̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - habitat

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� receives $72 million gift for habitat restoration projects across Europe’s land and seas

jg533 — Fri, 06 Oct 2023 08:00:00 +0000

Arcadia has made a major new philanthropic donation to the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, taking its total support for the Endangered Landscapes & Seascapes Programme to over $138 million.

̽��ֱ��Endangered Landscapes & Seascapes Programme supports the large-scale restoration of Europe’s most treasured but endangered ecosystems, enriching biodiversity while revitalising local economies.

̽��ֱ��work recognises humanity’s dependence on healthy, functioning ecosystems - for example in preventing urban flooding, and reducing the impacts of climate change.

̽��ֱ��Endangered Landscapes & Seascapes Programme is managed by the Cambridge Conservation Initiative, a partnership between the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and ten of the world’s leading international biodiversity conservation organisations.

̽��ֱ��Programme supports partners across Europe to deliver ambitious, large-scale restoration projects, aiming to inspire an inclusive and impactful approach. Through partnerships between local communities, policy makers and landowners, projects work to reverse environmental declines to create places where people and nature can thrive.

̽��ֱ��new funding includes over $30 million dedicated specifically to efforts to restore Europe’s seas. This will be reflected in the retitled ‘Endangered Landscapes & Seascapes Programme’.

Seas regulate the Earth’s climate, generate oxygen, and provide livelihoods and food for hundreds of millions of people. But Europe’s seas are suffering from pollution, biodiversity loss, seabed damage, overfishing, underwater noise, ocean warming, acidification, and spread of invasive species.

In the EU, 46% of coastal waters suffer from eutrophication - a process that causes excessive plant and algae growth leading to oxygen depletion, and 79% of the coastal seabed is disturbed due to bottom trawling.

̽��ֱ��funding will support up to eight new seascape restoration projects that will start the process of restoring damaged marine ecosystems.

Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, founders of Arcadia, said: “ ̽��ֱ��Endangered Landscapes & Seascapes Programme has become a vibrant network of nature-restoration projects and practitioners across Europe. We are inspired by the commitment of the projects’ teams, and are grateful to them, to the programme’s panel and to the coordinating team, for their invaluable role in realising the programme’s vision.

“As the programme launches its third phase, we look forward to seeing new projects join the Endangered Landscapes & Seascapes Programme network, helping to create resilient, self-sustaining and biodiverse ecosystems that benefit nature and people.”

Dr David Thomas, Director of the Endangered Landscapes & Seascapes Programme, said: “Restoring ecosystems at scale is urgent if we are to address the linked biodiversity and climate emergencies. This new funding from Arcadia will allow a significant expansion of the projects supported by the Endangered Landscapes & Seascapes Programme.

“It’s especially exciting that we will now be able to fund more projects focused on Europe’s seas, where many habitats are in poor condition and species are in decline. Experience shows that with the right interventions, marine ecosystems can recover.”

Professor Deborah Prentice, Vice-Chancellor of the ̽��ֱ��, said: “It is now widely accepted that reversing the damage humans have done to our natural landscapes and seas is vital for our future prosperity. With this magnificent gift from Arcadia, the Endangered Landscapes & Seascapes Programme can increase investment in projects that help restore ecosystems on a large scale.”

Natural ecosystems support all life on earth, and the damage that has been done to them by human activities has huge costs to our lives and wellbeing. We have reduced nature’s capacity to support us through ecosystem services, such as climate regulation, and provision of clean water and fresh air that we all depend on.

Existing projects funded by the Endangered Landscapes & Seascapes Programme include dam removal in the Danube delta to support migratory fish and vegetation recovery, and work to restore marine ecosystem connectivity in south-western Turkey. Already, these are demonstrating the benefits from restoring nature at the landscape scale.

All projects are underpinned by capacity development, lesson-learning, and robust monitoring to determine what does and doesn’t work in restoration, with results made available through open access to help build knowledge in the wider restoration field.

