The Global Degradation Crisis: Root Causes & Response Framework
In this article, I address the global environmental degradation crisis that is becoming more prominent in this new millennium. First, I discuss its fourfold gravity by observing three major characteristics; from there, I proceed to present the Conserve-Reduce-Restore-Diversify framework—a set of principles meant to guide us in the design and implementation of responses to this crisis.
The Problem
In the XXI Century, we are waking up to a new form of scarcity. A scarcity that for the first time has a global reach and relevance; a scarcity that impacts our ecosystems and climate in unprecedented ways and jeopardizes life in many of the forms we have come to know it.
In this first part, I will show how today, as we face the familiar challenge of (1) unproductive or insufficient land to feed our growing population, we are also waking up to (2) scarcity of new land to convert into cropland, and have slowly realized (3) the powerful effects on global climate patterns of a combination of reduced carbon sequestering ability due to deforestation and increased emissions due to fossil fuel and chemical usage. All of this while watching (4) hundreds of species—whose role in this world was unclear if not completely unknown—disappear forever from our planet.
I will describe the problem we are living by highlighting the three major characteristics that make it unprecedented in human history. These are (1) scarcity, (2) ripple-effect consequences, and (3) magnitude.
Scarcity (or the ‘Acquire-Deplete-Abandon approach’)
In his 500-page masterpiece ‘Deforesting the Earth: from Prehistory to Global Crisis’, Michael Williams tells us how, ever since their earliest days, humans have had to deal with scarcity — be it game, timber, soil fertility or general degradation of natural resources. Yet, until very recently, these were mostly just local occurrences confined within a limited space, and it often simply took abandoning the degraded land and moving onto new areas to find stashes of untapped goods.
Shifting agriculture — a technique initially common to probably all agriculturalist peoples around the globe — is purely based on a nomadic pattern: Acquire-Deplete-Abandon. But thinking of it, even more in modern times humans have retained this ancestral approach. As an example, although by 1600 all British woodlands were already virtually depleted from centuries of exploitation, the British economy still managed to lock in centuries of renewed growth, in a context where timber was ever-present and needed. From putting together one of the largest fleets on earth to the buildings in great cities like London or, not less importantly, farming and cooking food for a growing population, all of these basic economic activities required large volumes of wood. How did they manage at a time where in England and Scotland it was even hard to find a proper forest? Simply by outsourcing it: first from the vast coniferous forests of the Baltic regions, and later from the Indian teak forests.
Throughout human history, depleting, abandoning and acquiring new land has been the modus operandi, and aside from a few dramatic situations where access to new virgin areas was secluded or impractical (e.g. Easter Island), all in all, ours has been a rather successful strategy.
Successful, but again, only as long as new sources of abundance could be accessed at a reasonable cost. As long as the world was largely covered in endless forests and people were few and scattered, shortsighted management of natural resources could be afforded. As technical progress advanced, new swathes of fertile forest soil were made accessible by improved transportation technology, and clear-felling carried on faster, with no apparent consequences other than localized forms of degradation. When these appeared, the now degraded land was labeled as ‘uneconomical’, and swiftly abandoned and left behind.
Today, we are waking up to the realization that these lush and endless forests are not actually endless, but have become smaller and scarcer. The boundaries of their abundance are now within our line of sight, and the Acquire-Deplete-Abandon approach that has served us seemingly well for the past millennia is nearing a dead end.
Ripple-effect consequences
Abandoning and outsourcing a scarce resource is the first response to a locally delimited scarcity. Because we are creatures of habit, substitution, with another raw material, production system, or even behavior, is a less preferred option, but one that has been adopted in times of need. Indeed, we have always shown great inventiveness in changing an old fashion that had suddenly become too expensive with a newer, more convenient one. Plastics, for example, have substituted more traditional materials in thousands of applications, as composite materials are substituting timber in decking as a cheaper, lower maintenance option.
But when it comes to natural capital and ecosystems, substitution as a response to scarcity might not actually be the winning strategy.
The issue is that those same natural resources we are depleting might, in fact, be the actual fundament for life as we know it. What this means is that even if we managed to find new ways to grow our food or supply our energy once standard natural resources are exhausted, we might discover that life itself will be hindered by the absence of those same resources. As we are only just scratching the surface of this realization, it is still hard to make clear examples, and only faint connections are now proposed, such as linking Covid-19 and other viruses to the disturbance of delicate and biodiverse habitats.
