Saving Biodiversity Starts Here at Home with Changing Agriculture
Healthy soil means healthy rivers, food and people. But restoring health and balance to the ecosystems we’re part of will require changes in the way we farm.
Human impacts on the planet since the Industrial Revolution show that things are badly out of whack.
In 2009, scientists developed a framework for measuring a ‘’safe operating space’ for humanity within environmental boundaries. They suggested that if we pass those boundaries, we risk catastrophic ‘’non-linear, abrupt environmental change’’.
But even while the framework was being developed, two boundaries were already crossed – safe nitrogen limits and biodiversity losses. Now, four boundaries have been crossed, including climate change and land use. Other limits include freshwater, ocean acidification and deforestation.
We might think these problems are happening somewhere else in the world, not here in ‘’clean green New Zealand’’. Deforestation, polluted rivers, the effects of climate change, are matters for other countries, not for us in ‘’Godzone’’.