Setting Priorities for Biodiversity and Climate: the Urgent Need for Action in the Richest and Most Endangered RegionsJune 2021

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.

The next topic is setting priorities for biodiversity and climate, the urgent need for action in the richest and most dangerous areas. Our very well-known and distinguished panelist who’s going to present on this is Russell Mittermeier. He’s currently the chief conservation officer for Re Wild, which was formerly global wildlife conservation. Prior to this, many of you knew Russ for many years as the president of CI Conservation International, and also before that at WWF. He has a long-term association with the IUCN in many different capacities, and of course, not the least, his love of lemurs and other primates. On the specialist group, he has a special focus on Brazil, Suriname and Madagascar. Russ has published 42 books and about a zillion articles. Russ, very glad to have you.

Thank you. Thank you, Vance. Can you all hear me? All good. Yeah. Well, greetings everyone. It’s great to be with you all today. I always like to start my presentations with an image of a non-human primate, in this case the largest of the living lemurs of Madagascar, the Indri. And Madagascar is going to be one of my examples today. And this is also because I spent the better part of the last 50 years working in the tropical forests of the world, looking at these and many other animals in these forests. Now, as Vance mentioned, in case any of you missed it, a couple of weeks ago, global wildlife conservation changed its name to rewild, which I think is particularly relevant to our session here today.

My topic today is setting priorities for biodiversity and climate, the urgent need for action in the most diverse and most endangered regions, and start off with some basic premises. Biodiversity loss and climate change are two of the most important existential crises that we face this century. The two are inextricably linked and effective. Biodiversity conservation, as has already been indicated by some of the previous speakers, can make a major contribution to combating climate change. Protected areas are essential to achieving our biodiversity and climate change objectives, as are indigenous and community conservation areas, which are getting more and more attention these days. And although rapid action is obviously needed to combat climate change, the need to deal with biodiversity loss is even more immediate. And my examples today are going to be terrestrial and incorporating also any freshwater systems. I’m not going to be talking about marine, and marine has already been very well covered by some of the previous speakers.

Nothing illustrates this more clearly than the hotspots concept. This was a concept that was first developed by Norman Myers back in 1988. I immediately picked up on it, I loved it and carried it forward for the past, what, 33 years now published on it in many different venues. The hotspots are basically about prioritising areas of high irreplaceability as measured by endemic species, and also very high levels of threat. Norman Myers started out with ten hot spots, and over the years, through our research, we’ve increased that to 36 hotspots. These areas once occupied about 16% of the land surface of the planet. The natural vegetation in them, that’s an area roughly equivalent to Russia and Australia put together. More than 85% has already been lost remains is about a little over 2%. This is an area roughly the size of India or the five largest states of the United States combined. And yet in this very small area, you have concentrated as endemics more than 50% of all plants and more than 40% of all non-fish vertebrates, and including a lot of fish, of course, as well. If you want to look at the most endangered species, the most threatened species, using the IUCN red List, we find that anywhere from 70% to 90% of the groups, especially vertebrate groups that we’ve looked at in relation to this issue, are concentrated in these hotspots as well.

Some key points about the hotspots, they’re not just tropical rainforests, they’re not just species richness or endemism. They’re also concentrations of endemism at higher taxonomic levels, endemic genera, endemic families. So we’re also conserving in these areas deep lineages and evolutionary history. No place represents this better than the island of Madagascar and the associated Indian Ocean islands. Madagascar is a little bit larger than France, a little bit smaller than Texas. It’s been isolated for about 90 million years. It has a great diversity of ecosystems, like these giant deoban forests, and it also has very high levels of diversity and endemism in certain groups of organisms. The reptiles, for example, 450 plus species. That’s more than all of North America north of Mexico, and that’s an area 33 times larger than Madagascar. But of course, the lemurs are the best example. They’re the real flagships for Madagascar. You have five families out of the 16 families of primates that exist on earth. 15 genera, 112 species and subspecies. They’re 100% endemic and more than 90% are threatened with extinction.

Unfortunately, Madagascar is also a champion in terms of habitat destruction, I estimate that more than 90% of the natural vegetation is already lost. A lot of the country looks like this, and this devastation, sadly, is continuing as we speak. This is why many of us consider to be Madagascar the world’s highest priority hotspot. But what’s happening there is not limited to there. It’s found in the same situation as occurring in many of these other hotspots as well. Now, before we said a dual focus. In addition to the hotspots, we’ve also looked at what we call high biodiversity wilderness areas. These are also elaborated on in a book that we did a while back. High biodiversity wilderness areas are also high in biodiversity and high in endemism. But unlike the hot spots, they’re still largely intact. 70, 80, in some cases 90% still intact.

