Let Animals Do Their Thing
Protecting or restoring just nine species could sequester 95% of the carbon needed to limit global warming to 1.5 degree C. We need to think more holistically to get there.
Here’s some good news you may have missed: protecting or restoring the habitats of nine species could capture 95% of the carbon needed to meet the Paris agreement goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
According to “Trophic Rewilding can Expand Natural Climate Solutions” an academic article Nature Climate Change, those nine wildlife species—marine fish, whales, sharks, grey wolves, wildebeest, sea otters, musk oxen, African forest elephants, and American bison—could capture 6.41 billion tons of carbon/year. (There are good summary articles from Grist and Yale.)
The paper quantified the impact of basic animal facts that any five year old could tell you—namely, that animals do things like eat plants and each other, dig for fun and to make a home, walk around, and poop. All of these animal behaviors can increase the carbon storage capacity of an ecosystem by up to 250%! The scientific term for this is animating the carbon cycle. To get a sense for the potential magnitude of these changes, check out this five minute video on the wolves of Yellowstone.
Translating the carbon storage potential of restoring critical native animals into policies requires a level of multi-disciplinary coordination that we rarely achieve. For example, the UN Conventions and negotiations on biodiversity and climate change are negotiated and updated separately.
Partitioning the world into discrete “issues” to be solved by experts talking to each other and past everyone else has a certain logic to it, but it’s hard to see what’s next to you when you’re in such a deep and narrow hole. The world and climate need to be thought of as one complex system. Optimizing small parts will not account for all of the connections and feedback loops that dominate how complex systems work.
To solve the climate and biodiversity crises, we need to take a more holistic view that celebrates the interconnectedness of these issues. It’s an opportunity for true win-wins. As the authors of “Trophic Rewilding” paper notes:
Current natural climate solutions focus on protecting or restoring plants (primarily trees, mangroves and seagrasses), and soil and sediment microbes in the ecosystem.
Enlisting animal functional roles for natural climate solutions, however, requires changing the current mindset, which largely holds that wild animals need to be protected from human impacts and climate change. This mindset accordingly leads to the separate allocation of landscape and seascape space for animal conservation and natural climate solutions because it sees them as competing objectives for finite spaces. Changing the mindset to consider them as functionally interdependent creates new opportunities to increase negative emissions.
The way that we calculate the carbon reduction potential of “natural climate solutions” is from plants—animals are excluded. Actions meant to protect animals that result in carbon storage won’t get “credit” for that storage from a carbon accounting perspective.
While protecting the planet and climate are the ultimate goals, policies and businesses use proxies that generally rely on measuring carbon. If the wolves in Yellowstone have a massive impact on the carbon storage of the ecosystem, nature cares, but your carbon accountant may not yet. Right now we to take actions that move the planet in the right direction and press for the carbon accounting to catch up. If we wait for the accounting to be perfect, we’ll miss our window to act because carbon accounting is a lagging indicator in the climate space.
This being Bright Spots, let’s turn to the good news. In December 2022, 190 countries met in Montreal for the UN Biodiversity Conference. At the meeting, the parties agreed to a set of goals; I’ll turn it over the the New York Times to summarize.
Overall, the deal lays out a suite of 23 environmental targets. The most prominent, known as 30x30, would place 30 percent of land and sea under protection. Currently, about 17 percent of the planet’s land and roughly 8 percent of its oceans are protected, with restrictions on activities like fishing, farming and mining.
A global treaty that calls for protecting more land and sea could also protect animals that stimulate carbon sinks if we’re strategic about the land protected. As more land is protected and the impacts from the Rewilding article are seen in more places, the carbon accounting will catch up.
That’s the good news. The less good news is that we need a new mental model to meet the goal of protecting 30% of land—especially with a human population of 8 billion+ and growing. Put simply: the traditional approach of allocating land that’s for animals and protected from human interaction won’t work.
Gabe Popkin from The Nature Beat nails the point in his piece on foraging:
In our stunted environmental discourse, the mode of caring for nature that most Americans recognize today is simply to keep our hands off of it — the “fortress conservation” model that began in the U.S. with the creation of national parks and has since been exported around the world.
While this approach has prevented exploitation of certain areas, it just as often ends up harming the very places we think we’re helping. When we’re prohibited from interacting with nature in meaningful ways, we also stop caring about it in meaningful ways.
While Popkin is talking about foraging and local parks in the US, the point holds: we cannot meet our climate goals if we view ourselves as separate and distinct from nature. We are part of this planet and need to relearn how to live as part of a broader ecosystem that contains animals both large and small. Only when we see ourselves as part of the natural world will we humans allow these nine species and others to travel across the ranges they need to thrive, sequester carbon, and help us restore balance.
While these are global issues, there are still things that each of us can do.
We can all:
Support native plants and animals: this needs to be inclusive of all native animals, including predators. One way to support your native ecosystem is to become more knowledgeable about it. Learn the names of some plants and animals. If you have a yard, plant native plants.
Support legislation and organizations that take a holistic approach to environmental protection. The Nature Conservancy takes a pragmatic approach and engages with communities, farmers, and ranchers. Support them.
Be present outside. It could be in your backyard, a public park, or on the street. The key is to really listen, observe the natural world, and recognize that we are all part of a complex ecosystem—even in our daily lives.
Breakdown silos. When you or people you know narrow in on a single solution or way of thinking, step back and ask if there’s a broader perspective that could help see the problem—and potential solutions—more clearly.
Convince Republican politicians that signing onto global environmental treaties will benefit their constituents and expand American power. Only two countries are not a party to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity: the United States because of GOP intransigence and the Holy See. No one likes to work with a bully. By not signing global treaties that everyone else signs because of our supposed exceptionalism, we undercut any argument that America is exceptional and corrode our negotiating power on this and other topics.
Animals are amazing. The way that animals interact to create balance across complex ecosystems fills me with wonder. Instead of trying to engineer everything with precision, which inevitably fails, the best thing we can do is appreciate that we’re a small part of a more complex and wondrous whole.