I've handed the reins of my blog over to Mark Avery for most of June. Mark's sharing the successes and challenges of saving nature around the world in the run up to the Rio+20 Earth Summit.
It is unclear when the first person got to the North Pole, but it may well have been Roald Amundsen, 14 years after he beat Scott to the South Pole, as other previous claims of success are now doubted.
The Arctic is equally deserving of Scott’s description of Antarctica; ‘Great god! This is an awful place…’ but as the planet warms, and the Arctic has warmed twice as quickly as the rest of the world, and with technological advances, the Arctic will become more accessible to development.
Arctic sea ice has reduced in extent by about 2.7% each decade since 1978 and this will open up the Arctic Ocean to more shipping and to fisheries but there may also be a mixing of marine species between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans which hasn’t occurred in the last 800,000 years and ice-dependent polar bears and seals will suffer from loss of habitat.
Unlike the Antarctic where there is a global convention banning exploitation, the Arctic is up for grabs and it seems more and more likely that there will be a ‘cold rush’ in future to exploit its oil, gas and fish.
Thinking of the Arctic challenges our view of our planet – quite literally. Get a globe and look down at the North Pole and you will see that Canada, the USA and Russia are all near neighbours in this area and the prospect of a ‘gold rush’ style ‘cold rush’ is worrying. Gold rushes have not been polite, orderly or very safe affairs and it is to be hoped that with nuclear powers involved, Arctic exploitation, which seems inevitable, might be managed better.
The Arctic accounts for about 13% of the undiscovered oil, 30% of the undiscovered natural gas, and 20% of the undiscovered natural gas liquids in the world. As oil prices rise these resources may become too tempting to resist, and I suppose, that if they are exploited in the best possible way then they should be tapped.
Scientists are calling for nations to agree a plan for harvesting Arctic fisheries sustainably. The warming of the Arctic Ocean may be good news for the cod, herring and pollock fisheries as all species have increased in numbers in previous short periods of warmer climate. The opening of a new fishing frontier surely calls for our species to show that, given the hard-won experience we have had of exploiting fisheries unsustainably over a long period of time we do much better in this instance. I wonder, will we?
I have to admit to feeling uneasy about Arctic exploitation but maybe I shouldn’t. I think the root of my unease is a concern over whether we will do it well or badly – the best scenario is great, the worst scenario is awful. But another part of my unease is that there are few wildernesses left. We never give up any of the planet and turn it back to wilderness; instead it’s a one way street of development and industrialisation. How do you feel about it?
There are lots of ways you can Step Up for Nature at home here are some green living tips to get you started.
Dr Mark Avery is a former Conservation Director of the RSPB and now is a writer on environmental matters. We’ve asked Mark to write these 20 essays on the run up to the Rio+20 conference. His views are not necessarily those of the RSPB. Mark writes a daily blog about UK nature conservation issues.
Today is World Oceans Day; the 21st since the first one at the Earth Summit in 1992.
We live on the Blue Planet; c71% of the Earth’s surface is ocean. We live most of our lives on the 29% of dry land although even so 10% of the world population lives in the thin strip of low-lying coastal areas.
Half of species on Earth live in the oceans and they are massive carbon stores while marine phytoplankton produce most of the planet’s oxygen.
However, we have plundered the oceans and blundered in their management. Human exploitation almost drove many of the great whales to extinction, and their numbers are still greatly reduced which makes no sense whether you want to watch them or eat them. Few people wish to watch cod but many want to eat them and the collapse of the cod stocks in the Grand Banks off Newfoundland should have taught us a lesson in marine fisheries management – when fishing pressure was lessened the stock showed signs of recovery, but only very slowly and is still far short of previous levels. This is a lesson in how fragile ecosystems can be.
The oceans, most of the Earth’s surface in other words, could provide us with much more of our food if only we let them recover more fully from decades of over exploitation. By letting marine populations recover we could soon harvest more food from the oceans.
Increasingly, marine biologists believe that strict marine protected areas can help both marine life and marine fishermen have better lives. There are numerous case studies that show, unsurprisingly that no-take zones help fish species and other marine life to recover (eg here, here and here).
In April 2010 the UK government declared the largest marine no-take zone in the world around the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean after pressure from many conservation organisations.
Nowadays, even if you never go to the Oceans you can do your bit for them in your local supermarket. The Marine Stewardship Council certifies fisheries that are sustainable so that you don’t have to make the difficult choices yourself. It’s a simple recipe and it works – you can even find MSC certified fish fingers these days. Rewarding those fisheries that do the right thing encourages the good guys – and MSC certification tells you more accurately than you could ever work out for yourself who are those good guys.
