Tag Archive for: Landscape Restoration

Conservation in the Age of Climate Change: Saving the Cows—and Grasslands—of Rural Zimbabwe

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Author: Judith D. Schwartz

Sianyanga is a small community far from any paved road in Matabeleland North, Zimbabwe’s poorest province. The village, part of the Hwange Communal Lands, comprises about 150 households — one household being six or seven family members living in a group of small, thatched huts. From the 1990s until about 2010, along with problems endemic to the region, including hunger and lack of clean water, the people of Sianyanga bore an added affliction: biting ants, or izinyebe, that thrive on bare soil.

These weren’t just annoying bugs that nipped a little. Balbina Nyoni, a single mother who has spent her whole life in the area, told me that being rushed on by izinyebe is like having boiling water poured on the skin; the onslaught has sent men to the hospital. The ants were known to gouge out the eyes of baby goats, killing them in minutes. People who lacked shoes, as Nyoni did, wrapped their feet in plastic to avoid getting stung. Being bitten could mean losing toenails, so open shoes were of no use. Plus, the ants ravaged low-growing staple crops such as groundnuts and cowpeas.

In September 2014, I toured Sianyanga with a group of community leaders. I was there to see the results of a seven-year effort to restore a landscape beset by desertification and drought. An older man paused in a grassy meadow and said, “This used to be so bare you could pick up a needle from the land.”

Thousands are leaving drought-ridden areas for places with more water, prompting fears of unrest in a nation already politically and economically fragile.

A few moments later we were on a narrow path when Balbina grabbed my shoulders and shouted, “Look! An ant!” I had to crouch down and squint to see it scuttling in the reddish dirt. Balbina told me that the ants have recently become quite difficult to find.

It was only then that I noticed that the women were all wearing sandals.

The izinyebe were a symptom of a broader problem affecting both Sianyanga and much of the world’s arable land: desertification, a process in which poor land management, overgrazing, and development combine to disrupt the fragile water cycle of semi-arid areas. Shade trees are cut down, natural grasses are removed for crops, and the soil dries up from the direct exposure to the sun. Once-fertile soil becomes inert dust, unable to sustain life. It primarily affects grassland ecosystems, which represent a significant portion of the world’s land mass; it is an important factor in poverty, conflict, and internal and international migration.

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Reconnecting with—and regenerating—our grasslands

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Author: Deanna Pogorelc

This farmer and rancher says an important global movement is underway.

After working for several years as a farmer and rancher at a family farm in the Sacramento Valley, Chris Kerston is now helping promote large-scale restoration of grasslands through holistic management as the director of events and public outreach for the Savory Institute.

While there’s still a lot of work to be done on restoring the land, there’s a big, global movement happening on every continent: Kerston notes that more than 60 million acres of land across the globe being are managed holistically.

He’ll be joining Organic India CEO Kyle Garner, IFOAM Organics International President Andre Leu and Organic Connections Editor Anna Soref on a soil health panel at Natural Products Expo West to talk about just that. Here, he provides some background and context to frame the conversation.

What are some of the major barriers that are keeping more producers from looking at livestock in a more holistic way?

Chris Kerston: This is a difficult question to answer because everyone wants a tangible thing that is what’s in the way to opening this up to the whole world, and the sad part of the answer is that what’s in the way is the human mind. It’s what people believe is possible and what matches with their culture and with how they think things are supposed to be. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t market and policy barriers, but the biggest barrier in terms of widespread global adoption toward regenerative farming is in the way that we think. It’s ‘is this possible?’ and, if somebody believes it’s not possible, they’ll find every way to make it not possible.

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Meet John D. Liu, the Indiana Jones of Landscape Restoration

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[ English | Español ]

He’s known to some as the “Indiana Jones” of landscape degradation and restoration.

John D. Liu, ecosystem restoration researcher, educator and filmmaker, has dedicated his life to sharing real-world examples of once-degraded landscapes newly restored to their original fertile and biodiverse beauty. Liu is director of the Environmental Education Media Project (EEMP), ecosystem ambassador for the Commonland Foundation and a visiting research fellow at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

We recently sat down with Liu, the newest member of the Regeneration International (RI) Steering Committee. In this interview, Liu walks us through large-scale ecosystem restoration projects in China and Rwanda. We learn that when humans work with nature, degraded landscapes can be restored in a matter of years, and economies can be regenerated, putting food security and climate change mitigation within our reach.

In order to survive as a species, Liu explains, humanity must shift from commodifying nature to ‘naturalizing’ our economy.

