5 ways climate change is impacting nature, and how nature can prevent climate change
By restoring and protecting natural habitat it can remain our biggest carbon store
I recently gave a short talk at our local community centre, which I volunteer at, about the ways nature is being affected by climate change, but also how nature helps prevent it. I thought I would share some of the insights with you.
1) The natural carbon cycle is damaged
Plant life around the world absorbs carbon from the atmosphere. Plants and animals die, eventually releasing the carbon again through decomposition. Over the course of millions of years, some of the carbon is locked away for long amounts of time in peat, ocean beds, soils, sediment, frozen tundra and fossil fuels like oil and coal. This constant process of absorbing and releasing carbon is called the carbon cycle and over billions of years has worked to stabilise our climate, creating the liveable world we know today.
Human activity from using fossil fuels, rapidly releasing locked carbon back into the atmosphere, and the eradication and disruption of significant areas of natural habitat on land and sea, are harming the natural carbon cycle, causing rapid global warming. This warming is already having an impact on natural systems around the world.
According to the United Nations organisation, “approximately 1 million animal and plant species are at risk of extinction at a rate estimated to be 100 to 1,000 times higher than the natural extinction rate.” That is a huge range but whichever end you choose, it’s horrific to ultra-horrific.
On the flip side, if we can protect and restore natural ecosystems quickly, it is one of our best ways of addressing rapid human caused global warming. The world’s best and proven carbon capture, it’s worked for billions of years.
2) Global average temperature has increased by approximately 1.2°C since pre-industrial times (Met Office)
The world is on course to hit an average of 1.5C global warming within a few decades. Of course, as an average, that looks small but it has a big impact across the globe, and some regions of the world are heating faster. As we know in gardening, plants react quickly to temperature changes, growing and behaving in different ways through the seasons. Wildlife too use temperature to know when to breed, migrate and hibernate. That slight change is already disrupting plants and wildlife behaviour in every corner of the globe.
On a global scale, warmer temperatures melt ice of glaciers, tundra and the poles releasing carbon locked within or below them. Warmer air in the atmosphere can hold more water, leading to heavier and unpredictable rain storms in many areas. Changes in temperature will also change or disrupt the jet streams, and that’s one of the biggest concerns because no-one knows if that change can ever be reversed.
In more drylands, such as desert or semi desert, or land stripped of forests, the small temperature increase can tip the balance to make the entire area uninhabitable. We are seeing areas of the world facing desertification (becoming desert) already due to climate change. In some of these edge places, where an annual rainfall is essential, a slight change in temperature or reduction in rainfall can make all the difference. This can wipe out entire ecosystems, and of course, it is already affecting the lives of millions of people in those areas.
3) Ocean acidification has increased rapidly causing pH to drop by approximately 30% since the pre-industrial era (European Environment Agency)
Carbon dioxide is quickly absorbed into water and while this naturally happens, we’ve significantly increased the amount in the atmosphere. When atmospheric carbon dioxide is absorbed in water, it reacts to form carbonic acid. Carbonic acid quantities increasing in oceans due to increases of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, even at weak levels, affects marine life by making it harder for shellfish to build shells and other marine life to grow skeletons, which are made of calcium carbonate, it will even slowly dissolve them. Acidification of oceans is one of the reasons coral reefs are bleaching and dying.
4) Approximately 50% of plant and animal species are already experiencing population or range shifts due to climate change (World Wildlife Fund)
Displacement applies to oceans, land and air. Changes in temperature mean the range of places animals can survive in, or need to survive, will move. As an example, a recent Scottish Biodiversity Indicator report found that “over the past 40 years, butterflies traditionally found south of the border - for example, orange-tip and peacock - have become more common in Scotland.” This might sound positive, but it happening so quickly is problematic because food sources might not be available for them in these new areas or they may start competing with existing species, accelerating their extinction. It also means in other areas, such as down south, the conditions may no longer be suitable for those to survive.
Seasonal shifts caused by global warming are another major problem that we’ve seen affect wildlife. Earlier spring, unpredictable and stronger drought or heavy rain - these extremes are becoming more common, and that is hard for wildlife to adjust to. Taking the butterfly example again, butterflies really struggle in heavy rain, as we saw this spring with a huge decline in UK populations. Shifts are happening for every species of living organism around the planet, and that matters because all life is connected and reliant on other species.
5) Approximately 25% of the UK's total carbon is stored in soils (UK's Committee on Climate Change) and that is under threat
Around the world, living soil is a natural carbon store, drawing carbon dioxide in from the atmosphere by plant, fungi and animal life, and then retained in both the living and dead organic matter. But human activity and climate change is disrupting that natural soil life carbon cycle, both releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and reducing the amount of land that can actively store carbon.
Industrial farming and habitat destruction are among the top causes of soil life disruption. Though increasingly, the chaotic and extreme climate is having a global impact. That small increase in global temperature speeds up processes such as decomposition, releasing carbon from dead organic material faster. As gardeners will know from making compost, the warmer the material is, the faster it decomposes. Heavy rain degrades and erodes soils. Soils degraded by human activity, such as for industrial farming, are far less resilient to effects from the weather, leading to a downward spiral.
There are many other ways global warming is affecting wildlife, every single ecosystem is already being affected. Hopefully this gives you a good overview to think about what is going on around you.
What to do about it? Well, this is why gardens are important, around the world, gardens add up to a lot of land that we can control together. You can also support charities such as the WWF, Wildlife Trusts, RSPB, Bornfree and World Land Trust who work with local communities to protect natural habitat. We can also support farmers transitioning to organic and non-industrial practices by buying their products.
p.s. up until the end of the year, every paid subscriber can ask to be sent a personal note from me as a thank you for all your support this year, find out the details here
Very interesting read, thank you. Is it naive to think small efforts such as what can be achieved in a small or even tiny suburban garden, like mine, can really have a positive impact on the wider problem? I admit to switching off to the David Attenborough's of this world, as I find it all so overwhelming doom and gloom. I suspect I'm not the only one either! I feel more people would open up to the challenges if they felt they could make a difference.
When I moved to Norfolk thirty years ago, it was counteracting the lack of water ( the time of Beth Chatto's gravel garden) that was the chief concern, and now the battle is with flooding. Much of my garden is sodden from October to late spring and I have had to rethink completely what I grow.