boundary? A global assessment

·         Author: Newbold, Tim, et al.

·         Ref:  Science  15 Jul 2016: Vol. 353, Issue 6296, pp. 288-291

·         DOI: 10.1126/science.aaf2201

The paper is behind a paywall but there’s a summary in ZME Science.

Paving the road to hell

Roads are a major problem for the planet. Globally, many new roads are built into rainforest to support logging or dam building. These roads start a process of exploitation that is hard to stop and that transforms habitats and provides access to poachers. Since 2000, for instance, 30,000 miles of new roads have been cut into African rainforests. It's no surprise that poachers have killed two thirds of the forest elephants in that same period.

The rainforests will not survive the combined pressures of logging, settlement and clearance for pasture and cropping that road-building makes possible. And many species will not survive the loss of their rainforest homes.

This has happened at extraordinary speed and there's no sign that it's slowing down. The G20 meeting last October argued for annual spending of $2T pa (that's $2 million million pa) on infrastructure in developing countries. Only a fraction of that is likely to be roads; but that's still a lot of roads (and railways, power stations, airports, etc.)

Most of the species that existed 100 years ago are still with us, though in much reduced numbers. Their habitats have been greatly reduced and many will be gone in much less than 100 years if development continues. For some threatened species a few dozen animals may survive in zoos and game reserves. Many will disappeared leaving no more than stuffed examples in museums, films, if we're lucky, DNA sequences in some database.

A tragic loss and little time left.

Uganda's forests in terminal decline?

What's the state of African forests? 

A recent article in New Scientist gives a dismal answer for Uganda. 

First the numbers. Between 1990 and 2009 forest cover fell from 24% to 10% and is still falling. At that rate it's probably down to 6% already and will all be gone by 2025.

But that estimate may be too optimistic. Many forest reserves look OK from the outside but in the forest squatters have cleared land and built homes, schools and churches. Many are solid, brick-built structures. The squatters are not planning to move on.

There's a quality issue too. Loggers, legal and illegal, have concentrated on native African hardwoods but reforestation - where it's occurred at all - has usually been with faster-growing softwood species like eucalyptus and pine.

And all this affects the wildlife. Deforestation, loss of native species, hunting, human defence of crops and the breaking up of large areas into a patchwork of forests and fields all make the wildlife move away. Those animals that stay lack food and face conflicts with the squatters. Conflicts that the humans are bound to win.

There are clearly two causes. One is land hunger due to population growth and human conflicts in both Uganda and its neighbours. The other is inadequate policing due to the usual mixture of limited resources and local corruption. Climate change is probably involved as well.

According to Forestry Commissioner Margaret Adata Uganda aims to get the squatters out of the forest and return forest cover to 1990 levels. Wildlife, she thinks, will follow.

I wish her well but time is terribly short.

Zombie gains new life

The Waste Authority's plan for Pinkham Way was defeated two years ago but there's now a new application. Barnet wants to move its Waster Transfer Station WTS from Cricklewood to Pinkham Way and has applied for planning permission (to Haringey Council as the site isn't actually in Barnet!)

According to the Pinkham Way Alliance:

"WTS’s are bad neighbour developments, bring additional heavy vehicles with all the accompanying pollution and nuisance not to speak of traffic congestion. They are high fire risks.  Enfield Council we are told is against waste development at Pinkham Way because it will result in traffic rat running up Waterfall Road and surrounding residential streets to avoid the congested A406."

Also the site is valuable for biodiversity as it provides homes for 6 notable bird species, slow worms and cinnabar moth caterpillars.

The trouble here is that the Council has more time and money than the locals. Then again it lost last time!

Does greed or need drive the planetary crisis?

The Green Party’s distinctive insight is that we must all live on planet Earth and that, in the long run, we must live within our planetary limits. Our species already grabs 40% of the Earth’s production. That’s morally indefensible – we are just one species yet we are driving the rest toward extinction.

It’s also unsustainable. Our impacts are ever increasing but we have only one planet. Once we’ve converted all the forests and grasslands to crops we’ll have nowhere to expand and the system of planetary exploitation we call consumer capitalism will have to stop expanding.

But that, of course, will be too late. Our increasing emissions of greenhouse gases put us on course for at least four, maybe six, degrees of warming. That will raise sea levels (by 20 meters if we can stay below four degrees) and reduce global food production. The combination of less food and more people can have no good outcome.

