Speaker notes by Julian Caldecott for TheStoneClub, 24 February 2010

 

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2010 is the cusp of a momentous eight decades (roughly 1970-2050) during which dramatic changes to the natural world have built up and are now approaching a climax.  If all the events of this period (barely longer than a human life) were compressed into a day, we would have no doubt that a global environmental calamity had occurred. But it’s all happening in slow motion, and scattered worldwide, so we find it hard to see the big picture.  My job today is to share with you a sense that life on Earth is at a tipping point - yet we can perhaps alter the outcome.

 

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My starting point is 1975, for reasons of personal narrative. That’s when I was in my late teens and began to work on wildlife ecology. For similar reasons, I trace the story forward to 2035, when I’ll be in my late seventies and most likely past it. But by then we’ll know our fate anyway.

 

In 1975, there were still many healthy wildernesses, and global warming was only a scientific curiosity. But it was already a battered world, after 150 years of industrialisation and 30 years of post-War boom, and there were warning signs all over it. For example:

·      cattle ranching replacing forests in Central America and around the edges of the Amazon;

·      lowland rainforest being cleared in Malaya to make way for oil palm plantations;

·      the final stages of timber booms in the Philippines and parts of Malaysia, and the beginning of one in Indonesia;

·      the discovery of ozone depletion in the upper atmosphere;

·      the massacre of wildlife for trade in ivory, skins and feathers; and

·      the rumoured appalling levels of pollution behind the Iron Curtain.

 

But in 1975, big charities like WWF were on the case. The UN had recently had its first major conference on the global environment. The map was becoming speckled by national parks and nature reserves. The world still seemed diverse, stable and “too big to fail”.

 

But who could have guessed the power of exponential growth in our numbers, in our economic activities, in our demand for resources, and the impact they would have in a finite ecological system? It is this that has finally put the world at hazard.

 

As Environment Secretary Hilary Benn said last month: “… the action we take in the next couple of decades will determine whether the stable environment on which human civilisation has depended since the last Ice Age 10,000 years ago will continue.” He was writing about biodiversity loss and mass extinction, but it could equally well have been about climate change, deforestation, fresh water depletion, or the spread of deserts.

 

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I can describe the parts of the world where I worked from the mid-1970s, and what has happened in those places up to now. My longest involvement has been with Indonesia and neighbouring countries, but I’ve also worked in Nigeria, Mexico, Bangladesh, China and elsewhere. So I can confirm that what I saw in Indonesia is part of a global pattern.  In 1975, Indonesia had a million and a half square kilometres of pristine lowland, montane and swampy rainforest, as well as coral reefs and many other ecosystems in its 17,000 islands. But then the timber boom began.

 

The first phase was aimed at producing logs for export. Then the focus switched to plywood. Then the trees left by selective logging began to be pulped. Meanwhile, millions were resettled from crowded Java to the outer islands. Great areas of swamp forest were felled, the peat drained for rice, then abandoned when the peat disintegrated to leave only white sand.  By 2000, Indonesia was aiming to be the world’s biggest producer of palm oil, and plantations spread after the near-exhaustion of the country’s timber. Vast forest fires burned deep into peat and created smogs across South-east Asia. Illegal loggers and settlers occupied many of the parks, and the final end of the country’s lowland forest was staring us in the face.

 

Indonesian forests hold about 1,500 tonnes of carbon per hectare. Peat-swamp forests around five times as much. As they burn or decay, they release CO₂ and methane - both greenhouse gases. As a result, Indonesia is now the third-largest GHG emitter after China and the US. Plus, as the most species-rich country on the planet, the loss of Indonesian forests contributes hugely to mass extinction.

 

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Repeated across many other countries, the wholesale obliteration of natural ecosystems on land, along the coasts and out to sea since 1975 has been an extraordinary thing to witness. In 1975 the scale of it was unimaginable, but within 30 years it was reality.  And now we can look forward for a similar length of time, and see that this year is also more than half way towards a very different and much less comfortable place, one that seems to await us in the 2030s and 2040s.

 

Although the main forward-looking studies on the global environment tend to lose certainty around then, what they do show us is scary enough. By that time, if things go on as they have been, some of what we can expect is:

·      Runaway global warming will be rearranging climates, coastlines, farmlands and cities, and redistributing diseases such as malaria into wholly new locations.

·      Sea-borne storms, more powerful than any ever recorded, will be savaging coastal lands.

·      Local water crises will have multiplied far beyond the thousands that we are now seeing, and will have coalesced into the spread of giant new deserts.

·      Fisheries and coral reefs will be vanishing in an ocean made acid by dissolved CO₂.

·      Millions of wild species will have gone extinct along with the forests, grasslands, wetlands and coastal ecosystems that once sustained them.

·      And our population will be approaching what the UN expects to be a peak of over nine billion people - though it’s seldom explained what they will be eating and drinking, and where they will be living, in the 2040s.

 

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My aim here is to give you a sense of living at a very special moment in the history of life on Earth, and in the history of our own species.   This is the cusp of a short period during which many things will be lost, evolution will be diverted, and much of the future will be decided.

 

But no talk like this would be complete without some hints on what we can do about it. Unfortunately there are no easy answers, since we are confronted not by one threat but by multiple interacting challenges.  Thus deforestation, water crisis, mass extinction and other issues of our age are all at the same time both causes and consequences of climate change, and all are connected to and feed off each other.

 

In this situation it isn’t hard to think of:

·      things that we know we should do (like slashing carbon emissions from industry, transport and land use, capturing carbon from the air, and preparing adaptation strategies to reduce disaster risks and cope with climate-change refugees);

·      things that we know we should not do (like undermining the political viability of our efforts by making them unfair, putting things off, and trying out only easy, partial and short-term solutions aimed at fragments of the whole problem); and

·      things that we know we should do better (like managing ecosystems sustainably and paying for this through realistic pricing of ecosystem services such as fresh water supply and carbon storage).

 

Three illustrations from just the last few months highlight some of the different kinds of strategic problem that face us:

·      The million-dollar problem of ignorance. The UK government has committed £50 million to Indonesia, to plant oil palms on degraded lands. But truly degraded tropical land is very poor for plantations, and in practice what will happen is that logged peat swamps will be used instead. Then, under the oil palms, the peat will oxidise to methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than CO₂. And yet, for this kind of money, millions of hectares of peat-swamp forest and billions of tonnes of carbon could be protected in Indonesian New Guinea.

·      The billion-dollar problem of inertia. Deals have been done to ship annually 30 million tonnes of coal from Queensland in Australia to China, and another 20 million tonnes from Lampung in Sumatra to power stations elsewhere in Indonesia. These contracts add up to about US$100 billion, and demonstrate our lack of progress in escaping our fossil-fuel addiction, regardless of climate consequences. And yet, for this kind of money, Indonesia could largely be powered by zero-carbon tidal and geothermal electricity delivered through an HVDC network like that now being built in Europe.

·      The trillion-dollar problem of weak leadership. At a conference of European pension fund managers in Dublin, it was made very clear that the industry saw investing in a low-carbon future to the tune of €1.5 trillion per year as a tremendous opportunity, provided that there was a sensible regulatory environment and a level playing field. Copenhagen was supposed to deliver these, but didn’t, so the immense potential of long-term pension-fund investment remains untapped.

 

But ignorance can be corrected, inertia can be overcome, and leadership can be strengthened. We have the brains and money needed to save the world. We’ve come a long way since 1975, and not everything has been disastrous. We’ve learned many things that can help us restore the world and adapt to environmental change. The problem is that in 2010, after putting things off for decades, we’re running out of time.