The best way to save nature? more natural

Avocets, terns and gulls pounce Wallasea island on the east coast, looking disheveled for the food, blade of grass in the summer sea breeze. In addition to the wind, and the odd chirping and screaming, it’s quiet, the kind of tranquil scene for centuries is as it seems to go already. Five years ago, there were not these wetlands. The mud, the birds have landed at one time is below the streets of London. In 2015, as part of a railway project, a construction crew has attracted more than 3 million tons of earth from under the capital and piled on arable land, on the coast of the county of Essex, 50 miles east. In the summer of 2019, a crane hoisted the old Heavy Machinery out of the water, the last traces of human intervention to remove. Wallasea is the largest coastal wetland restored in Europe, the first example of a growing movement earth “Rewild” and go back to the way it was before human beings started by millennia exploitation. And ‘good for the birds. But it is also increasingly seen as key to ensuring a welcoming people worldwide. As the bubbling water in and out of Wallasea mudflats and salt marshes, carbon dioxide, which would otherwise escape into the atmosphere and contribute to global warming restored it is buried. “Bit decompose the leaves and rivers are the costs of algae,” said Rob Field, senior scientist at the conservation of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the Wallasea running. “If you get to [slow] Salinas, the carbon precipitates suspension and is stored there, in the middle, the gloopy mud.” Environmentalists say coastal wetlands as these are capable of carbon capture up to 40 times faster than hectare tropical rain forest. But over the past 400 years, agricultural land, increased coastal development and sea level have combined to destroy the coast of Essex, 91% of wetlands. The 35% are wetlands in the world were destroyed around the world from 1975 to 2015, according to UN scientists say it is too late to avoid catastrophic climate change, only by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. and to phase out fossil fuels in a hurry, the world needs, so-called negative emissions technologies use large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to pull already down. Many believe that renaturation is the cheapest and easiest way to do it. Other options, including machines, the capturing carbon as emitted by power plants or suck from the atmosphere underground carbon savings, the need for research, money and time to mature before it can be used on a large scale. For this reason, most of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are ways of limiting warming to 1.5 ° C above pre-industrial levels is based on forestry and better land management for most of the coal to form drawdown in over the next 30 years. To save the planet, we need to give a little ‘back to nature. In Europe, home to some of the most densely populated countries in the world, and where the true wilderness has become almost non-existent, to bring the idea back to nature, but also of climate change, has captured the imagination fights. Dozens have emerged from private Rewilding projects and publicly funded across the continent. Europeans are shooting Wallasea coastal habitats such as the UK, the drainage of wetlands marshes in Germany turning and replanting forests in the Scottish Highlands. adapt the projects not only carbon sequestration, but also increase biodiversity and help the country to climate change, to prevent flooding and forest fires. The renaturation advocates say that these services offer an easy advantage over rewilding planting trees and popular with European governments for decades. From 2005-2015 forest cover in Europe it increased by the equivalent of 1,900 football fields per day as the E.U. spent several tree’s bottom billion euro planting, often on farmland that had been abandoned in countries such as France and Italy due to changing agricultural practices. Some of them had reforestation, native species to restore the forests with what they were before, but much of reforestation has been called, the planting of many a tree, where it was not, in regular lines. Many reforested trees are cut regularly and used for wood products, paper or biofuel. Afforestation Rewilding supporters say, as an offering carbon sequestration, while afforestation of capacity, offers few benefits for wildlife and involves risks. Studies have shown that large-scale plant disturbed by trees not native to Canada and China natural ecosystems degraded forest fires and depleted groundwater. Meanwhile, other landscapes have been neglected. “I think politicians like planting trees, because it is a very clear, simple action” monitored, says Timon Rutten, head of the company to Rewilding Europe, an NGO based in the Netherlands, the natural restoration, from Portugal to Bulgaria. “But swamps, wetlands and meadows are just as good or if not improves the carbon sink.” Northern