We can now add yet another item to the long list of creative ways in which we are undermining our planet and ourselves: creating a serious problem by over-extracting a natural resource, and then compounding that problem in unintended and unanticipated ways…

We’ve known for a long time that we are drastically overfishing our oceans, and we’ve known for a long time that many fisheries are now crashing, or on the verge of collapse. We know that lower fish stocks will have consequences for global food supplies, and in particular that poor coastal communities in developing countries will be among the first to pay the price. Now we have an additional dimension to worry about.

Apparently bony fish excrement accounts for 3-15% of the calcium carbonate in the oceans (plankton account for most of the rest), and calcium carbonate is a key factor in absorbing carbon dioxide, reducing the acidity of our oceans, and maintaining marine life, including coral reefs. So by removing too many fish from the ocean we are also increasing our vulnerability to global warming, which will in turn further reduce marine life, creating a negative feedback loop. The tragedy is that once again, poor coastal communities will be the first to suffer the consequences – not just in the decreased availability of their primary food and protein source, but also as a result of rising sea levels and extreme weather patterns.

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These new protected areas come not a moment too soon. News of serious marine degradation – collapsing fisheries, dead zones, acidification, invasive species, coral reef die offs and species extinctions – is in the news daily. And to date only a tiny fraction of the world’s oceans are protected: at less than one percent of the world’s oceans versus about 12% of the planet’s land area, marine conservation lags far behind terrestrial conservation.

Even though these enormous, remote areas represent a small fraction of what’s necessary and possible, it’s clearly very encouraging to see so many very large areas established in such a short space of time. These marine protected areas (MPAs) set an important example and precedent. They also provide a new impetus to discussions on marine wilderness – how to define marine wilderness biologically, and how to protect marine wilderness from a protected area standpoint.

This conversation is decades old (obviously the concept of marine wilderness is much older).  One place where this discussion has been held is in WILD’s World Wilderness Congresses. At the second WWC in Australia, Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser declared the establishment of the Capricornia Section of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, which includes a wilderness designation, and each of the WWCs since have discussed the issue of marine wilderness. This topic has also been taken up by other conservation organizations, and in the literature, and the United States has several wilderness areas that include some marine area.

Nonetheless, the concept of marine wilderness has yet to be adopted more broadly, and applied to more MPAs around the world. One reason is that there wasn’t sufficient scientific knowledge on what constitutes a biologically intact marine area, and how many such areas remain around the planet. A major new study by the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis assessing the state of the world’s oceans is a critical first step in answering this question. Increased experience with MPAs around the world, and plans for developing a global network of MPAs by IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature) and others also invites more discussion of marine wilderness. Finally, new political will – as evidenced by the very large new MPAs listed above – indicates that the moment has finally come to define the marine wilderness concept more clearly from a biological standpoint, and to “operationalize” it from an MPA standpoint. WILD is working to develop a consortium of marine conservation partners at WILD9: The 9^th World Wilderness Congress in Merida, Mexico in November of 2009. We hope the time has come for broader adoption of marine wilderness MPAs.

The U.S. Senate didn’t take long to address some unfinished business from last year, passing an omnibus lands bill with a resounding majority of 66-12 in an unusual Sunday session on January 11^th. The bill, S.22 sponsored by Senator Bingaman, D-N.Y., is entitled “A bill to designate certain land components of the National Wilderness Preservation System, to authorize certain programs and activities in the Department of the Interior and the Department of Agriculture, and for other purposes”. It consists of an amalgam of 160 different bills, including many new or expanded wilderness areas. In fact, the bill provides protections to an additional 2 million acres of wilderness all over the country, from West Virginia to Colorado, to Oregon and California; it also includes new protections from oil and gas development, and a range of other environmental measures.

Polls have repeatedly found that the American public strongly supports more wilderness designation, and political history since the passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964 indicates that wilderness designation is truly a bipartisan issue. That’s hardly a surprise in an overcrowded, overheated, stressed out planet that is running out of open space and natural resources. Additional wilderness protection is wonderful news and worthy of celebration, but it really is – or should be – just a matter of simple common sense. Let’s hope the U.S. House of Representatives sees it the same way and acts with the same speed and clarity of purpose as the Senate.

Read more about 66.12

But the Kyoto Protocol was always intended as a temporary measure: it expires in 2012, and negotiations are under way for a successor agreement. Because of our rapidly worsening climate situation, awarding credits for protecting standing forests is back on the table for the Kyoto Protocol successor agreement: at UNFCCC meetings in Bali at the end of 2007 delegates approved a proposal for awarding credits based on Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) in tropical forests.

This is a very exciting development: a REDD-type mechanism could provide a massive financial incentive for wilderness protection, generating huge social and environmental benefits around the world as well as contributing significantly to the fight on global warming – a “win-win-win” situation . It’s an absolutely golden opportunity. In fact – it’s probably our only opportunity. There’s no other way to protect our planet’s biodiversity, secure ecosystem services at all scales, sequester millions of tons of carbon, and generate huge socio-economic benefits at the same time. There’s definitely no way to do all of the above as quickly and cost-effectively as protecting wilderness.

But the devil is in the details. What financing mechanism should be used for a REDD scheme? A market-based system? A Fund? Should a ton of carbon from a forest project sold on a carbon exchange be fungible with a ton of carbon emission reductions from a factory? At what scale do you measure forest protection? At a project scale? At a national scale? Should REDD schemes be restricted to tropical forests? Or does it even make sense to limit it to forests when other systems, such as wetlands, are also critically important from a climate perspective? How do you make sure local and indigenous benefits participate so that their rights are fully respected and the financial benefits don’t all get swallowed up by governments and large corporations?

