by Briony Penn
This summer a long, detailed and beautifully illustrated report came out called Taking Nature’s Pulse: The Status of Biodiversity in British Columbia, (See www.biodiversitybc.org). On the front cover is a Taylor checkerspot butterfly, a coho salmon, a bumblebee, a spirit bear and an ensatina salamander. The report is a labour of love and science put out by Biodiversity BC, a coalition of fifty scientists from both environmental organizations and the provincial government.
What struck me most is that I haven’t seen a document like this for nearly 15 years. Not since BC took a huge leadership role by being the first to sign the UN Convention of Biodiversity at the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 has there been such a concerted effort to bring together all the people observing the naturalworld (in BC) to give us a status report on their research. The most important thing about the report is not simply the findings, which are as serious and disturbing as we could have imagined, but that it hopefully signals a resurrection of Rio in the hearts of British Columbians.
The original intention of Rio was to tackle the overarching issue of threats to the earth. In addition to the biodiversity convention there was a convention on climate change and a third on desertification. These three inter-related approaches were collectively meant to bring together the countries of the world, to come up with an integrated plan: stop humaninduced carbon emissions going into the atmosphere, prevent desertification and protect the raw material of nature.
After all, functioning ecosystems are the primary mechanism for drawing carbon out of the air. However, during the sixteen ensuing years, the only part of Rio that anyone has heard about is climate change, and that has been boiled down to one element – carbon, and only carbon in its ancient form. Flora and fauna became the Rio rejects, despite the fact that deforestation and changes in land use are the second leading cause of global warming. There has been declining policy on biodiversity in almost all countries since the hiatus in the 90s.
As climate change policy has taken precedence over other environmental policies and budgets, the protection of natural living ecosystems, whether it is forests, grasslands or wetlands, has fallen by the wayside. At some point, we stopped talking about leaves, soil, fur, and feathers and reduced them all to an element on the periodic table.
To many of us, the trend to focus exclusively on energy and transportation technology changes has felt like focussing on the operation when the patient is dead. People and industry want to offset emissions they choose or feel they cannot avoid, but so far the menu of options does not include the key protection of nature that is urgently needed.
There are simple explanations for why nature was sidelined by carbon. First, we do need to reduce our emissions and stop putting additional carbon into the atmosphere. Second, there is lots of business to be made or to be lost when it comes to carbon. Carbon in the atmosphere can also be quantified, added, removed and/or traded. A price can be assigned and it becomes a mechanism for developing technologies, and shifting trade and power around energy. Living organisms aren’t quite so conveniently packaged, there are no technologies that can replicate them, nature is hard to quantify, they don’t propel vehicles or generate electricity and you can’t trade chunks of nature on a world market (yet).
Third, as the offset market builds momentum, numerous tree planting programs have been promoted by both governments and business, diverting our attention from nature for today to trees for tomorrow. This is a logical path for industry as it means we can ignore the deforestation and degradation of land, with its carbon emissions, that land development and “resource extraction” produce. Even though for more than 10 years it has been demonstrated by economists that restoring degraded areas can cost up to 100 times what it would cost to acquire the area outright. As the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment has shown, ecosystems provide every single service that humans need – but we’ve not ascribed any value to it – in our capitalist market place, and in our practices on the planet.
Enter the logical conclusion that in order to demonstrate that the protection of nature is a mechanism for mitigating carbon emissions, we have to characterize nature as carbon – living carbon. As ecologists argue, chopping down a forest, draining a wetland or eliminating species releases the same type of carbon atoms as when you burn coal or gasoline – oil and gas are just ancient carbon. Once you have characterised nature as living carbon, then looking after nature becomes what Richard Hebda has named “carbon stewardship.”
It is a strange concept, fraught with problems but part of our political reality. Many would argue that trying to quantify life in terms of carbon is a slippery slope to nowhere. For example, shouldn’t we be legislating for an end to the destruction of nature, not paying large companies not to do something they shouldn’t be doing in the first place? If we could legislate conservation over consumption, then that would be the best solution. Others argue that unless we ascribe value to the unpriced natural services and systems, like nature, air and soil, they will continue to be unvalued and exploited. The reality is (the bottom line) the pricing of living carbon is simply one tool by with which we can protect nature in the short term, and yes it should be coupled with strict legislation, incentives and a shift in values.
This spring more than 25 BC environmental organizations made a joint submission to the BC Climate Action Team. It included more than 30 measures to reduce emissions and result in the government’s goal of reducing BC’s emissions by 33 percent below 2007 levels by 2020. Measure 17, called Adopting a Carbon Stewardship Approach to Land Use Management, presented the concept of carbon stewardship as a greenhouse gas reduction measure, recommending the protection of nature as a significant action that can and would, if supported, help both mitigate and adapt to climate change.
