Here I pick out three key ways wildlife will save our food and climate systems. The first thing to understand about carbon is that storage is only one part of the cycle. About 80 percent of our planet’s terrestrial carbon is in its soil but you are also made of 20% carbon. Animal life (and human animals) can’t exist unless there is a process to cycle carbon and other essential life supporting nutrients out of the soil and into food chains.

A paper published in Science in 2018 aimed to create discussion about how wildlife regulates climate and soils, through its impact on the carbon cycle. It’s still rare to find wildlife mentioned as a driving force in the regulation of earth systems.

Conserving or managing wild animal species to control carbon exchange between ecosystems and the atmosphere is rarely considered as part of the portfolio of natural carbon-recapture solutions … Without such consideration, there may be serious inaccuracies in both carbon cycle models and anticipated global changes, which may lead to ineffective policy formulation for natural carbon storage. Schmitz et al. (2018) [1]

As a society, we have a strange tendency to consider ourselves separate to nature and wildlife separate to ecosystems. We can’t lock carbon away to address climate, we also have to collaborate in its wise use alongside other animals, in order to have food to eat. I find overwhelmingly, that climate science tends to overlook this fact: that food security depends on having more carbon circulating. This creates a paradox, which I’ve discussed further below.

#1 Cultivation grazing by wildlife

Animals eat plants and other animals. Over time, populations evolve that have learnt to select food that provides enough energy to compensate for the effort to find it. In systems that are relatively pristine where there are still large herbivores, it’s been shown that turnover of carbon is far greater. This in turn provides an abundant and dynamic system that supports a far higher biomass of other animals and leads to the kind of rich landscape that humans typically use for farming and fisheries. The magnitude of animal impact serves to increase soil carbon storage and maximise the amount that passes back through the food chain.

#2 Amplification and concentration of nutrients

Every animal produces waste. About ten percent of what we consume is emitted as either heat or physical waste and deposited back into the ecosystem. The quantity of waste is highest in areas where there are more animals and this tends to be determined by a range of physical factors such as where there are river valleys. For instance, the carbon that washes off the Himalayas onto the Indus River flood plains in Pakistan creates some of the largest and most fertile soils in the world. This is also an area brimming with wildlife, from migratory Bar-headed Geese to the endangered Indus River Dolphin. The physical processes aren’t enough on their own as they only kick start what becomes a kaleidoscope of animal-driven processes that amplify the effects to the point that the land can support numerous large-bodied animals like us. Over time, the impact of animals in landscapes has evolved a patchiness, where there are some areas of far greater soil nutrient concentration than others.

#3 Transfer of nutrients

The greatest effects occur where there is migration and this is controlled by the seasonality of global climate. Migrants arrive at just the time when growth is at its maximum, because over millions of years, these ecosystems would have destabilised unless there were animals to moderate the incredible amounts of plant energy created. The biggest migrations on Earth create phenomenal nutrient transfer and build a biomass of animals so large, they can support the likes of elephants and in the ocean, Blue Whales. It’s migration that supercharges the other two processes (above) and led to the kinds of conditions on Earth, that made humanity possible in the first place.

The carbon-biodiversity paradox

Are you wondering why an increase in carbon through animal impact doesn’t conflict with climate change? If you are, it may explain why we are failing to spot the significance of wildlife in our plans to address climate change. We too easily assume that climate is solved by storing carbon and forget that we also need to release carbon into ecosystems, to make food.

But, in order to support the abundance and size of animals like us, that carbon release needs to be on a huge scale but it poses a risk to our climate – that’s the paradox. In order to have food to eat, we need more carbon in food chains but we have to be able to control its effect with great precision and can’t do that using over-hyped geo-engineering. There is in fact only one tribe of lifeforms capable of acting at the scale, magnitude and precision needed to bring ecosystems back to stability – and that’s wildlife.

This is the reason why we should be gravely concerned about the rate at which we’ve killed wildlife.

Climate change, which is caused by our over-use of fossil fuels, is a separate problem to biodiversity loss and as I explain here, we underestimate the significance of nature (and wildlife in particular) in maintaining a habitable Earth.

Also read: Wildlife, Biodiversity and Climate

1. Schmitz, Oswald & Wilmers, Christopher & Leroux, Shawn & Doughty, Christopher & Atwood, Trisha & Galetti, Mauro & Davies, Andrew & Goetz, Scott. (2018). Animals and the zoogeochemistry of the carbon cycle. Science. 362. eaar3213. 10.1126/science.aar3213.