Instant Genius - Biodiversity, with Dr Andrew Terry

Episode Date: January 13, 2023

In December 2022, representatives from governments and other official bodies from around the world met in Montreal for COP15: The UN Biodiversity Conference. Amongst the many things discussed was the so-called 30 by 30 target – the pledge to conserve 30 per cent of the planet’s terrestrial and marine habitat by 2030. In this episode, Terry, tells us about the significance of the target, the current state of the Earth’s biodiversity and what role we can all play in reversing its devastating loss. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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delivering digital precision with analogue warmth. So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com. to learn more. Hello and welcome to Instant Genius, a bite-sized masterclass in podcast form. Each week you'll hear world-leading scientists and experts talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor at BBC

Science Focus magazine. In December 2022, representatives from governments and other official bodies from around the world met in Montreal for COP15, the UN Biodiversity Conference. Amongst the many things discussed was the so-called 30-by-30 target. the pledge to conserve 30% of the planet's terrestrial and marine habitat by 2030. In this episode, I speak to Dr Andrew Terry, Director of Conservation and Policy at the Zoological Society of London. He tells me about the significance of the target, the current state of the Earth's biodiversity,

and what role we can all play in reversing its devastating loss. In December, we had the COP 15 UN Biodiversity Conference in Montreal. So I think the best place to start maybe then is to say, what exactly is this, what's its history, and who attends? So this was the conference of the parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, to kind of give it its full name. And the Convention on Biological Diversity was one of the original Rio summits, which were looking at biodiversity, climate change, and desertification.

And what they did was they created these three conventions that almost ran in parallel tracks. And actually, one of the real challenges we've identified and come to deal with now is that addressing these problems has followed their own pathways through time and not actually all being dealt with as one particular problem because they're all highly interrelated. So it's all about saving biodiversity and setting global goals. And who comes? Well, it's a complete mixture. So the parties to the convention are countries. And so there's almost 200 countries who signed the convention. They are the decision makers.

There's a notable absence, which is the United States, who sort of see themselves as a friend of the convention, but refuse to sign it. And then a whole host of intergovernmental agencies and non-governmental organizations like ourselves at ZSL, who are observers. And we are there to advise and inform and keep track of the negotiations. as they progress. So you mentioned there the different streams. So we've recently had COP 26 in Glasgow. So that's a bit confusing, isn't it, that 15 is coming after 26. So what's the difference there? It's related to how often they meet and when they sort of entered into force. And so essentially, we've had 15 cops for biodiversity. We've now had 27 cops for climate change. And that's to do with how often they're meeting.

And just in the same way that COP26 was a sort of landmark convention for climate change, so COP15 was a landmark meeting for biodiversity. And so those don't happen every so often. So COP15 was all about creating this new framework, new set of goals and targets for our global commitment to save biodiversity. Yeah, so we'll get into the sort of the meat of that in a moment. But first off, we're talking about biodiversity. So what exactly is biodiversity? So biodiversity speaks to the range of the variety of life. And we think about that right from the genetic level all the way up to variety and whole ecosystems. We often tend to use the species as the sort of flagship for biodiversity. So we think about the different. animals and plants and fungi that make up life. But it's really the full variety of life, the variation

within populations down to a cellular and genetic level that makes up the resilience and diversity of our natural world. So we're talking about everything ranging in size from microbes to blue whales and everything in the forest, on the land, in the ocean, in the rivers. Exactly. And the variety of the differences between individual blue whales and microbes and everything. And it's really that connectivity and that interaction that kind of gives resilience to the system. It also makes it very difficult to police because unlike climate, unlike thinking about carbon emissions, biodiversity is not all the same. It's different in different places. And so we can't think of it, you know, a similar way that we might think about some of the climate change problems. So having said that,

