“What she showed us is that nature doesn’t recognize our borders, and our protection systems have to catch up to that reality,” says Laurel Angell, director of government relations and policy at the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, or Y2Y, a transboundary U.S.–Canada–Indigenous wildlife protection non-profit.

Canada shares a nearly 9,000-kilometre-long border with the United States, and more than 500 migratory species cross that border each year, ranging in size from the monarch butterfly to the grey whale – and that’s not including the animals that roam across the border constantly, such as whitetailed deer, grizzly bears and grey wolves like Pluie.

Nature doesn’t recognize our borders, and our protection systems have to catch up to that reality.

– Laurel Angell, Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative

The two countries have collaborated on cross-border wildlife conservation for decades, sharing research and partnering on initiatives. Key to this has been the relationship between federal agencies, local governments, non-profits, scientists, private landowners and Indigenous groups. But as U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration slashes funding for conservation research and federal departments, and rolls back critical endangered-species laws, wildlife that rely on the stability of these relationships now face unbalanced protection.

“We are genuinely concerned about what’s happening to federal land and wildlife management agencies,” Angell says. “Our federal partners are essential to this work, and when you cut those agencies deeply, you lose the people, the research capacity, the field scientists and the relationships that make cross-boundary conservation actually function.”

In 2025, Trump began slashing jobs at U.S. public land agencies, firing rangers and land managers who protect public parks. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has had an 18% reduction in workforce – about 1,800 jobs, including around 500 biologists. In a letter to the U.S. Secretary of the Interior, FWS director Brian Nesvik said that “almost 60 percent of the nation’s wildlife refuges lack the resources and staff needed to fulfill their missions.”

Sixteen out of 22 land research cooperatives – government research centres that focus on science-based conservation – have been placed on indefinite hiatus. During his first administration, Trump proposed several provisions that would weaken the critical Endangered Species Act (ESA) to make energy and resource development easier. And the 2027 proposed budget would cut funding by hundreds of millions of dollars to a host of environmental programs and departments.

Staff cuts to the Fish and Wildlife Service predate the current administration, says Collin O’Mara, president and CEO of the National Wildlife Federation. But the accelerated rate is worrying, he says, particularly the loss of scientists, who are integral to collecting the data sets that then inform conservation work. As climate change and biodiversity loss affect how transboundary wildlife – including endangered species such as caribou and monarch butterflies – shift their movements, up-to-date data and research is vital.

These aren’t solely U.S. problems. Many species protected by the Endangered Species Act migrate across the border, like the whooping crane, which travels from Texas to breeding grounds in the Northwest Territories and Alberta. These migration routes are essential to their survival.

On-the-ground conservation work across the border has been disrupted, too. “There are cross-border conservation projects right now where the U.S. side of critical habitat and connectivity mapping work is being cut mid-stream, leaving partners working from an incomplete picture of the landscape and leaving many people uncertain about what to even do,” Angell says.

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Connectivity mapping helps researchers maintain and improve wildlife corridors across borders, which are protected spaces that allow animals safe passage through busy roads and private lands. Making sure animal populations aren’t isolated is essential to their survival. For more than 30 years, Y2Y has worked to bridge the gap between two of the largest Rocky Mountain grizzly populations in Montana and Canada, which were split by 240 kilometres. Now, through land conservation and wildlife corridors, that gap is just shy of 50 kilometres. Once connected, the transboundary populations can migrate and mate, strengthening their numbers.

“That’s what we’re trying to protect,” Angell says. “And that last stretch to achieve real, full connectivity – which would be a landmark conservation success story – requires sustained investment and rigorous science, not less of both.”

Both Angell and O’Mara have cause for optimism, however. So far, the U.S. Congress has pushed back on most of the proposed budget cuts, “in a bipartisan, nonpartisan way,” O’Mara says. “I think at the end of the day, there’s so much support – across regions, across political ideology, across the national boundary – for this work,” he says. “That’s what gives me hope.”

Ayesha Habib is a Toronto-based journalist who has written for The Globe and Mail, The Walrus, The Narwhal and Maisonneuve.

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Just after 3 a.m. on a recent Friday morning, a 4.5-foot-long leatherback sea turtle covered her freshly dug nest with sand, sweeping and packing it into place with steady strokes of her flippers just above the high tide along a remote, rugged stretch of Ecuador’s Pacific coast.

Nearby, a team of scientists watched the turtle’s every movement, using brief pauses between her motions to carry out their own work: attaching an electronic tracking device, known as a satellite tag, to the animal’s leathery carapace.

