Monthly Archives: March 2023

World Water Day, 2023

Global heating is making complex Earth systems behave in odd ways as they start to wobble towards complete breakdown. Some involve a clear direction of change, including rising sea-levels that expose coastal lands and island aquifers to salt intrusion, and multi-year droughts that reveal the long-term desiccation of whole territories and sub-continents. Others are turbulent and inflict chaotic impacts in the form of killing heat-waves, wild-fires, disease outbreaks, floods and the increasingly savage storms that slam into unprotected coastlines. They all feed off each other and also from the degradation of coastal and catchment ecosystems that should be helping to protect human settlements, but have been damaged and are no longer able to.

These calamities are linked directly or indirectly to water: too much too quickly, or too little too late, or water with salts or poisons or germs in it. Why this matters is that all life on Earth has always depended on water, and it is an essential part of all ecosystems. The adequate supply of clean, fresh water is very much a human need as well, and one that is becoming increasingly hard to meet in many places. This has many dimensions. As one of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 6), the United Nations focus tends to be on ensuring access to water and keeping it clean, with an emphasis on reliable piped services and systems for keeping disease out of the pipes. But ecologists tend to focus on where the water comes from in the first place, how it is kept clean, fresh and arriving at adequate but not excessive rates of flow, and where human wastes go to, how they are processed by ecosystems, and what happens next.

From this more ecological point of view, we ask about where, how often and how hard the rain falls, how do the soils and vegetation of the catchment react to being hit by raindrops, how well does the water soak into the ground, and where does it flow to and through what? These questions are important, considering that a tropical storm can have the energy of a hydrogen bomb, that water can easily strip away unprotected topsoil and even pull rocks apart, and that it can dissolve and pick up many things that we would rather not drink. As well as climate change, which tends to make the rain fall harder when it falls at all, our chief preoccupation is often to do with the health of plant root systems that protect the soil and allow water to soak in rather than run off. So we worry about vegetation cover in the catchment: who controls, uses and protects it, and why should they manage it properly? If the people who depend on the water flowing off it don’t control it, how can they persuade the people in charge to protect it?

These practical questions go right to the heart of water security, which is among the most important issues in a water-stressed and changing world. They imply that there must be some kind of shared governance between catchment and downstream water users. This is why ‘payment for ecosystem services’ arrangements are such an important tool, in which water users pay catchment managers for protective services. These deals can be very effective, especially when local governments facilitate them and use water taxes to pay for them, but there is always a reluctance to pay for water, and often a temptation to privatise the water supply which can fatally change its ecological logic.

In many cases catchments and rivers are shared between countries, making water diplomacy a vital skill. But can be hard going if legacies of distrust or conflicting water interests are involved. The Swiss government’s ‘Blue Peace’ diplomatic initiative aims to help countries overcome such difficulties in Central Asia, the Middle East, West Africa and also in global forums. It promotes water cooperation across borders, sectors and generations, enhancing dialogue, using technical exchanges to leverage high-level discussion, and building capacity in the long-term. This is ambitious and demanding, but as global problems escalate Blue Peace may be one of the best models we have for dealing with life-threatening complexity at extreme scales.

Ecological insight can help people find practical ways to safeguard their water security. Our needs for water are met in the context of rainfall that flows through catchment, river, aquifer, farm, urban, wetland and marine ecosystems. The whole sequence must be understood and managed sustainably if water security is to be obtained anywhere. But these flows and ecosystems are often under different managers or jurisdictions, requiring co-management to be negotiated and agreed. The nexus of ecology, governance and diplomacy is thus where the keys to success in sustainable water resources management usually lie. This raises the stakes for any water and sanitation project, and those stakes are also becoming higher as climate change alters the ecological context for all efforts, decisions and negotiations. The implications of all this are worth considering on this World Water Day of 2023.

© Julian Caldecott

International Day of Forests, 2023

How we treat our forests is a measure of our relationship with nature, with each other, and with common sense. With nature because natural forests are key components in the web of life: rich with biodiversity and evolutionary and biophysical processes that sustain the living world. With each other, because natural forests are lived in by many indigenous peoples and also support vast downstream and nearby populations who rely on them for water, environmental security and essential harvests. And with common sense, because natural forests make landscapes, countries and the world as a whole both habitable and beautiful, so wrecking them is our loss.

We know all this, but the harm still being done to forests shows that we find it hard to regulate our collective treatment of them. This is usually because the bounty that forests offer is most appreciated locally and globally, but less so at intermediate levels where businesses and national governments operate. Here there are incentives with their own logic, which make it profitable in the short term to over-harvest catchment forests for their timber, to replace wetland forests with aquaculture ponds, or inland forests with plantations, mines or planned settlements.

Local and indigenous people are often too weak politically to protect themselves against these forces, yet wherever they are empowered over their forests they prefer to keep them intact. Meanwhile, the global community looks on with rising alarm, conscious that with every hectare of forest lost, another few hundred tonnes of greenhouse gases are released into the air. The days are long gone when a forest could be destroyed in Borneo or the Amazon without anyone caring on the other side of the world. Now we know that we all have to live with the consequences of global heating: floods, droughts, crop failures and high food prices, a list lengthening inexorably towards worldwide suffering, war and total system breakdown.

The story of our efforts to slow and halt forest degradation and loss is dominated by the interplay of these three levels of human society. Local people have strived for recognition and control of their lands and ecosystems. Businesses and governments have strived for short-term wealth. And global actors have strived to moderate short-term demands on forests, while not interfering in national decisions but not able to pay enough to cancel out perverse incentives. Yet this dialogue has yielded victories when different interests aligned around workable solutions.

These usually result from governments and global actors agreeing that local people should take charge of local forests for everyone’s benefit, and should be supported in doing so. Examples include the successes of Danish and Swiss support for indigenous land titling in Bolivia and community forest user groups in Nepal, and Danish support for community forest protection in the Harapan area of Sumatra and the Mbeliling area of Flores in Indonesia. There are many others, and not just in forests. The combination of local empowerment and environmental education works just as well for mangroves, fisheries, grasslands, bush-savannahs and other ecosystems wherever one cares to look, from the equator to the poles.

As well as being good for human rights, traditional lifeways, local well-being, biodiversity and landscape-scale ecosystem services, community forest initiatives are also cheap. Just for carbon, test calculations from Danish investments show that protecting high carbon-density natural ecosystems with community help has far higher climate change mitigation effectiveness per unit cost than renewable energy generation projects ever can. And the co-benefits of these initiatives are abundant, diverse, and full of promise for fair and sustainable wealth creation.

So while we struggle to head off global catastrophe later this century, we should be concentrating on the most cost-effective ways to change outcomes. And that means massively accelerating our investments in nature-based and community-based solutions in natural forests, but learning from past successes and doing it right. Adequate funding for local partnership-based protection over millions of hectares can offer certainty that billions of tonnes of carbon will not be released quickly. As a precaution during a life-or-death gamble with the living world, the need for this assurance should be shaping the regulations and market preferences that control the flow of all climate-relevant investment. With local people as genuine partners, encouraged and enabled by wise governments and advised and financed globally, conserving the world’s remaining natural forests is key to solving the triple crisis of climate, nature and poverty that faces us all. This offers us hope and purpose for the International Day of Forests, 2023.

© Julian Caldecott 2023