Can we have a sort of broad brush view? What's the current state of biodiversity globally? Declining massively. So every indicator you look at, whether it's the Living Planet Index, which is one that ZSL produces looking at the state of wildlife populations worldwide, or whether you look at the health of ecosystems or the health of genetic variation, it's all declining. So every single indicator shows us that over a period of time, biodiversity,

is all declining. And this has major knock on consequences for us. Yeah, so why is biodiversity so important? So biodiversity or nature, I mean, we can stop you. Unfortunately, biodiversity is a term that doesn't resonate very well with people. So as a technical term, it captures something, but we're really talking about nature. And nature underpins the ability of humanity to persist. So when we often think about our economic models and society. We really need to think about how societies are embedded within the biosphere, within nature, and how our economies are embedded within society. So the biosphere, nature underpins everything we do. It underpins our health, our well-being, the ability of our economies to function. Unfortunately, we flip that on the head and we put our economies at the top

and we put nature at the bottom. And ultimately, that lies at the root cause of all of our problems. So is this decline happening all over the world equally, or is it worse in some countries and areas than others? So it's happening across the world, but it's not happening equally. And there's a historic lens to that, as well as that biodiversity isn't distributed around the world equally. So if you think about in the tropical regions, we have the major stores of nature of wildlife. And so that's where you've got the most to lose. But equally, historically, some regions went through major declines earlier than others. So if we think into the UK, we lost a lot of our wildlife many hundreds of years ago,

and we're dealing with the consequences of that now. And those declines are not so severe currently in, let's say, in Europe, because they're really historical, whereas they are extremely severe in the tropical regions. So when we look into the Living Planet Index, we see that at an ecosystem level, freshwater systems are most badly hit at the moment. And if we look regionally, areas in the Caribbean and Latin America are being hit the worst. So how about the current state in the UK? You know, where do we stand?

We are one of the most nature-depopurate countries in the world, putting it bluntly. And that to me says two things. One is, again, we're coming at the end of a historical legacy of modifying our natural environment to suit humanity and suit our uses. Over three quarters of our land is under management for food consumption. And that has had a huge impact on nature within our country. And also, it's how we think about protecting, restoring nature, how we think about the function of our national. parks and protected areas, what are they there to do? And our appetite for seeing wildlife to come back broadly across society as well. So if we think about, so the Earth's 4.5 billion years old,

it's taken that long to build this level of biodiversity. And then humans come along and it starts reducing. So when did this all, at this decline, start happening? I think, yeah, I think there's one thing. We've got to be very careful about the relationship. between humanity and nature because humans have come, you know, they have humanity. We influence our surroundings. We interact with our surroundings and our surroundings change in response to that. But we've got to be very careful to avoid a narrative of humanity as, you know, the bad guy in this. And increasingly communities, local communities and indigenous communities in particular,

you know, there's an easy narrative that people fall into to target a, as being the bad guys. And actually, the opposite is true. In so many cases, indigenous communities are the custodians of natural areas. And this is, this comes into play, particularly politically when we think about COP 15, but also the climate change cops. The need to support and ensure resources get to communities who lead and are enabling protection of wildlife and on the ground is absolutely paramount.

but so little of those resources actually get there. And so I'm sort of not really answering your question, but in essence it's a very, it's become a very divisive issue in conservation. And it's important to recognize the value of local communities in protecting biodiversity. Okay, maybe I can put it in a different way. So what's actually causing the biodiversity loss?

So the biodiversity loss, we look at, principally, it's habitat use and habitat loss. So that's changing natural areas for human use, whether it's turning primary forest into agriculture or into highways or into mines. And then it's direct over-exploitation of species. So primarily, for example, fishing and harvesting practices, the way in which we clear forests for timber. And then we've got other drivers of change or primary pressures such as invasive alien species.

