By Frank Landis, Conservation Committee Chair & Rare Plants Co-chair
“Unprecedented changes in climate and biodiversity, driven by human activities, have combined and increasingly threaten nature, human lives, livelihoods and well-being around the world. Biodiversity loss and climate change are both driven by human economic activities and mutually reinforce each other. Neither will be successfully resolved unless both are tackled together. This is the message of a workshop report, published today by 50 of the world’s leading biodiversity and climate experts.”
This showed up in my mailbox a couple of days ago, and you can read it yourself at https://www.ipbes.net/events/launch-ipbes-ipcc-co-sponsored-workshop-report-biodiversity-and-climate-change.
While I’m still digesting the report, I’ve got the deadline from this column to make. So…
Here’s the background. My standard rap about the biodiversity crisis is that, while San Diego hasn’t had any species go extinct since the California Golden Bear, we’re on the precipice edge of extinction with a large number of species. These include most notably the Quino checkerspot butterfly (notable because that’s a major fight in the litigation over Otay Ranch Villages 13 and 14). This precipice is also heavily populated by vernal pool plants, beach plants, coastal canyon plants, border plants, and old-growth specialists, most of which have lost well over 90 percent of their historic habitat and are getting destroyed by weeds and human impacts from recreation and carelessness. They’re not necessarily living where they are best adapted anymore, they’re living where they haven’t been eliminated yet.
The other part of my standard rap is that extinction is (was) thought to be caused by three factors, in decreasing order: habitat loss, invasive species, and climate change. I’ve also added the prediction that later in the century, these all converge into one problem, which a lot of people ignored for no particular reason.
And that brings us back to the report above, which was generated by the first-ever joint workshop of experts from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
As a reminder, the IPCC is the Nobel Prize-winning group that issues the climate change assessments, of which the sixth is due out shortly. They are very much the mainstream/conservative end of the climate science spectrum. The IPBES is their biodiversity counterpart.
They are not doomsayers. Per the new paper, “The evidence is clear: a sustainable global future for people and nature is still achievable, but it requires transformative change with rapid and far-reaching actions of a type never before attempted, building on ambitious emissions reductions.”
However, they warn that narrowly focused actions to combat climate change can harm nature and vice versa. Fortunately, there are many actions that can benefit both climate and nature. These include:
“Stopping the loss and degradation of carbon- and species-rich ecosystems on land and in the ocean.” In San Diego, these ecosystems include everything from eelgrass beds to salt marshes, freshwater marshes, riparian thickets and forests, old chaparral, montane forests, and undisturbed desert soils with their vegetation. Granted we don’t have rainforests in San Diego, but every bit preserved is necessary. And local actions can be monitored better. We should not stop there, as indirect actions to stop deforestation from intact forests elsewhere is crucial. Deforestation globally is a major source of both species loss and GHG emissions.
“Restoring carbon- and species-rich ecosystems.” The authors have evidence that restoration is “among the cheapest and quickest nature-based climate mitigation measures to implement.” Given that restoration is not quick, this says quite a lot about how slow other methods are. In San Diego, people in the county need to focus more on invasive species removal—weeding—than we do. San Diego County hosts a large inventory of indifferently successful restoration projects where a bunch of stuff from nurseries were planted, watered, weeded for three years and abandoned, with no penalty for failing to meet goals.
This indifference has to stop, although it is unclear what can be done to force the bad actors to clean up their games. It is also unclear what it will take to get local municipalities to invest in weeding, even though it’s often a more cost-effective form of restoration than outplanting is.
“Increasing sustainable agricultural and forestry practices.” In San Diego this is controversial, since the Farm Bureau is currently pushing for farmers to be allowed to do whatever without oversight, while simultaneously promising to get the ag industry into carbon sequestration big time. We’ve been down that road with how many industries now? I’m all for expanding no-till farming, and for some other measures that keep carbon out of the air by getting it into the soil. That said, I’ve seen too many carbon offset games played to believe in anything less than enforced trust but verify protocols.
To the degree that native plant agriculture is profitable, I would like to see it expand. This includes things like growing white sage for smudges (to stop it being poached) and growing wildflower meadows as seed sources for native plant nurseries. And, of course, it means growing the market for native plants, and growing the nurseries that provide these plants. Not big solutions, but they may be useful for restoring degraded and marginal lands that would currently support one cow every ten acres or less.
“Enhancing and better-targeting conservation actions, coordinated with and supported by strong climate adaptation and innovation.” This is a verbose way of saying “30x30,” which is the global movement Newsom’s administration is embracing. 30x30 (for the few that haven’t heard) is the idea of having thirty percent of the Earth conserved by 2030, or having 30% of California conserved by 2030 in our case. This is probably doable, depending on what counts as conserved.
Conservation becomes problematic when unlimited recreation is seen as a legitimate use of conserved lands. There is now a whole subfield of recreation ecology that looks at recreational impacts to conserved lands, and they can get pretty substantial. Grim, even. And while mountain bikes are the leading non-motorized problem, hikers don’t lag far behind. Unfortunately, recreation is not impact neutral, and we all need to learn to give plants and animals the spaces they need to survive, for the sake of our own survival and peace of mind.
“Eliminating subsidies that support local and national activities harmful to biodiversity.” They cite examples such as excessive harvest of timber, wildlife, or fish, overuse of fertilizer, and so forth. Again, this is a good idea, but working smarter with fewer resources is rarely peoples’ preferred alternative. Reducing consumption, loss, and waste is a perennial idea and need, but I’m cynical enough to think we need some drastically new ways to do this, given how (not) well attempts to date have worked.
Parallel to this is the notion that environmental education needs to be about more than what humans are doing wrong, it needs to constantly find ways to make it good to do the right thing. Many people want to be good, live good lives, and it turns out that conspicuous consumption is not a particularly good life for the consumed. What is? If you’re creative, think of this as a challenge…
The report also goes into various ideas for curbing climate change that cause problems for biodiversity. These include massive subsidies for biofuels, massive tree plantations where no trees currently grow, and/or of exotic species, and increasing irrigation to deal with increasing drought. The last two are certainly problems in California, and I’m certainly concerned that some bright bulb will want to plant eucalyptus in place of coastal sage scrub to increase carbon sequestration (eucs don’t last long enough to make it worthwhile). Irrigation is a more insidious problem, as water districts tend to have real trouble saying no to more customers.
Since San Diego County is working on a comprehensive update of its native plant landscaping ordinances, this report arrives at a good time. County efforts to deal with climate change and biodiversity loss are siloed to say the least (different people, different departments, different measures, not talking with each other…). Treating climate change and the 6th Extinction as facets of a single, existential crisis may be the tool needed to get people to work together on it. I can hope anyway.