‘Restoring Peace with Nature’
This talk by Julian Caldecott was on Lost Species Day and St Andrew’s Day/Là Naomh Anndrais, 30th November 2023, at the Edinburgh Climate Change Institute (ECCI), and was organised by the Edinburgh Environment and Development Network (EEDN).
About the talk. Almost every community in Scotland has people actively restoring peace with nature or wanting to, and this puts Scotland in the vanguard of a global Zeitgeist shift to restore peace with nature. Ecocide laws and constitutional protections for nature are urgently needed to accelerate and consolidate this shift in values and attitudes. Scotland has the opportunity to be a global thought-leader in this process. The video of the talk is now available here. But we should meanwhile be aware that planetary boundaries have already been violated and Earth Systems are approaching their tipping points, so time is now short in which to build a viable future for humanity and life on Earth. The six broken Earth System Boundaries are highlighted in this diagram from the Stockholm Resilience Centre:
My role
I have long focused on encouraging and enabling official aid agencies to appreciate ecological reality and the power of nature-based and community-based solutions to global heating, mass extinction extinction and ecological degradation. An overview of my work and links to my writing is here, and my ORCID bio is here. My recent works include the 2020 edition of my book Water: Life in Every Drop, my 2021 book Surviving Climate Chaos, my 2022 dialogue on Peace with Nature for the Scottish Wildlife Trust, and my 2022 paper on Implications of Earth system tipping pathways for climate change mitigation investment.
In my paper on Earth system tipping points, I show that as they approach each tonne of greenhouse gas (tCO2e) not emitted has a higher survival value the sooner it is conserved. Making this ‘time premium’ explicit in investment calculations would help regulators and markets selectively reward projects that conserve carbon quickest and cheapest per tonne. I use test calculations to show that protecting high carbon-density ecosystems or building national decarbonisation capacity have much higher mitigation utility per unit cost than renewable energy generation or tree-planting investments. They also differ in important co-benefits. Focusing only on financial returns is unjustifiable in a global emergency, and investor education and regulatory guidance are needed to correct this.
I was born early in the geological era known as the Anthropocene, ‘the age of people’, which will be clearly visible in future sedimentary deposits from a layer of plastic residues and the drastic reduction in the number of species and lineages from the fossil record – the hallmark of a mass extinction. As an ecologist and writer, my job is to raise awareness of the subtle but potent and dangerous changes that are underway in our relations with the living world and with each other, and to offer the best possible information and guidance on how to make them less severe.
In practice, this mission means that I focus on moderating the damage being done to ecosystems, the ecological services they provide, and the wildlife populations they contain, at all scales from the very local to the landscape, the continental, and the global. But most of my work has been at the landscape scale of up to a few thousand square kilometres, and mostly in the equatorial tropics – in the hills and mountains, and along the coasts. I have earned a living (so far) by advising charities, companies and especially aid agencies on what they can do to keep human development going while preserving the necessary fabric of our amazingly beautiful and intricate biosphere. A summary of my professional work is available here, and since 2009 I have worked though my own company Creatura Ltd, which is described here.
I see ecology, knowledge and governance as the three great interconnected themes in how people relate to the world and live together, and values as a key cross-cutting theme. So I’m particularly interested in what people see as the most important things in the world. This is explored in another website (www.mostimportantthings.org) where I post commentaries on what people believe to be most important, and also my blogs and comments on events and issues that arise. As well as the Most Important Things themselves, the major categories on the site include climate change, adaptation, and Peace with Nature. That is where I also post my commentaries on international days, including: the International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction (13 October); Urban October (from World Habitat Day to World Cities Day); the International day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples (9 August); World Nature Conservation Day (28 Jul)y; the World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought (17 June); World Ocean(s) Day (8 June); World Environment Day (5 June); the International Day for Biological Diversity (22 May); International Mother Earth Day (22 April); Earth day (22 April); and Fossil Fools Day (1 April).
My other books
Every few years, after I’ve done enough projects and learned enough new things, I take time out to write a book. My aim is mainly to get the knowledge out into the public domain, where it might be of more use to people than it is in technical reports held on file with ministries and other institutions. I try to make everything I write accessible and interesting to any reader, and I’m quite good at that, but some of it is undeniably of specialist interest to ecologists and aid professionals even though I try to add comprehensive glossaries and clear explanations.
In any case, my books are accessible through the following links: on rainforest monkeys, on hunting in Sarawak, on designing conservation projects, on good governance for the environment, on ecology of the oceans, on conserving the great apes, on the ecology of the global water crisis, on aid performance and climate change, and on surviving climate chaos.
I’ve also produced technical books from the evaluations that I’ve led, focusing on major aid and climate change programmes, including those funded by:
- Finland (see here for sustainability of poverty reduction, here for Nepal, and here for Tanzania, and here for cooperation with Nepal, Nicaragua and Tanzania);
- Denmark (here for Nepal, and here for the 2021 report and the ministry’s response); and
- Switzerland here for the 2014 climate change public report, here for the 2022 climate change technical report and management response, and here for the 2022 evidence annexes).
Because people often like to listen rather than read, I also do public speaking.
I see all my work since 1979 (or before, if you count badgers, elephants and gibbons) as being parts of an ongoing lifetime project that is leading towards a synthesis of ideas under the headline Peace with Nature, a description of what the world would be like when we end our rebellion against the laws of ecological reality and the norms of cooperative sociability.
Opportunities and dangers
“Protecting all remaining high carbon-density natural ecosystems (tropical moist forests, mangroves, peat swamps, etc.) globally is the maximum top priority for preventing GHG emissions and a mid-century biosphere tipping point. The most cost-effective way to protect ecosystems is often through community participation, which requires local communities to have secure resource tenure. The restoration and regeneration of natural ecosystems is also useful, but slow relative to protecting intact forests. This can be combined with conservation by arranging for downstream users to pay for true ecosystem values such as water catchment services. Better management of lower carbon-density ecosystems such as soils on farm and grazing land can also contribute if large areas are involved. Net decarbonisation of land use, energy, transport, and other sectors requires whole-economy thinking, improved choice awareness and technical support, all of which are needed everywhere to implement net zero commitments. All climate change mitigation investments should be justified by quantitative estimates of their GHG emission effects, with a strong bias towards the early delivery of large net GHG emission reductions and co-benefits. [Recapturing billion-ton] quantities of methane per month from the melting Arctic after 2030 is also essential and very urgent.” My comment in Consequences of deforestation in Europe as demand for firewood grows amidst the gas crisis: experts’ opinions, compiled in December 2022 by Catalina Russu for DevelopmentAid.