An ally in the climate battle: nature itself
The declaration of the global climate summit on fossil fuels made all the headlines in Dubai this month. But nature scored quite a victory in itself.
In the final agreement, COP28 participants recognized that climate change threatens ecosystems and the billions of people who depend on them. They have also committed to halting all deforestation and forest degradation, as well as the destruction of other terrestrial and marine ecosystems, by 2030.
For the first time, negotiators also aligned the climate declaration with a separate agreement to protect biodiversity, which includes targets such as protecting 30 percent of the world’s land and seas.
“Ministers today chose to break down traditional silos and pursue strategies that put nature at the center of responses to climate change,” Joe Walston, executive vice-president of the Wildlife Conservation Society, said in a statement.
Nature can be used in countless ways in the fight to curb global warming and its most tragic consequences: forests store carbon and lower temperatures, coral reefs help protect coasts from extreme weather, and grasslands protect water sources from droughts .
But to fully protect diverse ecosystems and help them fight climate change, we need to understand them – and there is still much to discover. For example, scientists estimate that as many as 91 percent of ocean species have yet to be classified, and that 80 percent of the oceans remain unmapped.
Some help from space
One piece of the puzzle is becoming clear: how much carbon ecosystems actually store.
Scientists are now using space-based lasers to measure the biomass of forests around the world, allowing them to calculate how much planet-warming carbon the trees keep out of Earth’s atmosphere. NASA’s Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (or GEDI, pronounced like the knighthood in “Star Wars”) deployed a sensor on the International Space Station in 2018.
Data from that project is now being analyzed, with surprising results: Forests store, on average, about 30 percent more carbon than what countries have previously reported. Keeping these forests healthy and preventing their vast carbon stocks from escaping into the atmosphere is even more important than we thought.
Over the past century, governments around the world have drawn borders to protect thousands of the world’s most valuable ecosystems from destruction, from the forests of Borneo and the Amazon to the savannas of Africa.
These protected areas have provided lifelines to species threatened with extinction, supported the way of life of many traditional communities and secured water supplies for cities. But the reserves are under increasing pressure, with their boundaries largely ignored as people cut down trees and encroach deeper into the ecosystems set aside for protection.
a research based on GEDI data found that designating protected areas to prevent deforestation over the past two decades has prevented about a year’s worth of fossil fuel emissions.
“It’s a lot of carbon, more carbon than we expected,” said Laura Duncanson, a remote sensing scientist at the University of Maryland and co-author of the study. She called the findings “a nice side benefit” of global forest conservation.
What “simply cannot be replaced”
Political and economic pressure to get rid of reserves is increasing, and keeping them safe is becoming increasingly difficult.
“We must focus on conserving the critical ecosystems, the irreparable carbon stocks that simply cannot be replaced,” said Zoe Quiroz-Cullen, director of Fauna & Flora, an international wildlife nonprofit.
A 400-year-old tree that is cut down retains much more carbon than a tree of the same species planted today.
With the new declaration from Dubai, almost 200 countries have now committed to ending deforestation and forest degradation by 2030. But Quiroz-Cullen told me the world still needs a more specific agreement with goals, lines of action and, perhaps, most importantly: financing flows.
Still, recognizing that fossil fuels are the problem and nature is part of the solution was a victory. However, nature’s ability to help us will depend on the extent to which we can protect it.
“It all has to do with nature,” Quiroz-Cullen said. “The more we erode it and the more climate change we experience, the harder it becomes for nature to do its job.”
California’s struggle to solve its water crisis
The story of California’s water wars, like so many stories in the Golden State, begins with gold.
The gold seekers who rushed west after 1848 sought fortunes from the mountain slopes using water poured manically and in gigantic quantities from rivers. The early water laws established a boundary principle: first come, first served.
Later settlers gobbled up land and built dams, ditches and communities. Clever barons turned vast estates into jackpots of grain, livestock, vegetables and citrus fruits. California grew and grew and grew, and along the way new engines of prosperity emerged: oil, Hollywood, Apple, AI
Today, the state is at the mercy of water claims that were at stake more than a century ago, in a cooler, less crowded world. As drought and overuse undermine the state’s water flows and aquifers, California is haunted by promises to generations of farmers and ranchers that they would get priority access to the West’s most valuable resource, with little oversight, essentially forever.
A Times analysis shows that decades of unrestricted groundwater pumping have caused many aquifers to severely degrade.
To address these 21st century crises, a state that prides itself on creating the future must first reckon with its past.
“The reality is that California has had a fairly soft approach to water rights management” compared to many Western states, said E. Joaquin Esquivel, chairman of the state water board. “The system worked as long as it really could.” — Raymond Zhong
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