No-take zones which allow stock and ecosystem recovery and economic rewards from discerning shoppers are just two recent moves in the right direction to protect the oceans better and in return to be able to harvest them more profitably for our own uses. These are the types of successful steps towards sustainable living where the oceans are leading the way, and such successful examples give great hope for the future.
We already have the national and international laws that should be protecting marine wildlife, including seabirds. There is now an urgent need to implement them and designate those sites that need protection. Step up and safeguard our seabirds at sea by signing our pledge today.
The trouble with rainforests is you can’t make much money out of leaving them alone. Yes, they are majestic and stuffed full of creepy crawlies, with the occasional orangutan or tiger but, compared with a nice productive palm oil plantation they just don’t pay their way. Or do they?
The ‘value’ of rainforests has been assessed several times recently and the valuations come out as being very high – but you have to look at the economics in a particular way. The ‘real’ value of rainforests is in their ecological services – the roles they play in regulating the climate and nutrient cycles, the medicines derived from their species, recreational value and the value of timber and food that can be sustainably harvested from them.
Back in 1997 Robert Costanza and colleagues put some numbers to all these things and came up with a rainforest value of $969/ha/yr. Of this value well over half is delivered through nutrient cycling and climate regulation. Most tropical soils are poor in nutrients and in rainforests the nutrients from dead animals and plants are efficiently recycled into new animals and plants. So although the soil under a rainforest is very rich, and you can grow a good crop on it for a while, our agricultural systems lose the nutrients and then you are left with having to add fertilisers to maintain your crops.
Rainforests also store huge amounts of carbon in their soils, roots and the above-ground vegetation. Forest destruction releases much of that carbon and accounts for about 8-20% of global carbon emissions each year. About 300 billion tonnes of carbon are usefully stored away in tropical rainforests and almost half of that amount is in Latin America.
Rainforests have produced many medicines that are in widespread use. The endangered Madagascar periwinkle is the source of medicines that combat leukaemia, diabetes, malaria and Hodgkin’s disease.
Many of these benefits from rainforests are shared benefits – you benefit, I benefit, a man on a bicycle in Delhi benefits and a woman lying on the beach in California benefits from the existence of the Amazon rainforest, but none of us is asked to pay for our benefits. And so a man with a chainsaw, who also benefits from those shared benefits, sees that he can benefit more, at least in the short term, if he chops down the trees, sells the timber and replants with a more commercial crop.
Some rainforests are being protected and sometimes primarily for their wildlife – which is fine because if the wildlife is protected so are all those other values too. A good example is the work that the RSPB has done with the BirdLife International partner in Sierra Leone and the Sierra Leone government. The Gola Rainforest has been made a National Park and that means better protection for chimpanzees, carbon and the world’s climate.
But overall the world has to find a way to show that rainforests pay their way, and that probably means finding a way that I (and you! – we must be fair about this), the bloke on the bike in Delhi and that woman in California put our hands in our pockets and pay for what we are getting at the moment for free. There are plenty of plans in place to do this but they are all immensely complex and not guaranteed to succeed. But unless they do succeed then the cost to us all will be enormous.
Did you know that you can step up and protect tropical rainforests when you’re shopping? If you shop at Tesco, you can donate your green clubcard points to our joint project, Together for Trees. What a great way to protect one of the most important and incredible places on earth!
If you have had an eye on nature for the last few decades then you are likely to have noticed changes around you. The chiffchaffs that I used to hope to hear before my birthday at the end of March I now hear a couple of weeks earlier. Many butterflies are spreading north in the UK, for example marbled whites and speckled woods, even though in some cases their populations are declining in numbers. My walks in rural Northamptonshire are now quite likely to include sightings of little egrets, which would have been very rare sightings even 20 years ago.
Observations reveal to us the biological impacts of a warming global and local climate; spring events nudge a little earlier and southern species spread north.
Nature is on the move in space and time, across the world, because of climate change and we can see signs of those changes in the nature around us – and in the fact that you need to cut the grass later and later each autumn as the growing season lengthens.
There is already plenty of evidence that these climate-induced changes may not all be benign. Some summer migrants, unlike my chiffchaffs, have not shifted their arrival dates forward, we don’t really know why not. And, looking across Europe as a whole, those species, such as wood warblers, that have not advanced their arrival dates are declining rapidly. It may be, and the RSPB is looking at these issues, that somehow, some species are a bit stuck – they can’t get back to their breeding grounds any earlier and so when they do return they find that they are missing important flushes of insect life which are now happening a little earlier in the year.