On August 6th, the Climate Action Team presented their recommendations – both regulatory and voluntary – which did not include the protection of BC’s ecosystems for carbon sequestration, including those huge carbon stores within BC’s coastal Douglas fir zones – one of the three most endangered ecosystems that Taking Nature’s Pulse identified.
The Land Trust Alliance of BC’s report, Mitigating and Adapting to Climate Change through the Conservation of Nature, released in January 2008, identified the values of these carbon sinks in BC.
British Columbia forests have some of the highest carbon stores in Canada, averaging 311 tonnes per hectare, with some coastal forests holding 600 to 1,300 tonnes per hectare. Based on the average estimates, the total carbon stored by BC’s forests amounts to 88 times Canada’s annual greenhouse gas emissions (989 times BC’s GHG annual emissions). This stored carbon is worth an estimated total of $774 billion, or $62 billion per year ($1,072 per hectare).
Meanwhile, the fifty scientists that authored Biodiversity BC did an extensive review on the status of 3,800 species. Out of the report came 23 major findings, the top four of which directly address the region of the coastal Douglas-fir/Garry oak ecosystem. Many of us in the southern portion of BC live in the rarest ecosystem in BC and it is critically imperilled – which is the highest ranking of con- servation concern. What is more, we have the majority of the global range for this ecosystem, so this is it folks, we’re holding the baby.
Climate change is identified as the biggest threat to biodiversity, followed by urbanization, agriculture, alien species and deforestation. Protecting carbon sinks and practicing carbon stewardship are the best tools for protecting biodiversity as well as mitigating and adapting to climate change.
The bad news is that the provincial government’s response to Taking Nature’s Pulse, has been to take little to no action. The David Suzuki Foundation points out that “the government’s new wildlife policy relies on a fragmented, weak, and discretionary patchwork of existing approaches that haven’t shown much success in the past.” Besides no new approaches, there is no proposal for provincial endangered species legislation, nor any indication that the carbon stewardship approach proposed by the NGOs will be adopted.
However, although not one of the group’s recommendations, there has been initial development of a Pacific Carbon Trust, a carbon trading registry – a first in Canada – and a scoping paper on how at least BC government operations that aren’t reduced, might be offset. Although in the initial concept of this registry there is only reference to tree planting (absolutely no substitute for protecting intact ecosystems) as an offset measure, once a registry is established carbon stewardship may well become an accepted means of offsetting emissions. It all depends on whether we can convince the politicians (their scientists need no convincing) to value living carbon in the same way as ancient carbon.
Various ENGOs including The Land Trust Alliance of BC have joined together as the Forests, Biodiversity, and Climate working group, and are putting together further reports and persuasive arguments for the protection of more of BC’s unique globally important ecosystems.
The good news is that as a measure to mitigate climate change, ecosystem protection is unlikely to go away. Last December, the World Bank launched a $300 million dollar Forest Carbon Fund to provide a pricing incentive for industry to buy carbon credits and prevent deforestation. Big polluters will offset their carbon emissions by paying into a fund, which will pay developing countries not to deforest. Our partner in the Western Climate Initiative, California, has accepted the acquisition of the 2,200-acre Van Eck Forest in Humboldt County into the California Climate Action Registry for the Pacific Forest Trust (PFT) to permanently reduce approximately 500,000 tons of CO2 emissions over a 100-year period through conserving this forest, According to the Registry’s president, Diane Wittenberg, the Van Eck Forest Project meets the highest standards, providing real, significant and durable sequestration.
On the social side, we need strong support for carbon stewardship as an essential tool to protect nature, whether it is as a pricing mechanism to make destroying nature too costly, Columbia Valley Voters Support Tax for Conservation BC’s Columbia Valley has become the first community in Canada to adopt a comprehensive conservation fund tax. Despite the current global financial crisis, the majority of voters (54%) from Canal Flats to Spillimacheen said Yes! to paying about $20 per parcel of additional property tax for a dedicated fund to support conservation projects in the Valley. In the United States, similar initiatives have also been strongly supported. In their recent election, voters across the United States backed 62 of 87 conservation finance measures, generating a single day record of $7.3 billion in new conservation funding. —East Kootenay Conservation Program, December 16, 2008 or providing incentives to protect nature in all land use decisions, whether it is forestry or urban development. That tool then needs to be coupled with strong legislation to protect endangered species and ecosystems as well as local economies. Ensuring social equity is a major component of the debate on Climate Change effects, and offset projects, but there is a strong indication that in 2012, the next round of Kyoto will take a more active position on tackling deforestation and land use change worldwide. The time has come to resurrect Rio in its entirety and its full intent to protect the earth.
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Briony Penn is a writer/illustrator, naturalist and lecturer with a Ph.D in Geography who lives on Saltspring Island, BC with her two sons. She grew up on the endangered shores of the Salish Sea.
Taking Nature’s Pulse: The Status of Biodiversity in British Columbia, (See www.biodiversitybc.org).
[Watershed Sentinel, Jan/Feb, 2009]