Save planet to counter dire risk

WHEN the Covid-19 pandemic hit early this year and countries began competing for a limited global supply of medical masks and other protective equipment, Finland didn't join the hunt.

Instead, it turned to its national stockpile of medical gear and food, which it had developed during the Cold War era and maintained with an annual budget, even as Scandinavian neighbours like Sweden had dismantled their stores to cut costs.

“Finland could just open its closet and supply all the hospitals – and Sweden was chasing (equipment) on the market,” said Johan Rockstrom, Swedish co-director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, based in Germany.

As the world faces increasingly frequent and severe shocks – from Covid19 to extreme weather linked to climate change – it will need to re-evaluate its priorities, from a focus on efficiency to the value of interconnectedness, he said.

That might extend as far as fundamentally rethinking how key planetary life-support systems – such as the fast-disappearing Amazon rainforest – are governed as a global resource, said Rockstrom, an Earth scientist and leading thinker on resilience.

“If the Amazon rainforest crashes, we will lose jobs in Germany,” he said. “It will create much havoc in the climate system” as temperature increases accelerate and rainfall shifts, he warned. “We cannot allow wet markets that lead to zoonotic mutations. In the same way, we cannot allow the West Antarctic ice sheet to collapse”, raising sea levels an estimated 3.3m globally, he said.

Harnessing a growing ability to digitally monitor what is happening around the world minute-to-minute – using everything from satellite data to cellphone tracking systems – could provide earlier warnings and greater protection for threatened systems, he said. “The next Wuhan” – the Chinese city where the coronavirus pandemic emerged – “should be detected much earlier”, he said, noting that the global damage caused by the virus “is exactly what can happen” if the Amazon disappears, driving catastrophic climate change. To cope with a growing range of threats, human systems need to become more like healthy natural systems – diverse and with plenty of duplication, he said.

In nature, when a fire, drought or disease hits, temporarily or permanently wiping out one plant or pollinator, others usually can take its place, Rockstrom said. “Ecological diversity is a way of reducing risks. If you want to recover in a resilient way after Covid-19, you likely want to invest in diversity.”

That could mean growing a wider variety of food crops, rather than the current few strains of rice, maize, wheat and soy, to ensure a crop pandemic hitting one variety doesn't wipe out too much of the global food supply.

Global connections mean food surpluses in one place can be used to plug shortages elsewhere – but overreliance on trade can lead to conflict and hunger if exporting countries decide to keep scarce food at home in an emergency. Perhaps the surest way to boost resilience and cut human risks is to protect the planet's imperilled natural systems, he said. Already, half of nature on land has been destroyed to make way for agriculture, cities and other human needs, he said.

“It seems like we've reached a saturation point on what the planet can cope with,” Rockstrom said. That is evidenced in hotter temperatures, melting ice, wilder weather, more forest fires and shifting disease threats.

To change that, scientists are pushing governments to commit to protect 30% of land and oceans by 2030 to help stem climate change and halt biodiversity loss. Doing so would save $5 (R77) for each $1 (R15) spent in terms of boosting farm and forest yields, improving freshwater supplies, conserving wildlife and fighting planetary warming, economists said. “The most clever investment is to keep nature intact,” he said, calling for a “zero loss of nature” goal alongside emerging net-zero emissions goals. |