“We just satellite-tagged the first leatherback sea turtle in all of Ecuador,” said Callie Veelenturf, a marine biologist from Massachusetts and co-founder of The Leatherback Project, a global sea turtle conservation non-profit. Veelenturf co-led the tagging effort alongside Kerly Briones Cedeño, president and director general of Fundación Reina Laúd, a volunteer-run conservation group in Ecuador that monitors sea turtle nesting habitat.

The milestone marks a new step toward better understanding one of the most endangered marine species in the world and the threats it faces. Eastern Pacific leatherbacks – a distinct population of the world’s largest sea turtle – have declined by more than 90% since the 1980s.

“There are likely less than 1,000 individuals left,” Veelenturf said.

Satellite tagging has long been used to study leatherbacks by tracking where they forage, mate and nest. But most of that work, Veelenturf said, has taken place in Mexico and Costa Rica, where the largest nesting populations have historically been concentrated. That’s left major gaps in understanding how the species uses waters farther south.

“We know very little about how they use coastal waters in the East Pacific and specifically in Ecuador,” Veelenturf said.

What is known, Veelenturf said, is that these endangered turtles face a gauntlet of threats off the Pacific coast, primarily posed by fishing activity.

Ecuador hosts one of the largest artisanal fishing fleets in the eastern tropical Pacific, with tens of thousands of small-scale boats – typically fibreglass or wooden vessels operated by individual fishers. Large-mesh gill nets, widely used by these fleets, pose the greatest risk to sea turtles, which can become entangled in the gear and drown. Sharks, rays, whales, dolphins and seabirds are at risk too.

A 2020 study published in Scientific Reports by the Eastern Pacific Leatherback Conservation Network – also known as Red Laúd OPO – found that Eastern Pacific leatherbacks could disappear by 2060 without concerted efforts to reduce their incidental capture in fishing gear.

In January, Briones Cedeño saw those impacts firsthand. While monitoring a known leatherback nesting beach, she encountered a dead female she recognized as one that had laid several nests earlier in the season.

“We were expecting her fifth nest,” she said. The turtle showed signs of asphyxiation from drowning, she said, likely caused by getting caught in fishing gear. “We presume that she died due to the issue of bycatch fisheries,” she said. “Perhaps if we had tagged her, we would have known she was passing nearby, or perhaps we could have rescued her.”

But preventing these types of deaths requires a clear picture of how leatherbacks move through Ecuador’s waters and the rest of the eastern tropical Pacific region, Veelenturf said. “Understanding the overlap between artisanal, semi-industrial and industrial fishing activities with the leatherback habitat use is just so important,” she said. “If we don’t understand where they’re going and what their diving behaviour is like, for example, we can’t really know how to best protect them.”

Satellite tagging offers one of the clearest ways to answer those questions.

By outfitting the turtle with a satellite tag that transmits its location each time it surfaces to breathe, researchers can now follow the animal in near real time through an online platform developed by Wildlife Computers, a company in Washington State that specializes in tracking marine life.

The tag Veelenturf’s team used, also created by that company, records detailed dive data, too, offering insight into not only how the turtle moves through coastal waters and the open ocean where leatherbacks spend most of their lives, but also how deep they swim.

Because leatherbacks can dive thousands of feet below the surface, protecting them requires not only knowing where they are, but also how their behaviour may overlap with fishing gear set at different depths.

Over the past seven years, Veelenturf has led a long-term leatherback tagging program along the Atlantic coasts of Panama and Colombia, where her team fitted 24 nesting females with satellite transmitters. The resulting data has helped identify critical habitats, show migratory pathways and inform conservation strategies, particularly in areas where proposed coastal development projects, such as ports, may threaten the species.

Now, in Ecuador, Veelenturf hopes similar data can be used to pinpoint where turtles face the most risks and collaborate with local communities to mitigate them by altering fishing gear or establishing marine protected areas where certain human activities would be limited or prohibited.

Satellite tracking can help researchers focus those conservation efforts by identifying specific stretches of coastline or offshore waters where turtles are most vulnerable, as well as the times of year when risk is highest based on migration, nesting or mating patterns, said Bryan Wallace, a wildlife ecologist and co-coordinator of the Eastern Pacific Leatherback Turtle Conservation Network. That kind of precision can make conservation efforts more targeted and effective, he said.

But getting that data is not easy.

Satellite tags are expensive and not always accessible for local communities running entirely volunteer-led conservation operations like Fundación Reina Laúd, Briones Cedeño said. One satellite tag can cost up to $5,000, said Veelenturf, who received a grant from the National Geographic Society to tag 10 leatherbacks in the region in order to understand their habitat use.

