Christmas Island pipistrelle bat (Pipistrellus murrayi). © M. Schultz

On the continuing theme of the demise of laws designed to protect Australian biodiversity (see here, here and here), I’m reproducing our latest Nature Correspondence on the issue. I know this might be slightly dodgy to do so, but given that it’s only a Correspondence, I don’t think I’ll get in too much trouble. Besides, it’s too important an issue to hide away behind paywalls.

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Policy and legislative changes by Australia’s state governments are eroding the vital protection of the country’s unique biodiversity.

Reserves are being opened up to ecologically disruptive activities, such as grazing by domestic livestock, logging, mining, recreational hunting and fishing, and commercial development. Protected habitats on private and leasehold land are imperilled too. Queensland and Victoria, for example, are relaxing hard-won laws that limit vegetation clearance on private land, further accelerating the loss of regional biodiversity.

Collectively, these actions increase the pressure on biodiversity conservation in protected areas, many of which are already showing biodiversity loss (for example, the Kakadu National Park in northern Australia). Ecological connectivity is being lost, which will hamper the dispersal of species and their ability to respond to climate-change effects.

Species extinctions are primed to increase. Too many of the country’s unique fauna and flora have been wiped out over the past two centuries (see, for example, C. Johnson Australia’s Mammal Extinctions; Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006), including the Christmas Island pipistrelle bat (Pipistrellus murrayi) in 2009.

There could be no worse time to weaken reserve protection and relax laws designed to reduce habitat loss.

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Authors: Euan Ritchie, CJA Bradshaw, Richard Hobbs, Chris Johnson, Emma Johnston, Bill Laurance, David Lindenmayer, Mick McCarthy, Dale Nimmo, Hugh Possingham, Bob Pressey David Watson & John Woinarksi

Filed under: Australia, conservation, conservation biology, environmental policy, exploitation, habitat loss, management, marine protected area, protected area Tagged: Australia, biodiversity, decline, laws, national parks

The precautionary principle – the idea that one should adopt an approach that minimises risk – is so ingrained in the mind of the conservation scientist that we often forget what it really means, or the reality of its implementation in management and policy. Indeed, it has been written about extensively in the peer-reviewed conservation literature for over 20 years at least (some examples here, here, here and here).

From a purely probabilistic viewpoint, the concept is flawlessly logical in most conservation questions. For example, if a particular by-catch of a threatened species is predicted [from a model] to result in a long-term rate of instantaneous population change (r) of -0.02 to 0.01 [uniform distribution], then even though that interval envelops r = 0, one can see that reducing the harvest rate a little more until the lower bound is greater than zero is a good idea to avoid potentially pushing down the population even more. In this way, our modelling results would recommend a policy that formally incorporates the uncertainty of our predictions without actually trying to make our classically black-and-white laws try to legislate uncertainty directly.

Of course, the non-science world tends not to think probabilistically (indeed, we have a helluva time getting our own students to understand probability theory) despite the attraction of the logic. For example, I have sat in a policy meeting where by-catch limits were being set for a particular threatened species being caught in a local fishery. Here, a scientist showed some analysis indicating a 95% probability that the by-caught species was declining in abundance since by-catch was first observed. An industry representative at the meeting then claimed therefore that there was a 5% chance the species was increasing, and so we shouldn’t worry about it. Not only did he not understand the statistic, he was perfectly happy to take the (rather high) risk of seeing the species disappear for the benefit of his future profits. It’s not a very rare sentiment in business these days.

So when I saw this post in The Guardian last week, it got me thinking again about how the precautionary principle was being used in environmental laws, and whether the assumption among conservation scientists of its ubiquity and acceptance is being upheld. A little research indicates that it’s almost entirely absent from society’s general approach to biowealth protection.

We’ve failed to arrest the global decline of biodiversity, and even our protected areas are gasping, with about half of tropical protected areas losing their biodiversity, and national reserve systems [at least, in Australia] dying a death of a thousand cuts. It’s not just the biodiversity itself that’s suffering – society is losing trillions of dollars worth of biowealth and our natural wealth-adjusted index of economic prosperity has been declining since 1978.

So clearly on a global scale, we’re not being very precautionary at all. At a more local scale, I note that in addition to national parks being stripped of their legal protection, Australia’s Environmental Protection Authorities have been systematically removing so-called ‘green tape’ to make it much easier for industry to implement [short-term] economic development of limited long-term gain. We tend to sigh in relief when toothless ‘State of the Environment’ reports seemingly indicate no further decline in particular categories, while shifting baselines ensure we forget the collective destruction that has already occurred.

In other words, the very legislation designed to protect our life-support systems now runs almost completely on a ‘innocent-until-proven-guilty’ assumption. That is, industry may proceed if no one can find [usually a threatened] species that will be directly affected (i.e., someone must prove that there will be a negative effect). This is usually an impossible ask anyway because EPA approval is generally based on a cursory survey of the macro-species within the immediate vicinity. Even then, our laws still favour environmental destruction given proposals to offset localised  losses through biodiversity trading, even though the concept is so fundamentally flawed as to be laughable (see also here).

So what to do? A pragmatic and visionary government would instead invoke a ‘guilty-until-proven-innocent’ policy where industry would have to demonstrate that a development would cause no biodiversity loss before proceeding (i.e., they would have to prove that there wouldn’t be a negative effect). Given our track record, one could argue that this condition might never be met, but some middle ground would certainly be preferable to our current approach. A smart government would also view its short-term economic gains within the light of better long-term economic indicators, such as the Genuine Progress Indicator I wrote about a few weeks ago.

Some decisions will be harder than the mere change of our approval philosophy might imply. Things like developing nuclear power in favour of coal, how to deal with over-population and providing enough food for humanity now and into the heated future, are all contentious issues. But following the paths of lowest long-term detriment to me seems like an intelligent way forward. Demanding such from our governments will be a life-long challenge for all of us.

CJA Bradshaw

I can’t believe I’ve now done twenty of these – another 6 biodiversity cartoons while I’m travelling (see full stock of previous ‘Cartoon guide to biodiversity loss’ compendia here).

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Led by Bill Laurance, our latest opinion editorial in the Higher Education supplement. Interestingly, it has already spawned a bilious and spittle-flecked response by Queensland’s Acting National Parks Minister, Tim Mander. Given the evidence, who’s side do you take? I’m happy that at least one of the worst culprit state governments is at least now paying some attention to the issue.

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LAST week the world was appalled when Ecuador decided to open up one of its iconic national parks for petroleum development, with Leonardo di Caprio being among the chorus of dissenting voices. Yet the world should be even more disappointed in Australia, a far wealthier nation whose parks could be facing even worse threats.

Why is Australia going down this reckless path? It’s all down to the state governments – especially in Victoria, Queensland and NSW.

For the conservative politicians currently holding sway in these States, it seems it’s time to generate some quick cash while cutting park budgets – and never mind the impact on Australia’s imperilled ecosystems and biodiversity.

In Victoria, for instance, land developers are now being allowed to build hotels and other ventures in national parks. In NSW, recreational shooting and possibly logging will be allowed in parks if new legislation is passed. In NSW’s marine parks, bans on shore-based recreational fishing are being lifted [see previous post here].

Other parks in NSW and Queensland are being opened up to livestock grazing. In Morrinya National Park in Queensland, a strip of forest 20 km long was recently cleared for fencing, with new stock-watering tanks being established throughout the park.

Instead of advocating for sustainable cattle stocking, new laws in Queensland will allow graziers to use national parks whenever a drought should hit – the very time when heavy grazing would wreak the maximum damage on forest health.

