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
Designing High Seas Marine Protected Areas to Conserve Blue Carbon Ecosystems is a great overall report but puts itself in jeopardy by omitting wildlife and biodiversity from the climate considerations.
I feel this is the danger of reports written by people who don’t understand systems ecology.
Take this statement:
Scientific understanding of the ocean is most advanced for near-shore and coastal locations. The high seas are, however, gaining recognition as “one of the planet’s largest reservoirs of biodiversity [1] that serve as habitat for whales, sharks, sea turtles and a wide variety of commercially harvested fish species and feature a number of rare and important biological hotspots. Healthy populations of teleost (ray-finned) fish and cetaceans (whales, dolphins and porpoises) have both been identified as potentially significant for their blue carbon contributions [2]. While each ecosystem and its marine living resources are worthy of study from a climate-informed perspective, four living marine resource groupings are particularly important — and, arguably, often overlooked — in this regard: diatoms, ocean calcifers, krill and Sargassum macro-algae. [3]
Three main problem areas are highlighted, above:
- Throughout the report, “biodiversity” is confused with species richness. It references a report by Pew who also make this mistake. There is no relationship between species richness and climate.
- Far from being “potentially significant”, marine vertebrates are in fact the only mechanism for stabilising carbon cycles (this is the “biodiversity” the author should be talking about, above). The authors are wrong in stating that marine algae is “particularly” important.
- Sargassum (a floating marine algae) is important, sure. But sargassum is having unprecedented impacts on areas of the Atlantic, for example, killing entire ecosystems. Marine algae is a threat without animals.
These might seem trivial matters but the work can now be challenged by any politician. Sargassum has increased substantially in the last 10 years, in some areas starving the ocean of oxygen, killing animal life and rotting away on beaches, destroying tourism.
A politician would simply say, okay then, nature is adjusting. We’re all going to be okay … and the whole premise of this important work is lost immediately.
The truth is, sargassum is essential but without animals, there is too much free surplus energy in the system. Losing sargassum is just as bad as having too much. As usual, it’s not about having too much or too little, it’s about ecosystem stabilisation and that can’t happen without animals.
By not understanding biodiversity and omitting animals and an understanding of complex systems ecology, authors risk shooting themselves in the foot.
