What Does Rewilding Do for Climate Change? - How to Rewild скачать в хорошем качестве

What Does Rewilding Do for Climate Change? - How to Rewild

Which habitat do you think locks down more carbon over a normal human lifetime - a native deciduous woodland or a conifer plantation? When I asked my parents, they went with the native woodland. Well, of course they did. I did too. We’ve had the benefits of native trees hammered into us over the past few years by environmentalists like myself, and the media. But on this question, we were wrong. Conifer plantations lock down more carbon, more quickly than native woodland, or even naturally regenerating woodland like that found on rewilded land. That’s according to research published last week. Conifers also have an added benefit - the products produced from the timber can replace high carbon alternatives like plastics or concrete. So, if we’re in a climate crisis, is the logical response to plant more conifers? This probably feels wrong to you. And it does to me, too. Conifer plantations are terrible for biodiversity. They also don’t permanently lock down carbon. Sure, it’s pulled out of the atmosphere, but eventually the timber decays and a lot of that carbon is released again. The more we rely on offsets and find new ways to squeeze carbon into our landscape, the easier it is to justify our emissions and keep on polluting. The whole issue is being oversimplified, really. What’s lost in the news reports, is that we’re not facing one crisis, but two, and that, sometimes, they need different approaches to tackle them. This conifer plantation dilemma is the perfect illustration. Biodiversity is under threat. You may be tired of hearing about it, but it bears repeating. Many species are declining - have declined - due to habitat loss, climate change and pollution - whole ecosystems are shattered - reeling from these impacts, especially in the UK. Improving our biodiversity can help lock down carbon, but you know what? Sometimes climate change and biodiversity need different solutions - sometimes even opposite solutions. Planting monoculture coniferous woodland is terrible for biodiversity, but… it’s great for the climate. Beaver ponds emit methane, but… they’re fantastic for biodiversity. Ecotourism in remote locations helps fund many rewilding projects, but long haul travel is not sustainable. We’ve created two different crises here, and they may have two different solutions. Let’s not pretend otherwise - doing that risks undermining the real strength of rewilding to restore biodiversity and it also falsely suggests that rewilding might be an easy solution to the climate crisis. The climate’s hammering at our door - it often overshadows that quiet crisis in biodiversity. But biodiversity underpins the productivity of our farms and fisheries, it affects our health and wellbeing, and economists believe that even our financial stability rests on the integrity of our ecosystems. A depleted natural world with low biodiversity could have many consequences that we aren’t even aware of yet. So let’s not pretend that we can always kill two birds with one stone. I’ve often seen rewilding sold as ‘a solution to our climate crisis’ but it’s really not. There’s only one real solution to our climate crisis - reducing global emissions. Sure we can restore our environment and store more carbon that way, but we’re simply producing too much for that to be the only answer. Rewilding landscapes can improve their potential to store carbon, but that’s a distraction - putting carbon first can lead to poor land management decisions. Rewilding is, however, a great way to address the biodiversity crisis - it helps to restore ecosystem integrity, making our natural world more resilient to climate change. And, by protecting that biodiversity, rewilding allows us more time to deal with the other elephant in the room - it gives us breathing space to focus on technological solutions to reduce our emissions, like electric vehicles, nuclear fusion or renewables. Rewilding is a really important science, but if we sell it as a cure for climate change, we’re missing the point. It’s a solution for biodiversity and for ecosystem integrity.