The situation outside national parks and other protected areas is even worse. In Queensland and Victoria, laws that protect native vegetation on private land are being seriously weakened. NSW is considering similar laws, even though 85 % of its vegetation with high conservation priority is on private land. Western Australia, which contains more unique plant species than anywhere else, has already carved out large areas of conservation land for mining, even after destroying most of its native forests.

The laws designed to protect native vegetation on private land only came into force because Australia had among the world’s highest land-clearing rates, rivalling forest-destroying nations like Brazil and Indonesia.

Australia has already felled 40 % of its forests and logged, fragmented or degraded much of the rest. The United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization estimates that, from 2005 to 2010, Australia cleared an average of 924,000 hectares of native forest and woodland annually – equivalent to over two rugby pitches a minute.

The newly relaxed clearing laws in eastern Australia mean that national parks will become even more vital for nature conservation. Yet at the same time, park protections are being seriously eroded. That spells double-trouble for Australia’s biodiversity.

Across the Australian continent, biodiversity is already seriously threatened. Australia has had more mammal extinctions than any other continent, with 27 species disappearing since European arrival. In addition, 23 bird species, four frogs and over 60 plant species have vanished. Rather than an historic aberration, this alarming legacy is ongoing – over 1500 species of Australia’s mammals, birds, reptiles, frogs and plants are currently threatened with extinction.

Furthermore, many Australian ecosystems are teetering on the edge of collapse. Across much of northern Australia, resident populations of smaller mammals are rapidly plummeting. Native vegetation is being eroded almost everywhere one looks and invasive species are burgeoning. Some vegetation types, such as grasslands and open woodlands, have declined by over 99 % since European arrival.

In light of such threats, we see a particular danger in forcing national parks to generate revenue. In Queensland, for instance, the minister in charge of national parks, Steve Dickson, recently said: “Unashamedly I am looking to make money out of this,” in reference to the state’s current plans to open many national parks to developers and tourist operators.

Such views clearly deviate from the traditional roles of parks in preserving natural and cultural-heritage values and allowing people to interact in low-impact ways with nature. More importantly, they run a serious risk of creating expensive long-term problems.

Activities such as livestock grazing, logging and land development can exacerbate weed invasions and soil erosion, damage sensitive riparian zones and waterways, alter fire regimes and reduce carbon storage in vegetation. Removing trees also increases flood severity – something Australians must be keen to avoid after the last few years.

Hence, rather than generating sustainable revenues, repairing damage to national parks can require costly and protracted interventions.

In addition, Australia enjoys huge benefits from its economically vital tourism industry – which generates around $100 million per day in revenues. Such economic benefits could suffer if Australia is increasingly perceived as a nation that puts short-termism and ill-advised development above environmental quality and long-term sustainability.

As some of Australia’s leading environmental scientists, we vigorously oppose current efforts to weaken park protections in Australia. These efforts are not just profoundly ill-advised environmentally, but they will ultimately lead to far more economic costs than benefits.

Australia should be a nation that is applauded for its environmental leadership, not castigated for being an environmental offender.

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• William Laurance, Distinguished Professor and Australian Laureate, James Cook University
• Corey Bradshaw, Professor of Ecological Modelling, The University of Adelaide
• David Watson, Associate Professor of Ecology, Charles Sturt University
• Euan Ritchie, Lecturer in Ecology, Deakin University

I don’t like to talk about my family online. Call me paranoid, but there are a lot of crazy people out there who don’t like what scientists like me are saying (bugger the evidence). Yes, like many climate scientists, I’ve also been threatened. That’s why my personal life remains anonymous to all except for select group of people.

But I’ve mentioned my daughter before on this blog, and despite a few people insinuating that I am a bad parent because of what I said, I am happy that I made the point that climate change is a scary concept of which our children must at least be cognisant.

My daughter’s story today is a little less confronting, but equally enlightening. It’s also a little embarrassing as a scientist who has dedicated my entire research career to the discipline of conservation biology.

As a normal six year-old without the ability to refrain from talking – even for a moment – I hear a lot of stories. Many of them are of course fantastical and ridiculous, but those are just part of a healthy, imaginative childhood (I am proud to say though that she is quite clear about the non-existence of fictitious entities like faeries, easter bunnies and gods).

Every once in a while, however, there are snippets of wisdom that ooze out from the cracks in the dross. In the last few months, my daughter has independently and with no prompting from me come up with two pillars of conservation science: (i) protected areas and (ii) biodiversity corridors.

Of course, she didn’t use that nomenclature, but the concepts came through loud and clear nonetheless. As a contextual prologue, she has been fascinated with extinction for the last six months. She wants to know about every animal or plant that went extinct since the Ediacaran, what caused them to go extinct, and how important they were in the grand ecosystem scheme of things. Yes, this is obviously of prime interest to me, hence the subject at hand, but I’m amazed at how obsessed she is with the topic. When it comes to everything from the Late Pleistocene onward, the cause almost always comes down to humans, whether directly by exploitation, or indirectly through habitat loss or invasive species (or all of the above).

So having fully determined that the human race is largely responsible for extinctions, and that forest loss is one of the biggest contributors, she has it in her head to save the forests that remain. Her idea? Build a big fence around remaining forests and don’t let people in. Sounds a lot like ‘protected areas’ to me.

The second concept follows similar lines. Well, if you can plant trees (we have planted trees together on our property), then you can restore forests, right? Rather amazingly, she suggested that we should plant trees between existing forest fragments so that all the animals could “move back and forth between the forests and have more room”. Amazing.

Or is it? Like any parent, I’m convinced (without any corroborating evidence) that my child is a genius, but deep down I know that she’s rather normal. No – I don’t think she’s particularly brilliant to come up with these independently¹; rather, I think these two bastions of conservation biology represent some of the lowest-hanging fruit in applied conservation.

In other words, these are perhaps some of the easiest and most mundane solutions to the biodiversity crisis. While we do our best to protect what’s there, clearly it isn’t working. For example, over half of tropical protected areas are still losing their biodiversity, and Australia’s largest national park is experiencing a pathetic collapse of its vertebrates. Add all this to our governments’ charge to remove protections of our national reserve system, and you can see that we have to do so very much more. Biodiversity corridors are another potential disaster if not done very, very carefully.

Happily, conservation ecologists are now talking a lot more about what to do between protected areas. We also have a lot of research going on about the most biodiversity-friendly ways of farming. We’re even talking about our need to generate biodiversity-friendly energy for our growing and power-hungry human population.

So we’re getting there, but it’s essential we do not spend all of our efforts on merely documenting the calamity. We need some real solutions and we need them quickly. Think laterally. Think transdisciplinarity. Think controversially.

CJA Bradshaw

¹I am obliged to confess that my daughter is an only child, she has two scientists for parents, she spends substantial amounts of time watching David Attenborough documentaries, and she lives on a farm surrounded by forests and native animals. She’s therefore not entirely naïve about biodiversity or its problems.

Chiew Larn Reservoir is surrounded by Khlong Saeng Wildlife Sanctuary and Khao Sok National Park, which together make up part of the largest block of rainforest habitat in southern Thailand (> 3500 km²). Photo: Antony Lynam

One of the perennial and probably most controversial topics in conservation ecology is when is something “too small’. By ‘something’ I mean many things, including population abundance and patch size. We’ve certainly written about the former on many occasions (see here, here, here and here for our work on minimum viable population size), with the associated controversy it elicited.

Now I (sadly) report on the tragedy of the second issue – when is a habitat fragment too small to be of much good to biodiversity?

Published today in the journal Science, Luke Gibson (of No substitute for primary forest fame) and a group of us report disturbing results about the ecological meltdown that has occurred on islands created when the Chiew Larn Reservoir of southern Thailand was flooded nearly 30 years ago by a hydroelectric dam.