You know, again, as we've moved around the world and we've become increasingly globalized, we've moved species into places they shouldn't be and they have impacts that way. And then obviously climate change comes along and has a direct impact on natural systems, but it also interacts with these pressures to make them far worse and create negative feedback, loops. So really those are the ones. And we're going to see climate change historically hasn't been a major driver of change. And we're going to see it come and dominate those kind of pressures over the coming years. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. With over 100 years of combined expertise, Name and Focal have been bringing music to listeners just as the

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Visit focal powered by name.com for more information. So one sort of big headline item coming off all of this is this so-called 30 by 30 target. And obviously that's a really catchy title. But what exactly does it mean? Yes, 30 by 30 is very catchy. And I think a number of people really wanted it to be the 1.5 degrees for nature. So 30 by 30 has been around for a few years now,

and it refers to wanting to see 30% of terrestrial and ocean systems protected by 2030. So at a very simplistic level, that's what that target is there to try and achieve. But there's a lot of detail and nuance that's hidden within that simplicity, which we need to get into. So has this target been widely praised? Depends who you talk to is the answer to that. And this is where the nuance comes in. So it's a target that has been widely pushed by, for example, the high ambition coalition and major governments who are behind the CBD process. It's been pushed by major donors, major NGOs. And I think partly because a protected areas are one of the more effective mechanisms for conservation, although we need to get into And B, because it's a way of galvanizing attention around a target just like 1.5.

You know, it's a way of biodiversity has really lacked these kind of headline targets. It's been very difficult. And so 30 by 30 comes along as something that really grabs attention and people can get behind. So there's been a lot of support for it at a political level. However, it also represents, and one of the chief criticism, well, there are two chief criticisms of it. Number one is it represents a form of fortress-based conservation, which can be seen as being very old-school. So depending on how you implement it, it can involve quite negative practices in terms of relationship with local communities and others.

And so there's a natural resistance to what's seen as a potentially exploitative way of approaching conservation. The second major criticism is all about the question of quantity over quality. So 30 and 30 percent, they're sort of arbitrary targets. You know, there was a bolder ambition to the half-earth movement, which was to see 50% of the Earth surface protected. But we know that so many of these areas effectively only exist on paper. And so biodiversity has declined as protected areas have increased. So the solution is not only in protected areas. So if we only think about designating more areas for protected status,

we're going to be missing a big part of the problem. Yeah, so the time scale is obviously seven years away. I mean, that doesn't seem like a very long time to me. No, it's not. And it kind of comes hot on the heels of 20 by 20. You know, in 2010, the IHU targets were set to have 20% of the land and sea protected. and at last count it's about 17% of terrestrial services and 11% of marine surfaces are in some form of protection. So I'm not sure what we're going to be doing differently that's going to get us from there to 30% by 2030.

And I think that's, again, one of the challenges because, as I said, with the issue of many of those existing on paper, we're not going to hit those targets and a whole bunch of those aren't effective anyway. So what are we going to do differently that's going to get us to 30% by 2030? Yeah, so we've talked about the problem and the target. So how about solutions? What can we do? What can we do or what should we be doing and what are we doing to reverse this loss? So I think, you know, this is all coming down to implementation and financing.

And again, these were the real sticking points in Montreal. all, we are going to need to see a significant mobilisation of resources. There's a $700 billion gap in resources available for conservation to get from where we are to what we think is needed to solve the problem. Now, countries were very forthcoming financing at COP and within the new global biodiversity framework, but we're looking at sort of 30 billion by 2030, not 700. So we're going to have to really see an increase in both public and private financing. We're going to have to see new financial mechanisms, which people sometimes are very resistant to because it can sound and become quite close to greenwashing, thinking about biodiversity credits and all sorts of innovative financing.

But we need them to unlock resources available for nature. We're going to have to really focus on how do we avoid the sort of contradictions in the systems. So hundreds of millions of dollars are being placed into perverse subsidies that are undermining everything we're trying to arrange through the global biodiversity framework. And the framework addresses that directly. It talks about and it's got targets around that. But all the while we focus on 30 by 30, we're not focusing on how we're addressing the perverse subsidies that are going to stop all of that from happening. So the concerted effort on an economic front and a political front to address these problems is really where the priority has to sit now.