̽��ֱ��UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, which runs from 2021 to 2030, is motivating action to restore the world’s degraded ecosystems. And the Global Biodiversity Framework agreed at the 2022 UN Biodiversity Conference has set ambitious targets to have restoration completed or underway on at least 30 percent of the world’s lands, inland waters, coastal areas and oceans by 2030. ̽��ֱ��new funding will provide a much-needed boost for delivery of these goals.

Arcadia is a charitable foundation that works to protect nature, preserve cultural heritage and promote open access to knowledge. Since 2002 Arcadia has awarded more than $1 billion to organizations around the world.

̽��ֱ��gift from Arcadia will support the next phase of the Endangered Landscapes & Seascapes Programme for the large-scale restoration of Europe’s most treasured but endangered ecosystems.

With this magnificent gift from Arcadia, the Endangered Landscapes & Seascapes Programme can increase investment in projects that help restore ecosystems on a large scale.

Deborah Prentice, Vice-Chancellor

Zafer Kızılkaya

Fish near Turkish coastline

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Lack of evidence hampers progress on corporate-led ecosystem restoration

jg533 — Fri, 08 Sep 2023 07:47:52 +0000

An international team of scientists has analysed publicly available sustainability reports released by 100 of the world’s largest companies and found that despite many businesses claiming to actively rebuild damaged ecosystems, very little is known about what is actually being achieved.

Efforts to rebuild degraded environments are vital for achieving global biodiversity targets, and corporate-led projects offer huge potential to restore damaged and lost ecosystems around the globe.

But the study reveals that over 90 percent of corporate-led restoration projects fail to report a single ecological outcome. Around 80 percent of projects do not reveal how much money is invested in restoration, and a third fail to even state the area of habitat that they aim to restore.

̽��ֱ��United Nations has launched a Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, and in recent years businesses around the world have collectively pledged to plant billions of trees, hundreds of thousands of corals and tens of thousands of mangroves. Around two thirds of the top 100 largest global corporations undertake ecosystem restoration.

̽��ֱ��study is published in the journal Science.

“Ultimately, if big businesses are going to contribute effectively to the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, there needs to be transparency and consistency in reporting,” said Professor Rachael Garrett, Moran Professor of Conservation and Development at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge Conservation Research Institute, and a co-author of the report.

She added: “This is in the interest of the businesses themselves, who stand to gain from demonstrating to their customers, shareholders, employees and the wider public that they are making meaningful impacts with their declared restoration efforts.

“ ̽��ֱ��world’s largest corporations have the potential to lift ecosystem restoration efforts to an unprecedented scale. But their involvement has to be managed with proper evidence and accountability, to make sure the outcomes are beneficial and fair for everyone.”

Many countries require businesses to conduct Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) to quantify and reduce their environmental damage, and other private-sector initiatives also encourage companies to measure and disclose their biodiversity impacts. However, the study finds that current guidelines and legal frameworks around ecosystem restoration are inadequate, and are not yet resulting in appropriate reporting by businesses.

̽��ֱ��researchers are calling for more transparency around the reporting of corporate-led ecosystem restoration projects, and for reporting to be more consistently centred around scientific principles that determine ecosystem restoration success.

“Restoring degraded ecosystems is an urgent challenge for this decade, and big businesses have the potential to play a vital role,” said Dr Tim Lamont at Lancaster ̽��ֱ��, lead author of the study.

He added: "With their size, resources and logistics expertise, they could help deliver the large-scale restoration we need in many places. But at the moment there is very little transparency, which makes it hard for anyone to assess if projects are delivering benefits for ecosystems or people.

“When a business says it has planted thousands of trees to restore habitat and soak up carbon – how do we know if this has been delivered, if the trees will survive, and if it has resulted in a functioning ecosystem that benefits biodiversity and people? In many cases, we’ve found that the evidence provided by large corporations to support their claims is insufficient.”

̽��ֱ��researchers say new improved reporting guidelines around ecosystem restoration should:

Recommend that companies clearly differentiate between restoration activities that merely mitigate the negative environmental impacts of a business’ operations from those that aim to provide wider climate, biodiversity and social justice outcomes.
Recommend a principle-based approach, drawing from conservation science, for planning and reporting, so that restoration projects in a range of different contexts can all maintain high standards across core areas.
Ensure corporations engage with and empower local stakeholders to co-design restoration projects from the outset.

