Info, news & views for anyone interested in biodiversity conservation and good environmental decision making
“In the last 10 years, things have gone fundamentally awry. Rates of global hunger, numbers of migrants forced to move within countries and across borders, levels of political authoritarianism, violations of human rights and the occurrence of violent demonstrations and ongoing conflict — these measures of harm are all up, and in some cases by a lot. At the same time, the average human life expectancy dropped to 70.96 years in 2021, from an estimated 72.6 years in 2019, the first decline since the United Nations began tabulating such data in 1950.”
Thomas Homer Dixon [see item 2]
In this issue of Dbytes
1. National Ocean Accounts 2022
2. What Happens When a Cascade of Crises Collide?
3. Laying new foundations for environmental decisions: the fourth transformation
4. ‘Tangled mess of inaction’: hundreds of threatened species recovery plans expiring in next six months
5. Incorporating human behaviour into Earth system modelling
6. Community perceptions of carbon farming: A case study of the semi-arid Mulga Lands in Queensland, Australia
7. Scientists need help to save nature. With a smartphone and these 8 tips, we can get our kids on the case
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1. National Ocean Accounts 2022
Saltmarsh stored over 275 million tonnes of carbon in 2021, with carbon stores mostly held in the tropical regions of Queensland and the Northern Territory. This ecosystem has provided crucial protection services to over 150,000 people, safeguarding them from natural hazards such as storm surge associated flooding. With mangrove ecosystems also included, over 280,000 people are protected.
The publication [National Ocean Account] also highlighted the extent of saltmarsh and intertidal seagrass ecosystems, with approximately 388,000 hectares of intertidal seagrass existing across Australia in 2020.
Australia’s saltmarsh ecosystems provided protection to thousands | Australian Bureau of Statistics (abs.gov.au)
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2. What Happens When a Cascade of Crises Collide?
It seems as if the world is encountering a “perfect storm” of simultaneous crises: The coronavirus pandemic is approaching the end of its third year, the war in Ukraine is threatening to go nuclear, extreme climate events are afflicting North America, Europe, Asia and Africa, inflation is reaching rates unseen in decades and authoritarianism is on the march around the world. But the storm metaphor implies that this simultaneity is an unfortunate and temporary coincidence — that it’s humanity’s bad luck that everything seems to be going haywire all at once. In reality, the likelihood that the current mess is a coincidence is vanishingly small. We’re almost certainly confronting something far more persistent and dangerous. We can see the crises of the moment, but we’re substantially blind to the hidden processes by which those crises worsen one another — and to the true dangers that may be enveloping us all.
What Happens When a Cascade of Crises Collide? • Thomas Homer-Dixon (homerdixon.com)
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3. Laying new foundations for environmental decisions: the fourth transformation
The consequences of Australia’s long-term underfunding of our national environmental law, compounded in some cases by lack of political vision or will, are that many of the foundations of the current system of environmental protection and conservation provided for by the EPBC Act are either significantly under-done, or not done at all.
Although Tanya Plibersek has spoken +ve about implementing the Samuel reforms, there remains a significant risk that this government will repeat the mistake of the Howard government by enacting laws that are strong on paper but weak in practice.
https://sustainabilitybites.home.blog/2022/11/30/laying-new-foundations-for-environmental-decisions-the-fourth-transformation/
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4. ‘Tangled mess of inaction’: hundreds of threatened species recovery plans expiring in next six months
Hundreds of plans for the recovery of threatened species will reach their use-by date in the next six months as the government considers how to reform Australia’s flawed system of environmental protections. Documents released to Guardian Australia under freedom of information laws detail how underresourcing, disagreement with state governments, and the growing list of species threatened with extinction have constrained the federal environment department’s ability to get on top of a backlog of conservation work. Environment groups said the material showed a “tangled mess of inaction” over the past decade and failure by past governments to update recovery plans every five years as required under national laws.
‘Tangled mess of inaction’: hundreds of threatened species recovery plans expiring in next six months | Endangered species | The Guardian
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5. Incorporating human behaviour into Earth system modelling
Climate change and other challenges to the stability and functioning of natural and managed environmental systems are driven by increasing anthropogenic domination of the Earth. Models to forecast the trajectory of climate change and to identify pathways to sustainability require representation of human behaviour and its feedbacks with the climate system. Social climate models (SCMs) are an emerging class of models that embed human behaviour in climate models. We survey existing SCMs and make recommendations for how to integrate models of human behaviour and climate. We suggest a framework for representing human behaviour that consists of cognition, contagion and a behavioural response. Cognition represents the human processing of information around climate change; contagion represents the spread of information, beliefs and behaviour through social networks; and response is the resultant behaviour or action. This framework allows for biases, habituation and other cognitive processes that shape human perception of climate change as well as the influence of social norms, social learning and other social processes on the spread of information and factors that shape decision-making and behaviour. SCMs move beyond the inclusion of human activities in climate models to the representation of human behaviour that determines the magnitude, sign and character of these activities. The development of SCMs is a challenging but important next step in the evolution of Earth system models.
Incorporating human behaviour into Earth system modelling | Nature Human Behaviour
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6. Community perceptions of carbon farming: A case study of the semi-arid Mulga Lands in Queensland, Australia
Carbon farming can provide economic benefits to rural landholders. Economic incentives motivated adoption in the Mulga lands, despite community concerns. A mismatch in normative expectations and carbon farming has led to negative community impacts. There is mistrust and uncertainty around carbon farming in the Mulga Lands. Policy and planning should seek to manage carbon farming land use transitions.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0743016722002479?via%3Dihub
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7. Scientists need help to save nature. With a smartphone and these 8 tips, we can get our kids on the case
Citizen science is touted as a way for the general public to contribute to producing new knowledge. But citizen science volunteers don’t always represent a broad cross-section of society. Rather, they’re often white, male, middle-aged, educated and already interested in science. This lack of representation has several problems. It can undermine the potential of citizen science to bridge the divide between lay people and experts. It also means fewer people benefit from the chance to advance their informal science education and gain valuable life skills.
https://theconversation.com/scientists-need-help-to-save-nature-with-a-smartphone-and-these-8-tips-we-can-get-our-kids-on-the-case-192622
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About Dbytes
Dbytes is a weekly eNewsletter presenting news and views on biodiversity conservation and environmental decision science. ‘D’ stands for ‘Decision’ and refers to all the ingredients that go into good, fair and just decision-making in relation to the environment.
From 2007-2018 Dbytes was supported by a variety of research networks and primarily the Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions (CEED). From 2019 Dbytes is being produced by David Salt (Ywords). Dbytes is supported by the Global Water Forum.
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