So how about on a ground level then? Is there any sort of, I wouldn't say easy winds, but say should we be focusing efforts on plant life in the rainforests or microbial life in the oceans? Is there anything like that that we can say? So we have lots of prioritisation tools that tell us where the important areas for different forms of nature are.

And we should be focusing on those areas first. we should be looking at how we are integrating communities into the management of those areas and how we can ensure that community lands are adequately supported to protect nature, because that's where I think that great expansion in number is going to come from. It's going to come from not your classic national park ideas, but it's going to come from all of those community lands and how they can be supported to protect biodiversity. If you think about in the UK, to give sort of tangible examples, you know, we're shifting

our subsidy schemes for farming to think about nature stewardship as well. So, yes, it's food production, but it's also protecting nature. And these sorts of areas can start to be brought into that target. So how are we protecting areas that help us meet multiple targets at the same time? Practically, that's where it's going to be. And there's lots of detail about planning and prioritization and support. that's going to have to go in into every single country all at the same time. So it's quite a job we've got ahead of us.

So how many countries have actually signed up to the agreement? So there are 196 parties to the convention. And as we said, there are two sort of notable exceptions being the United States and the Vatican, not on the list. So going back to something you mentioned earlier about Indigenous people's rights, one of the things that I've seen that some people have focused on and perhaps has been well received, is the protection of Indigenous people's rights. So why is this so important? It's important for a number of reasons.

First of all, it's a human rights issue. So often indigenous communities who historically have owned the land, their survival is completely reliant on the ability of the environment to provide for them, have been the greatest custodians of that land. But they have come off worst

in deals and agreements on how to use and protect land. And land tenure, the rights you have to the land you live on, is one of the thorniest issues in conservation at the moment. It differs radically from country to country and even regionally within countries. And so ensuring the rights of the communities who are reliant on the land is a number one priority. And I think one of the heartening things coming out of COP, And we saw it similarly in COP 26 and 27 was a much stronger voice for indigenous communities coming through and a recognition in the language of the global declaration of the importance of supporting communities. So sort of going on from that, are there any certain, let's say, tipping points at which biodiversity will start recovering and then sort of continue to recover like nature finds away sort of thing without further intervention?

In terms of sort of tipping points, we tend to think about tipping points in the other direction. So, for example, at what point did our forests become emitters of carbon rather than sinks and things like that and move to being like a savannah system? But the point at which systems become sort of more resilient, I mean, effectively, we know that if you take the pressure off, nature has an amazing ability to recover. And this is why we always advocate protect before restore, because restoration, it can be very attractive because it's active. And, you know, if people think about tree planting and such like, but it's very expensive. And actually, it's far more cost effective to protect what you've got, to lift the pressures off and to enable nature to come back of its own accord, and then protect the areas that you can't, restore the areas that are degraded. the key issue there is thinking about connectivity. So we can't think about these protected areas in isolation because otherwise,

you know, wildlife needs to move and it can't if we think about them in isolation. So where we're protecting things, we need to think about how landscapes are connected to each other. And that works in the marine system as well as it does terrestrily and increase connectivity and then seek where are the key restoration opportunities that are going to create that connected landscape and then you will start to see nature really flourish. So are there any sort of key species that are indicative of a healthy ecosystem? Yeah, I think so. And I think we sort of look at it as you have a number of species that are really important to create healthy ecosystems as well. So for example, different ecosystem

engineers, whether they are fruit bats or in tropical sort of forests or hornbills or forest elephants, they perform a vital function. And we know that if they are there, if they are there in numbers, and if they are able to perform that function, then they're creating the conditions and the natural diversity within an ecosystem to allow many other species to flourish. And so we tend to look for the presence of key indicator species like that and to kind of promote their restoration because we know so many others are going to benefit as a result. So moving back to the UK, do we know anything about the plans that have been put in place for the UK over the next seven years? We do, and we know a little bit.

