December 2024 – Cabot Institute for the Environment blog

Peatlands urgently need to be restored for UK to meet emissions targets

Posted on December 3, 2024 by amanda.woodman-hardy

The headline goal of the UK’s peatland strategy – a framework published by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) that sets out how to improve UK peatlands – is simple, yet ambitious. The aim is for 20,000km² (2 million hectares) of UK peatland to be kept in good condition, restored or sustainably managed by 2040.

Yet, with approximately 30,000km² (3 million hectares) of these soggy ecosystems forming a complex mosaic across the UK’s four nations, 80% of it in poor condition, this is a monumental task. Five years after its launch in 2018, the experts behind the IUCN’s UK peatland programme have been reflecting on the progress.

Peat forms where wet and oxygen-limited soil conditions slow the decay of dead vegetation. This builds up over thousands of years leading to thick accumulations of organic matter, or peat. Given the continuing climate emergency, it is imperative that the carbon this contains is kept in the ground and out of the atmosphere where it will contribute to climate change.

However, land use practices over the last century have deeply drained the UK’s peatlands, destroying the waterlogged and oxygen-free conditions that preserve them and releasing the equivalent of 20 million tonnes of CO₂ each year.

Peat restoration is an important nature-based solution that can mitigate climate change and will be an essential part of reaching the UK’s legally binding emissions targets.

By restoring the UK’s peatlands, we avoid further emissions and, in time, convert them back into carbon sinks. Not only that, peatland restoration restores important functions of the ecosystem that help to reduce flood risk, clean water and improve biodiversity.

There are some reasons for optimism. Peat restoration began in the 1990s but has been rapidly accelerating in the last decade, largely focusing on raising water tables to restore low-oxygen conditions.

Around 2,550km² (255,000 hectares) of restoration have been completed. Despite problems in collating reliable data, a preliminary milestone of “1 million hectares in good condition by 2020” has probably been achieved. However, this number includes the best peatlands, which had never been extremely degraded and required little intervention.

Peatlands are finally being recognised in policy. Scotland, England and Wales all now have national peatland strategies that drive restoration of each unique landscape. And progress has been made in legislating against the effect of peat burning, with all burning on deep peat banned in England since 2021 and unlicensed burning on Scottish peatlands set to be implemented from 2025.

The peatlands of Scotland’s Flow Country, the world’s largest and most intact expanse of blanket bog, was recently designated a Unesco world heritage site.

peat cut on peatland, left out to dry — Peat turf cut and left to dry on a wetland in the Scottish Highlands.
DrimaFilm/Shutterstock

The way that peatland landscapes are being managed is advancing too. Paludiculture, a way of farming that allows groundwater to remain near the surface, has been a success in Europe and recent trials have shown promise in the UK.

This wetter farming could produce sustainable construction materials and biofuels with crops like bulrushes or reeds and wetland food crops like cranberry, celery and watercress. It could help convert intensive grasslands to wet meadows that can be grazed by carefully chosen breeds of cows or even water buffalo.

Although not ready to be widely implemented, recent trials suggest that this could be key to UK land management in the future.

Despite all this attention, there has been limited progress towards most key areas of the peatland strategy, with both conservation of the best peatlands and restoration of the others falling well below target levels. Indeed, the UK government’s climate change committee consider progress to be “significantly off-track”.

In this latest report, the IUCN UK peatland team says: “The progress we talk about in our report has been made across the whole of the UK since the 1990s.” Scotland, for example, needs to complete as much restoration in only ten years as they have in the last 30. They have scaled up – just nowhere near enough.

Shortfalls and long-term goals

So why, with all this effort and goodwill, are we still falling short? Funding is a problem.

It is widely accepted that public funding will not deliver the estimated £8-22 billion needed to restore all peatlands, but private financing schemes like carbon credits are in their infancy.

There are still no universally agreed definitions of either “peatland” or “restoration”, so eligibility for the various environmental schemes that allow landowners to fund restoration is confusing and off-putting.

Even where restoration can overcome these limitations, there is no centralised way to record the progress in transforming peatlands and very little capacity for the long-term monitoring needed to show whether particular projects are being successful. So tracking progress is near impossible.

Most frustratingly, despite collectively investing £318 million in peat restoration projects, no government has banned the extraction of peat and the long-promised ban on peat sales for horticulture has not materialised anywhere in the UK.

Although progress has been slow, the capacity and knowledge built over these last five years is huge. There has never been such awareness of a need to protect and restore our peatlands, so many people available with the right skills to do it and so much political will and public or private funding to carry it out.

There are many reasons progress has been slow but, with the right funding and legislation, the progress made in the last five years can be accelerated and two million hectares of healthy UK peat may still be possible by 2040.

