This work is the purpose of the organisation I lead, the Zoological Society of London (ZSL). We now have numerous examples of conservation’s success, from the return of red kites in England to the recovery of tigers across much of Nepal and India. We know how to do it – it needs habitats to be protected, interests to be aligned with local communities and the conditions recreated for animal populations to return at scale. We know that nature can recover when given the chance, and that animal populations can bounce back quickly. Restoring populations of reindeer, wild horses, musk ox and American bison is not a nice-to-have tangential to the main effort against climate change, but a key part of that effort. Ensuring there are herds of large animals will help keep the carbon there, by compacting the snow, keeping the soil frozen. The Nature paper uses the example of the Arctic, where huge amounts of carbon is stored in the permafrost. They are important, but can only be part of the answer. The current emphasis for nature-based solutions is on the plants – restoring mangroves, kelp and seagrasses, for example. This means avoiding the urge to go for quick and simple fixes of plant monocultures to sequester carbon, devoid of animals. We would do well to be a little less enamoured of our own ingenuity, and a little more respectful of nature’s. It may well be sensible to try to develop new technologies to capture carbon, but it is definitely not sensible to ignore the proven ways of doing so that nature already gives us. Specifically, the complex mechanisms that nature has developed are startlingly effective in ways we do not yet fully understand – and we destroy them at our peril.
But this new research carries important lessons for how we pursue these nature-based solutions.įirst, nature works.
Reducing emissions is not going to be enough – we need to use the immense power of nature to remove carbon from the atmosphere and lock it up. We already knew that so-called “nature-based solutions” need to be part of any effective strategy to tackle climate breakdown.
Looking across a range of different studies, it concludes that wild animals account for only 0.3% of the carbon in the total global biomass, but can cause anywhere between 15% and 250% difference in how much carbon is stored in a given ecosystem. It makes the case that animals cause ecosystems to be more effective in storing carbon, through their eating, moving, trampling, digging, defecating and building. These are examples contained in a stunning new paper just published in Nature.
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