Reference

Lamont, T, et al: 'Hold big business to task on ecosystem restoration: corporate reporting must embrace holistic principles from restoration science.' Sept 2023, Science. DOI: 10.1126/science.adh2610

Adapted from a press release by Lancaster ̽��ֱ��.

A near total lack of transparency is making it impossible to assess the quality of corporate-led ecosystem restoration projects, a new study finds.

̽��ֱ��world’s largest corporations have the potential to lift ecosystem restoration efforts to an unprecedented scale. But their involvement has to be managed with proper evidence and accountability, to make sure the outcomes are beneficial and fair for everyone.

Rachael Garrett

Tim Lamont

Degraded coral reef 'rubblefield' in Indonesia

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Saving England's chalk streams

ta385 — Thu, 27 Apr 2023 07:00:00 +0000

A conference organised by Pembroke College, Cambridge Conservation Initiative and WildFish Conservation has mobilised activists working to save chalk streams - one of the world's rarest habitats - from pollution and over-abstraction.

A lost world? How zooarchaeology can inform biodiversity conservation

lw355 — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 14:00:01 +0000

As dawn breaks, a Cantor’s Roundleaf bat flies through the lush rainforest canopy searching out its colony. Its home is the Great Cave of Niah, Sarawak, in northern Borneo, where it accompanies tens of thousands of other bats, careening through the cave after a night’s work hunting insects. It’s a scene that has probably been replicated daily for tens of thousands of years.

Evidence for the longevity of bat colonisation of the cave has been revealed through analysis of some 12,000 bat bones, as well as 1,400 bird bones, uncovered by archaeologists digging in Hell Trench at the West Mouth of the cave, and examined and dated by Cambridge zooarchaeologist Dr Chris Stimpson. His recently completed study, which was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council, suggests that bats have been living there for 50,000 years.

̽��ֱ��forest surrounding the Great Cave of Niah once blanketed the entire state of Sarawak, but today only pockets remain such as the Niah National Park, where the cave is located. Conservation efforts here and elsewhere in the world are faced with the challenge of how best to manage and conserve what is left of some of the most biologically diverse and complex habitats on Earth.

Stimpson, along with other zooarchaeologists around the world, believes he has something new to offer the debate: “Conservation efforts draw on relatively recent ecological evidence. To formulate effective priorities for biological conservation, zooarchaeology, or the study of ancient animal bones, can provide a remarkably long-range perspective. It can tell us something about the nature of animal communities before humans intensively modified their habitats, as well as provide a deeper understanding of the role that humans have played in structuring tropical forests across millennia.”

Tall, moisture-loving, closed-canopy forests form a band around the equator and have been described as of “disproportional importance” in driving patterns in global biodiversity and the global carbon cycle. ̽��ֱ��ambitious study begun by Stimpson will measure changes in animal communities in tropical forests over 50,000 years and across three continents.

̽��ֱ��bare bones

̽��ֱ��idea behind the new study grew out of Stimpson’s PhD research at the Great Cave as part of a major research project begun in 2000 under the leadership of Graeme Barker, Disney Professor of Archaeology and Director of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research in Cambridge. ̽��ֱ��long-term investigation, which was funded principally by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, involved a team of 40 archaeologists and environmental scientists from a dozen universities. ̽��ֱ��team found astonishing evidence for sophisticated methods used by early Modern Humans to exploit the rainforest as far back as 45,000 years ago, from specialist hunting techniques to the neutralisation of poisons.

Famously, the oldest reliably dated Modern Human fossil in Southeast Asia yet recorded, known as ‘Deep Skull’, had previously been discovered within the cave in the 1950s by Tom and Barbara Harrisson. As a result of Barker’s research, its age was confirmed as 37,000 years old.