That healthy ecosystems provide for a healthier life is not news, nor is it news that Earth’s very specific climate is what allows life to exist on our planet. We have known all of this since long, albeit often in a more intuitive, non-quantifiable way. Today we are learning to know it scientifically — in numbers — and practically — on our own skin. Disturbance of one component (e.g. vegetation cover) triggers a ripple-effect degradation of many others (e.g. soil erosion and fertility, transpiration rates, carbon sequestration), quickly elevating the disturbance or imbalance to an entire ecosystem or region. Let this happen across millions of hectares and suddenly a regional problem becomes a global one, jeopardizing the existence of delicate ecosystems that could not survive this level of disturbance.
Before we learned this could reach a global scale, we thought imbalances within a particular ecosystem could only generate localized challenges. In most cases we would find that the once fertile soils are now useless, that rainfall does not get absorbed by the soil, and instead causes flash floods, and that the lack of organic matter in the topsoil makes the sun bake it like clay. Also, we noticed that new creatures, like invasive plants or insects, start to appear and take over the void opened by degradation.
The fact that degraded ecosystems make it hard if not impossible to grow our food is a long-known lesson, arguably the only one that we have historically cared for and tried solving, although in most cases our solutions were limited to the application of chemical fertilizers or, if possible, the clearing of new patches of forests. Today, we are realizing how countless other outcomes of ecosystem degradation can transcend locally limited challenges, and can actually take consequences to a much larger if not global scale.
Magnitude
Like all problems, the larger they get the more difficult, costly, and frightful they become. Pockets of ecosystem degradation scattered across millions of hectares of stable and balanced forest would not be too impactful in the big picture, nor too difficult to solve, as the surrounding forest would act as a genetic bank ready to repossess what was subtracted if allowed sufficient time. But again, today’s situation is radically different than what we are used to as a species and there might not be enough time for ecosystems to regenerate. The graph below, which plots the human population and CO2 emissions over the last 2000 years, portrays a clear shift in the order of magnitude of the problem.
In the past 100 years, the global population has grown nearly 5x, while CO2 emissions have grown 18x. We have always known that more mouths to feed require increased agricultural production, and even that richer mouths consume items (e.g. beef) that require more water and more energy to be produced. These translate into emissions, which, as we seem to be learning just now, have impactful consequences on nearly all habitats on Earth.
Avoiding too complex Climate Change modeling, let us instead see what having more mouths to feed has meant on the ground thus far.
As could be expected, in the graph above we see an increase of grazing land and cropland, which seems to be paving the way for the subsequent growth in population. Although significant expansion is recorded especially since the year 1000 AD, we notice the same, extremely rapid, almost epidemic-like increase in just the past 100 to 200 years. According to these data in fact, since 1800 approximately 36 million square Kilometers of pasture and cropland were added as assets onto man’s balance sheet.
To understand what that has meant for the natural world, in another graph below the data is plotted against other land-uses. We see that an increase in cropland meant an equal decrease in forests and natural grasslands, which were brought into productivity. It sounds so natural that it might not surprise anyone. And it is, indeed, very natural to humans. Michael Willians describes in his book that the alteration — many times irrevocable — of natural habitats has been man’s tool for harnessing food chains for as long as we can remember, much earlier than the adoption of agriculture.
Today more than ever, we realize that the consequences of this “normality” are devastating.
One step deeper and we learn something more: what has been altered most is primary, “old-growth” forests, and naturally occurring grasslands, which are today closer than ever to disappearing. Poorer and less functioning land-uses, such as ‘Other Land’ (i.e. unproductive, desert-like land) and Secondary Forest (i.e. species-poor, unstable forests) have instead increased.
Summing up the problem
Biodiversity-rich, delicate and balanced ecosystems, teeming with thousands of rare and endemic species have been converted into cropland and grazing meadows at a staggering rate to produce food for a growing population.
At the same time, shortsighted management of newly acquired resources has led to a widespread increase in unproductivity and degradation, leaving behind a long trail of non-functioning, species-poor, or even desertified landscapes that do not anymore serve man’s purpose or support the regeneration of natural abundance.
Additionally, our “shifting” response to the depletion of resources — the Acquire-Deplete-Abandon approach — is proving inadequate before the critical reduction of the natural abundance we had gotten so used to.
Meanwhile, energy consumption fueled by a more sophisticated and richer lifestyle, made accessible to billions of people, is releasing unprecedented amounts of carbon in the atmosphere, causing unforeseen shifts in the global climate.
