Wildlife, biodiversity and climate
A habitable climate depends on wildlife and biodiversity, because:
- Climate is a consequence of biodiversity and biodiversity is everything that ecosystems represent to life on Earth;
- A stable climate and therefore, a habitable Earth, depends on stabilising ecosystems; and
- Animals are the only mechanism that can do that.
As wildlife declines, we are breaking down biodiversity structure and losing energy (in the form of carbon) out of food chains and into the atmosphere and ocean. This way, climate and our food security are inextricably linked. We’re not only stripping soils of the material needed to feed us, we’re also introducing chaotic free energy into our atmosphere and causing huge fluctuations in the weather. The latter makes it harder for us to know when, where and how to feed ourselves.
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The Biodiversity and Climate Change IPBES-IPCC report came out last week with delegates confirming the over-riding view that the two are connected. It’s a step forward but the report does …
Climate change: fossil fuels v. wildlife
Climate change has always been the symptom of biodiversity loss … that’s to say, the breakdown of the complex connectivity between lifeforms that allows Earth to flex in response to changing conditions.
Only recently have we created artificial climate change by mining carbon buried deep underground by animals millions of years ago. The animals that did that are no longer around and today’s animals, that would be busy moderating modern-day carbon, have populations that are heavily depleted.
We cannot engineer our way out of this crisis. We can only rebuild ecosystems rich in a diversity of animal life.
Latest posts about why the oceans are important
Last week Masters Student in Ecology Leisha Knack spoke about how whale wee works wonders for ecosystems! Yes, that’s right. Urine is as important for ecosystems as it is for lemon trees. Which allows me to paraphrase the wonderful joke by Jim Moir (Vic Reeves). You don’t need a PhD to work that out, but you might need a pee-each-day … ha! Knack tells us that whales spill about 4,000 tonnes of nitrogen each year into the ocean from their pee alone. This is nutrient that their kind moves from one part of the ocean into relatively nutrient-poor tropical waters during their annual migration. This is having huge impacts on our coastlines.
The impact of distant animals on our nearby lives
“Before whaling, nutrients would have been three times higher than it is now’, Leisha Knack went on to say.
Indeed, the role of wildlife in creating life-supporting ecosystems has been wildly underrepresented in science … until now, thanks to scientists like Leisha. Rebounding populations of Humpback Whales around our coast are rebuilding natural processes that affect our farming and weather systems.
Blue Whales, the largest animal that ever lived on Earth, regulate climate by stirring and fertilising the ocean. They can even modulate the effect of Australia’s bushfires.
The capacity of animals to transport nutrients from biodiversity hotspots and spread them around the world was once ten to twenty times greater than it is today [1] but the recovery of whale populations is a sign of positive change that we are beginning to value. This might lead to one of the world’s largest whale sanctuaries ever created … a story I explore in more detail in ‘my latest in ‘How to Survive the Next 100 Years: Lessons from Nature‘.
Seabirds, the ultimate nutrient conveyors
Seabirds are another extraordinary nutrient transportation mechanism. Australia has two populous seabirds. 80,000 Wedge-tailed Shearwaters on the Great Barrier Reef’s Heron Island produce about 22 tonnes of guano each breeding season. Birds combine their waste into a material that allows them to carry less weight. The white part is an ammonia-rich concotion that also combines with waste from ocean surface algae to seed clouds on a continental scale. Guano is about 15% Nitrogen.
Before Europeans arrived, there were maybe 23 million Short-tailed Shearwaters breeding in southern Australia. These could have produced about 6,400 tonnes of guano per year–just at the breeding colonies–with presumably more being produced at sea, since the birds spend vastly longer periods there than they do on land. These are one of many species doing the same thing, with the collective total being many tens of thousands of tonnes of Nitrogen.
How much is 1,000 tonnes of Nitrogen? What does it mean?
What do all these figures mean though? You may ask. Well in 1995, the entire Nitrogen budget for the Great Barrier Reef coming from rivers was about 7,000 tonnes [2]. Total inputs including microbial communities and upwelling were thought to be in the order of 17,000 tonnes (N) and 1,400 tonnes (P), dwarfed twenty times by what they call recycling fluxes, which is the amount being processed through
the system by animals and plants. Put another way. The whole of the United Kingdom farming system runs on about 60,000 tonnes of Nitrogen fertiliser annually.
When you mentally calculate the number of animal and birds species living in the sea that are processing Nitrogen, recycling it and transporting it, it’s easy to see this is significant. It is, after all, how ecosystems have always run. The type of Nitrogen matters though. Natural systems produce nutrients that are ‘bio-available’ and generate ecosystem processes by amplifying the animal-led impacts. The kind we tip onto our farmland does the opposite when it’s used in excess.
Which is why rewilding our seas is the only way we can rebalance nature. Once again, animals are humanity’s best hope.
References
- Doughty, C., et al., Global nutrient transport in a world of giants. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2015. 113.
- Nitrogen and Phosphorus Budgets for the Central Great Barrier Reef Shelf Miles Furnas, Alan W. Mitchell and Michele Skuza Tropical Oceanography Program Australian Institute of Marine Science, Townsville A REPORT TO THE GREAT BARRIER REEF MARINE PARK AUTHORITY. © Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority 1995