Interview with John D. Liu, February 4, 2016

RI: What is the significance of the Paris Agreement, reached at the COP21 Climate Summit in December (2015), for the pioneers, such as yourself, of the landscape restoration movement?

Liu: There is now recognition of soil carbon, which was not the case in the past. The best and perhaps only way for humanity to massively affect carbon disequilibrium in the atmosphere is to restore natural ecological function of soils through the restoration of biomass, biodiversity and accumulated organic matter.

One of the things that I have been learning about, and that has most impressed me, is the difference between natural systems, which have huge organic layers, and human systems, which are massively degraded and actually have lost their organic material.

In Paris, we’ve started to turn the corner. Instead of just talking about greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, we’re now seeing [climate change] spoken about as a holistic problem. When you see it holistically, you find out that CO2 and GHG emissions are a symptom of systematic dysfunction on a planetary scale… Human impact on the climate is not simply emissions; it is degradation.

There is a way forward. That is why I am so excited about the early work I did in the Loess Plateau and in Ethiopia, Rwanda and other countries. When you increase organic matter, you increase biomass and you protect biodiversity. You get a completely different result than if you just totally destroy those systems. So I don’t think that the political agreements go far enough, but they are starting to reflect reality, which is better than before.

RI: In Paris, RI encountered skepticism about the potential power of regenerative agriculture and landscape restoration to restore climate stability and feed the world. Can you tell us about your experience with the Loess Plateau restoration project in China and how it impacted your perspective on the potential of restoration?

Liu: There was a moment in the mid-1800s when Thomas Malthus reported that the rate of agricultural increase was happening arithmetically while human population growth was logarithmic. He posited huge famine and this pushed the development of industrial agriculture. But what I’ve seen is that this is based on huge assumptions and those assumptions are basically false. If you think that you can get higher productivity by reducing hydrological function, or the natural fertility in the land or the biodiversity of a biome then you are just sadly mistaken. You can get higher yields of monocultures for a short time but you ultimately destroy the basic fundamental viability of the entire system. So you are creating deserts. This is what happened in the Loess Plateau and this is what happened in every cradle of civilization.

It isn’t inevitable that human beings degrade these systems; we simply have to understand them. It is our understanding, our consciousness of these systems that determines what they look like. What I’ve noticed is that degraded landscapes are coming from human ignorance and greed. If you change that scenario to one of consciousness and generosity, you get a completely different outcome. And that is where we have to go, where we need to go. We are required to understand this. We have to act now as a species on a planetary scale. This has to become common knowledge for every human being on the planet. This has been our mission for the past 20-some years.

RI: Apart from the ecosystem benefits, the Loess Plateau project also helped lift 2.5 million people in four of the poorest provinces in China out of poverty. Is that correct?

Liu: Well, there are different ways to look at it because the Loess Plateau project influenced more than just the project areas. It changed national policy. Some of the negative behaviors, such as slope farming, tree cutting or free ranging of goats and sheep—behaviors that were devastating to biodiversity, biomass and organic material—were banned nationwide because of the work done on the Loess Plateau.

Landscape restoration does not only change ecological function, it changes the socio-economic function and when you get down to it, it changes the intention of human society. So if the intention of human society is to extract, to manufacture, to buy and sell things, then we are still going to have a lot of problems. But when we generate an understanding that the natural ecological functions that create air, water, food and energy are vastly more valuable than anything that has ever been produced or bought and sold, or anything that ever will be produced and bought and sold – this is the point where we turn the corner to a consciousness which is much more sustainable.

RI: It’s almost as if a global paradigm shift is needed to start accounting for nature in the economy. ‘Naturalizing’ the economy as you would say.

Liu: We have to be very careful not to commoditize nature. We need to naturalize the economy. What this means to me is that natural ecological functions are more valuable than ‘stuff.’ When we understand that, then the economy is based on ecological function. And that is exactly what we need in order to mitigate and adapt to climate change, to ensure food security, and to give every individual on the planet equal human rights. Suddenly we are in another paradigm. It’s similar to the shift from flat earth to round earth paradigm.

We need to realize that there is no ‘us and them.’ There is just us. There is one earth and one humanity. We have to act as a species on a planetary scale because we will all be affected by climate change. We have to come together to decide: What do we know? What do we understand? What do we believe as a species?

RI: Tell us about your work in Rwanda.

Liu: Rwanda is an interesting case study because of the 1994 genocide. This sort of a situation is ground zero. It is a reset. Every family, every person was affected. In 2006, I was invited to Rwanda by the British government and the Global Environment Facility (GEF). What I saw in my travels were bare hillsides, erosion and sediment loads in river systems. I presented my findings to the president, prime minister, parliament, cabinet, ministries of environment and agriculture, universities and press. We put films on TV. I explained each of these natural systems and what you have to do to correct it. And at the same moment in time, everyone in Rwanda was talking about ecological function.