In an even more concise form: as we face the familiar challenge of (1) unproductive or insufficient land to feed our growing population, we are also waking up to (2) scarcity of new land to convert into cropland, and have slowly realized (3) the powerful effects on global climate patterns of a combination of reduced carbon sequestering ability due to deforestation and increased emissions due to fossil fuel and chemical usage. All of this while watching (4) hundreds of species — whose role in this world was unclear if not completely unknown — disappear forever from our planet.
Whatever challenge we have faced in the past — from epidemics to mini Ice Ages, wars or invasions — is simply incomparable to the one we are facing today. Even taken alone, each of the four components outlined above is an immense challenge, while their fundamental interconnectedness creates a tangle that can hardly be solved by a single group of humans or computers.
What is perhaps the scariest part, is that we are yet to know what the true impact of all of this will be, as we are still surprisingly ignorant about what the actual role of the species and ecosystems we are so furiously destroying is—or, in a lot of cases, used to be. And while Nature has a way of mending its own wounds, it will require us to leave habitats alone for some time.
As Edward Wilson suggests, a lot of time:
“The one process now going on that will take millions of years to correct is the loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats. This is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us.” E. O. Wilson, Biophilia
Towards building solutions
There is no silver bullet solution for this problem, but only a diverse, multi-disciplinary set of techniques and approaches, embedded into a systemic shift, can help us get past this, regenerate natural abundance and preserve our ecosystems. Humans have always demonstrated the ability to change when the environment required them to, and with 8 billion people around there should be little doubt that we have enough bright and creative minds to solve this tangle of mighty challenges.
As many of us are working every day to solve and improve pieces of this large puzzle in our own particular contexts, I want to present here a set of principles that I believe can guide us in the right direction.
These are four simple concepts that together can support us in performing the systemic and—even more importantly—the mindset shift that is needed to reverse the current trend of degradation. In their simplicity, I have tried to make them as adaptable as possible to different contexts and situations, so as to maintain focus on a common goal even when tackling small-scale or very specific challenges.
The principles are:
I. Conserve
II. Reduce
III. Restore
IV. Diversify
I. Conserve
This is the simplest, most obvious, and at the same time the easiest and yet most crucially important of all. We must immediately stop the ongoing destruction and protect what is left of the once extensive natural habitats. Their existence is critical, as they act as repositories of genetic diversity, as well as living laboratories to continue our research into how they work and what we can adopt from them in our responses to the crisis. Additionally, natural forests act as very effective carbon sinks, and studies conducted in China showed not only that carbon sequestration of natural forests can be in excess of 1.5 times that of a 35-year-old tree plantation (Qi, 2010), but even demonstrated that natural forests make better use of available resources, such as water, making them more resilient to stress and climatic changes (Yu, 2018).
So as we continue shifting towards carbon-neutral energy production, we critically need existing carbon sinks to remain functional, while also using them as inspiration on how to use resources more efficiently and design more resilient systems.
However important though, conservation alone is highly insufficient for the scale of the problem and more needs to be done to craft workable solutions.
II. Reduce
The first, sensible, and difficultly arguable response to the scarcity of a given resource is to reduce its uptake, by either replacing it or using it more efficiently. We do it all the time — with our own money, for example — so that extending this concept to our whole economy should feel like a natural response to newly discovered scarcities.
We have already proven in countless ways that reducing usage is not only possible but even comes with numerous benefits. Israel—a net agricultural produce exporter despite its arid climate—is a classic example of meticulous use of limited resources. There, natural water scarcity and the high cost of manufacturing freshwater through Reverse Osmosis made a clear case for technologic and systemic advances to increase usage efficiency.
If we remain unaware of these increasing scarcities, the generalized lack of serious economic evaluations of natural capital will continue to disincentivize investing in often expensive, upfront efficiency improvements. Wasteful practices are in fact a normal consequence of shortsighted or flawed evaluations, which either do not account for scarcity or do not value ecosystem services correctly.
As we wake up to the intrinsic limits of natural capital, we should also be gearing up towards more complex and realistic assessments of its true economic value. Fortunately, this is already happening, as we can notice from the coinage of new terms that help us communicate unprecedented barriers. Unburnable carbon, for example, is a newer term that refers to existing carbon stocks that we could profitably burn, but cannot afford to if we want to maintain within the below 2°C scenario.
In this context of increasing scarcity and economic value, reducing should be part of the sensible response in the way we produce and consume. Furthermore, reducing our resources uptake will take us further towards replenishing scarcity, while also cutting production costs, increasing output and creating sounder investment opportunities, which will result in higher competitiveness and more resilient development.
