Please note: This video was one of a number of presentations from the webinar, and in order to allow each video to be watched individually, they all have the same 30 second introduction to provide the required context.
If you have already seen this introduction in another video from the webinar, please skip to 0:31.
Read the video transcript:
The subject of the webinar today is animating the carbon cycle. It really explores the very important link between biodiversity and climate. And the goal of this webinar is to launch a new global initiative to launch nature and climate, and set the first global target for restoration and rewilding to address this accelerating climate breakdown.
We’re going to move right forward now to Karl Burkart, who is the deputy director of One Earth and he was formerly director of media, science and technology at the Leonardo DiCaprio foundation. One Earth supports academic institutions and NGO’s working on the cutting edge of climate and energy science, biodiversity mapping and sustainable agriculture through grant making and development capacity. Their programme is particularly focused on scaling innovation in big data, remote sensing and artificial intelligence to accelerate conservation on land and sea.
Carl, thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me. This is an exciting, exciting day today, with the kick-off of the UN decade on restoration. So it’s an honour to be here. And today I’m going to really be providing a quick, brief intro and some context setting about the state of our global climate system and how rewilding could actually play a really key role in limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees celsius. For some context, we’re currently at about 1.2 degrees in global average temperature rise above early industrial levels, and already in 2020. As you all know, we saw extremely dramatic climate responses, from rapidly melting polar ice to intensifying forest fires.
As Christiana Figueres, one of the architects of the Paris climate agreement, recently said, from here on out, every 10th of a degree matters. We’re used to talking about these more kind of dramatic fire and ice impacts, but we’ll have extreme impacts across all ecosystems. A recent paper found that above 1.5 degrees, we could lose from eight to 4% of all arable land. And this could cause a collapse of many. Oh, sorry, got you guys in there. Cause the collapse of many ecosystems and with increasing risks of extinctions worldwide. So, 1.5 degrees really is our upper limit. And the existential question we’ve been working on is, can we still achieve the 1.5 degrees goal? And if so, how? Back in 2017, we started asking top climate scientists and experts this very question, trying to see who had the game plan to achieve the 1.5 degrees goal.
And really, we came up empty handed. I have to say, at the time, there were no models that showed how we could realistically achieve this target using currently available technologies and natural climate solutions. So, we decided to fund it with a cohort of leading scientific partners, led by the German Aerospace Centre and University of Technology, Sydney. The climate model was published by Springer Nature in the book achieving the Paris climate Agreement goals. It’s about 500 pages of very dense text, so it is certainly complicated to answer that question. But I can give you the spoiler. The quick answer is yes, we can. Contrary to some opinions, it is still possible to limit warming to 1.5 degrees with available technologies and natural climate solutions. And that’s actually using a more conservative carbon budget, which factors in biosphere feedbacks such as wildfires and thawing permafrost. It won’t be easy, but it’s definitely possible.
So, here’s the 1.5 degrees scenario in one graph, updated post Covid not going to go into a lot of detail, but there are three major things I wanted to point out that this chart tells us about what we need to do to solve climate change. And so first, as mentioned earlier, there’s the big black mountain there on the left, and that’s historic carbon emissions and the need to rapidly decarbonize our energy supplies with a goal of at least 50% renewables by 2030 and 100% by 2050. So, this is kind of our biggest task in some way, but it’s not enough. We need nature.
And the second thing in the blue and green areas on the lower left, that really shows nature’s contribution to regulating the carbon cycle, and that’s through land and ocean carbon sinks. These are the wildlands and marine areas that absorb about half of our carbon dioxide emissions every year and store them. So, we need to protect all remaining natural ecosystems. And the third big thing, which we’re going to spend a lot more time on today, is represented by the gold area under the line. This shows the potential of restoration to actively remove additional carbon from the atmosphere. The 1.5 degrees model identifies that we need about 510 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide removal. That’s about 140 gigatons of carbon by 2100. And it also shows that this can be achieved through restoration.
Now, I’m not going to dwell at all on the energy model, but that would be another hourlong lecture. But I do want to say that no matter what you hear in the next or the past few months, the next few months coming out of the mouths of politicians, we do in fact have virtually all the technologies we need right now to decarbonize energy. And it’s actually far cheaper than most people would think. So, we do not need to invent new Sci-Fi technologies, but we do need nature. We need a lot of nature. To get us the rest of the way to our goal of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees. The global safety net was a major scientific paper we released last year in science advances to look at this. And it shows the full spatial extent, at a one-kilometre resolution, of all remaining natural lands that play an important role in biodiversity and carbon storage. Totalling approximately 50.4% of the world’s land, these areas act as our global carbon sponge, keeping the climate system from going haywire, really, by storing 1.9 trillion tonnes of carbon above and below ground and absorbing about ten gigatons of carbon dioxide every year.
We really can’t afford to lose any of these coloured areas on the map. We need to protect them all. But as we mentioned, we also need to draw down additional carbon from the atmosphere to have that good chance of 1.5 degrees. And we need to put it in the ground where it belongs. This map here is from Herb et al paper 2017 that shows historic carbon loss from land. And those darker areas show more intense loss. The paper shows that about 465 billion tonnes of carbon has been lost to the atmosphere since agriculture began. But how much of this lost carbon can we actually still put back in the ground? This was a big question, and it was the beginning of it was answered in chapter four of the book I mentioned, which established for the first time a statistical methodology for including nature restoration into the climate models. This chart depicts four major forestry pathways divided into tropical and temperate zones. So, reforestation. The best known one is the lighter green areas there in the middle, that has the biggest potential, across 350 million lands, to deliver 52 gigatons of carbon removal in the tropics. And then another eight gigatons of removal in the temperate.
In temperate areas. The darker green curves on the bottom show the potential for actually increasing carbon density through natural restoration of existing forest. That’s what Magnus was talking about earlier. We have these, some of these emptier forests that we have a lot more biomass put back in, and that’s in the study here. Across 600 lands, there’s a potential of 27 gigatons of carbon removal. The brown curves show potential for better forest management practises on managed lands, and the red shows potential for trees on agricultural land at the top. So, altogether, through just these four pathways, we find a technical potential of about 140 gigatons of carbon that could be removed by 2100.
But, of course, there are many, many more pathways for restoration, which is why we’re having this event today. A new paper we’re funding will show the technical potential of restoration across several other ecosystem types, including coastal areas. But really restoring habitats, that’s the actual physical structure of habitats for carbon removal, is just the first step. When we start to look at the dynamic interplay of species within ecosystems, we can see many more opportunities for carbon removal. The science is only now catching up to the potential for rewilding as a climate solution. Just one example is the whale. According to one study, recent study marine biologists found that if we doubled, we’re able to double current whale populations, which is still less than their historic numbers. We could realise as much as an additional ten gigatons of carbon removal this century just through that practise.
So, this is one example of the vital role that rewilding could play as a solution to climate change. So, to end, I just want to say, you know, present this target that we’ve been working on for a while, really just say it’s time that the world gets really serious about the technical potential of rewilding to supercharge our terrestrial and marine carbon sinks. We know that we need at least 150 gigatons of carbon removal for a good chance of 1.5 degrees. And the science is showing us that Keystone species like wolves and tigers and toucans and tapirs actually animate the global carbon cycle, and thus they are critical for the survival of humanity. Thriving biodiversity is really key to maintaining the health of land and ocean ecosystems that sequester and store carbon. So that’s the topic we’re going to dive into today. And I’m myself excited to hear the panel looking at specific examples of rewilding around the world and how we can start to get towards this goal of 150 gigatons of carbon removal through rewilding.
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