Now that the UN’s climate summit, Cop29 in Azerbaijan, is over, it is clearer than ever that almost every peat-containing nation in the world is grappling with the same trade-offs. Just as we are debating how to raise water tables in Somerset without ending hundreds of years of dairy farming, south-east Asian countries struggle to reduce emissions from their vast regions of degraded agricultural peatland while still sustaining populations with enormous requirements for rice.

Keeping peat in wet ground, from Scottish peat bogs to the rice paddies of China, is one of the most cost-effective ways of keeping greenhouse gas emissions down, and we need to preserve and restore as much of it as possible.

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute for the Environment member, Dr Casey Bryce, Senior Lecturer, School of Earth Sciences, University of Bristol. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Casey Bryce

African penguins could be extinct by 2035 – how to save them

Posted on December 2, 2024December 2, 2024 by amanda.woodman-hardy

African penguin on a beach — African penguin. Photo by Taryn Elliott via Pexels.

In October 2024, the African penguin became the first penguin species in the world to be listed as critically endangered by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.

This is a sad record for Africa’s only penguin, and means it is now just one step away from extinction.

How did this happen? African penguins (Spheniscus demersus) are found only in Namibia and South Africa. Their numbers have been declining since the 1800s. At that time, they were burnt in ships’ boilers, their eggs were harvested and consumed as a delicacy, and their nests were destroyed by guano-harvesters seeking a rich source of fertiliser.

Such activities are fortunately no longer allowed. African penguins have been protected under South Africa’s Sea Birds and Seals Protection Act since 1973 (and more recently under the Marine Threatened or Protected Species Regulations since 2017).

These laws and regulations ban the capture of penguins or their eggs, and any intentional harm done to them. Fertilisers no longer use guano (penguin excrement). After egg and guano harvesting stopped, the lack of prey (small fish like sardines and anchovies) became the main issue for penguins from the early 2000s.

The impacts of climate change on the distribution and abundance of their food, and competition with industrial fisheries, have contributed to a 70% reduction in this penguin’s population between 2000 and 2024.

We are a group of scientists from universities and non-governmental organisations that have, for years, focused on solutions to save the African penguin. Today, unless the South African government takes urgent steps to protect the African penguin, it will likely become extinct in the wild by 2035. At present there are fewer than 20,000 birds left in the wild.

Penguins are like the canaries in the coal mine. They are disappearing because the ecosystem they rely on, together with many other species, including fish targeted by commercial fisheries, is in dire straits. By saving them, we protect their ecosystem and the other species that rely on it.

Penguins are also valuable to the economy, bringing in revenue from tourism.

What’s worked for the penguin so far

The destruction of African penguins’ nesting habitat over the centuries has been partly repaired by setting up artificial nests in penguin colonies. New research has found that these improve the number of penguin eggs that hatch by 16.5% compared to natural surface or bush nests which remain vulnerable to the elements.

Steps to protect the African penguins’ food supply also worked. One step was the experimental “no-take zones”, where the South African government prohibited fishing around the penguins’ breeding areas between 2008 and 2019.

The government closed commercial fishing of sardines and anchovies in a 20km radius around Robben Island on the west coast and St Croix Island in Algoa Bay for three years. During this time, commercial fishing around the neighbouring penguin colonies of Dassen Island and Bird Island was still permitted. The closure was alternated every three years until 2019 to see if it affected the penguin populations.

The results were positive. Penguins were able to catch fish with less effort and their chicks’ health and survival rates improved. The population increased by about 1% – a small increase, but very important, considering they were already endangered.

In parallel, the African Penguin Biodiversity Management Plan was published in 2013. The plan focused on managing predators, such as Cape fur seals and kelp gulls, and rescuing abandoned eggs and chicks. Thousands of individual penguins were saved and released into the wild over the years.

What has gone wrong for the penguin

Despite these efforts, the African penguin population fell faster from the mid-2010s. This was mostly due to the sudden collapse of the colony at St Croix Island, then the world’s largest African penguin colony.

This collapse coincided with the establishment of ship-to-ship bunkering activities (refuelling ships at sea rather than in ports) in Algoa Bay in 2016. While the ships were refuelling, four oil spills occurred.

Ship-to-ship bunkering also increased underwater noise pollution due to a ten-fold increase of maritime traffic in the bay.

Our previous research has revealed that African penguins are highly sensitive to underwater noise. Noise from ships or drilling equipment chases penguins away from their feeding grounds.

This also uses up the African penguins’ energy, often at a time when they have none to spare. Penguins need energy reserves before starting their annual moult, when they stay ashore for three weeks without eating to replace all their feathers. If they don’t find enough food before or after that stressful period, they die.

Can the African penguin be saved?

The experimental use of no-take zones in penguin breeding areas ended in 2019. A panel of international experts was then appointed by the South African government to review the experiment and suggest a way forward.

The panel said no-take zones should be put in place around all colonies. They recommended ways to balance the benefit to penguins against the cost to fisheries.