Several weeks later, the government wrote me a letter saying thank you for coming to Rwanda to share your experiences. Then they wrote me a second letter, in which  they said we believe you and we’re rewriting our land use policy laws to reflect that economic development in Rwanda must be based on ecological function.

The measures Rwanda has taken have led to regeneration. They had food security when there was famine in East Africa. They have had increasing use of renewable energies and lessening of dependence on fossil fuels. If human beings can go to hell yet they can somehow come back and work to build a fair, equitable and sustainable society, that is a good thing. We need to watch carefully how Rwanda develops, as a lesson for the world.

RI: Can you tell us about the widespread detrimental impacts that industrial agriculture is having, particularly with regards to loss of biodiversity? Why is biodiversity essential to sustain life as we know it?

Liu: Evolutionary trends favor more biodiversity, more organic matter. The industrial or degenerative agriculture model favors less biodiversity, less biomass, less organic matter. This disrupts photosynthesis, hydrological regulation and moisture, temperature and it artificially elevates evaporation rates. Industrial agriculture sterilizes soil with UV radiation. It is just wrongheaded.

Humans went down the wrong path. But once we begin to understand these evolutionary trends, we understand that we have to get back in alignment with them. That is where regenerative agriculture and landscape restoration come in. We’ve seen the results at large scale and we’ve seen them on a smaller scale. This is the way forward for sequestration of carbon, this is the way forward for fertile healthy soils, this is the way forward for food security this is the way forward for meaningful work for everyone. We understand this. This is the basis of wealth and sustainability for humanity.

RI: If there were one behavior or habit of humans that you could magically change, what would it be?

Liu: It is clear right now that economics is driving today’s problems. There are a lot of assumptions in economics that are simply false. Economics now says that extraction, manufacturing, buying and selling can create wealth. This is bullshit. We are creating poverty by doing this. We are creating degradation of the landscapes. So few people in a tiny minority are accumulating vast material possessions in this system, while billions of people are living in abject poverty at the edges of large degraded ecosystems. Others can no longer even stay in their homes, and millions of people are migrating to escape from the horrible conditions. Well this cannot work. This must change.

What I have noticed is that ecological function is vastly more valuable that extraction, production, consumption, and buying and selling things. What we really need to understand is: “What is money?” If I were going to leave one thing for the people to think about it is this: What is money? What is it? It is basically a storehouse of value, a means of exchange, and a trust mechanism. That means it is an abstract concept; it can be anything that we want it to be. If we say that money comes from ecological function instead from extraction, manufacturing buying and selling, then we have a system in which all human efforts go toward restoring, protecting and preserving ecological function. That is what we need to mitigate and adapt to climate change, to ensure food security, to ensure that human civilizations survive. Our monetary system must reflect reality. We could have growth, not from stuff, but growth from more functionality. If we do that and we value that higher than things, we will survive.

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Alexandra Groome is Campaign & Events Coordinator for Regeneration International, a project of the Organic Consumers Association.

We can save individual species — but can we save entire ecosystems?

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Author: Daniel Ackerman

The 1973 Endangered Species Act has rescued numerous individual species from extinction in the United States — think Rocky Mountain wolves or Florida crocodiles, for instance. But as the climate changes and humans continue to modify the landscape in a frenzy of plows, pastures and pavement, single species are not the only things in need of protection from extinction. Entire ecosystems — biological communities created through millions of years of evolutionary interactions between organisms — are at risk as well. Saving single species alone will not restore the intricate tapestry of relationships that shape ecosystems. To protect the habitat that supports those species and preserve services we humans rely on, from cleansing water for our cities and homes to buffering impacts of climate change, we need to save not just species, but also ecosystems, from extinction.

The concept of ecosystem extinction has been recognized for some time in the scientific literature, but is just now beginning to gain widespread application in land management. In fact, the International Union for Conservation of Nature — source of the Red List of Threatened Species, our planet’s premier “high alert” when species start going down the tubes — is developing a red list of endangered ecosystems, similar to its threatened species list.

Thanks largely to agriculture, tallgrass prairie has been reduced by 99 percent.

Among those most threatened are grasslands. Historically, these ecosystems served as valuable habitat for a spectrum of species and provided humans with natural plant- and animal-based foods, as well as wide-open spaces valued for aesthetics and recreation. Today the IUCN calls them “the most altered biome on the planet.” Tallgrass prairie, for example, once covered a Texas-sized swath of North America. From the Canadian Great Plains to the Oklahoman Panhandle, tallgrass prairie supported a diverse array of native plants, pollinating insects and large animals, from grizzlies to bison and elk. Thanks largely to agriculture, tallgrass prairie has been reduced by 99 percent down to a few slivers of road margins and sandy hills throughout the Midwest, now totaling an area smaller than Rhode Island.