The main high biodiversity wilderness areas are the big tropical forest blocks, Amazonia, the Congo forests of central Africa, and the island of New Guinea. They occupy about 6% of Earth’s land surface. And the most striking example, the most intact area that still exists is the Guiana shield region of northern South America, incorporating the northernmost parts of Brazilian Amazon, the three Guyanas and southern Venezuela. And in that area, the flagship country really is Suriname, which is the greenest country on earth. It’s still more than 90% forest covered, and that’s the highest percent of any country on earth. So it offers a lot of real opportunities for conservation of large-scale wilderness. This is a map just to show you that it is, in fact, very green still.

Now, if you’re interested in human cultural diversity, we also have a lot of human cultures, as measured by linguistic diversity in these hotspots and high biodiversity wilderness areas. Of this, roughly 7000 languages that are still spoken, about 74% are found within the hotspots and high biodiversity wilderness areas, including some of the most endangered cultures and languages that are down to a few hundred or a few thousand individuals. So, it’s a real win win situation by focusing on these priority areas. So, the bottom line is that hotspots and high biodiversity wilderness areas are the top priority in terrestrial biodiversity conservation. And if we fail in these areas, especially in the hot spots, we will lose a major portion of the world’s terrestrial biodiversity very soon, regardless of how successful we are in other areas.

So, what to do? Well, we have to protect what remains intact in these priority areas and aggressively rewild them both for their biodiversity values and their critical role in combating climate change. Protected areas. I mean, everyone knows these are one of the greatest tools we have for maintaining biodiversity. We have this target now of 30 by 30, protecting 30% of the planet by 2030, which many, many organisations have signed on to. This is very interesting, this is important, but I think we also need to emphasise that it has to be the right 30 by 30. In other words, not just the percentage, but actually focusing in on the highest priority areas for biodiversity that are at greatest risk. This is well demonstrated by the key biodiversity areas. There are more than 16,000 of these currently identified, but if you look at that pie chart in the lower left-hand corner, only about a third of these are currently protected. So, we really need to see, as top priorities for protected areas, the KBAs in the hot spots, again using Madagascar and the Indian Ocean islands as an example, and top priorities for restoration, for rewilding also strongly overlap with the hot spots.

If you look at this map of priorities for restoration, the areas in dark red, you’ll see that they overlap very heavily with the hotspots and also with some of the more degraded areas of the wilderness areas. Now, indigenous peoples also tremendously important partners in all of this effort. You have this concept of indigenous and community owned conservation areas, which is growing every daily in importance. I’m not going to go into any detail on this, but there’s a very good new populace. A new publication that just came out called territories of life goes into this issue in a great deal of detail, but it looks like we could get 20 plus percent of really critically important areas covered by these indigenous and community owned lands.

An example from Amazonia. Here you have a map of Amazonia with the in darker green, the traditional protected areas, and in yellow, orange, yellow, whatever you want to call that, the indigenous areas. And you can see that depending on the country, the indigenous areas are either equivalent to or even somewhat greater in extent than the traditional protected areas, and they serve as a real protection against destruction. Here in the circle, you see the indigenous lands of the southern Brazilian Amazon, the
Jingu regions, about 13, 14 million. It’s in an area of extreme devastation in Amazonia,
as indicated by the red. And basically it’s the indigenous lands that remain intact. The rest is all cattle pasture and soy. Now linking biodiversity and climate change.

Obviously, we do this through nature-based solutions. We did a book on this last year and of course this is getting a lot of attention. In particular, the importance of tropical forests is being emphasised as a solution to climate change problem, both protection and restoration of tropical forests. It’s an immediate, low-cost solution, but it’s still less than 2%, maybe even less than 1% of global investment. Now, to finish up, I just want to give my example of animating the carbon cycle. I love this concept, I think it’s brilliant and I want to just give you a tropical forest example. I saw this article a few years back called hyper dominance in amazonian forest carbon cycling. This showed that 1% of forest trees all over Amazonia are responsible for about 50% of the carbon capture. This is roughly 20 species of large, slow growing, emergent hardwood trees in primary forests. Looked at the list of tree species, I recognised a lot of them because from my studies of primates in Amazonia, I realised that a lot of these were dispersed by large frugivorous primates, like this spider monkey, by large frugivorous birds, like this curacao, by tapirs, and even by forest floor tortoises, which, like the marine turtles that were mentioned earlier, can exist at very high densities if they’re not hunted out.

Unfortunately, these large hardwood species are among the first trees to be cut down when so called sustainable logging operations come in, which are not sustainable at all. And as humans enter these areas, these animals that are critically important dispersers are also among the first to be hunted out. So, when we look at these forests, it’s not just a matter of protecting the forest, but making sure that the key species in them, both plants and animals, are also maintained to make sure that they continue to have their great carbon capture potential. So, with that, I’ll wrap up, I’ll end everything is interconnected. Biodiversity, climate change and the species conservation, protected areas, indigenous and community conservation areas, restoration. We need a truly holistic approach to be successful. But please, let’s pay very special attention to those priority areas for biodiversity that are disappearing as we speak, because they could be gone before we get anywhere close to 2030. Thank you very much.