But the government departed from the panel’s recommendations and put in place fishing closures aimed at minimising economic losses to fisheries, and not conserving penguins. For example, they closed down fishing in some areas where penguins don’t hunt for fish.

In March 2024, the non-profit organisation BirdLife South Africa and the South African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds, represented by the Biodiversity Law Centre, asked the Pretoria high court to review and set aside the Minister of Fisheries, Forestry and Environment’s August 2023 decision on fishing closures around key African penguin breeding colonies. The case is still underway.

Meanwhile, bunkering in Algoa Bay has stopped temporarily after the South African Revenue Service detained five ships in September 2023 on allegations of breaching customs laws.

Subsequently, small increases in the St Croix Island penguin population have been seen for the first time in nearly ten years.

African penguins can bounce back when environmental conditions are good. Government and non-governmental organisations have worked hard to prevent various threats to penguins. But critical work remains to be done to protect their foraging habitat (the ocean around their colonies) from polluting activities.

Penguins also need protection from competition with industrial fisheries for fish supplies.

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This blog is by Lorien Pichegru, Adjunct professor, Nelson Mandela University; Alistair McInnes, Research Associate, Nelson Mandela University; Katrin Ludynia, Honorary Research Associate and Research Manager at SANCCOB, University of Cape Town, and Peter Barham, Professor emeritus, University of Bristol. Dr Lauren Waller of the Endangered Wildlife Trust contributed to this article. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Tiny oceanic plankton adapted to warming during the last ice age, but probably won’t survive future climate change – new study

Posted on December 2, 2024 by amanda.woodman-hardy

Global temperature records are expected to exceed the 1.5 °C threshold for the first time this year. This has happened much sooner than predicted. So can life on the planet adapt quickly enough?

In our new research, published today in Nature, we explored the ability of tiny marine organisms called plankton to adapt to global warming. Our conclusion: some plankton are less able to adapt now than they were in the past.

Plankton live in the top few metres of ocean. These algae (phytoplankton) and animals (zooplankton) are transported by ocean currents as they do not actively swim.

Climate change is increasing the frequency of heatwaves in the sea. But predicting the future effects of climate change is difficult because some projections depend on ocean physics and chemistry, while others consider the effects on ecosystems and their services.

Some data suggest that current climate change have already altered the marine plankton dramatically. Models project a shift of plankton towards both poles (where ocean temperatures are cooler), and losses to zooplankton in the tropics but might not predict the patterns we see in data. Satellite data for plankton biomass are still too short term to determine trends through time.

To overcome these problems, we have compared how plankton responded to past environmental change and modelled how they could respond to future climate changes. As the scientist Charles Lyell said, “the past is the key to the present”.

We explored one of the best fossil records from a group of marine plankton with hard shells called Foraminifera. This comprehensive database of current and past distributions, compiled by researchers at the University of Bremen, has been collected by hundreds of scientists from the seafloor across the globe since the 1960s. We compared data from the last ice age, around 21,000 years ago, and modern records to see what happened when the world has previously warmed.

We used computational models, which combine climate trends with traits of marine plankton and their effect on marine plankton, to simulate the oceanic ecosystems from the last ice age to the pre-industrial age. Comparing the model with the data from the fossil record is giving us support that the model simulated the rules determining plankton growth and distribution.

We found that some subtropical and tropical species’ optimum temperature for peak growth and reproduction could deal with seawater warming in the past, supported by both fossil data and model. Colder water species of plankton managed to drift to flourish under more favourable water temperatures.

Our analysis shows that Foraminifera could handle the natural climate change, even without the need to adapt via evolution. But could they deal with the current warming and future changes in ocean conditions, such as temperature?

Future of the food chain

We used this model to predict the future under four different degrees of warming from 1.5 to 4 °C. Unfortunately, this type of plankton’s ability to deal with climate change is much more limited than it was during past warming. Our study highlights the difference between faster human-induced and slower-paced geological warming for marine plankton. Current climate change is too rapid and is reducing food supply due to ocean stratification, both making plankton difficult to adapt to this time.

Phytoplankton produce around 50% of the world’s oxygen. So every second breath we take comes from marine algae, while the rest comes from plants on land. Some plankton eat other plankton. That in turn gets eaten by fish and then marine mammals, so energy transfers further up the food chain. As it photosynthesises, phytoplankton is also a natural carbon fixation machine, storing 45 times more carbon than the atmosphere.

Around the world, many people depend heavily on food from the ocean as their primary protein sources. When climate change threatens marine plankton, this has huge knock-on effects throughout the rest of the marine food web. Plankton-eating marine mammals like whales won’t have enough food to prey on and there’ll be fewer fish to eat for predators (and people). Reducing warming magnitude and slowing down the warming rate are necessary to protect ocean health.

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This blog is written by Rui Ying, Postdoctoral Researcher, Marine Ecology, and Daniela Schmidt, Professor in Palaebiology, University of Bristol. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.