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Crisis Response: When Trees Stop Storms and Deserts in Asia

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Author: Kathleen Buckingham 

This is the first installment of our Restoration Global Tour blog series. The series examines restoration success stories in Asia, Latin America, Africa, Europe and North America. Tune in over the coming months for additional installments, or check out our Restoration Diagnostic for more information.

A history of deforestation has made Asian nations like Vietnam, China and South Korea especially vulnerable to coastal storms, floods and sandstorms. Yet just as these nations have experienced similar crises, they’re also all pursuing a solution—restoring degraded landscapes.

In fact, reforestation, afforestation and changing agricultural policies have played a large role in bringing these countries from the brink to prosperity. WRI recently analyzed Asia’s restoration practices to inform the design of our Restoration Diagnostic, a method for evaluating existing and missing success factors for countries or landscapes with restoration opportunities.  Here’s a look at how these countries overcame disasters by restoring degraded land:

Protecting Mangroves in Vietnam

Vietnam has lost more than 80 percent of its mangrove forests since the 1950s. During the American War with Vietnam (1955–75), the U.S. military sprayed 36 percent of the mangroves with defoliant in order to destroy strongholds for military resistance. Since then, extensive areas have been converted into aquaculture, agricultural lands, salt beds and human settlements. More than 102,000 hectares (252,000 acres) of mangroves were cleared for shrimp farming from 1983 to 1987 alone.

With diminishing mangroves, the country’s coast became increasingly vulnerable to natural disasters like tropical cyclones.  Over the past 30 years, more than 500 people died or went missing every year due to natural disasters, thousands were injured, and annual economic losses totaled 1.5 percent of GDP.

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View the Map of Restoration Case Examples

Born to Rewild

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Author: Eli Kintisch

In April 2011, Nikita Zimov climbed into a heavy duty truck with six elk in the back and set out from Novosibirsk, a major city in southern Siberia, on a 4000-kilometer trek to the edge of the world. Time was not on his side. He had to reach the Arctic town of Cher-sky, where he and his father, Sergey, run a hardscrabble research outpost called the Northeast Science Station (NESS), before the spring thaw melted the frozen rivers that serve as winter roads in northern Siberia. White wooden crosses marked spots along the winding road where unlucky drivers had perished. Two weeks into his journey, just 40 kilometers from home, Zimov hit a snowbank—his brakes were shot—and the truck tipped over. Unscathed, he phoned his father and spent the next 4 hours, cold and exhausted, leaning against a flimsy tarp hat covered the truck’s roof to keep the elk, also uninjured, from bolting. “I was miserable,” he says. “Almost literally insane.”

Sergey swooped in to rescue Nikita and the elk, and the animals finally reached their destination: Pleistocene Park, a 14,000-hectare reserve near Chersky founded by the elder Zimov 19 years ago. It’s a grand experiment to test whether large herbivores—elk, moose, reindeer, horses, and bison—can, simply by grazing, bring back a grass-dominated ecosystem called the mammoth steppe. That biome dominated the northern reaches of Eurasia and North America for 2 million years, until the end of the last glacial period some 13,000 years ago, when  the landscape turned to mossy tundra and sparsely forested taiga.

If the Zimovs are right, a brighter future for the entire globe may hinge on the experiment’s success. A decade ago, Sergey and colleagues estimated that permafrost encircling the upper Northern Hemisphere contains a whopping 1 trillion tons of carbon—twice earlier estimates—and that this vast pool may be on the brink of leaking into the atmosphere. The finding was a clarion call to climate scientists to take the arctic carbon threat seriously. “This is the most dangerous territory in the world in terms of climate change,” Zimov declares.

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How ‘Natural Geoengineering’ Can Help Slow Global Warming

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Author: Oswald J. Schmitz

As natural wonders go, perhaps the most awe-inspiring is the annual migration of 1.2 million wildebeest flowing across East Africa’s vast Serengeti grassland. It would be a tragedy to lose these animals. But we almost did in the mid-20th century when, decimated by disease and poaching, their numbers crashed to 300,000.

The consequences of that collapse were profound. Much of the Serengeti ecosystem remained ungrazed. The accumulating dead and dried grass in turn became fuel for massive wildfires, which annually burned up to 80 percent of the area, making the Serengeti an important regional source of carbon dioxide emissions.