Pope Francis has blamed our environmental overshoot on greed whilst Mark Lynas and his fellow ‘ecomodernists’ see it as the result of trying to meet human needs. The Pope is closer to the truth.
The great expansion in fossil fuel burning in the 19th century was led by entrepreneurs. Though greed was one motive so was the desire (by some) to do good. That century produced new forms of philanthropy and Andrew Carnegie’s dictum that ‘the man who dies rich dies disgraced’ as well new forms of exploitation. Yet I believe that the simple desire to make a (big) difference was more significant than either greed or philanthropy.

Yet from these origins came a system that expected, in fact required, company directors to be greedy and which for the last 50 years has encouraged consumer greed through advertising. The system – consumer capitalism – is largely self-sustaining. It has created greedy consumers and promotes managers who are greedy for the growth and profits of their firms. It also rewards academics and commentators who encourage consumer greed (yes, I do mean you, fashion journos!) and who praise managers who increase profits – whatever the costs to other people and species.

And yet we do need some growth if we are to help the ‘bottom billion’ who go to bed hungry out of poverty. The challenge to the Green Party – indeed to everyone who cares about people and planet – is to find forms of development that relieve the worst poverty, bring greater well-being to ‘consumers’ and reduce our impacts on the rest of the planet’s ecosystems.

And to win the political battle of ideas for the new way.

The question of soil

After Friday's hustings someone asked me to explain the Party's policy on soil!

In fact it's a very good question. Good soil is obviously vital - 95% of our food comes from soil. Yet last December a senior UN official said that at current rates of degradation all of the world's top soil could be gone within 60 years.The official, Maria-Helena Semedo of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), blamed chemical-heavy farming techniques, deforestation which increases erosion, and global warming.

This is a key concern for Greens - it's one of the ways in which human activity is overloading the planet's carrying capacity. It's no accident that the Green Party of England and Wales is the only UK party led by someone with a degree in agricultural science!

[By the way, Cameron and Miliband both read Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) at Oxford. But I digress.]

So what is our policy on soil?

The whole food and farming policy is at here. Paras 630 to 639 are the most relevant.

In summary we would make a transition to a more sustainable agriculture, that is, an agriculture that does not depend on large inputs of fossil fuel energy and which improves, not degrades, soil fertility.  It's not really that new. The Norfolk Crop Rotation does exactly that and was invented in the 17th century!  Doubtless we can do better now.

In the UK we would:

• Support a rapid increase in the proportion of land designated as organic by providing advice and subsidies.
• Encourage a reduction in the use of synthetic fertilisers by taxing them and supporting alternative methods of retaining soil fertility, such as green manures and composting
• Support a shift towards farming systems based on perennial crops through targeted support and funding.
• Progressively remove some of the tax rebate on fuel for agricultural use. 
• Fund research into the best ways of making the transition.

Those policies address Semedo's "chemical-heavy farming and deforestation" in the UK and we also have energy and transport policies that would sharply reduce and then eliminate our contribution to climate change.

Looking beyond the UK we would encourage other countries to adopt similar policies and, especially, to halt the wave of deforestation and natural habitat destruction that is sweeping the tropics. Since much of that destruction is driven by our demand for the crops that replace old forests, notably oil palms, a complete solution requires all the developed countries to reduce their use of such products. That is also our policy and much more than an add-on to this one.

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For more information about soil see the WWF view and Fred Pearce in New Scientist on losses from salt contamination and some US Soil data.

The triple crisis

Today we face a triple crisis.

• London is a rich city in a rich country, yet wages have fallen, work is insecure and many Londoners cannot afford decent homes. For the last 30 years the super-rich have taken most of the benefits of growth. And, horribly, a five mile drive across Enfield sees a ten year drop in life expectancy.
• Ever fewer people vote. While caring about their communities they are fed up with MPs who break their promises and seem powerless to solve their problems. Our political system no longer reflects the realities of Scottish devolution and the fractured nature of English politics. Worse, the major parties are afraid to upset the press barons and their friends in the City. They offer no real choice.
• Our industry and agriculture destroys more and more of the natural world. The World Wildlife Fund tells us that the numbers of birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish have declined 52% since 1970 whilst climate scientists warn us of catastrophe.

In short – we need fundamental change and have little time to achieve it.

The Green Party stands for a more equal society in which everyone can share the wealth (and pay their taxes!) We want to change our politics so that every vote counts and no-one can buy influence. And to stop trashing the planet we must abandon fossil fuels in favour of energy efficiency and renewables.

This will be hard. But it can be done if you, with me, vote Green.