The End of Doom (37 page)

The IPCC's 2014
Adaptation
report notes: “Models project that the risk of species extinctions will increase in the future due to climate change, but there is low agreement concerning the fraction of species at increased risk, the regional and taxonomic focus for such extinctions and the timeframe over which extinctions could occur.” That is to say, the computer models that researchers use to try to estimate the effects of climate change on species don't agree on how many species are at risk, where they are at risk, which species are at risk, and how long it would take before species went extinct. As a result, the report finds that “model-based estimates of the fraction of species at substantially increased risk of extinction due to 21st century climate change range from below 1% to above 50% of species in the groups that have been studied.” Another interesting observation in that report is that “evidence from the paleontological record indicating very low extinction rates over the last several hundred thousand years of substantial natural fluctuations in climate—with a few notable exceptions such as large land animal extinctions during the Holocene—has led to concern that forecasts of very high extinction rates due entirely to climate change may be overestimated.” Furthermore, the
Adaptation
report notes, “The limited number of studies that have directly compared land use and climate change drivers have concluded that projected land use change will continue to be a more important driver of extinction risk throughout the 21st century.” In other words, the biggest peril faced by species is not climate change but how human beings use and alter landscapes.

Since how people use land and water is the critical factor in protecting species from extinction, looking to the future there is good news with regard to strongly positive trends in population, farmland, urbanization, protected areas, and wealth. As we've seen in earlier chapters, human population will most likely peak in this century and begin to fall. Second, average wealth will also increase substantially, which will generate more demand for environmental quality, including the expansion and protection of wild areas.

Expanding Protected Land and Seascapes

In fact, the expansion of protected areas is already happening at a remarkably fast pace. The World Bank notes that protected areas have nearly doubled from 8.5 percent in 1990 to 14.3 percent in 2012 of the world's total land area. That's an area twice the size of the entire United States. Marine protected areas have increased from 4.7 percent of territorial waters in 1990 to 10 percent in 2012. Under the Convention on Biological Diversity, governments of the world have committed to protecting 17 percent of terrestrial and inland water areas and 10 percent of coastal and marine areas by 2020.

Additionally, forests covered 41.6 million square kilometers (16 million square miles) of the globe in 1990, falling to 40.2 million square kilometers (15.5 million square miles) in 2011, about one-third of the world's land area. The encouraging news is that the annual global deforestation rate decelerated from an average of 0.18 percent in during the 1990s to an average of 0.11 percent in the last decade.

Still Time Enough to Save Ocean Biodiversity

A January 2015 article in
Science
by a team of researchers led by University of California at Santa Barbara ecologist Douglas McCauley seeks to analyze what is happening to marine biodiversity. The good news is that extinctions in the seas appear to have been much rarer than on land. For example, while the IUCN reports that 514 terrestrial animal species have gone extinct since 1500, only 15 marine species have. These include the great auk, Steller's sea cow, and the Caribbean monk seal.

Nevertheless human pressure, especially overfishing, has dramatically reduced the numbers and ranges of many marine species. The study notes, “Aggregated population trend data suggest that in the last four decades, marine vertebrates (fish, seabirds, sea turtles and marine mammals) have declined in abundance by on average 22%. Marine fishes have declined in aggregate by 38%, and certain baleen whales by 80% to 90%.” Scripps Institution of Oceanography researcher Jeremy Jackson reported in 2008 that the populations of large open ocean predators such as tuna and sharks have been reduced by 90 percent, oysters by 91 percent, and North Atlantic cod by 96 percent. Nevertheless, as the
Science
article points out, “Marine defaunation, however, has not caused many global extinctions of large-bodied species. Most large-bodied marine animal species still exist somewhere in the ocean.”

The chief cause for declining marine populations is overfishing, but habitat degradation could play a bigger role over the course of this century if global warming and ocean acidification continue apace. To rein in excessive exploitation of wild marine populations, the authors recommend among other policies the adoption of incentive-based fisheries. One of the main ways to achieve this is to close open-access fisheries by privatizing them. A 2008 study in
Science
found that implementing such a policy “halts, and even reverses, the global trend toward widespread collapse.”

McCauley and his colleagues observe, “Wildlife populations in the oceans have been badly damaged by human activity. Nevertheless, marine fauna generally are in better condition than terrestrial fauna: Fewer marine animal extinctions have occurred; many geographic ranges have shrunk less; and numerous ocean ecosystems remain more wild than terrestrial ecosystems.” As a result, the researchers conclude that while the need for action is urgent, there is still time to rescue and restore the biodiversity of the oceans.

Cities Spare Nature

Another extremely positive megatrend with regard to protecting and restoring nature is urbanization. In his 2010 article “How Slums Can Save the Planet,” prominent environmental thinker Stewart Brand cited architect Peter Calthorpe's 1985 assertion that “[t]he city is the most environmentally benign form of human settlement. Each city dweller consumes less land, less energy, less water, and produces less pollution than his counterpart in settlements of lower densities.”
By 2010, the majority of people lived in cities for the first time in history. Demographers expect that 80 percent of people will live in urban areas by 2050 or so. Setting aside the demographic fact that people who live in cities have fewer children, what this trend means is that a lot fewer people will be living on the landscape in the future. Today, about half of the world's population of 7.2 billion people lives in rural areas. Assuming that world population grows to 9 billion by 2050 and that 80 percent do live in cities, that would mean that only 1.8 billion would be on the landscape, as compared to 3.6 billion today. If world population tops out at 8 billion, then only 1.6 billion people would live in the countryside—2 billion fewer people than live there now.

