Forests help counter global warming, but they are also threatened by it. Many tree species struggled this past summer as much of Europe was hit by heat waves and a severe drought – thought to be the worst in 500 years.
Even olive trees, known for their ability to resist dry conditions, have suffered. Spain is the world’s leading producer of olive-oil but many Spanish farmers expect their olive-oil harvests this year to decline by as much as 50%.
In this context, Horizon researchers are racing to understand more about how trees respond to drought as part of the fight against climate change.
Existing forests already remove about a third of the greenhouse gas emissions caused by human activities. A worldwide afforestation programme could do the same for almost a third of the discharges that remain in the atmosphere.
‘If you look at the last 10 years or so, there have been a number of events where severe drought has caused large-scale death of trees in forests.’ said Dr Jaideep Joshi, of the Plant-FATE project, which is studying plant traits to protect forests from climate change.
Planting billions of trees is a relatively inexpensive way to tackle the climate crisis, according to a study about the potential for global forest cover to mitigate climate change. But as drought spreads, forests worldwide are at risk. In Europe, 500 000 hectares of forest were wiped out as a result of drought between 1987 and 2016. Joshi led the Horizon-funded Plant-FATE project, which broke new ground when it comes to predicting the impact of drought on trees of all kinds.
A major limitation of current models is that they rarely consider trees’ ability to adapt to dry conditions and how resilience may differ between species. That leads to inconsistencies when projecting how forests will respond to future climate scenarios.
‘That is where the largest uncertainty currently lies,’ said Dr Joshi. ‘You have this whole ecosystem of mixed species – we have tried to bring this all together in a simple but comprehensive modelling framework.’
A model acts as a tool for simulating outcomes and he believes his team’s model will be particularly useful when it comes to planning tree-planting programmes. That’s because it can signal the carbon capture and storage potential of different species over the next 50-100 years, when climate conditions will be different to what they are today.
‘It could help make the right choices of which species to plant or where to plant them,’ said Dr Joshi. ‘It’s our model’s most promising conservation application.’
In their model, the Plant-FATE researchers incorporated trees’ ability to adjust to changing climate and looked at a range of timescales.
In shorter timeframes of weeks to months, for example, trees exposed to drought may shed their leaves to conserve water (because water evaporates through pores on the surface of leaves) in what’s known as a ‘false autumn’.
But over longer timescales, trees can grow new wood with different properties better suited to dry conditions.
Dr Joshi and his team also took scale into account. For example, some responses occur in specific parts of a tree as roots and leaves, while others take place at the level of an entire species.
To test their full model, Dr Joshi and his colleagues used data from an Amazon rainforest site containing about 400 species in a 5 000 square-metre area. They found that their model’s predictions closely matched what happened in real life at the site.
It marks the first time that a vegetation model has performed realistically over different timescales while using very few parameters, according to Dr Joshi, a researcher at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria.
‘It gives you the capacity to predict forest performance for unknown conditions,’ he said. ‘That makes it much more useful to predict the response of global forests to future climate scenarios.’
While tall trees are often considered to be more vulnerable to dry conditions than shorter ones, much remains to be discovered about why and to what extent a tree’s height affects its resistance to drought.
Dr Laura Fernández de Uña leads the Horizon-funded DISTRESS project, which is examining how a tree’s ability to transport water changes with height and how that might influence drought responses.
She and her colleagues stand to shake up some conventional wisdom in the field.
‘We see certain differences between individual trees and also between species types,’ said Dr Fernández de Uña, a post-doctoral fellow at public research centre CREAF in Barcelona, Spain.
Unsurprisingly, research confirms that it’s harder for water to reach the heights of taller trees. Even in normal conditions, gravity is a basic impediment.
During a drought, it is harder for trees to extract water from dry soil and draw it upwards. This increases the risk of water-transporting conduits sucking in air bubbles, which can block the flow (similar to embolisms in human blood vessels). If any bubbles occur, parts of a tree can be denied water and die.
Furthermore, tall trees in a forest are exposed to more heat and wind and less humidity. ‘The canopy conditions themselves are drier than for a smaller tree in the understory,’ said Dr Fernández de Uña. ‘All this is negative for tall trees during a drought.’
Nonetheless, past research indicates that tall trees can adapt to heat and water stress or even cope better than small trees. They are able to expand their water-conducting pipes, for example, to get more flow up their long trunks.
In addition, larger trees have more roots that reach greater depths, allowing access to water even when levels in the upper ground are low.
They also tend to have thicker trunks, which allow bigger trees to store more carbohydrates and water.
For Dr Fernández de Uña, all this shows that – contrary to common assumptions – tall trees have a fighting chance when temperatures soar and water becomes scarce for prolonged periods.
‘They are able to adapt and overcome their limitations,’ she said. ‘We need to be more open-minded about how they may respond to drought. If it wasn’t worth it to be tall, then trees wouldn’t grow tall.’