The tagging process itself is also time- and labour-intensive.

First, conservationists must find a turtle. And unlike the well-known nesting beaches in Mexico and Costa Rica, leatherback nesting in Ecuador is sporadic.

It took 14 people four days of patrolling more than six miles of remote coastline – by foot, motorcycle and boat – before the team finally located a nesting turtle they could tag earlier this month. The encounter happened on Pajonal Beach, a rugged stretch of shoreline about 5.5 miles south of Bahia de Caraquez, bordered by steep jungle-covered cliffs and the Pacific Ocean.

Veelenturf had hoped to find the turtle while she was laying her eggs – a stage when sea turtles enter a trance-like state and are largely unresponsive. But by the time the team arrived, the leatherback was already covering her nest.

Working in near darkness, illuminated only by their red-light headlamps, the team moved carefully, timing each of their actions to coincide with the turtle’s natural pauses so as not to disrupt her.

“Every time she stopped and exhaled, I would do a next step,” Veelenturf said.

First, they sanitized a small area of the turtle’s shell where they planned to attach the satellite tag – a small, box-shaped electronic device fitted with an antenna designed to break through the water’s surface each time the turtle comes up to breathe over the next two years.

Then they anchored the tag to the raised ridge of the turtle’s soft carapace by drilling two small holes through it, threading small tubes that serve as fasteners for the device. A quick-setting epoxy was also moulded to serve as a secure base for the equipment, helping hold it in place.

Once the tag was attached, the team stepped back and watched as the turtle shuffled its way back toward the ocean.

They called her Lucero, a Spanish word that in English means “morning star.”

“Naming her Lucero is deeply meaningful to us,” said Briones Cedeño. “Just as the morning star guides those who navigate the ocean, this turtle will help guide our understanding of leatherback movements and the future of their conservation in Ecuador and across the East Pacific.”

Teresa Tomassoni is an environmental journalist covering the intersections between oceans, climate change, coastal communities and wildlife for Inside Climate News.

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Enabling that goal is the objective behind the Business and Biodiversity Assessment report, a first-of-its-kind publication released on February 9 by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), an independent organization created in 2012.

A product of nearly three years’ work by 80 scientists and private-sector experts, the report was endorsed this month by representatives of the more than 150 IPBES member countries at a week-long plenary session in Manchester, United Kingdom. It is intended to serve as a key reference on nature-related risks for business – and how alleviating those risks hinges on policy change by governments.

“From my perspective, it plays a role for nature similar to what the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] has played for climate change,” says Thomas Walker, special projects lead at the Institute for Sustainable Finance at the Smith School of Business, Queen’s University, in an interview with Corporate Knights. “Canadian business leaders should pay attention because of Canada’s resource-based economy and because nature underpins the productive capacity of said economy.”

Stark warning

The report begins with a stark warning to businesses: they can either lead transformative change or “risk extinction.” The authors cite evidence of significant declines over the last 50 years in many categories of the natural “ecosystems services” on which business and economies depend. This includes things like raw materials from nature, pollination and seed dispersal, air and water quality, soil fertility, and amenities for tourism and recreation. Altogether, they underscore just how much business is at risk from nature’s collapse. The report presents a detailed guidebook of more than 130 actions that companies, along with policymakers and other enabling actors, can take to reverse it.

“What’s really fundamental here is that our experts looked at the methods and approaches that are available to understand what [risk from biodiversity loss] means in an individual business context. How you can, as a business, understand your exposure to that. How you measure your impacts and dependencies and therefore how you can understand your risks,” said Matt Jones, one of three report co-chairs and a senior officer at the UN Environment Programme, at the launch press conference.

The report’s release (for now, just the policy summary, with remaining chapters to follow in a few weeks) was well-timed, coming just one week before governments convened in Rome from February 16 to 19 to begin the first global review of nature action under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) since it was created in 2022. Mark Carney’s Liberal government is also expected to soon unveil its revised 2030 Nature Strategy, replacing the previous Nature Accountability Bill that failed to pass before the last election. The new strategy will spell out how Canada intends to meet its commitments under the GBF to halt and reverse biodiversity loss and protect 30% of lands and waters by 2030.

In an email to Corporate Knights, Samantha Bayard, a spokesperson for Environment and Climate Change Canada, emphasized the role of nature disclosure in addressing the role of business in biodiversity loss. “While adoption of nature-related disclosures is still at an early stage in Canada – hindered by, for example, capacity, expertise, and data limitations – a growing number of companies and municipalities have begun to address nature-related risks in their portfolios and integrate natural assets (e.g., wetlands) into their financial disclosures.”