European countries host large expanses of marshes-sometimes called Moore, who, perhaps, the greatest opportunity to offer heath or mitigation Sümpfe- for natural climate. The plants grow on the surface of peatlands seizure or absorb carbon dioxide when they grow up. When they die, not the decomposition of plants that do not wash the carbon back into the atmosphere, but it can be buried in muddy swamps squeeze into a new layer of peat. These habitats cover about 3% of the globe, but also contain more carbon stored as all other types of vegetation on Earth combined. Mascherano 370 million tonnes of carbon per year. But 15% of the peat in the world was drained for agricultural use, or in such a way that their peat could feed the generators are burnt to emit carbon dioxide in the process. The dried-out peatland that is left is then stored carbon into the atmosphere; Mori now account for nearly 6% of annual global carbon dioxide emissions by humans. EUROPEAN UNION. Rewilding funded projects in Finland, the UK and Germany rewetting marshes sinks back into carbon to convert. Rewilding supporters are competing for investments with more modern negative emissions technologies. Dozens of companies are developing carbon capture and storage (CCS) in the machine from the air filter chemical substance processes use CO₂. The gas is then used to make the products stored underground or to remove from the atmosphere. Schweizerer start Climeworks as CO₂ from the air scrub in factories in Italy, Switzerland and Iceland, at a cost of $500 to $600 per ton of CO₂. E ‘then sold for use in greenhouses, the manufacture of soda and the production of biofuels or preserved in the rock deep underground. But most of the IPCC plans for the prevention of more than 1.5 ° C warming are another type of CCS: bioenergy and carbon capture and storage (BECCS), which should represent the majority of negative emissions by the end of the century. central BECCS burn trees and plants, the carbon sequestered is to produce electricity while growing up, then take their carbon emissions. The British government has invested $32 million in domestic BECCS projects, including the first pilot program to introduce into E.U., the Drax power station in the UK, which went online in February. Currently, these high-tech methods to remove carbon from the atmosphere are expensive and have such limited scope. Rewilding, for the moment at least, it is made more economical and proven. peatland restoration for example, the case, a ton of CO₂ per year at $16 etwa. Despite the low cost, but there are obstacles to Rewilding on a significant scale. “There is a limited amount of land we can do to restore,” said Simon Lewis, a professor of global change science at the University College London. The mudflats and salt marshes at present buried Wallasea carbon about 1,200 tons per year: the equivalent of per capita of only about 200 Britons emissions in 2018 the UK must wetlands Rewild about 10 times the size of the country across the country in the field of national carbon dioxide emissions set to zero. renaturation on a large scale is not real political support. The plans Rewilding current British government are only 500,000 hectares of land 0.2% of the total area over the next 25 years in the country. And private rewilding are often financed against resistance; one of the largest projects of the summit in Sea, which provides for the restoration of ecosystems to 10,000 hectares of farmland in Wales, strong opposition from local communities and agricultural groups has attracted the country for their existence in a position of non-use fear more, a local politician has the project as “forced urban values ​​in a rural area of ​​Wales” and Union calls Welsh farmers to be canceled. In Wallasea the illusion of nature was drilled visited by a dark gray smoke over the northern edge of the island in the morning July period. To dispose of the British military use at the country of expired ammunition, explains the site manager Rachel Fancy. “We have a lot of big bang out of here.” However, he says Fancy find other ways to co-exist both people are expected to nature in the coming decades, threatened in particular climate change. Rewilding not only carbon sequestration but also reduces the risk of floods and forest fires, both of which have become more frequent on a warming planet. If the next 100 years shocks Wallasea flow of salt marshes, sand dunes and serve as protection against natural floods, protect homes and farmland nearby, human walls caused by rising sea levels and storm surge are overwhelmed. Wallasea doing its bit for the worse this climate collapse buries AVERT as medium carbon samphire and sea lavender. Meanwhile, the birds can relax here. The weather is fine, for now. This is an article in a series on the state of the global response to climate change. Read the rest of the stories and register for one.five, TIME climate change newsletter.
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