How does mankind, responsible for climatic and other anthropogenic changes including geo-political and cultural processes, interact with biodiversity, ecosystems and the services they provide?

The widespread recognition of the considerable value of biodiversity and ecosystems for man kind has led to an increasing need to understand and assess the role of biodiversity and ecosystem services and to assess the changing state of biodiversity and ecosystem services, and public attitudes towards them. Understanding the changing state there is a need to analyse the impact of the most significant drivers, including human behaviour, and their interactions on biodiversity. Analysing options for the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity and evaluating the effectiveness of policy and communication instruments should help with what to do about the changing state of biodiversity and ecosystem services (quoted from the Common Research Strategy of ALTER-Net, a long-term biodiversity, ecosystem and awareness research network.

What factors determine the resilience of the full set of interacting ecosystem services that support human well-being and allow for adaptation to a changing environment?

This question requires interdisciplinary research among physical, biological and social sciences. It raises significant conceptual or theoretical issues, as well as significant needs for empirical research at global and regional scales. The question quickly gives rise to a host of important more specialized questions. Answers to this family of questions are relevant for applied questions of sustainability science.

Definitions: (1) Resilience is the capacity of a system to persist within thresholds or “guardrails”, adapt to changing circumstances, or transform to something new when the current mode of operation is unsustainable. (2) Ecosystem services are benefits that people receive from nature, such as provision of food and water, regulation of water flows and quality, and cultural values. They can be analyzed at the global scale or for specific landscapes and seascapes.

Challenges: A key challenge is that changes in ecosystem services generally have strong correlations. That is, changes that cause increases in one group of ecosystem services often cause decreases in another group of ecosystem services. These tradeoffs among bundles of ecosystem services are not well understood. In management, they lead to unintended adverse consequences. These consequences often take systems across thresholds, degrade resilience, and impair the capacity of the system to respond adaptively to future environmental changes. Thus understanding the tradeoffs has fundamental importance for sustainable management.

Obstacles: In order to address this question, new frameworks for interdisciplinary collaboration are needed. Also there are significant needs for conceptual development, theoretical research, monitoring at global and regional scales, and empirical research at global and regional scales.

What are the global impacts (socio, economic, others) of biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation?

The reason why the “Vision” must address this question is that biodiversity loss impacts local communities, environmentally, culturally, socially, and economically. However, unless we have a global perspective of the level of the threat (ex. IPCC and climate change), we will be hard pushed to reach the tipping point of public concern to come up with the level of response required.

How and why did genuine global changes happen? What were their local and global consequences on the physical environment, the ecosystems and the societies? What thresholds are involved?

Without paleoclimatic information, we would not know that atmospheric CO2 can vary naturally by up to 100 ppm on glacial-interglacial times, that abrupt climatic changes did occur on annual or decadal scales, that ice sheets may disrupt very rapidly, and basically that climate can change at all. These testimonies of how our Earth system is functioning are invaluable, yet still quite sparse and often not so well understood. They will likely deliver numerous further surprises. A great variety of climatic changes occured in the past, with many different amplitudes or consequences, and on many different time scales. When exceeding some thresholds, they were able to induce changes on the environment of past ecosystems and societies. These events should be traced back and quantified, before we can claim that we are in a position to predict future changes and their impacts.

What are the regional vulnerabilities in the availability of fresh water to support human needs and sustain freshwater biodiversity, and how can these vulnerabilities be mitigated?

Fresh water is multi-user resource subject to multiple threats including over-exploitation and contamination such that both quantity and quality of water is absolutely limiting for humans in many parts of the globe. Freshwater ecosystems support around 10% of global biodiversity (in less than 1% of the Earth’s surface area), and provide valuable ecosystem services upon which humans depend. Growing human water demands are placing increasing pressure on the ability of freshwater ecosystems to meet human needs, and degrading the capacity of fresh waters to sustain biodiversity. There is evidence that freshwater biodiversity is already undergoing pandemic decline, but responses to these declines at regional or larger scales are lacking. Global climate change and burgeoning populations will exacerbate present conflicts between humans and nature as demands for fresh water increase, but the vulnerability of fresh water biodiversity to impacts arising from this conflict will vary regionally. It is imperative that we identify which regions are now – and which will be – most vulnerable with respect to human needs for water and potential biodiversity loss. These data will provide an essential first step to devising adaptation and mitigation measures intended to ensure that human water requirements can be met without loss of biodiversity or irreparable degradation of freshwater ecosystem function.