The list of questions goes on and on, the subject is technical, negotiations are fast paced, and as the volume of information becomes larger and more complex, there is even a risk that REDD negotiations could collapse under their own weight. Fortunately, discussions on REDD at the recent climate meetings in Ghana made good progress. Still, the conservation community has a significant challenge on its hands to generate a strong, clear and (relatively) simple consensus on how to implement an avoided deforestation scheme that is truly a win-win-win. We need to generate this consensus quickly so that a united conservation community can speak with a strong voice. We had some room for error last time around, when the Kyoto Protocol was being negotiated – we don’t any more.

We came to realize that wetlands provide a valuable flood control function, so we tried to replace natural flood controls by building levees. We found out that wetlands were very effective at filtering and cleaning water, so to help with the ever increasing challenge of decreasing water pollution (often from agricultural runoff from the farms that replaced the wetlands in the first place), we spent hundreds of millions of dollars on water purification plants and expensive remediation measures. We came to understand how biologically productive wetlands are, so we passed laws limiting wetlands destruction, and created requirements that if a wetland had to be drained, developers at least had to offset the loss by creating artificial wetlands.

None of these surrogate measures has proven very effective. Levees fail, often with tragic results. Water purification is hugely expensive. Artificial wetlands are better than nothing, but they will never approach the biological diversity of natural wetlands.

In recent months, we’ve also been hearing more and more about the potentially critical role wetlands play in climate change. We now know that the planet’s remaining wetlands, in particular peatlands, sequester huge amounts of greenhouse gases. In fact there is roughly the same amount of greenhouse gases stored in our planet’s wetlands as there already is in the earth’s atmosphere, leading scientists to label wetlands destruction as a potential “carbon bomb”.

At some point we need to accept the fact that throwing money and technological fixes at the problems we’re creating by degrading wild places is hugely inefficient. Trying to play catch up by mitigating degradation is always going to be a losing strategy, especially as our planet’s population is headed for 9 billion people in coming decades: it’s vastly easier and cheaper to let nature do the job. Do we really want to spend our time scrambling to defuse the next carbon bomb that we hadn’t even anticipated – or is much worse than we ever thought it would be – instead of building towards a more sustainable future?

Unfortunately, this message has not yet been fully understood around the world. In the United States, where we have already destroyed many of our invaluable wetlands resources, we have been struggling for years to put a plan in place to restore one of our nation’s natural treasures, the Everglades in Southern Florida. A complex, multi-billion dollar proposal has been put forward, which shows signs of promise, though it is by no means guaranteed to be accepted by all in its current form, or to successfully bring back the Everglades “river of grass” even if it is. But what is encouraging in the Everglades plan is the implicit acceptance of an absolutely crucial fact: that restoring Florida’s “river of grass” is far more valuable than maintaining almost 200,000 acres of sugar cane production, and then trying to mitigate the huge environmental impacts of that industry.

Sadly, just as news of progress on the Everglades was being reported, we also learned of Kenya’s plans to drain parts of the Tana River wetlands for sugar cane plantations. The conservation community still has a lot of work to do to convince the global community that investing in wilderness and wild places makes much more sense than sitting in fear of the next carbon bomb.

Fortunately the rush to biofuels production has slowed because of a number of well-documented negative side effects. Biofuels production contributed to a global food shortage and a rise in food prices as farmers sold off their crops to ethanol or biodiesel producers. Deforestation increased in tropical wilderness areas as countries such as Brazil and Indonesia cleared rainforest to make room for biofuels such as soybeans, leading to large losses in biodiversity. Deforestation also increased greenhouse gas emissions, as carbon stored in those forests was released into the atmosphere, offsetting gains from biofuel use and contributing to global warming.

In the US, agricultural run-off increased as millions of acres of farmland were brought into production, creating one of the biggest ever dead-zones in the Gulf of Mexico as fertilizers made their way down the Mississippi. Much of the farmlands returned to production were lands previously placed in highly successful, federally funded conservation programs…including some of our last wild prairie lands. With remarkable lack of foresight, some members of Congress have suggested removing even more lands from these programs.

The decreased fuel efficiency of vehicles using ethanol – some drivers are also saying ethanol fuels makes their engines sputter – combined with the energy and fertilizer intensive process for producing crop-based biofuels, further combined with serious biodiversity and food supply impacts, all make it clear that biofuels produced from crops are not a solution. Another perverse effect has been that ethanol subsidies driven up the price of corn, slashing profit margins, and making corn-based ethanol production in the US have viable only for some of the larger food producers – the very same large industrial agribusiness companies that drove the rush to ethanol in the first place…

Biofuels hold significant promise if they are produced in a way that takes their entire life-cycle into account, from production to indirect impacts such as loss of wilderness areas, and especially if they can be generated using non-food crop sources. Cellulosic ethanol, produced from switchgrass or biowastes has higher cellulose content and is available in abundant quantities without growing crops. Cellulosic ethanol could therefore be a far more efficient and environmentally friendly biofuel alternative, pending investments in the necessary technology and infrastructure.

Luckily we‘re now witnessing the first retreat on crop-based biofuel production as politicians are finally forced to admit that crop-based biofuels are hugely problematic. The European Union Parliament’s Environment Committee recently voted unanimously to reduce mandated biofuel targets, though only Parliament can make this decision final. In the U.S., the State of Texas is asking the Environmental Protection Agency for a waiver to temporarily reduce ethanol production. As with the EU, EPA has not yet decided what to do. With a little luck, common sense will prevail, and the result will be a stronger food supply, better economic policy, and more wild nature.

More Info:
American Association for the Advancement of Science
New York Times
Grist
Sierra Club
Reuters