Then, conservation programs to eradicate disease and crack down on poaching led to the recovery of the wildebeest, restoring the grazing system and reversing the extent of the large-scale wildfires. Grazing now causes much of the carbon in grass to be released as animal dung, which is in turn incorporated by insects into soil reservoirs that are not prone to burning. The Serengeti ecosystem has now reverted to a carbon dioxide sink so large that it is estimated to offset all of East Africa’s current annual fossil fuel carbon emissions.

The wildebeest decline and recovery taught a valuable lesson, not only in how easy it is to loose an iconic animal species, but, more importantly, how the loss of a single species can have far-reaching ramifications for ecosystems — and the climate. Mounting evidence from ecological science is showing that one or a few animal species can help determine the amount of carbon that is exchanged between ecosystems and the atmosphere. It’s not that any single animal species by itself has a huge direct effect on the carbon budget. Rather, as the wildebeest case shows, by being an integral part of a larger food chain the species may trigger knock-on effects that grow through the chain to drive significant amounts of carbon into long-term storage on land or in the ocean.

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Stewardship with Vision – Episode 1: Jeff Laszlo

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As a result of the O’Dell Creek restoration, Granger Ranches has documented a 900% increase in waterfowl species and a 600% increase in species diversity. The ranch now hosts at least fifteen species of concern, including the American White Pelican, Clark’s Grebe, Great Blue Heron, White-Faced Ibis, Franklin’s Gull, Caspian Tern, Long-billed Curlew and American Bittern, Baird’s Sparrow, McCown’s Longspur, Sprague’s Pipit, Burrowing Owl, Short-eared Owl, Ferruginous Hawk. Trumpeter Swans, once gravely imperiled, take refuge on the ranch with 20-50 wintering annually. Raptor species increased from four to ten. Up to 5,000 Rocky Mountain Sandhill Cranes now make annual migratory visits. The wetlands are also supporting river otters, moose, deer, and rare and sensitive flowers.

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A Continuing Inquiry Into Ecosystem Restoration: Examples From China’s Loess Plateau and Locations Worldwide and their Emerging Implications

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Authors: John D. Liu and Bradley T. Hiller

4.8.1 A JOURNEY BEGINS

In early September 1995, after spending 15 years working as an international news television producer and cameraman, John D. Liu embarked on a life-changing assignment that ultimately prompted this section (Figure 4.8.1). Liu was part of a documentary crew flying in a small Soviet-era copy of a Fokker Friendship aircraft (dubbed the “Friendshipsky”), which landed at a small, dusty airport in Yanan in Shaanxi Province, on China’s Loess Plateau (see Box 4.8.1).

4.8.1.1 CONSIDERING THE IMPLICATIONS

The Loess Plateau has proven to be an excellent place to pursue a type of ecological forensics to witness and understand how human actions over time can destroy natural ecological function. The restoration process of the plateau is providing a living laboratory in which the potential of returning ecological function to long degraded landscapes can be studied. Essentially, what has been witnessed and docu- mented on the Loess Plateau is that it is possible to rehabilitate large-scale damaged ecosystems. This realization has potentially enormous implications for human civilization. Witnessing firsthand many geopolitical events as a journalist, including the rise of China from poverty and isolation throughout the 1980s, the Tiananmen tragedy in 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union, global terrorism, and much more, provided John D. Liu with references to compare to the restoration of the Loess Plateau. He quickly came to realize that, in terms of significance for a sustainable future for humanity, understanding what occurred on the Loess Plateau would be critical.

Yanan is perhaps most famous as the mountainous hideout where Mao Zedong led the Chinese communist Red Army to escape annihilation by the Nationalists (this retreat is often referred to as the “Long March”). The typical dwellings in Yanan at the time were man-made cave dwellings dug so deeply into the soil that they were almost invisible, which made Yanan a particularly good place for a revolutionary to disappear. By 1995, the Chinese communist revolution had moved on and China’s socialist market economy was flourishing on the eastern coast and making waves worldwide. But Yanan remained virtually untouched by the agricultural changes, the industrial growth, and the increasing international influence that much of China was experiencing. Yet in this backwater, a new revolution was brewing.

The purpose of the assignment was a World Bank baseline study for an ambitious development project called the Loess Plateau Watershed Rehabilitation Project (see Box 4.8.2). The scene (as depicted in Figure 4.8.2) was of a completely barren landscape.

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How Wolves Change Rivers

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When wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park in the United States after being absent nearly 70 years, the most remarkable “trophic cascade” occurred. What is a trophic cascade and how exactly do wolves change rivers? George Monbiot explains in this movie remix.

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