Delivering transformative change

A core tenet of the GBF is that reversing biodiversity loss requires the “involvement of all society,” including companies. Significantly, among the GBF’s 23 targets is a call for government action to encourage and enable companies to better manage their impacts on nature and more accurately assess – and disclose – their risks and dependencies. Both sides of that equation are squarely addressed in the new IPBES report.

For businesses, it lays out actions at four decision-making levels: corporate, operational, value chain and portfolio. Asked to suggest some critical first steps, report co-chair Ximena Rueda, dean of the School of Management at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, urged companies to choose their battles. “What is their highest dependency [on nature] or highest impact? Start from that.”

Government’s responsibility

However, the report also makes clear that voluntary efforts alone won’t be enough to deliver the kind of “transformative change that will halt and reverse biodiversity loss,” added co-chair Stephen Polasky, professor of ecological and environmental economics at the University of Minnesota. That will occur only if governments also step in “to change the set of conditions in which businesses operate.”

A key target here are the massive subsidies currently directed toward business activities that drive biodiversity loss. In 2023, according to the report, subsidies of US$2.4 trillion contributed to the estimated US$7.3 trillion in public and private finance flows that had direct negative impacts on nature. In contrast, just US$220 billion in private and public funds were directed to the conservation and restoration of biodiversity. “There is a big role here for governments and the financial system to provide incentives for business to do actions that are beneficial for biodiversity and to take away incentives to business to do actions which are harmful,” Polasky said.

The challenge of subsidy reform

According to the ISF’s Walker, the report’s concern about harmful subsidies “resonates” in Canada. Government fiscal and tax policies designed to encourage resource development and production have often failed to reflect environmental externalities or cumulative ecological impacts, he says.

While reforming subsidies will be “politically complex,” Walker says there is nothing to stop Canadian companies, which have “ample experience with climate disclosure frameworks,” to immediately start considering biodiversity in corporate decisions and disclosures. The disclosure framework established by the Task Force on Nature-Related Financial Disclosures in 2023, which is now being implemented through the work of the International Sustainability Standards Board, provides a blueprint for companies and their boards to follow.

“Structured disclosure can help integrate biodiversity into enterprise raisk management,” Walker explains. “Once nature dependencies are identified and quantified . . . they can be considered alongside climate, market and operational risks.”

Brian Banks is a writer in Cobourg, Ontario, who specializes in environment, business and sustainability.

The post A landmark study on biodiversity loss takes aim at harmful government subsidies appeared first on Corporate Knights.

But this week, a group of 160 scientists from 23 countries announced that the planet has already reached its first major tipping point: the widespread death of warm-water coral reefs. That’s due primarily to rapidly rising marine temperatures – the seas have absorbed 90% of the excess heat we’ve created – but also the acidification that comes from more atmospheric carbon dioxide interacting with water. (This interferes with corals’ ability to build the protective skeletons that form the complex structure of a reef.) Since the late 1980s, ocean surface warming has quadrupled. Accordingly, in the last half century, half of the world’s live coral cover has disappeared.

“We’re no longer talking about future tipping points – there’s one happening right now,” Steve Smith, a research impact fellow at the University of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute and a co-author of the report, told Grist. “Although our governments are used to planning for incremental, slow change, things do seem to be speeding up.”

The more individual corals perish, the harder it gets for a reef to bounce back, destabilizing it and pushing it into a spiral of die-off. A quarter of all marine species rely on these bustling warm-water ecosystems – which cover some 350,000 square miles – but corals are bleaching as they release the symbiotic algae they need to harvest energy. Since 2023, more than 80% of the world’s reefs have suffered through the most widespread and intense bleaching event on record. Ever-higher acidification makes it even harder for corals to reproduce and then grow back from this kind of disturbance.

Warm-water corals are particularly vulnerable to climate change because they’ve made an evolutionary compromise. Being close to the ocean surface, their symbiotic algae soak up bountiful sunlight to provide energy, meaning they don’t need to rely as much on outside nutrients. But that positioning also means that during marine heat waves, hot water envelops the corals, stressing them to the point where they release their algae, causing bleaching. “This is a tradeoff. They have a balance they have to strike,” said Gordon Zhang, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s Reef Solutions group who wasn’t involved in the new report. “If the water doesn’t move much, and it’s a very shallow place, the water just keeps heating up.”