As is the case in many parts of the world (e.g., Three Gorges Dam, China), hydroelectric dams can cause major ecological problems merely by flooding vast areas. In the case of Charn Liew, co-author Tony Lynam of Wildlife Conservation Society passed along to me a bit of poignant and emotive history about the local struggle to prevent the disaster.

“As the waters behind the dam were rising in 1987, Seub Nakasathien, the Superintendent of the Khlong Saeng Wildlife Sanctuary, his staff and conservationist friends, mounted an operation to capture and release animals that were caught in the flood waters.

It turned out to be distressing experience for all involved as you can see from the clips here, with the rescuers having only nets and longtail boats, and many animals dying. Ultimately most of the larger mammals disappeared quickly from the islands, leaving just the smaller fauna.

Later Seub moved to Huai Kha Khaeng Wildlife Sanctuary and fought an unsuccessful battle with poachers and loggers, which ended in him taking his own life in despair in 1990. A sad story, and his friend, a famous folk singer called Aed Carabao, wrote a song about Seub, the music of which plays in the video.

One good thing that became of this tragedy was the birth of a grassroots conservation organisation, Seub Nakasathien Foundation (SNF), which mobilises people through social media to question government policies on the environment, especially big dam and infrastructure projects that affect important wildlife areas. SNF were successful in stopping the Nam Choan Dam from being built inside Huai Kha Khaeng, and currently they are trying to stop the Mae Wong Dam from being constructed inside Mae Wong National Park. Mae Wong is one of two last remaining large watersheds in Thailand that are yet to be dammed. The other is Mae Yom in northern Thailand.”

Obviously, Seub lost the battle and Chiew Larn was born. But it wasn’t just the flooded forest and drowning wildlife that resulted. Nearly 30 years later, the islands created by the dam have lost nearly all of their native mammal species.

Making the best of a bad situation, the creation of the dam provided an amazing opportunity to study extinction dynamics. The entire mammal fauna was surveyed on 16 islands varying in size from 0.3 to 56.3 hectares both 5-7 and 25-26 years post-flooding.

What we report in today’s article is rather disturbing. In the < 10-ha islands, the mammal species almost all went extinct within 5 years, and within 25 years in the bigger fragments.

Malayan field rat (Rattus tiomanicus). Normally found in villages and agricultural areas, R. tiomanicus has invaded forest islands and apparently displaced native small mammals. It is a good coloniser, being able to cross open stretches of water or other inhospitable habitat, and also has rapid generation times – and was even observed giving birth inside the traps. These traits could partly explain its success in Chiew Larn Reservoir. Photo: Luke Gibson

We also developed an island biogeographic model of the extinction process, which revealed a rather amazing result. It was the biggest islands that lost their species faster than the smallest. Possibly exacerbated by the invasive Malayan field rat, the average time to lose half of an island’s biota (estimated over all islands) was only 14 years, with the biggest islands losing species faster.

This might be a case of ‘the rich having more to lose’, and that being ‘big’ doesn’t really help if island (fragment) area is substantially below some critical threshold beyond which it behaves more like ‘mainland’ communities. In other words, size didn’t matter within the range of fragment areas available – all mammal species were committed to extinction regardless.

It’s a sobering result, and certainly demonstrates the absolute necessity of keeping large fragments intact in disturbed landscapes.

Armed with this conclusion, one could argue  that small fragments have no value. I don’t think this is the case, because we didn’t examine smaller taxa such as birds, reptiles, amphibians, insects, plants or fungi. While something might be better than nothing for many taxa, in the case of mammals at least, you need big areas, even for relatively small  species, to have any chance of persisting. Not only that, it demonstrates that fragmentation can result in catastrophic extinctions within less than a few decades, so any restoration efforts must occur quickly.

Anytime someone argues that a few fragments is enough to do the job, just show them this study. ‘Big’ is essential if we want any hope of maintaining biowealth into the future.

Thanks to Luke ‘Cookin-with-Gas’ Gibson, Tony ‘Tiger’ Lynam, Fangliang ‘Fang’ He, Dave ‘Bickie’ Bickford, David Woodruff, Sara Bumrungsi and of course me old mate, Bill ‘Fragmentation’ Laurance.

CJA Bradshaw

Interim post following some mind- and body-stressing international travel. I present another 6 biodiversity cartoons (see full stock of previous ‘Cartoon guide to biodiversity loss’ compendia here).

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It is a sobering statistic that most of the world’s tropical forests are not ‘primary’ – that is, those that have not suffered some alteration or disturbance from humans (previously logged, cleared for agriculture, burned, etc.).

Today I highlight a really cool paper that confirms this, plus adds some juicy (and disturbing – pun intended – detail). The paper by Phil Martin and colleagues just published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B came to my attention through various channels – not least of which was their citation of one of our previous papers ;-), as well as a blog post by Phil himself. I was so impressed with it that I made my first Faculty of 1000 Prime recommendation¹ of the paper (which should appear shortly).

As we did in 2011 (to which Phil refers as our “soon-to-be-classic work” – thanks!), Martin and colleagues amassed a stunning number of papers investigating the species composition of disturbed and primary forests from around the tropics. Using meta-analysis, they matched disturbed and undisturbed sites, recording the following statistics:

1. at least one measurement of above-ground biomass, below-ground biomass, soil carbon content, plant species richness and/or plant species community composition
2. the time since last disturbance for secondary forests
3. the type of disturbance prior to secondary succession, which included conversion to pasture, cropland or small-scale shifting agriculture.

What they found is thought-provoking. While the good news is that forests can be restored or re-generated to some degree, and therefore have some value for biodiversity conservation, Martin and colleagues show that the recovery is slow – around 50 years for tree species richness, and about 100 years for epiphyte richness.

While this appears ultimately to be good news, the story becomes more complicated when looking at species composition. The authors found no increase in the proportion of ‘primary forest’ species in the recovering forests over time, suggesting that initial extirpations of the most sensitive species were never rescued by seed dissemination or re-colonisation.

Carbon sequestration is an increasingly important consideration in tropical forest conservation beyond biodiversity concerns (think REDD, etc.), and the paper confirmed about 85% above-ground (biomass) carbon recovery after about 80 years. However, below-ground (soil) carbon showed no relationship with time since clearance. Even though well over half of tropical forest carbon is held above-ground (mainly in the woody biomass), there is still a very important component stored in the soils. Will it ever recover? Only (lots of) time will tell.

Permitted several more centuries of recovery, these statistics might change, but it does re-iterate the point that nothing can replace the biodiversity – or carbon – value of primary tropical forests.

CJA Bradshaw

¹I have just been added to the Faculty of 1000 as of September 2013.

A lot of people hate journal impact factors (IF). The hatred arises for many reasons, some of which are logical. For example, Thomson Reuters ISI Web of Knowledge® keeps the process fairly opaque, so it’s sometimes difficult to tell if journals are fairly ranked. Others hate IF because it does not adequately rank papers within or among sub disciplines. Still others hate the idea that citations should have anything to do with science quality (debatable, in my view). Whatever your reason though, IF are more or less here to stay.

Yes, individual scientists shouldn’t be ranked based only on the IF of the journals in which they publish; there are decent alternatives such as the h-index (which can grow even after you die), or even better, the m-index (or m-quotient; think of the latter as a rate of citation accumulation). Others would rather ditch the whole citation thing altogether and measure some element of ‘impact’, although that elusive little beast has yet to be captured and applied objectively.

