The God Species_ How the Planet Can Survive the Age of Humans - Mark Lynas [62]
How far this trend can continue before precipitating some kind of regional or even global collapse in the functioning of the biosphere was considered by the planetary boundaries expert group, which concluded that no more than 15 percent of the Earth’s surface should be converted to cropland in order to protect the Earth system as a whole.15 We are perilously close to this proposed planetary boundary already, with 12 percent of land already devoted exclusively to agriculture. This leaves only 400 million hectares of additional land to be brought into production, a major challenge for humanity given population growth and increases in wealth and consumption across the planet. It is a challenge we can still meet, however—but only if we make the right decisions about how to use the planet’s land most wisely.
A PLAN FOR LAND
It is not all bad news. Much of the world’s land surface is already officially protected from damaging interference. At the last count, some 44,000 conserved locations covered 14 million square kilometers, encompassing nearly a tenth of the Earth’s terrestrial area. These collectively represent, as one ecologist puts it, “one of the most stunning conservation successes of the 20th century.”16 Not all are properly managed, unfortunately—more than 70 percent of 200 parks in tropical countries are affected by poaching, land invasion, logging, and a variety of other threats,17 and few have the resources to tackle them effectively. Priority number one for effective management of the planetary surface has to be to properly protect remaining natural or semi-natural areas, however degraded they may already have become.
This need has already been noted at the international level. At the 2010 meeting of the parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in Nagoya, Japan, nearly 200 countries agreed on a target for at least 17 percent of terrestrial and inland water areas to be managed in “ecologically representative and well connected systems of protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures” by 2020, by which time “the rate of loss of all natural habitats, including forests” should be at least halved and “where feasible brought close to zero.” While not legally binding in the sense that sanctions will be taken against countries that fail to meet them, these targets at least represent a step-change in the attention given to biodiversity and land use by national governments. The Nagoya agreements represent a huge opportunity for conservationists: Now that international targets have been set, we must force policymakers to take them seriously and to translate aspirations into real, practical action that protects ecosystems in situ.
We also need to better highlight successes where they exist, rather than constantly lamenting failure. This is good psychology as well as good politics: People are naturally more motivated to act when they see that in other areas similar actions have yielded environmental benefits. Only a few of us gravitate toward lost causes, and then only until disillusion sets in. In Brazil, the government of former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has successfully reduced deforestation in the Amazon by three-quarters from a high in 2004, achieving something many conservationists had never dreamed they would see. In October 2010 President Lula announced that Brazil’s target of an 80 percent reduction in its deforestation rate in the Amazon could