Beyond their critical role in hosting marine life, these reefs provide $9.9 trillion a year in goods and services, like fishing and tourism, supporting the livelihoods of one billion people. They also act like giant barriers for coastal communities, absorbing the impact of storm surges, the walls of water that hurricanes shove ashore: reefs in Mexico, for instance, reduced the damage from 2007’s Hurricane Dean by 43%.

Coral reefs, then, are both ecologically and economically essential, yet civilization is woefully unprepared for them reaching this tipping point – to say nothing of the other looming tipping points, like the retreat of glaciers. “We are now in a new reality, and we can no longer rely on the institutions and policies designed for the old one,” Manjana Milkoreit, who researches global governance at the University of Oslo and co-authored the report, said during a press conference announcing the findings.

For one, nations as a whole are nowhere near ambitious enough in reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that are putting unprecedented stress on coral reefs and other essential systems. Secondly, certain tipping points could be so catastrophic that governments would struggle to deal with the society-shaking fallout. A change in ocean currents in the Atlantic, for example, would plunge Europe into deep freezes and mess with the monsoon rains that faraway nations need for their crops. And thirdly, these irreversible changes can reinforce and exacerbate other crises – droughts would worsen if the Amazon turns into a savanna, for instance – a very unwelcome kind of synergy.

Basically, humans need to actively prevent tipping points, because there may be no going back once one kicks off. Coral ecosystems can’t recover and stabilize if we keep warming and acidifying the oceans. “The key message here is: Do not assume that we already know what to do, or we’re already doing everything we can,” Milkoreit said. “It’s not just more of the same, or a matter of implementing existing policies – a different approach to governance is needed.”

This article originally appeared in Grist here. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Grist is a non-profit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. 

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A new strategy could turn things around: conservation impact bonds are outcome-based finance instruments that aim to close the gap by increasing returns when funded conservation projects are successful. Investors receive their capital back plus a return if certain measurable results are achieved.

“We know the government budgets are limited. We know that philanthropy is limited, particularly in the era where we are seeing declining amounts of both,” says James Pilkington, a sustainable-finance program manager at the Zoological Society of London, a science-driven conservation charity working to restore wildlife around the world. “So we really need to mobilize the private sector and private finance to fill that financing gap and invest in biodiversity.”

Impact bonds of this sort are alreadybeing implemented in South Africa. In 2022, the World Bank rolled out the Wildlife Conservation Bond to conserve and increase the population of endangered black rhinos in two protected areas in South Africa, Addo Elephant National Park and Great Fish River Nature Reserve. The five-year, $150-million bond, also called the “Rhino Bond,” raised private capital to finance the effort. At intervals, the growth rate of black rhinos will be independently calculated by Conservation Alpha, a conservation financing firm in Nairobi, and verified by the Zoological Society of London. And if successful, investors will receive a return on their investment, with the performance payment provided by the Washington, D.C.-based fund manager Global Environment Facility.

“It’s a relatively low-risk investment so investors know they are going to get their money back,” Pilkington says.

Returns on rhinos

South Africa has the world’s largest rhino population, with about 16,056 members occupying the country’s grasslands and savannas. However, poaching by criminal syndicates is a major threat. In 2024 alone, 420 rhinos were killed in South Africa, despite conservation efforts aimed at protecting rhinos and their habitats.

Ilesanmi Adeyemo, professor of wildlife ecology and conservation at Nigeria’s Federal University of Technology Akure, agrees that mobilizing funds from private capital to finance conservation activities “could be a good solution” to biodiversity conservation challenges in South Africa. “Rhinos are already endangered [in South Africa]. Projects like this [bond] will help conserve endangered species,” he says.

While the bond is specifically designed to conserve and increase the population of black rhinos in the protected areas, other species that share their habitat will also thrive, largely because rhinos are an umbrella species, so their conservation helps protect many other species within the same ecosystem, according to the International Rhino Foundation.

Additionally, South Africa’s economy will increase through tourism, and local communities will benefit from conservation-related jobs such as project managers, park rangers, park maintenance officers, gatekeepers and patrol guards. “Activities supported by this bond aim to increase rhino population growth by 4% while also improving the management of over 150,000 hectares and providing over 2,300 jobs for local communities in and around both protected areas,” Carlos Manuel Rodriguez, the Global Environment Facility’s CEO and chair, said in a statement.