“There had been some debate as to whether the rainforests were a major barrier to the dispersal of modern humans because of the difficulties of foraging in an environment where food is widely dispersed and ephemeral, and sometimes inaccessible in the canopy. But the findings in the Great Cave showed that they weren’t flailing around. They coped well, were thinking ahead and adapting to change,” said Stimpson.

Tropical forests such as the Niah National Park are often regarded as the world’s last ‘virgin landscapes’. Yet this runs contrary to Stimpson’s and others’ findings, as he explained: “These communities may have been subject to exploitation and modification by humans for thousands of years. Essentially, what we regard as ‘pristine’ ecosystems are in fact ‘degraded’ ecosystems. Zooarchaeology can help those involved in conservation efforts to understand how ecologically representative remnant stands of forest are."

After painstakingly analysing the vast number of animal bones found in the cave, Stimpson discovered that people were hunting hornbills at least 19,000 years ago and eating cave-dwelling fruit bats 42,000 years ago. He was able to identify bones from four species of hornbill, although only a single species remains in the forest today.

Using the distal part of the humerus bone (close to the elbow) as a taxonomic marker to differentiate between species of bat, Stimpson found that a colony of wrinkle-lipped bats, which may have numbered as many as three million individuals at its peak, had disappeared by the 17th century: “This may be because the colony was disturbed when people began to visit the cave regularly to collect the nests of cave swiftlets, whose edible nests were much prized as the main ingredient of bird’s nest soup,” he said.

By contrast, he found evidence to suggest the persistence of the Strategy I bats, a guild of bats that need closed-canopy forest to hunt. “If you lose the closed-canopy forest, then you lose this group of bats,” he explained. “This finding presents a robust case for the existence of closed-canopy rainforest for at least 50,000 years, putting starkly into perspective the fact that recent forest felling has reduced the forest by two thirds in the past 40 years.”

Looking for ‘lost worlds’

“Attempts to contextualise and quantify the extent of human impact on the biodiversity and resilience of the tropical forest are hampered by the lack of studies that consider tropical forests from millennial timescales,” Stimpson said. “Yet, such studies can provide benchmarks far deeper in time than ecological snapshots, which rarely approach 50 years in duration.

Although the title of the new research project, ‘A lost world? Zooarchaeology and biological conservation in the tropical forest biome’, tips its hat to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s tale of an expedition to a South American plateau where prehistoric animals still survive, it does so because it considers study sites at times before the recent intensive modification of habitats by humans. In other words, tropical forest communities that might now be considered ‘lost worlds’.

“I’m interested in what role humans have played as active predators in structuring the animal communities of tropical forest habitats and what implications this has for the animal communities we see today,” explained Stimpson, whose new research is funded by the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.

To do this, he is pulling together published zooarchaeological datasets from 26 studies at archaeological sites in Central and South America, Central Africa and Southeast Asia, with a view to eventually increasing this to 40 datasets. Each dataset represents a faunal inventory listing all of the different animal groups that are evident from the thousands of bones retrieved in the course of excavation. He will then compare this with the fauna that exist in the region today.

Because the project is so broad in its spatial and temporal coverage, it will allow Stimpson to characterise the direct and indirect effects of human hunting behaviour in geographical regions over millennia. He will be able to ask whether trends exist in the spectrum of targeted animals and what ecological role these animals play in tropical fores

As his studies progress, Stimpson will work closely with conservation scientists in Cambridge: “I’m trying to knit biological conservation and archaeology together.”

̽��ֱ��results, he believes, will provide a powerful tool to improve current understanding of ecosystem change in response to anthropogenic pressures. Crucially, the long-term benchmark data produced by the project will be of direct relevance to conservation initiatives working in the tropical forest biome; his aim, as he explained, is to ask: “How can we utilise these data in the best possible way to inform conservation priorities for protection?”

A new study of tropical forests will provide a 50,000-year perspective on how animal biodiversity has changed, explored through an archaeological investigation of animal bones.

̽��ֱ��study of ancient animal bones can provide a remarkably long-range perspective. It can tell us about the nature of animal communities before humans intensively modified their habitats.

Dr Chris Stimpson

Chris Stimpson

Ancient bat bones

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