I mean, obviously, recently things were a little bit up in the air when we think about a combination of our goals around nature protection as set out in the Environment Act. And a number of targets were released by the UK government during COP for the UK. and I think were challenged, let's say, for not necessarily meeting the ambition that was being talked about by politicians in Montreal. There was a level of ambition that was found wanting within those environmental targets at a UK level. But then there's also the future of the farming subsidy schemes, the environmental land management scheme, which was called into question under the trust government and a review was instigated. And that review is going to be, I think, made public in the beginning.

innings of the next Parliament, but very shortly. And there we need to see what the future of our land stewardship is going to look like, and that's going to be very important. The UK government talks about 28% of England, anyway, 28% of England being protected for nature. But if you ask the NGOs in a recent study, they found it was nearer 3% for terrestrial surfaces and about, I think, 8% for marine surfaces. And that shows you the difference in how country might think or report about the protected status and what we actually think is going on. And it also shows that in the UK we have a long way to go.

So obviously, most of our listeners wouldn't have attended COP, and they're probably not politicians. No, no offence. But is there any role they can play? You know, can they play a part in reversing this? Absolutely. I think one of the key messages I always say is as citizens in our society, we have to remember the power we have. And that power extends from everything from the choices we make as individuals, the foods we choose, the products we buy. Manufacturers are paying very close attention to the adverts we look at, the products we buy. So the choices we make about where they come from, whether we buy locally, all of those things, they all have. They all have. have an impact, they all send a message. How we engage with the environment, one of the things

that concern us is, concerns us is that people are increasingly remote from the natural environment and understanding about what happens in nature. So how can we ask people to fundamentally value and protect something? They don't really engage with or understand. And so we take every opportunity to go out in natural spaces, learn about the nature around you, try and bring nature into your gardens if you have a garden onto your window box, but go into your local nature reserves, be a participant in what's happening in nature conservation. And then equally, for those who want to send political messages, write to your MPs. It's incredibly effective tool to bombard MPs with letters and to ask them questions. Why are you not doing

more for nature in your constituency MP? Or ask this question in the House of Commons. All of these factors have an impact. And a really good example is when the review of the environmental land management program was put in place and other things were happening, the nature conservation organizations in the UK banded together. And essentially they called it the attack on nature and said, we have one of the largest constituencies in the country and you, the government, are directly attacking nature. And that response and that response of those people had an impact on government decision-making. And we haven't seen that happen too often. And it just is a reminder of the power of individuals to actually influence what governments do.

And we should never lose sight of that. So sort of thinking about what we've just said in the past half an hour or so, would you say you feel optimistic about the future of biodiversity? You know, can we recover this loss? I think we always talk about it is sort of like a cautious optimism. I think what we're seeing now is a huge rise in attention on the natural world. So that's a real positive. One of the things we haven't talked about was the presence of the private sector at COP.

It was more than ever before. Companies have recognized not only the value of looking at nature, but the risks attached of not looking at nature. And they are all trying to find ways to look into their supply chains, understand how to disclose risks associated with their practices, what can they do to change their practices and make them more sustainable. That sends a very, very powerful economic signal. So we're starting to really see that shift. We're seeing companies embrace all sorts of mechanisms. We're slowly seeing governments pushing this up their agenda. And particularly as the private sector

pushes, we will see treasuries and finance ministries starting to take stronger note because that's where the shifts really need to happen. The responses need to be whole of government rather than stuck within one sort of sector. And similarly, I think we're seeing nature, sustainability, climate, all coming to the fore of people's attention. And so from that side, I am really optimistic. My children talk to me about the natural environment and know more about the environment than I ever did as a child. They're learning more about it than ever before. And we need to see that continue. So the younger generation are getting increasingly critical and asking more questions. So we're seeing action happening. We just need to translate that into the

resources that need to hit the ground to have the impact that will then bend the curve of biodiversity loss in sort of 10 years' time. So we are really, I think, creating the enabling frame. and we just need to hold countries to account to actually make the changes and make them now because we don't really have the time. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius. That was the Zoological Society of London's Dr Andrew Terry. The current issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines or visit sciencefocus.com.

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