Instant Genius - Could leaving nature to its own devices be the key to meeting the UK’s climate goals? - Mark Lynas

Episode Date: June 26, 2019

The UK government’s official climate advisors recently reported that the country’s greenhouse gas emissions must fall to zero by 2050 in order to tackle the growing threat of manmade climate change. However, it seems unlikely that we will be able to reach this target by simply burning less fossil fuel and cutting down on international travel. So what else can be done? Environmental charity Rewilding Britain thinks that the answer is to let large areas of the country return to their pre-agricultural state to restore natural carbon sequestering environments such as peat bogs, heaths and salt marshes. In this episode of the Science Focus Podcast BBC Science Focus commissioning editor Jason Goodyer talks to environmental researcher Mark Lynas about the potential beneficial effects of rewilding. We now have more than 75 episodes of the Science Focus Podcast, each of which is still well worth a listen. Here are a few that you might find interesting: Can science explain everything? – Michael Blastland What if the Earth’s magnetic field died? – Jim Al-Khalili How can we save our planet? – Sir David Attenborough Are we facing an insect apocalypse? – Brad Lister Air pollution is killing us, here’s how you can stop it – Gary Fuller There is no Plan B for planet Earth – Lord Martin Rees Follow Science Focus on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Flipboard Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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alongside French acoustic specialist focal, combine handcrafted tradition with cutting-edge innovation and high-end materials, 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. Rewilding is quite different from traditional nature conservation

where you set up a nature reserve or this particular bird or particular plant that's rare and you're trying to conserve, which is valuable, of course. But what rewilding is trying to do over perhaps a larger area is actually to bring back the wild. You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team. With the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly,

available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store. Hello and welcome to the Science Focus podcast. I'm Alexander McNamara, online editor at BBC Science Focus magazine. The UK government's official climate advisors recently reported that the country's greenhouse gas emissions must fall to zero by 2050 in order to tackle the growing threat of man-made climate change. However, it seems unlikely that we'll be able to reach this target by simply burning less fossil fuel and cutting down on international travel. So, what else can be done? Environmental charity rewilding Britain thinks that the answer is to let large areas of the country return to their pre-agricultural state

to restore natural carbon sequestering environments such as peat bogs, heaths and salt marshes. Here's the BBC Science Focus Commissioning editor Jason Goodyear, talking to environmental researcher, Mark Linus about the potential beneficial effects of rewilding. First of all, for those of our listeners who don't know, who've never heard about this concept before, can you just briefly run over the basic outline of what rewilding is? Okay, so rewilding is quite different from traditional nature conservation where you set up a nature reserve or this particular bird or a particular plant that's rare

and you're trying to conserve, which is valuable, of course, but what rewilding is trying to do over perhaps a large, area is actually to bring back the wild. It's to bring back nature in a more self-willed way where natural ecosystems can begin to rejuvenate and restore the land in the way that, you know, so species can more or less, you know, design their own ecosystems rather than having human management defining every single aspect of what goes on in what should be a natural environment. So essentially for rewilding, you aim to remove almost the entirety of the influence of I mean, you can't do that, of course, because there's always air pollution and, you know, there's a multitude of wider things going on.

But you don't manage the land unless you absolutely have to because of an invasive species or something. You don't manage the land or the water in any direct sense. So you let nature more or less do its thing and return to the wild. It's pretty much what it says on the tin when you talk about rewilding. So are we talking about specific types of terrain and landscape? Well, in the report that Rewilding Britain's just produced, there is certainly a lot of talk about some very specific and unique ecosystems that the UK has. In particular, for upland areas, peat bogs, blanket box in particular, which have been heavily degraded in past decades by drainage, by burning, management for grouse mauls, and overgrazing by sheep. And to the extent that they don't largely sequester peat anymore.

So these are huge, huge reserves of carbon, draped across the tops of many of our upland areas, which haven't been managed properly. So what needs to happen is that these areas need to be rewetted so that the heat forming vegetation can return. We need to get most of the grazing animals off there so that the plants can actually grow and let it return to doing its thing, which is removing carbon from the atmosphere. So say I'm a farm. I've got some land that I'm up for. having rewilded.

So how would I go about that? And what would happen? What sort of, you know, what would happen in the first six months then after a year, etc.? Well, the thing about farming is that it's a business. And the point of the Rewilding Britain report is that we're recognising that farmers need to be supported when we're looking at ecological restoration and carbon sequestration. These aren't things that you can expect farmers to do for free and still make money. I mean, there are business opportunities with diversification, with ecotourism and so on,

but you've always got to think about how farmers are going to make a living. And if you're talking about sheep farmers or livestock farmers and you're asking them to remove the stocking density, then, you know, how do they continue to make a profit out of that? So the point of the report is to look at how we can restructure farming subsidies because pretty much all upland farming and a good deal of farming more widely is supported. largely by subsidies, which are paid by land area by and large. So that doesn't support environmental objectives. And if we can restructure these subsidies in a way that they do support the environment,