So just in case you haven’t already seen it, Google has recently put its journal-ranking hat in the ring with its journal metrics. Having firmly wrested the cumbersome (and expensive) personal citation accumulators from ISI and Scopus (for example) with their very popular (and free!) Google Scholar (which, as I’ve said before, all researchers should set-up and make available), they now seem poised to do the same for journal rankings.

So for your viewing and arguing pleasure, here are the ‘top’ 20 journals in Biodiversity and Conservation Biology according to Google’s h5-index (the h-index for articles published in that journal in the last 5 complete years; it is the largest number h such that h articles published in 2008-2012 have at least h citations each):

1. Ecology Letters 83
2. Biological Conservation 58
3. Conservation Biology 57
4. Journal of Applied Ecology 54
5. Ecological Applications 53
6. Journal of Ecology 52
7. Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics 51
8. Journal of Biogeography 47
9. Diversity and Distributions 44
10. Global Ecology and Biogeography 44
11. Biological Invasions 40
12. Biodiversity and Conservation 40
13. Ecological Indicators 40
14. Ecography 38
15. Landscape Ecology 37
16. Conservation Letters 35
17. Journal of Vegetation Science 33
18. Journal of Wildlife Management 32
19. Conservation Genetics 29
20. Basic and Applied Ecology 28

You can play with other subdiscipline rankings if you wish. Perhaps these can assist you in making that important decision about where to submit your important scientific work.

CJA Bradshaw

I have been thinking a lot lately about poor governance and bad choices when it comes to biodiversity conservation policy. Perhaps its all that latent anger arising from blinkered, backward policies recently implemented by conservative state and national governments in Australia and elsewhere that leads me to contemplate: What would I do if I had the power to change policy?

While I am certain I have neither the experience or complete knowledge to balance national budgets, ensure prosperity and maintain the health of an entire country, I do have some ideas about what we’re doing wrong conservation-wise, and how we could potentially fix things. This is not meant to be an exhaustive list – it is more a discussion point where people can suggest their own ideas.

So here are 16 things I’d change or implement (mainly in Australia) if I were king for a day:

1. Given that habitat loss is the most important driver of extinctions globally, I would immediately draft national anti-clearing laws for remnant/primary vegetation. In Australia anyway, anti-clearing laws are state-governed, and there is now a trend in some states to roll back or ‘relax’ these laws such that land-holders can now clear native forests. If there was national oversight of these laws, it would be much more difficult to change policy at the state level.
2. I would give the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 a complete over-haul, implementing anti-clearing clauses for threatened species.
3. I would implement a strong and binding carbon price that had no exceptions. Targets for reductions would be at least 30-50 % on 2000 emissions levels.
4. I would implement a 30% native forest cover target (pre-European extent) for environmental planting restoration paid for from the carbon pricing scheme.
5. I would legislate that all privately owned native forests would have an intrinsic carbon value and would be therefore eligible for payment from carbon pricing if maintained in perpetuity (following an insurance-based approach). The requirement for additionality would be waived in this case.
6. I would create a Department for Climate Change, a Department of Science and a Department of Sustainability and appoint relevant Ministers.
7. I would lift the ban on nuclear energy for electricity generation.
8. I would implement a national water neutrality scheme.
9. I would make national and state Environmental Protection Authorities require industry to demonstrate that a development would cause no biodiversity loss before proceeding (i.e., they would have to prove that there wouldn’t be a negative effect). This ‘guilty-until-proven-innocent‘ policy would replace the current ‘innocent-until-proven-guilty’ one.
10. I would ban all industrial and consumptive activities from the protected area network (e.g., livestock grazing, timber harvest, fishing, hunting).
11. I would make all ‘national parks’ actually ‘national‘.
12. I would require each relevant government department to have a scientific advisory council that would have to be in the majority for new policies to be implemented. The committee could not include industry representatives.
13. I would ban all political donations, no matter the amount.
14. ‘Ecology’ would become a required subject in high school (in addition to a normal science unit) up until the final year.
15. I would restore natural flows to all existing wetlands where in conflict with irrigation.
16. I would remove the dingo and all other barrier fences.

There are many more things one could do, of course. I’m therefore interested in your ideas or arguments for or against what I’ve proposed.

CJA Bradshaw

“So consider the crocodiles, sharks and snakes, the small and the squirmy, the smelly, slimy and scaly. Consider the fanged and the hairy, the ugly and the cute alike. The more we degrade this astonishing diversity of evolved life and all its interactions on our only home, the more we expose ourselves to the ravages of a universe that is inherently hostile to life.”

excerpt from ‘Biowealth: all creatures great and small’ The Curious Country (C.J.A. Bradshaw 2013).

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I’ve spent the last few days on the east coast with my science partner-in-crime, Barry Brook, and one of our newest research associates (Marta Rodrigues-Rey Gomez). We first flew into Sydney at sparrow’s on Monday, then drove a hire car down to The ‘Gong to follow up on some Australian megafauna databasing & writing with Bert Roberts & Zenobia Jacobs. On Tuesday morning we then flitted over to Canberra where we had the opportunity to attend the official launch of a new book that Barry and I had co-authored.

The book, The Curious Country, is an interesting experiment in science communication and teaching dreamed up by Australia’s Chief Scientist, Professor Ian Chubb. Realising that the average Aussie has quite a few questions about ‘how stuff works’, but has little idea how to answer those questions, Ian engaged former Quantum star and science editor, Leigh Dayton, to put together a short, punchy, topical and easily understood book about why science is good for the country.

Yes, intuitive for most of you out there reading this, but science appreciation isn’t always as high as it should be amongst the so-called ‘general public’. Ian thought this might be one way to get more people engaged.

When honoured with the request to write an interesting chapter on biodiversity for the book, I naturally accepted. It turns out Barry was asked to do one on energy provision at the same time (but we didn’t know we had both been asked at the time). Our former lab head, Professor David Bowman, was also asked to write a chapter about fire risk, so it was like a mini-reunion yesterday for the three of us.

Leader of the Opposition, Bill Shorten, speaking about ‘The Curious Country’ (Dr. Brendan Nelson in foreground)

I entitled my chapter “Biowealth – all creatures great and small”, which is in direct reference to a concept I’ve proposed before that “… without biodiversity we are poor. With it we are ‘biorich’.” Often called ‘biodiversity’, ‘natural capital’ or that most horrible and impenetrable of terms, ‘ecosystem services‘, I think a much better term to describe how we absolutely depend on all life for our own survival, prosperity and well-being is ‘biowealth‘.

It was an interesting ceremony held in the Great Hall of University House on the Australian National University campus. First, Ian Chubb talked about the book’s genesis and need, then Leigh Dayton explained how it all came together and why it was so important. We also heard from two Liberal (current Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Industry Bob Baldwin, and former Leader of the Opposition Dr. Brendan Nelson) and one Labor politician (Leader of the Opposition Bill Shorten), which is interesting in its own right considering the Liberal government currently in power has no dedicated Science Minister. That major gripe aside, it was largely a non-partisan celebration of why science is essential for humanity (not just Australians).

Another great thing about the book is that it’s absolutely free and available online in PDF form (apparently hard copies do cost something though). You can access the full book here, or specific sections here depending on your interest. I’d be keen to hear about your impressions of the book and my chapter in particular. Also, perhaps you know someone who might benefit from reading such a book?

CJA Bradshaw

Filed under: agriculture, anthropocene, Australia, biodiversity, carbon, climate change, conservation, deforestation, ecosystem, ecosystem function, ecosystem services, environmental policy, environmental science, extinction, extinction debt, fish, fisheries, food, fragmentation, habitat loss, harvest, health, marine protected area, research, science, science communication, scientific writing, threatened species Tagged: Australia, Barry Brook, biodiversity, biowealth, Bob Baldwin, Brendan Nelson, David Bowman, ecosystem services, Ian Chubb, natural capital, science communication

This is a little bit of a bandwagon – the ‘retrospective’ post at the end of the year – but this one is not merely a rehash I’ve stuff I’ve already covered.

