Phys.org

June 8, 2022
Traditional Owners in Australia are the creators of millennia worth of traditional ecological knowledge—an understanding of how to live amid changing environmental conditions. Seasonal calendars are one of the forms of this knowledge best known by non-Indigenous Australians. But as the climate changes, these calendars are being disrupted.

How? Take the example of wattle trees that flower at a specific time of year. That previously indicated the start of the fishing season for particular species. Climate change is causing these plants to flower later. In response, Traditional Owners on Yuku Baja Muliku (YBM) Country near Cooktown are having to adapt their calendars and make new links.

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Nation of Change

February 22, 2022
The reintroduction of gray wolves to Yellowstone National Park in 1995 triggered a cascade of knock-on effects. The wolves kept herbivores like elk in check and on the move, reducing their browsing pressure on young trees. As a result, groves of willow and aspen sprouted along watercourses, creating ideal conditions for a thriving beaver population. The busy beavers in turn engineered wetlands where a diversity of fish, songbirds and invertebrates flourished. In short, the return of the top predators transformed the U.S. national park into a biodiverse, fully functioning, carbon-sequestering ecosystem.

Now, a new study suggests that restoring just 20 large mammal species to their historic habitats could similarly revitalize ecosystems and boost biodiversity across almost one-quarter of the Earth’s land area.

The international team of researchers behind the study assessed global opportunities for the restoration, reintroduction and rewilding of intact large mammal assemblages across the world’s terrestrial ecoregions, geographic areas characterized by similar plant and animal communities. They published their results in the journal Ecography.

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Global Citizen

December 2, 2021
Conservation is about protecting that which sustains life on Earth — the rivers that flow with fresh water, the soil rooting crops in place, the forests and marinescapes that release oxygen.

Framed in this way, conservation seems like an undertaking that would be universally supported. 

But conservationists face countless challenges, from the industrial forces invested in exploiting natural resources and polluting ecosystems to a general lack of funding and government support. Efforts to conserve an environment have long been framed by opponents as a threat to jobs and community well-being — as if any jobs or well-being would exist without a functioning environment.

This opposition appears to be fading as the climate and biodiversity crisis brings increasing devastation. Organizations are receiving waves of funding, and the voices of Indigenous people, who have long advocated for reciprocity with nature, are being elevated. The United Nations has deemed now until 2030 to be part of the Decade on Restoration, a globally coordinated effort to heal the planet. An increasing number of countries have pledged to protect 30% of land and marine spaces by 2030, and some corporations are beginning to transform their supply chains and operations.

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New York Times

November 2, 2021
Jeff Bezos, one of the richest humans on the planet, and who started his financial empire by selling books online, pledged $2 billion to restoring natural habitats and transforming food systems at the climate summit in Glasgow on Tuesday.

Speaking at a conference where President Biden and other leaders announced a global pact to end deforestation by 2030, Mr. Bezos said that private industry must play a central role in the campaign.

“Amazon aims to power all its operations by renewable energies by 2025,” he said, restating his goal for the company to be carbon-neutral by 2040.

That will be a sizable challenge.

Amazon said, for example, that the company’s emissions from indirect sources had increased 15 percent last year over 2019. The company has pointed out that when its emissions are measured relative to its booming sales, its carbon footprint has been decreasing. But some climate experts say this calculation, called carbon intensity, obscures that the company is still generating an increasing amount of carbon.

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E&E News Greenwire

September 24, 2021
Americans have been draining wetlands for farming and development since Colonial times.

But climate change may reverse that tide — from destruction to restoration.

Federal scientists are studying whether heat-trapping carbon dioxide can be sucked out of the atmosphere and sequestered in restored salt marshes, sea grass beds and mangrove swamps. And those wetlands can in turn protect communities along the coast from rising seas and fierce, frequent climate-driven storms.

“The concept that’s forming is that what we need to do is massive-scale ecosystem restoration as soon as possible to begin absorbing as much carbon dioxide as we can and diminish the amount of overshoot that we have in atmospheric greenhouse gases this century,” said Kevin Kroeger, a research chemist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Woods Hole Coastal and Marine Science Center.

Across the Lower 48 states, wetlands hold at least 3.2 billion metric tons of CO2 equivalent, by one estimate — roughly half the country’s net total greenhouse gas emissions in 2019.

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Aljazeera - OpEd

June 2, 2021
Humanity faces a herculean task to reverse climate change and protect the natural world that supports us. We must retool human society to live in harmony with nature – all while leaving space for people in developing nations to prosper and grow.

We want this to happen immediately. But we must be realistic. Even if everyone starts immediately to turn their promises on climate change and nature loss into action – as they should and must – we are looking at decades of work.

To buy time to complete these transformations, particularly the transition to zero-carbon economies, we need fast-acting and simple solutions. Solutions that slow climate change, restore nature and biodiversity, protect us against pandemics, allow us to produce more food, create jobs, reduce inequalities, build peace.

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Mongabay

May 7, 2021
The world is brimming with bad news about people failing to take care of the Earth. But there is a way to change the narrative, says Canadian conservationist Harvey Locke. The key, according to him, is to strive for a “nature positive” world that is less about destruction and more about restoration.

“We know we’re on a rocket sled into the abyss, and we need to turn that around 100%, going the other direction on a rocket sled towards a positive solution,” Locke told Mongabay in an interview. “Tinkering is not possible. We can’t just [take] an old crystal radio set where you just kind of turn the dial a little bit [to] move from one station to another. It won’t work. We need to be on the internet, instead of listening to the radio — that kind of level of change.”

Locke is the lead author of a new paper published April 30, a few days before the start of a six-week virtual meeting of the Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice (SBSTTA), an intergovernmental scientific advisory body to the parties of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). At this meeting, the SBSTTA will provide advice on the post-2020 global biodiversity framework, Guido Broekhoven, head of policy research and development at WWF, told Mongabay in an interview.

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CNN

April 2, 2020
Marine life in the world's oceans could recover to healthy levels in the next thirty years if decisive and urgent action is taken, an international review has found.

A team of scientists from around the world found marine life to be "remarkably resilient" despite damage caused by human activity and interference, they said in a review published Wednesday in science journal Nature.

Researchers said ocean populations could be restored as soon as 2050, but warned that there is limited time to achieve this change.

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HuffPost

February 14, 2020
An irradiated nuclear zone is hardly the most obvious animal sanctuary. But in January, almost a decade after Japan’s Fukushima disaster, scientists using remote cameras in the area around the abandoned power station discovered an abundance of wildlife.

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National Geographic

May 7, 2019
Akagera National Park was badly degraded by poachers and settlers, but thanks to an innovative conservation effort it is now home again to the Big Five and a growing tourism business.

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