then that has to be a way to help support farmers move towards more ecological types of land-use activities, including rewilding. Sure. So are these subsidies, excuse me, currently at the, you know, an attractive enough level to entice these farmers to take them up? Well, all farmers, pretty much, who've got substantial areas of land, will take the subsidies

because the hectare wage payments are quite high. You get what's called basic payment, which are hundreds of pounds per hectare under the Common Agricultural Policy. What the opportunity is that we've identified here, of course, is Brexit, which means that, assuming it all goes ahead, that the UK will be leaving the Common Agricultural Policy

and therefore has the opportunity, to design a new and more sustainable system for agricultural subsidies, which we're suggesting focuses hectareage payments on carbon sequestration. Because it's one of the things you actually can quantify to a certain extent is say, well, how much, you know, if you're allowing a forest to regenerate on this grassland, how much extra carbon is it going to sequester? If you rewet this peat bog and allow it to return to absorbing carbon, then how much, you know, how many tons is it going to be per hectare? Put a price on those and you can pay the farmers accordingly.

Okay, so you mentioned that, yeah, concentrating on carbon emissions for all these reasons, but there are also several other benefits from doing this sort of thing, isn't there? Like reversing a loss of biodiversity or even flood protection? That's right. I mean, these things are more difficult to quantify because, you know, you can't price biodiversity quite as simply as you can price carbon. And carbon already has a price in the economy, and you can feed that back. say, well, you know, you can determine how many tons each ecosystem is going to absorb and

you can pay farmers or landholders accordingly. For biodiversity, I mean, how much is a curlew worth? I mean, how much is a particular species of orchid worth? How much is, you know, some rare bumblebee worth? And so it's difficult, it's much more difficult and much more controversial to try and price that. But in general, if you do support carbon sequestration, that does require wilder ecosystems, and in general that's better for biodiversity overall. It isn't always the case. There's some specialist species that need particular types of farming, and that should continue to happen and should continue to be supported. But by and large, rewilding will benefit the broadest way the biodiversity out of any kind of land use, we think.

Sure. So just sort of as the situation currently stands, what sort of impact does the agricultural industry, what contribution does it make to greenhouse gas emissions in the UK? Well, agriculture at the moment releases a huge amount of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The UK climate change committee, which is the government advisory body, recently suggested that we should move to net zero by 2050, so tightening up the Climate Change Act target. But it was quite noticeable actually that Wales couldn't go to net zero.

they said 95% simply because it has so many sheep. And sheep release a lot of methane through enteric fermentation being ruminants. And there's not a lot you can do about that when you've got sheep grazing grasslands. So the only thing you could do really is to reduce the numbers of sheep, which actually would be good for biodiversity too because you've heard the term sheep wrecked. A lot of the uplands in Wales and elsewhere in the UK are overgrazed to the extent that there's very little else up there except a few species of grass and moss and a few other bits and pieces, but very little in terms of actual widespread biodiversity.

So that's really what we want to encourage farmers to move back to wards. So going forward, what sort of scale would these types of projects need to be on in order to make a significant impact on greenhouse gas emissions? Well, we quantified at about 6 million hectares, which, you know, the newspaper headlines were, you know, the rewilding Britain calls for rewilding a quarter of the UK's land area, which would be great. And these were just indicative figures, but if we were to do that, we could sequester about 10% of the UK's emissions. And so that's, you know, remember we've got to not just cut emissions to zero.

We've got to reabsorb the accumulated carbon that's already up there for it to meet the climate change targets of two degrees or 1.5 degrees. So how do you get that carbon back out of the atmosphere? well, allowing rewilded ecosystems to begin to sequester carbon again is one of the options. But remember you've got to push farming in a net zero direction as well. And there's a lot going on. I mean, plowing releases carbon from the soils, all of the machinery. Tractors and so on are, of course, burning diesel, subsidized diesel as well, red diesel, which comes out much cheaper than commercial diesel.

Fertilizers, you know, nitrogenous fertilizers release nitrous oxides. which are also powerful greenhouse gases. So it's a complicated picture with farming. It's much more difficult to get a grasp of than just getting coal off the power sector and decarbonising the electricity grid. Sure. So that's six million hectare figure.

Do you know what the situation currently stands at? Well, it's difficult to quantify now. It's probably the case that the UK's peat bogs on net emitters. That's including lowland peat, which is currently in the Fenlands areas ploughed up for agriculture because it's very rich land. So that's likely to continue. There's still also peat being extracted for garden, you know, garden peat and so on. And that really absolutely has to stop and I think it's likely to stop.