I decided that it would be worthwhile to cover some of the ‘big’ conservation papers of 2013 as ranked by F1000 Prime. For copyright reasons, I can’t divulge the entire synopsis of each paper, but I can give you a brief run-down of the papers that caught the eye of fellow F1000 faculty members and me. If you don’t subscribe to F1000, then you’ll have to settle with my briefest of abstracts.

In no particular order then, here are some of the conservation papers that made a splash (positively, negatively or controversially) in 2013:

• Recovery of an isolated coral reef system following severe disturbance - “As the world watches with dismay at the loss of shallow water corals, this article provides stunning proof that recovery of coral reefs can be surprisingly fast and complete…”

• Higher levels of multiple ecosystem services are found in forests with more tree species -”This is the first dedicated, large (country) scale analysis of the relationship between tree diversity and the provision of multiple ecosystem services by forests…” (covered previously on CB.com)

• Global meta-analysis reveals no net change in local-scale plant biodiversity over time - As a result [of the species-area relationship], there’s not necessarily a direct link between the global extinction of a species and the numbers of species observed in a smaller sampling area…”

• Conservation efforts may increase malaria burden in the Brazilian Amazon - ”… increasing amounts of protected areas within a 10-30km radius of a city increases the incidence of malaria in the Brazilian Amazon…”

• Global effects of local human population density and distance to markets on the condition of coral reef fisheries - “… [coral fish] biomass decreased exponentially with decreasing distance to markets…”

• Evolutionary rescue from extinction is contingent on a lower rate of environmental change - ”… increased rates of environmental change led to increased rates of extinction, due not only to the loss of mutational opportunities because of reduced populations but also due to the loss of potentiating mutations that would be selected under milder conditions…”

• The risk of marine bioinvasion caused by global shipping - ”… model marine bioinvasions, identify hotspots and major pathways for marine biotic invasions, predict the most vulnerable specific ports and general ecological regions, and test their predictions against reported invasions…”

• High-resolution global maps of 21st-century forest cover change – “In addition to identifying areas of deforestation and forest regrowth across geographic regions and ecosystems, their results also present an exceptional opportunity to examine the causes of forest loss, how policy shapes forest preservation, the status of intact natural forests in areas where they protect biodiversity, and many other important environmental issues…”

• Carbon pools recover more quickly than plant biodiversity in tropical secondary forests – “… confirms … that biodiversity is nearly always in better shape in primary tropical forests compared to re-generated ones, [and] that soil carbon and species composition never really comes back in the same way…” (covered previously on CB.com)

• Recent burning of boreal forests exceeds fire regime limits of the past 10,000 years – “… fire frequency is higher in recent decades than at any time in the last several thousand years – essentially since the modern boreal forest was established…”

• Diversity loss with persistent human disturbance increases vulnerability to ecosystem collapse – “… the relationship between ecosystem stability and diversity may, in some cases, be either a non-linear function of the magnitude of environmental disturbances, or vary qualitatively with the type of disturbance…”

• Quantifying the influence of climate on human conflict - ”… for every one standard deviation in climate change (increased temperature or increased rainfall), the frequencies of interpersonal and intergroup conflict rise by 4% and 14%, respectively…”

• Signature of ocean warming in global fisheries catch – “… the ‘mean temperature of the catch’ … is a combination of species’ temperature preferences weighted by fish catch according to the division of the ocean into large marine ecosystems … most [large marine ecosystems] show increases to the [mean temperature of the catch] from 1970-2006 of about 0.2 C° per decade…”

• Plant-pollinator interactions over 120 years: loss of species, co-occurrence, and function - ”… a large proportion of the past interactions between plants and their insect pollinators in Carlinville, Illinios, have been lost over the last 120 years, largely due to the extinction of bee species and changes to the spatial and temporal co-occurrence of the interactors…”

• Plant invasions and extinction debts - ”This paper uses a combination of metapopulation modelling and field experiments to show that, for a suite of Californian native grasses, extinction due to competition from invasive grasses is a real possibility – it just takes time…”

• Europe’s other debt crisis caused by the long legacy of future extinctions – “… current red lists are best described by what humans did 50 to 100 years ago rather than what they are doing now…”

• Synergistic effects of non-Apis bees and honey bees for pollination services - ”… provides a very nice demonstration of how diversity in pollinator species synergistically enhances the total pollination in almond orchards…”

• Global decline in large old trees – “… the authors … trace the decline and wholesale removal of [large old trees] in a variety of forested and savanna ecosystems. In some cases, this erosion can be extremely rapid where forests are recently fragmented and the most valuable older trees are accessible. Excessive logging and inappropriate fire regimes are two major causes of this decline…”

CJA Bradshaw

Here are another 6 biodiversity cartoons while I prepare for yet another trip overseas (see full stock of previous ‘Cartoon guide to biodiversity loss’ compendia here).

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The real measure of conservation progress, on land or in the sea, is how much biodiversity we save from threatening processes.

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A new paper co-authored by Memorial University’s Dr Rodolphe Devillers and an international group of researchers argues that established global marine protected areas are too often a case of all show with no substance and do not adequately protect the most vulnerable areas of the world’s oceans.

“There is a big pressure internationally to expand global MPA coverage from around 3 % of the oceans to 10 %, resulting in a race from countries to protect large and often unused portions of their territorial waters for a minimal political cost,” said Mr. Devillers. “Marine protected areas are the cornerstone of marine conservation, but we are asking whether picking low-hanging fruit really makes a difference in the long-term, or if smaller areas currently under threat should be protected before, or at the same time as, those larger areas that are relatively inaccessible and therefore less used by people.

“We need to stop measuring conservation success in terms of square kilometres,” he added. “The real measure of conservation progress, on land or in the sea, is how much biodiversity we save from threatening processes. Metrics such as square kilometres or percentages of jurisdictions are notoriously unreliable in telling us about the true purpose of protected areas.”

The paper, Reinventing residual reserves in the sea: are we favouring ease of establishment over need for protection?, is the first comprehensive study to compare where MPAs are placed in relation to human extractive activities, such as fishing, and oil and gas.

Dr Devillers and his colleagues argue that the global pattern of MPAs appears to favour residual places – those with the least promise for commercial uses. Protection is therefore not provided to species and ecosystems that are most susceptible to threatening processes. Consequently – and conveniently – this residual approach tends to keep financial and political costs to a minimum.

An example the study looks at in more detail is the MPAs announced in November 2012 by the previous Australian government. The government maintained the initiative would protect more than a third of Australia’s marine waters for the future. Beyond the impressive number, a more detailed analysis of the distribution of those MPAs clearly shows bias in protection, with a strong will from the government to minimise the impact on existing fishing and oil and gas exploration and extraction, arguably making little difference to conservation. Australia’s new MPAs are biased towards deeper waters that are under relatively minor threat, leaving other areas vulnerable to commercial fishing and the extraction of oil and gas. Ecosystems and species in these more vulnerable areas are still in decline.

“The newly elected Australian government is already reviewing the 2012 MPAS because it thinks the price is too high for the fishing industry,” Dr. Devillers said. “Our team criticises those MPAs because we think the price paid is too low to protect marine ecosystems. Too often we are merely putting band-aids on ecosystems that are in critical, if not terminal, condition.”

