The God Species: How Humans Really Can Save the Planet.... Mark Lynas

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СКАЧАТЬ clearances. So far 1,800 square kilometres of forest have been protected at a cost of $300 million, both safeguarding biodiversity and reducing greenhouse gas emissions to the tune of 3.2 million tonnes.⁵⁴ In the Maldives, whose government I work for as an environmental adviser, one of the schemes under consideration is a levy on diving trips to fund the creation and policing of marine parks. Thus those who benefit from biodiversity – the foreign tourists who marvel at the reef sharks, manta rays and myriad of brightly coloured reef fish that swim around Maldivian coral atolls – can be asked to pay to conserve it.

      In other countries, ‘biodiversity credits’ are being designed that might offer a revenue stream rewarding those who protect and manage biodiverse habitats. In New South Wales, the state govern-ment’s environment department has set up a ‘BioBanking’ scheme where developers and landowners can trade biodiversity offsets. Some private companies have been making similar pioneering moves: in Borneo the local government has partnered with the Australian company New Forests to provide an income for the protection of its 34,000-hectare Malua Forest Reserve. Both individuals and businesses can purchase ‘Biodiversity Conservation Certificates’ that represent the ‘biodiversity benefits of 100 square metres of protection and restoration of the Malua Forest Reserve’ – habitat for ‘endangered wild orangutans as well as gibbons, clouded leopards, pygmy elephants, and over 300 species of birds’, according to the Malua BioBank website.⁵⁵

      As with carbon offsets, aimed at mopping up an equivalent amount of greenhouse gases to those unavoidably released elsewhere, a partnership between businesses, governments and conservationist groups is currently developing the concept of biodiversity offsets. Their goal is to design offsets that compensate for biodiversity impacts arising from business activities like mining and dam-building, potentially raising considerable sums to protect and enhance ecosystems elsewhere. To count as offsets, schemes must be additional to what would otherwise have happened, provide benefits that last as long as the damage they are intended to address, and deliver equitable outcomes that bring benefits to local people and communities. In addition, offsets are recognised as only being appropriate as a last resort: the so-called ‘mitigation hierarchy’, in order of importance, is avoid, minimise, restore, and only then offset.⁵⁶ Like achieving carbon neutrality, the principle of ‘no net loss’ of biodiversity – or even better, ‘net positive impact’ – should and hopefully soon will become part of mainstream business practice.

      Protecting natural systems can provide value for money even in the most direct sense. Creating marine protected areas enhances fish stocks, providing benefits both to biodiversity and fishermen in neighbouring areas. The World Bank and UN Food and Agriculture Organisation have estimated that $50 billion is lost each year in terms of economic benefits that could be realised if the world’s fisheries were managed sustainably.⁵⁷ It may seem counter-intuitive, but a reduction of fishing effort could lead to an increase in overall fish catch. This is a matter of life and death for the over 1 billion mainly poor people who are dependent on fish for their primary source of protein, and whose coastal fisheries have often been scoured out by foreign trawlers from rich nations whose own seas are exhausted.

      But voluntary measures will only achieve so much. For biodiversity protection to really work, and for the funds to flow, it needs to be given the force of law. Here too recent progress gives cause for some qualified optimism. The Convention on Biological Diversity, long the poor relation of the Convention on Climate Change, enjoyed a boost in October 2010 with the agreement by world governments of a ‘Strategic Plan’ for the decade to 2020, intriguingly subtitled ‘Living in harmony with nature’. The Plan directs governments to mainstream biodiversity concerns ‘throughout government and society’, and to take ‘direct action … to restore biodiversity and ecosystem services’ by ‘means of protected areas, habitat restoration, species recovery programmes and other targeted conservation interventions’.⁵⁸ These requests are still voluntary at the international level, but national governments are encouraged to turn them into law to ensure that companies, individuals and institutions take biodiversity seriously.

      Perhaps just as importantly, a new scientific body is being established, aiming to provide the same expert advice on biodiversity as the IPCC does on climate change. The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) could help finally put this issue at the top of the international scientific and policy agenda, compiling data and producing landmark reports that can inform the efforts of governments and other policymakers.

      Biodiversity is an issue whose time has come. All we need to do now is figure out how to pay for it. Remember, all it will cost to save the tiger from extinction is a mere $82 million a year. Rather than passively lamenting its demise, we need to roll up our sleeves and start raising funds. If you do only one thing after reading this chapter, join this effort today.

      Chapter Three

       The Climate Change Boundary

      That climate change is a planetary boundary will come as a surprise to no one. What may come as a surprise however is that the target that has been advocated by not just governments, but environmentalists too, has for years been much too weak. More recently that has begun to change: now an extraordinary coalition of more than a hundred governments and dozens of campaigning groups is lining up squarely behind a safe target for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, as proposed by the planetary boundaries expert group. Although powerful countries like the US and China are a long way from endorsing this target – and the world economy is even further away from meeting it – the fact that such a crucial planetary boundary has attracted such a strong level of support is a serious piece of good news and one that deserves celebration.

      Previous chapters explained how humanity has risen to global prominence through a massive exploitation of fossil energy resources. Human civilisation remains over 80 per cent dependent on fossil fuels worldwide, and as the economy grows so does the rate at which the carbon dioxide resulting from the burning of coal, oil and gas accumulates in the air. On average the carbon dioxide concentration of the atmosphere rises by about 2 parts per million (ppm) every year, from a pre-industrial level of 278 ppm to about 390 ppm today. Whilst the precise level of temperature rise implied by higher CO₂ is always going to be uncertain, it is indisputable that – all other things being equal – global warming will result from the human emission of billions of tonnes of greenhouse gases, sustained over more than a century.

      Arguments over what would be a ‘safe’ level of atmospheric CO₂ have raged for decades. Back in 1992 the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change required in its much-cited Article 2 that the objective of international policy should be to avoid ‘dangerous anthropogenic interference’ in the climate system – but without defining what ‘dangerous’ actually meant. The British government’s Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change of 2006 suggested a stabilisation target of 550 ppm CO₂e (carbon dioxide-equivalent, implying a bundling together of all climate-changing gases rather than only CO₂). Two years earlier, the European Union had endorsed a target of limiting temperature rises to 2 degrees Celsius, implying – it was stated – a CO₂ target of 450 ppm. This latter objective was endorsed in my 2007 book about climate-change impacts, Six Degrees, where I suggested that 2 degrees and 450 ppm were necessary to steer away from large-scale dangerous tipping points in the climate system. Major environmental groups also lined up behind similar targets, and pushed them hard at international meetings.

      It turns out we were all wrong. A fair reading of the science today, as this chapter will show, points strongly towards a climate change planetary boundary of not 450 ppm but 350 ppm for carbon dioxide concentrations – a level that was passed back in 1988, the year that NASA climate scientist and planetary boundaries expert group member СКАЧАТЬ