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.
That’s the end of the presentations. We have a very short announcement to make. I’d asked the team to spotlight Karl Burkart, and myself for our ending announcement. And we’re just about finished. Thank you. There we go, Karl. Good, thank you. The goal of this webinar has been to sound the note for the unification of biodiversity and climate solutions. We’ve done a lot about energy on climate. It’s now Nature’s day, so we’re very pleased to announce a new project focused specifically on that. And I’d like Karl to tell us. Thank you, Karl.
Yeah, thanks. This was. This kind of emerged, actually, as an idea when we were talking a few months ago about this panel. One of the things, I mean, the precedent we’re kind of working on is this big book I mentioned in my presentation, which is achieving the Paris climate agreement goals. When we funded this, we kind of did. Well, first, we didn’t really realise we were funding a 500-page book that would have the impact it did. It’s now, according to publisher, one of the most downloaded texts in their history, and it’s being taught to other modellers about what we need to do collectively to solve climate change. So just embedded in one little tiny part of chapter four of this book, which is a free download, by the way. You can get it. We’ll send the link out if you don’t have it.
There was the section on restoration as a climate solution, and we were shocked that no one had actually done a global model that did a meta-analysis of all these different models, put them into one composite Monte Carlo analysis, which means that it can then be plugged into climate modelling efforts, because before that, pretty much everyone was using Beck’s. I don’t know if you. There are some people on this call who know what Beck’s is essentially burning forest for energy and allegedly storing that carbon somewhere. And so we realised we needed a much better model than that. And so that’s what that was, a seed that was planted in that book. So as we were talking about this panel, we realised, well, this is a great theory of change, because this one book has impacted probably hundreds of climate modelling efforts. So we really thought, well, could we do this for rewilding?
Could we if we kind of take a global composite approach, could we look at the impact of doubling kelp, doubling sea otters, doubling whales, doubling wolves in different types of landscapes? It feels like a vastly complicated project to take on, but it feels like one that’s absolutely necessary right at this moment. And so one earth is going to do an initial grant to the rewilding alliance to create a schema for this book, which then will roll up into a larger scientific effort. And I think it’ll take a similar kind of concept and approach, which was a collaboration of scientists. So I think Vance and his crew will have a really interesting consultative process with the experts on this panel and all the experts around the world on this topic. So it’s a very exciting project. It’ll be years in the making, but on the other end of it, we could have a scientific model for the global impact of rewilding writ large. So that felt like a very exciting thing for one earth to support.
Thank you, Karl. That’s a great start. This is going to be an important work. As I mentioned, the time for nature is now. So thank you, Karl, for that. And in closing, I’d like to thank everyone who participated, and certainly all of the panelists. This was a landmark event and a sea mark event. Thank you. And we’re going to move forward. I wanted to really thank the team behind the scenes, who do all the work that make us speak to you in a coherent manner. I also want to really thank the UN decade. The UN decade is launching at the beginning of what we’ll undoubtedly be the most momentous, critical decade in human history on this planet. We have a lot of work ahead of us, all of us. But, you know, I have a very firm belief we were born for this time. So let’s do it. Thank you all very much. Have a good day. Have a good evening. Thank you.
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