Conservation bonds gain traction globally

While capital markets remain a novel source of funding for biodiversity protection, South Africa isn’t the only country where the strategy is being tried. In 2020, the environmental group Carolinian Canada and partners like Verge Capital and 3M launched a financial instrument called the Deshkan Ziibi Conservation Impact Bond, specifically to support habitat restoration and biodiversity conservation in the Carolinian Zone, a biodiversity hot spot in southern Ontario that’s home to one-third of Canada’s at-risk plants and animals.

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The project was successful, says Diane-Laure Arjaliès, founder of the Sustainable Finance Lab at Ivey Business School. She says it contributed to the restoration of 160 hectares of habitat, planted more than 39,000 native plants, and helped transform conservation practices in the area to include more Indigenous perspectives.

Conservation impact bonds are also gaining influence globally. The UN Environment Programme’s June 2024 data showed that private financing for nature-based solutions had grown significantly since 2020, representing a major gain in tackling the huge funding gap to finance conservation. UNEP added that “if nature finance keeps growing at this pace, we could close the [finance] gap by 2030.”

Growth of conservation finance still constrained

But Pilkington believes that getting investors to buy into biodiversity or general nature-based solutions does not come as easily as climate change mitigation and adaptation projects. This is because “markets for biodiversity and ecosystem services aren’t as well developed as carbon markets,” he says. “There isn’t the same enabling regulation that there is with carbon and climate change.”

Pilkington adds that most investors are not comfortable investing in biodiversity projects, largely because much of the world’s biodiversity values lie in developing countries. “Investing in these countries is challenging for investors. There’s some sovereign risk . . . issues around exchange rates, whether they will get their money back, as well as challenges with mobilizing domestic capital.”

Regardless, Pilkington says that capital markets still remain a viable option for conservationists to fund the protection of biodiversity. The only caveat is that for projects to be viable, they must have measurable outcomes and a third party willing to pay when the thresholds for higher returns are met, he adds.

“We have to focus on projects that are going to deliver quantifiable outcomes that can be measurable within the time period,” he says. “People want to see the difference on the ground in terms of, in this case, an increase in the population of rhinos, or a reduction in deforestation, or an increase in carbon sequestration.”

Patrick Egwu is a freelance journalist based in Toronto. He has reported from Chicago, Berlin and Johannesburg. He covers the environment, migration, health and conflict.

The post A novel investing tool is improving how conservation gets funded appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Developed by Prince William and biologist and broadcaster David Attenborough four years ago as a way to build excitement (and investor attention) around planet-saving ideas, the Earthshot Prize gives five environmental innovators £1 million each to grow their vision and impact. The A-list celebs, the televised “green carpet” preshow and the Shark Tank–level cash prizes may be straight out of Hollywood, but the event’s true objective is all business. Not just the five winners, but all 15 finalists become Earthshot “fellows” – eligible to draw on ongoing advisory services and a global funding platform designed to accelerate further growth.

As the prince, wearing white biodegradable sneakers, told the audience in Cape Town, it was a trip to Namibia in 2018 to study the illegal wildlife trade that helped him recognize “the power of how innovative, positive solutions to environmental problems could drive transformative change for humans and nature.”

This year’s winners were a mix of scrappy grassroots groups, start-ups and multinational deal-makers. In the “Clean Our Air” category, the winner was the youth-led advocacy group Green Africa Youth Organization (GAYO), based in Accra, Ghana. In communities where inadequate waste-management systems mean that most garbage is simply burned – including mountains of car tires and electronic waste – GAYO is promoting the no-waste movement. Through education and innovation, and savvy lobbying, GAYO has set up youth-run sorting centres where trash is separated and reused, reducing pollution while creating more than 700 jobs. GAYO is also involved in sustainable agriculture, disaster risk reduction and renewable energy. With a team of 150 employees in four countries, founder Desmond Alugnoa says that “the aim is to create a sustainable circular economy across Africa.” In addition to its 150 employees, GAYO has trained more than 5,000 people to upcycle waste and make a living by selling products such as compost and charcoal briquettes.

The Altyn Dala Conservation Initiative in Kazakhstan set out to preserve the “Golden Steppe,” the grassy plains of central Asia. Overgrazing, agriculture, a shifting climate, poaching and disease have affected many species in this crucial migration corridor, but none more than the saiga antelope, whose numbers dipped from the millions to as few as 20,000 in 2003. By restoring and protecting five million hectares and using ranger teams and aerial patrols to combat poaching, Altyn Dala has helped the saiga population bounce back to 2.8 million. Its work has also resulted in the formation of new national parks and a burgeoning ecotourism industry. The group plans to put its prize money toward doing the same for kulan (wild asses), ertagy (wild Przewalski’s horses) and steppe eagles.