Research in this article was funded via the EU’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA). The article was originally published in Horizon, the EU Research and Innovation Magazine.
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Nine companies are bidding for exploration rights to fossil gas in Lake Kivu in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) including US-based Symbion Power, a firm listed without clear experience in gas exploration. DRC’s Hydrocarbons Minister has said he seeks to sign exploration sharing agreements with successful bidders by 30 October, a timeline which flies in the face of the vetting procedure required by Congolese law. Firms are expected to pay hefty “bonuses” upon contract signature.
“The law stipulates a lengthy evaluation and verification process following the receipt of initial expressions of interest and the filing of bids. To properly execute these requirements in just two week is a mission impossible,” says Irene Wabiwa, International Lead for the Congo Basin forest campaign. “A hasty process is an open invitation to plunder the Congolese people and the ecosystems they depend on, while rapidly enriching an ecocidal elite.”
After a public opening of “expressions of interest,” Congolese law allows firms whose documents failed to meet initial criteria five days to contest their disqualification from bidding. Following the publication of a final list of qualified bidders, the law demands the Ministry to invite bids comprising financial and technical offers. Verification of these offers by law requires visits to companies’ headquarters and operating sites. Upon the approval of selected bidders by the Council of Ministers, and publication of winners, rejected bidders have five days to contest the results. Only then can contract negotiations begin.
Furthermore, no strategic environmental evaluation of the decision to auction oil and gas rights was conducted to date, as required by Congolese law. Three of the Ministry’s calls for tenders, including the one for the Kivu blocks, contain flagrant procedural anomalies. Oil blocks were designated without the free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) of local communities, as reported recently by seven Congolese and international NGOs. It is likely that consultations similarly did not take place with local communities in the designated gas blocks, which overlap with most of Idjwi Island and will inevitably impact the lives of its 298,237 residents, including Bambuti Indigenous People.
Last July the DRC auctioned 27 oil blocks, including rainforest and peatland areas, and three gas blocks. The auction followed the signature of a $500 million forest deal with the Central African Forest Initiative (CAFI) donor group at COP26 last year, which greenlighted new oil and gas activity in the rainforest.
Despite greenwashing efforts by DRC’s Environment Minister at a recent pre-COP27 “scientific” conference, the tender is facing opposition from local communities, scientists, climate activists, and Congolese and international NGOs.
Birds are often referred to as a barometer for the health of our planet. They are ‘ecosystem engineers’ thanks to their role as seed dispersers, pollinators and scavengers.
But as the latest State of the World’s Birds report shows that birds and our planet are in trouble. One in eight bird species is threatened with extinction, and the status of the world’s birds continues to deteriorate.
The report finds that migratory waterbirds are among the species most at risk. The biggest threat they face occurs during their annual round trip migrations between their summer breeding grounds in the northern hemisphere and their feeding areas in the south.
Last week, Member States, intergovernmental organization representatives and NGOs adopted a series of resolutions and guidelines to improve biodiversity loss and the conservation of 255 waterbirds listed under the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) backed African Eurasian Waterbird Agreement (AEWA).
Research shows that biodiversity loss is one of the greatest environmental challenges facing the planet today. In 2019, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Global Assessment warned that humanity was losing biodiversity at an unprecedented rate. One million species could go extinct in the near future if current trends are not reversed.
The Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS), the only global convention specializing in the conservation of migratory animals, their habitats and migration routes, confirmed this trend.
A CMS report presented at the 13th Conference of the Parties (COP-13) found that up to 73 per cent of its listed species were in decline. The loss of biodiversity and ecosystems, both of which sustain humanity, is nothing short of an existential crisis, said experts.
“Migratory animals are an essential part of the ecosystems in which they are found,” said Amy Fraenkel, the Convention’s Executive Secretary. “They directly contribute to the functioning and the balance and the makeup of healthy ecosystems which provide us with countless benefits, such as pollination, food, pest control and many economic benefits.”
Because migratory species cross-national, regional, and even continental boundaries, CMS has pioneered a framework that supports global cooperation – the kind that is needed to address multifaceted global challenges like biodiversity and climate change.
Despite dire assessments around species loss, several Multilateral Environmental Agreements and projects are offering hope for the future of the planet’s biodiversity.
AEWA is one of nine regional legally-binding instruments developed under the CMS framework. It covers 255 species of migratory waterbirds across Africa, Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia, Greenland and Canada.
The Northern Bald Ibis is one of the waterbirds listed under the Agreement. Once revered as the spiritual guide of ancient Egypt’s pharaohs, the Ibis is globally endangered, having dwindled to a population of approximately 700 individuals left in the wild in Morocco. The bird’s decline owes to habitat and land-use changes, pesticide poisoning, human disturbance of nesting sites, and hunting.