How long can the Earth System sustain the present rate of human-induced global-environmental change?

Humans are modifying the planet at an alarming rate. Cropland and pasture now cover almost 50% of the entire land surface. This has led to massive habitat destruction, fragmentation and pollution and, together with overhunting, is causing a critical loss in biodiversity. Agricultural pollution is also having a devastating impact on aquatic and marine ecosystems which, together with industrial fishing, is causing collapse of key species populations within these ecosystems. Industrial pollution and burning hydrocarbons is causing polar warming which threatens to destabilize the remaining ice-sheets and reservoirs of methane stored in the polar oceans and permafrost. With populations in the US, China and India still rising, these clearly unsustainable practices are set to continue. The critical question is how long can planetary environmental processes continue to function before these human-induced changes trigger negative feedbacks that result in a switch to an alternate and less supportive Earth System state?

How can we boost agricultural output and improve rural livelihoods in the developing world (especially sub-Saharan Africa) without attendant land/forest degradation and resultant biodiversity loss?

Sub-Saharan Africa is the poorest region of the world and experiencing high rates of land degradation, desertification, forest degradation and loss. The ecology-welfare link in this part of the world is very strong and most people live outside formal institutions and markets. Declining crop yields have meant agricultural expansion and in places like the Eastern Afromontane Hotspot this means large potential for the loss of endemic species. Livelihoods here are also closely tied to annual rainfall patterns and any near term changes in these as a result of climate change may also rationalize further agricultural expansion (e.g. to areas with more stable rainfall, or as an insurance mechanism to ensure a certain level of output). Here we have a nexus of severe poverty, high biodiversity, poor agricultural productivity, climate vulnerability and potential loss of carbon stored in woodland and forest ecosystems.

What are the components and dimensions of biodiversity that are necessary for particular ecosytem processes, functions and services, now and in the future?

Biodiversity has many dimensions (composition, variation, richness, phylogenetic, interactions and networks). We understand that diversity and variability provide insurance against future changes (~resilience). But which measures of biodiversity will best predict the quality and quantity of ecosystem processes, functions and services that biodiversity supports and on which we depend? When, where and how is biodiversity most significant? Answering this question, even in very general terms, is a necessary pre-requisite to an effective biodiversity monitoring system, to predicting damaging impacts of biodiversity loss, and will contribute to fully integrated earth system models.

What are the critical biodiversity levels below which ecosystems collapse, due to human interventions?

Mankind will exploit ecosystems more and more to fulfill its needs. Once the use will destroy its capability to restore and will lead to an irreversible loss of both biodiversity and its production capability. The knowledge of these critical levels are a matter of life and death.

How to establish balanced use of agricultural land and better ecological function?

Agricultural land occupies about 10% of total land area, pastures not included. Its ecological influence (nutrient cycles, carbon storage, energy, water, biodiversity) is considerably larger. The sector is growing both in extent and intensity. The world needs good ecological function of this sector.

The main task for agriculture is to produce food for mankind. The present main policy is that agricultural production like other “industries” shall be governed by market forces, in reality price competition on a global scale (within a very weak concept “Good Agricultural Practice).

However, there is a contradiction. Factors favouring market competitiveness are specialization and adaptability ( we could say shortsightedness). Factors favouring ecological function are diversity and longterm consideration, exactly the opposite. There are environmental programs, but they are not accepted world wide. They are criticized for distorting competitiveness in both directions.

With a few sacrifices in economy and production (if any in the long term) agriculture could develop much better ecological function even with present knowledge and technology (Background: www.greengard.se/Eco-efficiency.htm . But for the farm manager such measures compromise shortterm competitiveness. He should not be expected to disobey the rules the society has given him.

The research task (economic/political/agronomic) is to create a background for a framework including “ecological values” as drivers for development. Let market economy work also on the ecological side. It should go beyond present attempts with carbon trading etc, and include for instance nutrient and water efficiency, diversity and landscape function.

Göte Bertilsson, Agr system consultant, Sweden