The authors recommend a simple four-step framework of questions for planners and policy-makers to help reverse the emerging residual tendency of MPAs and to maximise conservation effectiveness, protecting against what they call “perverse outcomes of the least-cost approach.”

“In addition to being of value to humans, marine ecosystems oceans have a right to be protected,” said Dr Devillers. “However, there is a major cost to society for protecting marine biodiversity. By not paying that cost, we are standing by while our natural ecosystems degrade.”

Here’s a (paraphrased) recommendation I did recently for F1000 about a cool avenue of research I’ve been following for a few years now. Very interesting, but much, much more to do.

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The core concepts of conservation ecology are well-established: we know that habitat loss, fragmentation, invasive species, over-exploitation and of course, climate change, are bad for biodiversity. This well-quantified scientific baseline has led the discipline recently to embark on questions pertaining more to the (a) implications of biodiversity loss for humanity and (b) what we can do to offset these. A recent paper by Morand and colleagues addresses perhaps one of the most compelling reasons that human society should appreciate biodiversity beyond its intrinsic value; as biodiversity degrades, so too does human health.

Some argue that the only way to convince society in general that biodiversity is worth protecting is that we link its loss directly to degrading human health, wealth and well-being. Confirmation of such relationships at a variety of spatial and temporal scales is therefore essential. Morand and colleagues used data from a variety of sources to test two predictions: (1) that the number of infectious disease should increase as overall biodiversity increases and (2) that biodiversity loss, inferred from species threat and deforestation data, should increase the number of infectious disease outbreaks in humans. Using data from 28 countries in the Asia-Pacific region, they confirmed both predictions.

While the authors rightly controlled for various confounding effects such as population density, country area and health investment, their statistical approaches were basic and potentially prone to misinterpretation. While I’m reasonably confident that their overall conclusions would hold, it would be prudent to re-analyse the dataset using more sophisticated methods (e.g., accounting for spatial autocorrelation and model uncertainty). It would also be prudent to expand the rather small sample size to more than 28 countries.

These analytical issues aside, the potential mechanisms underlying the correlative phenomena are interesting. While it’s not unexpected that pathogen diversity should increase as overall biodiversity increases (more diversity, full stop), it is ecologically fascinating how biodiversity degradation could lead to a higher incidence of infectious disease in humans. Two mechanisms are proposed. One is the direct ‘dilution’ effect where a high number of potential hosts reduces the chances that any one (including humans) becomes infected with the pathogen. Another is the indirect dilution effect whereby higher host diversity reduces susceptible host density via intensified interspecific competition. Clearly the mechanisms underlying the correlations require much more work; regardless, the paper’s message represents an essential piece in the ecosystem services puzzle.

CJA Bradshaw

I don’t often respond to many comments on this blog unless they are really, really good questions (and if I think I have the answers). Even rarer is devoting an entire post to answering a question. The other day, I received a real cracker, and so I think it deserves a highlighted response.

Two days ago, a certain ‘P. Basu’ asked this in response to my last blog post (Lose biodiversity and you’ll get sick):

I am an Indian who lived in Germany for quite a long period. Now, if I am not grossly mistaken, once upon a time Germany and other west european countries had large tracts of “real” forests with bears, wolves, foxes and other animals (both carnivore and herbivore). Bear has completely disappeared from these countries with the advent of industrialization. A few wolves have been kept in more or less artificially created forests. Foxes, deer and hares, fortunately, do still exist. My question is, how come these countries are still so well off – not only from the point of view of economy but also from the angle of public health despite the loss of large tracts of natural forests? Or is it that modern science and a health conscious society can compensate the loss of biodiversity.

“Well”, I thought to myself, “Bloody good question”.

I have come across this genre of question before, but usually under more hostile circumstances when an overtly right-wing respondent (hell, let’s call a spade a spade – a ‘completely selfish arsehole’) has challenged me on the ‘value of nature’ logic (I’m not for a moment suggesting that P. Basu is this sort of person; on the contrary, he politely asked an extremely important question that requires an answer). The comeback generally goes something like this: “If biodiversity is so important, why aren’t super-developed countries wallowing in economic and social ruin because they’ve degraded their own life-support systems? Clearly you must be wrong, Sir.”

There have been discussions in the ecological and sustainability literature that have attempted to answer this, but I’ll give it a shot here for the benefit of CB.com readers.

There are plenty of examples where  ecological degradation has definitive and negative economic and social consequences. Haiti and China are certainly some that come to mind. But these confirmations of the prediction can be easily countered by the exceptions. For example, why isn’t most of Europe a socio-economic disaster? While some might argue that countries like Spain and Greece are well on their way, most countries in Europe are doing reasonably well, at least relative to many nations in Central and South America, Africa and Asia. It is therefore important to examine the differences between these countries.

1. Most importantly, the bulk of the ecological damage in Europe was done centuries, if not millennia, ago. It’s easy to forget that Europe had its fair share of famines, plagues and wars over the last few thousand years, and many of these are likely related to environmental stresses. In much of the rest of the world, including North, Central and South America, Asia and a good part of Africa, the environmental devastation has been relatively recent. This is perhaps why our previous ranking of environmental degradation among countries likely penalised those whose ecological disturbance was relatively more recent.
2. As such, much of the direct effects of ecological damage have already happened, and a sort of equilibrium has been reached. This equilibrium is aided by another important aspect that is one reason why European carrying capacity is so high – most of the region is incredibly productive. Why? Well, much of it was under several kilometres of ice only a few tens of thousands of years ago, making the soils deep and rich following the glacial retreat. All other things being equal, you can support a lot more people per hectare of land in Europe than you can in Australia, for example.
3. Related to this, many European countries – of which France is the star – have invested heavily in nuclear power. The cheap, low-emissions energy produced has likely increased their carrying capacities for less degradation than would have otherwise been achieved had they relied more on fossil fuels.
4. The great industrialisation of Europe during the 18th and 19th Centuries was not only famous for its increasing productivity and prosperity, it was infamous for its incredible pollution. Of course, Europe remains an industrialised region, but much of its pollution has been exported to developing nations (a concept known as ‘leakage’). It is a well-known phenomenon that industrial leakage allows the developed world to live in relative cleanliness while the nations that manufacture the shit we don’t need wallow in our ‘leaked’ filth.
5. With specific reference to disease (which was the heart of the question being discussed), Europe is a temperate region. One of the major findings of the paper discussed in the previous post was that higher overall biodiversity (typical of tropical countries) is correlated with higher overall pathogen diversity. This is expected, so by virtue of having fewer pathogens in temperate Europe, there are likely to be fewer disease outbreaks.
6. Finally and as mentioned earlier, it is plausible that the economic problems Europe is facing today are the tip of an iceberg that will soon be more and more evident across the region. Recent evidence from Europe also shows that there is a considerable lag between the demise of species and the events that are their ultimate causes.

It therefore stands to reason that the economic honeymoon Europe enjoyed for much of the last century is possibly nearing an end, and that the high productivity of the region merely lengthened the lag between ecological degradation and its negative consequences on its human population. I’m not predicting a ‘collapse’ as such, but I’d wager that unless we get a handle on valuing our ecosystems, out standards of living are likely to decline. Australia and America are probably the next cabs off that rank.

CJA Bradshaw

Dun! Dun, dun, dun! Dun, dun dun! Dun, dun, daaaaah!

I’ve waited nearly two years to do that, with possibly our best title yet for a peer-reviewed paper: Eye on the taiga: removing global policy impediments to safeguard the boreal forest (recently published online in Conservation Letters).