In
The Communist Manifesto,
Karl Marx asserted that bourgeois capitalism fueled the growth of cities and “thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.” History has shown that people prefer the opportunities and excitement of city life to rural “idiocy.” And the former country dwellers are voting massively in favor of urban living with their feet. Some 60 million people are leaving the countryside to move into cities annually. While some portion may be pushed by war or drought or poverty into cities, most people today are pulled in by the prospect of reinventing themselves, escaping from the narrow strictures of family, class, and community, and a shot at really making it.

As humanity has urbanized, people have become ever less subject to nature's vagaries. For instance, a globally interconnected world made possible by the transportation networks between cities means that a crop failure in one place can be overcome by food imports from areas with bumper crops. Similarly, resources of all types can be shifted quickly to ameliorate human emergencies caused by the random acts of a brutal insensate nature.

Today cities occupy just 2 percent of the earth's surface, but that will likely grow to 3 percent over the next half century. Oddly, environmentalist gadfly Jeremy Rifkin has proclaimed, “In the next phase of human history, we will need to find a way to reintegrate ourselves into the rest of the living Earth if we are to preserve our own species and conserve the planet for our fellow creatures.” Actually, he's got it completely backward. Humanity must not reintegrate into nature—in that way lies disaster for humanity and nature. Instead we must make ourselves even more autonomous than we already are from her.

Peak Farmland

Considering that agriculture is the most expansive and intensive way in which people transform natural landscapes, the really good news is that the amount of land globally devoted to food production may be falling as population growth slows and agricultural productivity increases. “We believe that projecting conservative values for population, affluence, consumers, and technology shows humanity peaking in the use of farmland,” conclude Jesse Ausubel, the director of the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University, and his colleagues in their 2013 article “Peak Farmland and the Prospect for Land Sparing.” They add, “Global arable land and permanent crops spanned 1,371 million hectares in 1961 and 1,533 million hectares in 2009, and we project a return to 1,385 million hectares in 2060.” As a result of these trends, humanity will likely restore at least 146 million hectares, an area two and a half times that of France or the size of ten Iowas, and possibly much more land. “Another 50 years from now, the Green Revolution may be recalled not only for the global diffusion of high-yield cultivation practices for many crops, but as the herald of peak farmland and the restoration of vast acreages of Nature,” write the researchers. “Now we are confident that we stand on the peak of cropland use, gazing at a wide expanse of land that will be spared for Nature.”

The Return of the Forests?

As a consequence of peak farmland, the forests that harbor many species are regrowing around the world. This was confirmed by researchers in a 2006 article on forest trends in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
that found that “[a]mong 50 nations with extensive forests reported in the Food and Agriculture Organization's comprehensive
Global Forest Resources Assessment 2005,
no nation where annual per capita gross domestic product exceeded $4,600 had a negative rate of growing stock change.” Consider, for example, that between 1960 and 2000, India added 15 million hectares to its forests, an area larger than the state of Iowa. In fact, leaving aside Brazil and Indonesia, forests around the world have increased by about 2 percent since 1990, according to researchers at Resources for the Future.

In 2014, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reported somewhat less rosy trends with regard to global forest cover. Based on analyzing satellite imagery, the FAO's Global Forest Resources Assessment team concluded that the total forest area in 2010 was 3.89 billion hectares (15 million square miles), which is around 30 percent of the global land area. Between 1990 and 2010, there was a net reduction in the global forest area of around 5.3 million hectares (20,000 square miles) per year. Net deforestation amounted to roughly 106 million hectares (400,000 square miles), an area more than double the size of California. The FAO reports that the extent of boreal, temperate, and subtropical forest area over the past twenty years has largely remained steady and most of the forestland cover reduction occurred in tropical forests.

A February 2015 study also using satellite imagery published in
Geophysical Research Letters
by University of Maryland researchers reported similar but accelerated trends for net tropical deforestation. They looked at trends in thirty-four countries that account for 80 percent of tropical forestlands. During the 1990–2000 period the annual net forest loss was 4 million hectares (15,000 square miles) per year. During the 2000–2010 period, the net forest loss rose to 6.5 million hectares (25,000 square miles) per year. The net tropical deforestation in the past twenty years amounts to about 105 million hectares (400,000 square miles).

There is, however, some good news: in 2009 researchers at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute estimated that a quarter to a third of the tropical forests that have been cut down by farmers and loggers are now regenerating. Why is this happening? Because like New England farmers before them, small farmers in tropical countries are moving on to more lucrative lives in towns and cities and secondary forests are now growing on their abandoned fields and pastures. In its
State of the World's Forests 2005
report, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization noted that secondary forests in tropical Africa, America, and Asia in 2002 were estimated at 245 million, 335 million, and 270 million hectares, respectively, for a total of 850 million hectares. In addition, the FAO observed that regenerating forests “contribute to biodiversity conservation by relieving pressure on primary forests, by functioning as corridors for the migration of flora and fauna in fragmented landscapes and by maintaining plant and animal genetic resources.”

In 2003, some prominent ecologists pessimistically predicted that it was “doubtful that more than 10% of the tropical forests will be protected, and probably more realistic to think of 5% surviving the next 50 years.” Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute scientist Joseph Wright rejects this catastrophist prognostication and reports in a 2010 review article that current forest trends suggest that between 64 and 89 percent of the tropical forests present in 2000 will remain forested in 2050. He also cites data showing that the composition of creatures living in naturally regenerating or secondary tropical forests are quite similar to those found in mature tropical forests. “These comparisons suggest that the conservation value of naturally regenerating tropical forests is potentially large,” Wright writes. “Fortunately, a wide range of tropical forest species are able to survive in human-modified landscapes, and new research programs are increasingly focused on management to increase the conservation value of human modified, tropical landscapes.”