To save this iconic species, Member States established a Species Action Plan under the African European Waterbird Agreement. The implementation commenced in 2005. Ongoing priority actions aim to improve breeding conditions in Morocco and to reintroduce the Ibis to Algeria, amongst others.
While the Ibis’ rebound is currently taking place in two countries, the conservation of the Slaty Egret hinges on regional cooperation. The total population of this rather shy bird is believed to be somewhere between 3,000-5,000 with Botswana’s Okavango Delta as its stronghold.
The Slaty Egret is the only globally threatened heron or egret on mainland Africa, and its declining conservation status owes to habitat conversion and the degradation and destruction of wetlands. To address these issues, the AEWA Species Action Plan for the species aims at habitat conservation measures as a priority.
This bird’s action plan will benefit species from other regions that migrate to wetland habitats within its range. The improved health of wetlands, which provide food, fresh water and other resources, are expected to boost local livelihoods and wellbeing.
Countries also work together under CMS on challenges that span continents such as the Intergovernmental Task Force on Illegal Killing, Taking and Trade of Migratory Birds in the Mediterranean.
The task force brings together the countries of the Mediterranean with experts and other organizations to stop the killing of protected birds, many of which migrate between Africa and Europe. It supports conservation across two continents and serves as a model that is now being replicated to stop the illegal killing and trapping of migratory birds in the East Asian-Australasian Flyway.
The impacts of CMS are as visible as the birds in the sky. As highlighted during the 2021 World Migratory Bird Day, people have increasingly sought out birds and their songs as beacons of hope.
Preserving these wonders of the world is what CMS, along with UNEP and other partners is working to achieve for future generations.
The UN Biodiversity Lab (UNBL), an innovative spatial data analytics platform, is now a digital public good, facilitating open access to spatial data that can inform environmental evidence-based decisions.
Designed to aid policymakers in identifying and addressing pressing issues related to conservation and sustainable development, UNBL is a key resource available in the digital public goods registry – a globally recognized list of digital public goods (DPGs).
DPGs are defined as open-source software, open data, open AI models, open standards, and open content that adhere to privacy and other applicable best practices, do no harm by design and are of high relevance for attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals. In effect, this designation recognizes UNBL’s role in bringing together 400 of the world’s best global spatial data layers from more than 40 data providers for use in research, policymaking, and innovative software applications, based on the terms of use from the data providers who generate this wealth of knowledge.
Following its initial development in 2018, an updated UNBL 2.0 was launched in 2021 as a free, open-source platform by the Secretariat of the UN Biodiversity Convention (CBD), United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and the United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC).
“Data is the lifeblood of the societies of today and the future – that includes revealing new insights that can drive climate action and restore our natural world,” says UNDP Administrator Achim Steiner. “By providing open access to spatial data sets and real-time analytics as a digital public good, the UN Biodiversity Lab aims to spur much-needed efforts by countries and communities to protect our planet’s irreplaceable biodiversity and spur progress across the Global Goals.”
UNBL is powered by Impact Observatory and the Planetary Computer, which are leaders in producing technological innovation to support state-of-the art infrastructure and user-centric design. The platform collates high-quality national and global spatial data on biodiversity to generate insight for action. Its recognition as a digital public good means it adheres to privacy and other applicable laws and best practices, and does no harm by design. These attributes encourage its greater utility as a safe and trusted platform that countries can adapt to build their own digital public infrastructure.
UNBL assists stakeholders in monitoring and understanding the impacts of biodiversity loss, as well as recommending where action should be taken to protect, manage, and restore nature based on evidence-backed, high-quality data.
“The health of our natural and human systems will determine the future of our societies, economies, and planet. UNBL enables us to harness spatial data to increase transparency on the state of our planet and to generate insights about where to prioritize action for nature that delivers powerful dividends for climate action and sustainability,” said Inger Andersen, UNEP Executive Director.
With the shift towards digitalization across countries, there has been an increased demand as well as uptick in the development of digital data analytics platforms. UNBL’s stewardship by UN-based actors, its emphasis on the intersection between nature and nature-dependent development, and its focus on supporting countries in their commitments to the UN Biodiversity Convention distinguishes it as an open-source resource designed for the public good.
“The world is set to come together in December to agree on new global biodiversity targets that will shape action for nature in this critical coming decade. UNBL will be a critical tool to support Parties around the world to use the power of spatial data for planning, implementation, and monitoring of this post-2020 global biodiversity framework based on their unique national needs and context,” stated Elizabeth Mrema, Executive Secretary of the UN Biodiversity Convention.
Past and current UNBL donors include the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark, Government of Flanders, Global Environment Facility (GEF), Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Microsoft, One Earth, Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida), and Swedish Postcode Foundation. UNBL would like to thank its data providers without whom this designation as a DPG would not be possible. UNDP’s digital public goods work is supported by the Government of Norway as part of UNDP’s leadership role in the Digital Public Goods Alliance.
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