Of course, the paper has nothing to do with cheesy Eighties music, underdog boxers or even tigers, but it does highlight an important oversight in world carbon politics. The boreal forest (also known as taiga from the Russian) spans much of the land mass of the Northern Hemisphere and represents approximately one quarter of the entire planet’s forests. As a result, this massive forest contains more than 35% of all terrestrially bound carbon (below and above ground). One doesn’t require much more information to come to the conclusion that this massive second lung of the planet (considering the Amazon the first lung) is a vital component of the world’s carbon cycle, and temperate biodiversity.

The boreal forest has been largely expanding since the retreat of the glaciers following the Last Glacial Maximum about 20,000 years ago, which means that its slow progression northward has produced a net carbon sink (i.e., it takes up more atmospheric carbon that it releases from decomposition). However, recent evidence suggests that due to a combination of increased deforestation, fire from both human encroachment and climate change, mass outbreaks of tree-killing insects and permafrost melting, the boreal forest is tipping towards becoming a net carbon source (i.e., emitting more carbon into the atmosphere than it takes up from photosynthesis). This is not a good thing for the world’s carbon cycle, because it means yet another positive feedback that will exacerbate the rapid warming of the planet.

You’d be forgiven then for assuming that the boreal forest was a major player in world carbon policies. Instead, both the Kyoto Protocol and the European Union have firmly resisted integrating the boreal forest into their global carbon-mitigation frameworks. Why? It’s not quite clear, but part of the problem is that we have ironically ended up placing more international interest on the plight of tropical regions and how we might alleviate some of that pressure on forests there (e.g., via policy mechanisms like REDD and its variants). It’s easy to understand why we’ve done this – the tropics easily contain the most species-rich ecosystems in the world, and given the tragedy unfolding in South America, Asia and Africa in terms of deforestation and general environmental degradation, we have the most to lose if we don’t halt the destruction.

On the other hand, all this attention on the tropics seems to have left the boreal forest out in the cold. Couple this with the fact that most boreal countries are relatively wealthy (Russia, Canada, USA, Finland, Sweden, Norway) and should have their forest-management shit together, and their collective arrogance that their forest management is already top-notch, you end up with a global laissez-faire attitude about the region. Unfortunately, this might consign the boreal forest to its carbon-sink fate, and inadvertently throw in the towel on its biodiversity.

This dangerous oversight is a tragedy in-waiting, and a missed opportunity for good carbon management at the planetary scale. We highlight these problems in Eye on the taiga, and we go some way to discussing how some of these problems might be alleviated:

• We need to change global treaty frameworks so that they remove impediments for incentivising the carbon value of the boreal forest. This would require removing the so-called ‘incentive gaps‘ from the Kyoto framework and vastly simplifying the onerous reporting requirements for carbon-accounting projects.
• We need to develop better forest management policies and methods that more fully support and integrate the socio-economic needs of local communities, long-term carbon sequestration, biodiversity conservation, and the provisioning of a wide array of ecosystem services, including those of high economic importance. This will require a shift away from management that encourages stability and simplicity to more complex, dynamic and long-term outcomes.
• We also need to maintain our future options. Here, new policies should provide the ability to respond quickly to change and to maximise the amount of intact and expansive primary forest.

We go into quite a bit of policy detail on these recommendations in the paper, so if you’re interested, I encourage you to read the entire article. It’s the result of a workshop held in Sweden a few years ago with biodiversity, forestry, social science and policy experts from all major boreal countries. Led by Jon Moen of Umeå University, the team involved is extremely experienced and knowledgeable, so I think that their collective wisdom is something to which the world needs to pay attention.

CJA Bradshaw

Here are another 6 biodiversity cartoons for your conservation pleasure/pain (see full stock of previous ‘Cartoon guide to biodiversity loss’ compendia here).

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South Australia State budget percentage expenditures for health, education and environment

Yesterday I gave the second keynote address at the South Australia Natural Resource Management (NRM) Science Conference at the University of Adelaide (see also a brief synopsis of Day 1 here). Unfortunately, I’m missing today’s talks because of an acute case of man cold, but at least I can stay at home and work while sipping cups of hot tea.

Many people came up afterwards and congratulated me for “being brave enough to tell the truth”, which both encouraged and distressed me – I am encouraged by the positive feedback, but distressed by the lack of action on the part of our natural resource management leaders.

The simple truth is that South Australia’s biodiversity and ecosystems are in shambles, yet few seem to appreciate this.

So for the benefit of those who couldn’t attend, I’ve uploaded my slideshow for general viewing here, and I understand that a podcast might be available in the very near future. I’ve also highlighted some key points from the talk below:

• Australia ranks 9th worst in the world for absolute environmental degradation [1]
• We have a legacy of deforestation, most notably in south-western Western Australia and Queensland from the mid-1970s to 2000s [2]
• Australia has the highest modern mammal extinction rate on Earth, and declines are continuing
• Australia has the world’s longest, contiguous human-made structure in the world – the ‘dog’ fence. It costs taxpayers millions to maintain each year and prevents dingoes from suppressing feral meso-predators (cats, foxes) that eat native wildlife
• Australia has elected the most environmentally destructive federal government in modern history, with already a legacy of devastating anti-environmental policies implemented within only 6 months of taking office (see also great discussion on this here)
• Most of South Australia’s forests were cleared in the 19th and early 20th Centuries [2]
• Native forests cover only about 9 % of the State’s area [2]
• There is < 10 % of the original forest cover in the Mount Lofty Ranges [2]
• There is < 4 % of the original forest cover left in the Adelaide Plains [2]
• Broad-scale clearing of vegetation was apparently stopped in 1991 with the implementation of the Native Vegetation Act; however, each year in South Australia there are between 1000 and 2000 hectares legally cleared, and over 200 hectares cleared illegally [2, 3]
• Only about 1 % of the South Australian State Budget is allocated to the environment (including the EPA), which compares to about 20-25 % for both health and education. Nationally, it’s about 1.2 % (see figure above)
• This is despite over 5 % of the State’s revenue depending on agriculture in the broadest definition of the term (it is 2.4 % nationally), with 56 % of the $3 billion national wine exports coming from South Australia. We also depend on $760 million annual from the seafood industry and substantial proportion of our income from tourism indirectly linked to our environment
• Yet there is no dedicated, broad-scale research into the importance of pollinator communities on these essential sources of income, or the role of healthy coastal systems on our fisheries production
• According to the 2013 State of the Environment South Australia report [3], the grades given to various components are:
  • native vegetation = poor
  • threatened species & communities = very poor and declining
  • soil condition = fair
  • introduced species = very poor
  • marine communities = extent and condition declining
  • pollution = decreasing
  • human population pressures = increasing
  • threatened marine species = increasing protection, but heightened threat from sea level rise and ocean acidification
• Having reviewed the biodiversity and marine chaptersof theSOE13 report [3] myself, I can confidently say thatthere are a few problems still with it:
  • It provides misleading statements about total vegetation cover (i.e., it glosses over the devastating losses already incurred)
  • It mentions biodiversity offsets as a meaningful component to combat continued vegetation losses, when it has been clearly demonstrated [4] that biodiversity offsets do not work, because native vegetation cannot be replaced (both in terms of biodiversity and function)
  • The indicator species chosen are apparently random, not justified in terms of function or representativeness and do not provide adequate coverage of the State’s ecosystems
  • There is inadequate long-term monitoring data or capacity in South Australia, such that it is impossible to track change in environmental performance over time
  • The State has an unachievable and distracting ‘lose no species’ policy (see here for critique)
  • There is no dedicated legislation for ecosystem protection in South Australia apart from the Native Vegetation Act 1991 and the National Parks and Wildlife Act 1972. Ecosystem considerations are mere afterthoughts in otherwise non-targeted legislation
• There are some smaller ecological function projects being done around the state (see one example I’m involved with here), but nothing that’s across agricultural and environmental sectors, and nothing of large enough scope to make a difference

In summary, the major impediments to environmental improvement in South Australia are:

• There is a State-level disconnect between biodiversity conservation and agriculture;
• The pastorlism industry has a strangle-hold on the NRM Boards and Biosecurity SA;
• There are too many piecemeal cross-institutional research projects, and little big-picture leadership;
• The national anti-environment agenda is killing state initiatives;
• There is too much complacency and nearly no environmental leadership in Parliament

So what to do?