Some Earthshot Prize winners are more global in scope, including the multinational organization that helped secure the “30×30” target, calling for the effective protection and management of 30% of the world’s land and water by 2030, signed by delegates of the 2022 UN biodiversity conference in Montreal. Co-chaired by Costa Rica and France, the High Ambition Coalition for Nature and People (HAC for N&P) gives governments the tools they need to protect more spaces, write their commitments into law and overcome financial and technical barriers to action. HAC for N&P says its efforts have helped 50 member countries enact or strengthen conservation laws. The organization puts special emphasis on protecting ocean waters, since member countries are further ahead on designating conservation lands than on protecting marine ecosystems – which helped HAC for N&P secure Earthshot’s “Revive Our Oceans” award.

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The winner of the “Build a Waste-Free World” prize was Nairobi-based Keep IT Cool (KIC), whose sustainable refrigeration system helps underserved smallholder fishers in Kenya and Uganda reduce spoilage and increase their revenues. KIC works with fishing cooperatives on Lake Victoria and the desert Lake Turkana, where fishers can take two days to collect a catch big enough to transport to market. At fish landing points, KIC now provides solar-powered icemakers and cold-storage units that have cut spoilage and food waste by 98%.

The “Fix Our Climate” finalist was Advanced Thermovoltaic Systems (ATS) of Fort Collins, Colorado, which has developed a simple, safe process to help heavy industries turn waste heat into electricity. Founder Kelly Adams says that current turbine-based recovery systems capture only 40% of waste heat; his company’s container-sized units use modern materials technology to generate electricity from even low levels of heat. What’s more, they use no moving parts, require little maintenance and can be run from an iPhone. ATS hopes to be operational in more than 100 plant sites by 2030, saving 3.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide.

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Every year, millions of animals move across the land in search of fresh grass and water, creating an incredible spectacle known as the Great Migration. This migration sustains hundreds of predators and scavengers like vultures. The wildlife is also important for local governments and communities that rely on funds from tourism and conservation efforts.

All this activity – the well-being of wildlife, the water they drink and the vegetation they feed on – depends on weather patterns. Extreme weather phenomena, therefore, can wreak havoc on the workings of the ecosystem.

I’m part of a team from the universities of Hohenheim and Groningen, Free University of Berlin, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the Indian Institute of Management in Udaipur and the Kenya Meteorological Department, which has been studying weather patterns in the Mara-Serengeti ecosystem since 1913. Our new study has found that it has been experiencing major changes.

Over the past six decades, rainfall has been above average and there have also been recurrent severe droughts, erratic extremely wet conditions and a temperature rise of 4.8°C to 5.8°C.

These events are having a significant impact on wildlife populations and biodiversity in the area. Vegetation and water are gradually drying. Competition between wildlife, livestock and people for resources is increasing. Wildlife numbers are falling, and there are changes in patterns of migration and breeding.

Key findings

We have found that the Mara-Serengeti is rapidly warming.

The average monthly minimum temperatures (taken in Narok Town, bordering the Maasai Mara ecosystem) between 1960 and 2024 increased significantly – an overall rise of 5.3°C. The minimum temperature increased from 7.9°C in May 1960, reaching 13.2°C in 2024.

Rainfall in both the Maasai Mara and Serengeti increased over time. Severe droughts are becoming more frequent and intense. And though extreme floods are relatively rare, they’re also increasing in frequency and intensity over time.

What’s driving these changes

By analyzing patterns in rainfall and temperature alongside global oceanic and atmospheric climate systems, we connect the weather changes in the Mara-Serengeti ecosystem to climate change. The global climate systems are changing because of global warming.

Specifically, we examined the Southern Oscillation Index and the Indian Ocean Dipole between 1913 and 2024. These are the most significant oceanic and atmospheric patterns affecting climate in East Africa.

The Southern Oscillation Index measures the difference in air pressure between two places, Tahiti in the South Pacific and Darwin in Australia. When the sea-level pressure difference is big it signals changes – like El Niño (warm phase of the oscillation) or La Niña (cold phase) – which can affect weather patterns around the world. El Niño is linked to more rainfall in East Africa and La Niña to droughts.

The Indian Ocean Dipole is a climate pattern that is like a seesaw for the ocean temperatures in the Indian Ocean. Sometimes, one side of the ocean near Africa gets warmer, while the side near Indonesia gets cooler. Other times it flips, with Indonesia being warmer and Africa cooler. This changing pattern affects the weather, causing more rain when the ocean near East Africa is warmer and droughts when the ocean is cooler.