And also a lot of burnings going on in the upland areas and management for grouse solely, as well as constant grazing by sheep. So if you reverse all of that, then you can get to a stage where we're seeing peat bog. absorbing millions of tons of carbon a year, which of course is how they came to exist in the first place. Pete bogs are just very large stores of wet carbon. So we need to restore them back to a kind of healthy balance. So for those of us that live in cities, they might be a bit surprised to hear about the importance of peat bogs, but they actually cover quite a lot of the UK, don't they? I think in terms of a proportion of its area, the UK has more peat, certainly more

blanket box than anywhere else in the world. And it's globally a very rare habitat contains tens of millions of tons of carbon already sequestered. So if that gets released, that's really pushing things disastrously in the wrong direction in terms of the climate crisis. And as you mentioned earlier, quite a substantial proportion of our water supply, certainly in the north of England, for example, and Wales too, comes from peatland areas, peatland sources. So if those bogs are in a good condition, then the water that comes off is nice and clean and can, you know, go directly to water consumers. If they're not in good condition, it's very brown, it's full of organic matter and so on and has to be cleaned. So sort of going off, oh, no, no problem, just going off in a slightly different tangent now. A lot of, there's a lot of interest down here in the southwest with the, with the re-interested.

introduction of native species, particularly beavers. Yeah. So, I mean, what kind of, is there a role for animals to play in this? Oh, absolutely, because it's not, you know, you don't have an ecosystem just composed solely of plants. And certain species are what's considered keystone species, beavers, and a good example of that, because they, they're ecosystem engineers. I mean, they, because they cut down the trees along the edges of streams and build these dams,

they create large new areas of wetland, which then produce habitat for lots of other species like fish and dragonflies and so on. So beavers, if you do see them introduce, excuse me, if you do see them introduced on riverine habitats, they can actually improve the quality of the habitat and also encourage it to sequester more carbon. So they're absolutely, and beavers are an all-round good thing. And of course, you need predator species as well. So links perhaps, ospreys, gosshawks, you know, a lot of species which would be present. in a wild and more natural habitat within the UK biome are not there and we should encourage them to return. Wild boar is another example, by the way. They were, I mean, they're beginning

to come back in some areas, but they were extirpated several hundred years ago. So, you know, the more species you get in the ecosystem, the more natural, the, you know, the trophic situation so that the food chain can become. Okay, so in a perfect world, going forward to the next. five years, what would you like to see happen? Well, I would like to see the report looked at by government and its proposals, hopefully, brought into policy. They're actually in line already with what the government's suggesting. So they have this idea of public payments for public goods. So if you're going to pay farmers public money, I mean, it's not a charitable endeavor. Farmers aren't objectives,

aren't recipients, shouldn't be recipients of public charity. They should be doing something which the public values and protecting, so sequestering carbon and protecting nature, you know, certainly delivers a public good. At the moment, farmers are paid simply to farm, and a lot of that farming, while it does, of course, produce food, is environmentally quite destructive. So let's incentivise farmers to move in a different direction when we're going to give them public money. I was just mentioning the food, though, is there any difference in the impact, like you mentioned the sheep earlier, with arable versus livestock farming? Well, cheaper, it's quite a peculiar situation where we more or less import and export the same amount of lamb.

Because I think the UK tastes are for supermarkets to have these big fat joints of lamb, whereas the Welsh lamb tends to be a bit leaner. It doesn't look as good on the supermarket shelf. But that's very valued in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. So it's kind of crazy, but we import and export the same amount. And also, if you look at the productivity of the uplands, just a relatively small number of sheep can ecologically impact a very large area and not produce much meat from it either. So by reducing the stocking rates of the uplands,

we're not going to be sacrificing much in terms of UK food sustainability, but you could make a big difference in terms of biodiversity. University. Arable's a different issue because that's much less subsidy supported and it's much more in a kind of wider global commodity market. So we'll have to look at that. But it's, you know, it is important that the UK continue to produce food and continue to make its farming more sustainable. You know, I personally think that you can see some intensification still in the lowland areas in order to spare larger areas of land and the uplands and elsewhere where it can return to nature. But you can't do that, of course, at the price of reducing the amount of food we produce overall. Sure. So if there's kind of one message that you'd like our listeners to take away, what would that be? Well, rewilding doesn't have to be over a huge scale. If you have even an acre of land or even just a back garden, you know, there's already a campaign not to mow to leave the flowers for pollinating insects. So rewilding is almost a state of mind as much as anything else as it's a state of land use. So please, please support the efforts of your local farmers or local landholders to begin to rewild as much of the land as they can. That was Mark Linus, talking about the impact rewilding could have on the UK's climate goals.

If you go wild for science, the latest issue of BBC Science Focus is packed full of features, news and interviews to help you make sense of the world around you. In the July 2019 issue, we look at the breakthroughs showing us dinosaurs' true colours, ask what it means to be a man, and head inside the lab that's making human organs from scratch. We now have more than 75 episodes of the Science Focus podcast, each of which is still well worth listen. So why don't you go back and listen to a few? We think you'll really enjoy them, so be sure to let us know what you think in the comments and reviews. It really helps us get the show out there. Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team. With the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at ScienceFocus.com or look out

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