And many species which are moving north are also losing ground on the southern edge of their range. Take the Dartford warbler as an example. This resident warbler has spread north in recent decades, and we expect to see that continue, but at the southern edge of its range in Europe, which holds many more Dartford warblers, the Spanish and Portuguese see declines in numbers. Will northern England, Ireland and Denmark really provide enough suitable habitat for Dartford warblers to compensate for the losses further south in their range?
Northern species don’t have as much scope to move further north – if you keep pushing polar bears north then they end up all trying to live at the North Pole, and where do Orkney and Shetland’s whimbrels go – there’s a lot of sea and not much land north of them?
Species living on low-lying coasts, whether they be redshank on Essex saltmarshes or tigers in the Sunderban mangrove ecosystem will be threatened by rising sea levels. Species that live at high altitudes may find their habitats are squeezed out whether they be the already extinct golden toad of Costa Rica or the dotterel of our Scottish mountain tops.
Climate change throws challenges at all life on the planet – our species and all other species too. As many as a third of all species on Earth may be committed to extinction by climate change by the end of this century.Will we rise to the challenge and will this month’s Rio+20 summit help move things along enough? And should I feel pleased or sad when I hear an early chiffchaff?
The UK should be leading the move to a fair and green economy, not going backwards on its commitments. We are asking as many MPs as possible to sign the Stop Climate Chaos Coalition’s Rio Declaration to commit to a sustainable future. Step and ask your MP to support the Rio-UK Declaration.
Everywhere you go you see wildlife, but some places are better than others. A cornerstone of nature conservation is to try to protect the very best places for wildlife.
The first National Park (NP) in the world was Yellowstone NP in Wyoming, Idaho and Montana, USA, and was designated in 1872. Across the Pacific Ocean, Australia’s first National Park was Royal NP south of Sydney in 1879. Virunga NP in the Democratic Republic of Congo was Africa’s first National Park and came into existence in 1925. Americans sometimes describe National Parks as ‘America’s best idea’ (although their inventor was the Scottish-born John Muir). The UK took up this idea rather belatedly with the Peak District NP in 1951.
In reality, there have long been areas set aside, and managed, for nature to thrive but originally these were seen as hunting preserves and over time the emphasis has shifted to protecting places for nature’s sake and so that people can enjoy the wildlife riches of the planet.
National Parks are slightly different concepts in different countries, and across the world we have added to the complexity of the network of protected areas for wildlife by adding all sorts of new and varying designations and titles. In the UK we now have Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, Areas of Special Scientific Interest (in Northern Ireland alone), Special Protection Areas for birds, Ramsar sites, Nature Improvement Areas and many many more. It’s an alphabet soup of designations and, I think, a list of off-putting and unappealing names.
Few people live further than a few miles from one of the c7000 Site of Special Scientific Interest (and ASSIs) in the UK and yet I doubt that 2% of people could name a single site let alone the one nearest to where they live. These designations, as designations, have not captured people’s attention or imagination. Somewhere along the line we forgot to give them a good image.
But although the woman on the Clapham omnibus will not be able to name her nearest SSSI I bet she will know of the existence of Wimbledon Common (which is her nearest SSSI) and may enjoy its open spaces and the breath of nature it brings into London. And I would be sure that most local voters would want Wimbledon Common to be protected more or less as it is for the future.
The mere survival of some of these wildlife areas in our crowded island says much for the effectiveness of the protected area system but we can also demonstrate that these designations have worked for the species they were designed to protect. A study published in the journal Science in 2007 showed that those species that had highest protection under the EU Birds Directive had fared better in the EU than outside the EU and had fared better in the years after the Directive came into force than they had before. And species fared best in those countries which had protected the greatest areas for them.
Enthusiasm for protected areas is growing and their proven success persuaded countries to commit, in Nagoya, Japan in October 2010, to targets to increase the global coverage of protected areas on land and sea by 2020.
It’s a pity that we didn’t put all the world’s protected areas in place soon after the USA kicked it all off in the late 19th century – the world would be richer in wildlife and for people now if we had. And it’s a pity that we conservationists have surrounded the whole process of protecting the best places for wildlife in such a welter of jargon and acronyms. But despite our slow start and horrible language we have systems for protecting wildlife sites across the planet that are effective – and that is something of which we all should be both grateful and proud.
However, whether John Muir succeeded in his mission to save the American soul from complete materialism is, perhaps, another matter.
If you’re worried about the damage being done to a local wildlife spot, but don't know what to do about it, have a look at our local planning packs. Our advice coupled with your local knowledge and personal experience may be all you need to step up and make a difference.