III. Restore
As mentioned above, our Acquire-Deplete-Abandon approach to Natural resources has left an endless trail of degraded, sub-functioning, or even desertified ecosystems that serve little or no purpose to anyone besides invasive species and possibly viruses. While we have observed it happen and mildly worried about it for centuries, a recent study by the Crowther Lab in Zürich gave us a figure that clearly defines the extensiveness of this problem. The study suggests that in the world today there are close to an extra billion hectares of degraded land that could have a canopy cover, under the current climatic conditions, without interfering with agricultural and urban areas.
Rewilding these impoverished landscapes will bring numerous benefits at virtually no land cost. But that is not all the existing restoration potential. In addition to abandoned land, even existing productive land can be largely improved, as current and traditional practices have largely decreased its productivity potential. Although still far from mass adoption, experiments around the world show how more dynamic, forest-inspired and soil-centered agricultural practices can improve yields when compared to mainstream monocultures. A study published by the Sustainable Agriculture Reviews in Switzerland shows how agroforestry-based cocoa plantation can achieve 46% higher yields while also reducing pest attacks. Agroforestry, Syntropic or Regenerative agriculture, and even silvopasture are only some of the new but deep-rooted paradigms that, if applied to large scale systems, could boost both productivity and ecosystem services globally.
IV. Diversify
Stefano Mancuso, a researcher in plant neurobiology, is one of the many ambassadors of the plants’ world that have tried to show us how we are still largely unaware of the potential of plants for our species’ advancement. In his recent book, ‘Plant Revolution’, he cites, among others, examples of hydraulic techniques employed by plants that allow dead tissue to perform movements. That is—to be clear—creating movement without employing energy in any form whatsoever. An example of that can be found in the pine cone’s ability to close up during a rainy day and relaxing back down when the sun is out, knowing well that its spores will spread wider in drier air.
There are plenty of arguments for taking more inspiration from some of plants’ smart and efficient techniques — which are in many cases radically different from those developed by animals. But to avoid getting into too complex innovation, there is also a more down-to-earth argument to pay more attention to the incredible diversity offered by this Kingdom. If in our hunting-gathering days we had mastered uses for nearly all the plant species that surrounded us, today we are downgrading in our ability to take advantage of such diversity. As an example, FAO recently reported that nearly 60% of all calories produced globally from plants come from a tiny portfolio of only three species: wheat, rice, and maize. All of which are annual crops— requiring yearly planting — and mostly cultivated in mono-crop systems. Yet, we are aware of hundreds of species more that could supply us with carbohydrates, some of which are perennial, providing additional ecosystem services on top.
Any investor knows that a diversified portfolio is a cautious choice, preferrable in times of uncertainty; in the same way, diversifying our food production chain will ensure a safer, more resilient and competitive strategy: less susceptible to the havoc a single pest or disease could create and better suited to adapt to a changing climate. At the same time, crop diversity, as opposed to monocropping, tends to mimic self-reliant natural habitats, calling for reduced or no usage of expensive and dangerous inputs to secure satisfying yields. A perhaps radical example, opposite to today’s mainstream agricultural production, is that of Masanobu Fukuoka. Fukuoka was a Japanese microbiologist who spent over thirty years observing how various wild and domesticated species interacted in his farm. In his ‘One-Straw Revolution’, he reports how he obtained plentiful and healthy yields—higher than his neighbors’ who employed traditional techniques coupled with chemical fertilizers—by simply ‘doing nothing’ and letting his farm ecosystem regenerates itself.
Besides Fukuoka’s practice—probably too difficult to reproduce globally— just as we saw for Restoration, even for the Diversify principle existing techniques such as agroforestry and regenerative agriculture can offer useful and proven frameworks to improve yields alongside ecosystem services through crop diversification.
Conclusion
What we are facing in the XXI Century is an enormous tangle of interconnected problems and imbalances that penetrate very deep in our understanding of the world and our way to live and fend for ourselves. Ahead of us is a hazy future—rather present—where rapid, systemic change is needed to preserve functioning ecosystems while keep feeding our species and improve and dignify everyone’s life.
In this complex mixture of natural phenomena and human behaviors, we need to keep focused on what the root causes of this crisis are, and how new paradigms can be employed to address them.
Personally, I hope the four principles I have presented here can provide a helpful framework to improve our understanding and keep developing and testing workable solutions. I also hope this will spark helpful discussion and critique as we all tackle this common challenge. Stay tuned to learn how I apply these four principles in real-world scenarios, through my Medium account and work at contardo.co.
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