I’ve been a bit busy the last few days but articles keep coming and in this age of “nature-based solutions” it seems everyone has an answer but animals are always missing from the narrative. The Guardian published a piece this week on a Dutch dredge company’s ideas for regreening the Sinai desert – inspired by regreening efforts in the Loess Plateau in China. But will regreening deserts work?

Van der Hoeven calculated the lake contained about 2.5bn cubic metres of silt. If one were to restore the Sinai, this vast reserve of nutrient-rich material was exactly what would be needed. “It became clear we had a massive opportunity,” he says. “It wasn’t the solution to a single problem; it was the solution to all the problems.”

Plants increase environmental nutrient load without animals

You’ll forgive my cynicism at the first instance. A solution to all problems?

I have worked with Dutch dredging companies, mining companies and consultants all my life. It’s worth taking suggestions with a pinch of salt. In this case, the company has been asked to re-deepen the lake, so the need to dump material somewhere, was the reason for the conversation in the first place.

In this case, 2.5bn tonnes of what could only really be described as “toxic” would be a consequence of requests to rescue Lake Sinai from silting up.

In theory it’s a reasonable idea and you’d argue doing something is going to be no better than allowing the lake to dry up completely. The sediment though, has to contain enormous quantities of nitrate and phosphate, among other things. This is not a problem in the Middle East that’s endemic to this lake.

Where does that nutrient go?

Engineers tend to think in fairly simplistic terms … more nutrients means more growth means more farming and more employment.

It’s true but this is not a nature-based solution because that would necessitate a net reduction of nutrients or at least, processes that ensure dangerous levels of pollution are absorbed into biological processes and not allowed to escape into waterways and the Mediterranean.

This could easily become just another form of landscape engineering and unless it is done very carefully, will not create an ecosystem. Each time we completely alter a landscape we release huge amounts of free energy into a system and we delay it reaching a habitable state once more.

Van der Hoeven says “If we want to do something about global warming, we have to do something about deserts.”

How is Earth’s tree cover fairing?

Earth has more tree cover now than it did 35 years ago. Why would we think planting more vegetation in the desert would be the answer to our environmental problems?

Yet again, it’s the animal impact that is missing. The reason why these suggestions make no sense alone, is because wildlife is the fundamental part of the equation that makes the outcome self-sustaining. Few ecologists understand this and I would be surprised to find any engineers that would. If you don’t build in structure and function, you end up having to pay to constantly clean up and that’s economically impossible.

You can’t restyle land and plant vegetation without simultaneous and significant attention to rebuilding ecosystem function, which simply means, wildlife populations and their concurrent habitat. It means migration corridors, conservation areas, bans on hunting and numerous other protection mechanisms sufficient to allow the system time (decades, or maybe hundreds of years) to reform.

The critical importance of wildlife in ecosystems

Ecosystems have to be readied for wildlife as part of the exit strategy–and that includes human animals! Local people are ultimately going to have to look after the land so they also need to be able to make a living. It’s encouraging to find that the Great Green Wall of the Sahel has moved towards locally-led programs and maybe the Sinai will do the same. Even then, there is little focus on wildlife.

Slowly, the idea of a Great Green Wall has changed into a program centered around indigenous land use techniques, not planting a forest on the edge of a desert. The African Union and the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization now refer to it as “Africa’s flagship initiative to combat land degradation, desertification and drought.” Incredibly, the Great Green Wall—or some form of it—appears to be working.

In the Sinai, there are Arabian Oryx, Sinai Leopard, Red-breasted Goose and the hundreds of other declining species of the region. What use will they be in zoos? The big questions for the dredge engineers are:

1. How do you create locally self-determined conservation outcomes?
2. How do you convince a nation that without wildlife, things might become worse?
3. How can locals be persuaded to protect their own wildlife in situ for the next 100 years?

These major landscape reconstruction ideas are no different to how the first Aborigines settled Australia, except now we are placing the human survival aspects in the hands of single corporations who don’t necessarily have accountability for the long-term health and integrity of ecosystems.

How do we get conservation on track?

I fear wildlife conservation will again be an after-thought done by low-paid scientists left to pick up where the engineers have left off.

I realise I sound cynical but I know how little ecology plays in the upfront design and intelligence of engineering projects. In this case, the proposals are not for building ecosystems because they can’t do that without wildlife and the consequences could be quite damaging for the surrounding regions and may not create a net benefit for the local human population.

As a footnote, I’m curious as to how this will work without upsetting systems globally. As the Guardian article points out, there is evidence that the Sinai once was green – as recently as 4,500 to 8,000 years ago. Back then though, wildlife was abundant and diverse planet-wide. We have to be very cautious these days not to further upset the biosphere when it is teetering on the edge of collapse due to the massive loss of animal biomass in the last 50 years.

“Biblical” famine, pestilence and plague wreaked havoc on these ancient food bowls and caused the collapse of entire civilisations like ancient Egypt but they were fairly isolated incidents … the rest of the world was still largely dominated by Aboriginal societies and abundant wildlife.

Today we have scaled the effect our impact to almost every place humans live and there is hardly a landscape untouched that still has fully-functioning animal-driven ecosystem services. In other words, there’s not much resilience left to cope unless we rebuild wildlife populations.

---

Spotlight

---