• We need to arrest all native vegetation clearance immediately;
• We need state-wide forest and soil carbon assessments;
• We need dedicated ecosystem intactness legislation;
• We need a representative system of long-term monitoring sites and the associated funding to support them in perpetuity;
• We need a much better research agenda to determine the water flow regimes on wetland health and function;
• We need broad-scale reforestation endeavours linked to the carbon assessments and markets arising;
• We need agricultural intensification, not expansion, to limit land transformation.

There is no one left alive in South Australia that can remember the pre-European environmental baseline, so we have a jaded and myopic view of what our environment should look like. Complicate this shifting baseline syndrome with the rapidity of climate changes, and you have a confused, rudderless management outlook that will continue to degrade our ailing life-support system.

References

1. Bradshaw, C. J. A., X. Giam, and N. S. Sodhi. 2010. Evaluating the relative environmental impact of countries. PLoS One 5:e10440
2. Bradshaw, C. J. A. 2012. Little left to lose: deforestation and forest degradation in Australia since European colonization. Journal of Plant Ecology 5:109-120
3. South Australia Environmental Protection Authority. 2013. State of the Environment South Australia. Adelaide
4. Bekessy, S. A., B. A. Wintle, D. B. Lindenmayer, M. A. McCarthy, M. Colyvan, M. A. Burgman, and H. P. Possingham. 2010. The biodiversity bank cannot be a lending bank. Conservation Letters 3:151-158

I’ve just written an article for the Australian River Restoration Centre‘s RipRap magazine, and they have given me permission to reproduce it here.

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The brave, new green world of the carbon economy hasn’t exactly taken off as desired. Perhaps it’s because it wasn’t really planned from the outset, or maybe it is still too abstract for most people to accept, digest and incorporate into their daily lives. An emergent property of society’s generally slow awakening to the challenge of climate disruption, is that it will be a long time before we accept its full suite of incarnations.

The infant carbon economy is, however, well and truly alive and kicking, so it is important to try and plan for its growing influence on our decision making. Bumps in the road aside, the carbon economy has mostly been a blessing (actual and potential) for biodiversity conservation projects the world over.

In principle, the aim of the carbon economy is rather straight-forward: charge people a certain amount for each unit of carbon dioxide equivalents they release, and then use that money to develop approaches that further increase carbon sequestration or limit emissions. It’s a ‘build-it-and-they-will-come’ framework, where increasing financial impetus to restrict emissions is enhanced by society’s evolution towards better approaches and technology.

The operational side of the carbon economy is unfortunately much more muddled, with vested interests and political gaming weakening its implementation. Nonetheless, we persevere.

Recently, a collection of 30 ecologists with various degrees of specialisation in landscape-scale environmental questions, produced a comprehensive review of the implications of the carbon economy for Australian biodiversity. We described how landscape-scale changes resulting from the flow of carbon finances would affect biodiversity in terms of (a) environmental plantings, (b) native regrowth, (c) fire management, (d) forestry, (e) agricultural practices and (f) feral animal control.

We concluded that environmental plantings were where the largest biodiversity benefits for our investment will come, but care will be needed to plant with ecological restoration in mind as we go. Regrowth vegetation in once-cleared areas is a substantial element of Australia’s future biomass carbon, so we need to manage this regrowth optimally, by which we mean the action of keeping (not clearing) existing, human-modified vegetation, or avoiding cropping and continuous grazing.

Fire management is also a big player in the Australian carbon game. By applying fire at the right time, one can potentially increase carbon storage indirectly and abate emissions via the reduction in intensity and frequency of high-intensity fires, thus minimising the total fuel burnt. For forestry, the once-common practice of using fire to remove logging debris is now much less attractive under the new carbon economy. Perhaps the most-touted capacity to retain more carbon in forests subject to harvest is by increasing rotation times, which would also benefit wildlife.

For agriculture, the two best candidates for landscape change that would provide marginal biodiversity improvements would be increasing the retention and encouraging the regrowth of shrubs, and reducing grazing pressure. Finally, while feral animal reductions are without doubt great outcomes for biodiversity, the avoided emissions from their removal are unlikely to make much difference to our national carbon budget.

As a result of these aspects, conservationists have been particularly aware of the carbon economy’s potential to strengthen existing and planned initiatives to preserve and restore native biodiversity. We have, therefore, been some of the first to benefit from this additional source of funding, even if it wasn’t necessarily targeted to biodiversity-specific goals. Additional funding is of course always welcome, because let’s face it, we don’t have nearly enough to do what this country needs.

Indeed, Australia has a long history of disrespect for its own home and the vital life-support system it provides us free of charge. With only about 4 per cent of the world’s forests in Australia, the little we have is too precious to degrade any further than the already ~ 40 per cent total forest cover loss we’ve realised since European colonisation. Believing the remaining 60 per cent is sufficient, ignores that over 50 per cent of remaining forests in Australia have been previously cleared or highly modified; for example, over 80 per cent of eucalypt forests have been altered in some way. Much of the remaining forest is highly fragmented, such that few areas of sufficient size remain to provide the spatial needs of many species.

While nothing can replace primary habitats in terms of biodiversity and the carbon they hold, it is not difficult to understand why so much emphasis has been placed on ‘restoring’ our highly degraded landscape into some vestige of its former ecological function. Combine this desire with the fact that plants incorporate atmospheric carbon dioxide into their tissues as they grow, and we have an effective means to fund some badly needed conservation initiatives in Australia.

Many questions remain, however, about the best approaches to restore an ecosystem with these two sometimes divergent aims. For example, an accounting approach to terrestrial carbon sequestration would place emphasis on planting the fastest-growing and readily available (often non-native) tree species. This ‘plantation’-style reforestation might be an effective approach to sequester the greatest amount of carbon, but it does little good for native biodiversity. Such ‘bio-perversities’ are a real and present danger. The other extreme is planting as many native plant species as possible, while taking future climate into consideration, to benefit the greatest component of the ecosystem’s other constituent species — an approach that is largely cost-prohibitive. So what’s the balance, and how do we achieve it?

Fortunately, a few biodiversity-carbon replanting experiments designed to answer just such questions are in progress around Australia — one in far north Queensland in the tropical rainforests of the Atherton Tablelands, one in the semi-arid Mallee forest of South Australia, and one in the wheatbelt of south-western Western Australia. Here, experimental manipulation of various planting densities and species assists in determining what the ‘ideal’ mix of planting effort and species composition is required to give both the biggest biodiversity and carbon bangs for our buck. With greater replication of such experiments in, for example, riparian areas, arid zones, savannas and coastal heathlands, we could eventually be able to provide a generalised approach to biodiversity-friendly, carbon-financed restoration projects across the entire country.

There is no question that we can improve our landscape practices and restore vast areas of Australia’s degraded ecosystems. The current lack of political will notwithstanding, the fact that at least one ecosystem service has the economic framework in place to fund such a lofty agenda gives us hope that real, effective climate change mitigation and biodiversity conservation can be achieved.

CJA Bradshaw