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.
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
A paper just published A 2021 Horizon Scan of Emerging Global Biological Conservation Issues (Sutherland et al 2020) identifies “Deoxygenation” impacts on Coral Reef Health and “Increases in Dissolved Iron Availability” as two of the top environmental issues on the horizon. These two are connected issues but the paper stops short of mentioning the significance of iron availability, animals and ocean deoxygenation as linked systems and the role wildlife plays in making the resulting environment habitable for humans. So I’m going to add the narrative here.
Ocean deoxygenation and iron
Iron is a key limiting nutrient in modern Earth’s oceans and as Sutherland et al (2020) point out, an outpouring of iron from polar meltwater is expected to trigger increased algal blooms and “increasing drawdown and sequestration of carbon” – reducing global warming.
Good news so far? Not quite.
Deoxygenation will also occur with this increase in algal growth at the poles. Elsewhere, a warmer climate is expected to increase algae growth, due to warmer more sunlit days. As algae die, the nutrients they release, combine with the ocean’s dissolved oxygen, making it unavailable to animals and wildlife dies.
This is also why trying to artificially tamper with iron in the oceans is a dangerous plan.
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Iron fertilisation without animals could spell disaster
During the last ice-age 20,000 years ago, there was a particularly cold period. Scientists have thought this might have had to do with an influx of iron into the Southern…
The threat without animals
The problem is, deoxygenation and loss of animals destabilises the fragile food chains that humans depend on. Even if an increase in marine plants removes more carbon, humans can’t live among a soup of algae and bacteria and we might get over-run by jellyfish. We need fish, birds, whales and sharks to survive. We’re animals of a similar size and nature and we live among them, in the structures that sits on top of the algal processes.
Think of Earth like software on a PC … at the base is MS-DOS. This basal operating system is like the sunlight that hits the Earth and all the physical continents and ocean. Microsoft Windows sits on top of MS-DOS. It’s like the plant layer, that translates the basic operations into functions that can be read by software. Then, to make life liveable, we need a suite (an “ecosystem”) of interacting software. This is run by the animals (including humans), much in the way you are currently running the computer or phone you’re using to read this. When we all operate altogether, we perform our daily tasks as part of a system, which has ‘biodiversity’ value throughout.
The way animals and ocean deoxygenation are regulated by iron
Animals help mix the ocean’s surface layers, cooling our atmosphere and delivering more oxygen into the system. Ironically, they also increase the amount of algae by introducing huge concentrations of iron into surface waters. These are the ways animals and ocean deoxygenation are linked.
Hang on a minute though, we just said more algae is bad for human habitation, didn’t we? As in everything ecosystem based, the system is non-linear.
It’s not the amount of algae that matters, it’s where and when it occurs. Iron from animals increases the diversity and abundance of algae over time but in such precise quantities, that it can’t pollute the ocean. They transfer, amplify and concentrate nutrients in the right place and time, meaning a diversity of animals (and human fisheries, where relevant) also know where to find it. More animals might mean more algae, but it means a more stable carbon-oxygen balance, which is what humans and other animals need to survive.
The biodiversity ‘hotspots’ we talk about, are regulated by animals, not algae. Deoxygenation is simply a redistribution of energy from places where it is useful for human survival (where animals put it), into places it is not useful e.g. abundant algal blooms. Under a “new normal”, we would see rampant algal growth across large areas of ocean in unpredictable ways, ways in which animals can’t function.
The take home message is that human beings exist inside the animal-led biodiversity processes, not the algae-led processes. All algae will do is absorb the same quantity of heat from the sun but in the absence of animals, there will be a failure to build the trophic systems that make Earth habitable.
Spotlight
IUCN Ocean Deoxygenation