Our study of the Southern Oscillation Index found that around 1970 the shifts in oceanic and atmospheric conditions that cause El Niño and La Niña were becoming more extreme. As a result, these events – and the droughts and floods they bring – are happening more often and with greater intensity.

Meanwhile, between 1913 and 2024, the Indian Ocean Dipole has slowly increased due to steady ocean warming. And there are two repeating cycles that happen every 4.1 and 5.4 years. These cycles change in strength and timing, but they keep coming back regularly. The steady strengthening of the dipole is a sign of global warming and altered atmospheric circulation. The increased frequency and intensity of dipole events, when there are warmer sea surface temperatures in the western Indian Ocean, are linked to more frequent and severe floods and droughts in the Mara-Serengeti ecosystem.

Implications of weather changes

The droughts, floods and temperature rise are affecting wildlife populations and biodiversity in the ecosystem.

We’ve seen this through field observations in annual reports by Kenya’s Game Department and its successor, the Wildlife Conservation and Management Department, and from local district documents in the Kenya National Archives, and there are also more contemporary observations.

We analyzed this observational data to identify trends and patterns in wildlife populations over time and the timing, scale and location of changes. We then linked these to changes in the weather and specific anomalies, such as droughts.

We also systematically ruled out other potential causes, such as disease outbreaks, habitat destruction, pollution or overexploitation, such as through poaching.

These are some of the impacts from the ecosystem’s changing weather patterns:

• Droughts kill wildlife through starvation, thirst and dehydration and the increased predation and poaching of weakened animals.
• Drought is linked to increased human-wildlife conflict because wild animals raid crops, kill livestock and injure or kill people.
• Droughts intensify the competition for scarce resources among wildlife, pastoralists and their livestock.
• Droughts temporarily increase carcass availability, boosting predator numbers, but as prey numbers decline, predators face starvation and their numbers decrease.
• Heavy rainfall replenishes drinking water sources and promotes plant growth, but it also causes wildlife drownings and destruction of habitats.
• Heavy rainfall after droughts can kill wildlife because sudden severe temperature drops following the onset of rains can be fatal to weakened animals. The rapid growth of young grass can further endanger vulnerable animals due to nutritional imbalance, sudden dietary change and dehydration.
• Heavy rainfall increases grass biomass and fibre accumulation, thereby depressing nutritional quality for ungulates that thrive best at intermediate biomass levels.
• Droughts bring diseases, such as anthrax or rinderpest outbreaks, and pathogens, such as parasitic lungworm.
• Droughts shrink the area of wetlands critical for herbivores during droughts.
• Heavy rainfall increases the risk of fires by promoting lush grass growth. The excessive biomass dries, ignites and burns.
• Abundant rainfall can boost breeding but may also increase wildlife death due to diseases and predation in lush conditions.
• Droughts force wildlife to migrate over longer distances in search of food and water, leading to early departures, delayed arrivals or movement into dangerous areas, such as near poachers.
• Heavy rainfall causes animals to roam further from their usual ranges and reduces the number of animals that migrate.
• Unpredictable rainfall makes animal migrations more erratic, and often mistimed with periods of peak resource availability.
• Extended droughts suppress reproduction, reducing birth rates, milk availability and successful mating. This leads to unseasonal calving, reproductive pauses or failures, and high mortality among young animals.
• Droughts delay the onset of births and timing of birth peaks, while good rains advance it.
• Droughts decrease the number of females that breed and reduce the likelihood of synchronized breeding among females, while high rainfall increases synchrony of births and females that give birth.

Joseph Ogutu is a senior researcher and statistician at the University of Hohenheim.

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The tool, NatureHelm, provides a subscription-based platform where large corporate entities or individual landowners can track significant species and ecosystem markers on their properties. The platform also provides analysis of how factors are changing over time and recommendations to improve biodiversity outcomes. NatureHelm plans to launch this month.

“[Tracking biodiversity] is no longer something that is a nice thing; this is going to become regulated,” says Debbie Saunders, a conservation ecologist and founder of NatureHelm. “It’s quite revolutionary for me. I used to go bird-watching for my job, and all of a sudden, I feel like I can help create positive change at a global scale.”

The new push toward better accounting for biodiversity comes in part from the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, adapted by the United Nations in December 2022. Its targets include “30 by 30,” which aims to protect 30% of terrestrial, inland water, coastal and marine areas by 2030. The plan also has a target to place 30% of degraded ecosystems under effective restoration plans. Already, the EU has formally adopted rules requiring that companies prove their products aren’t causing deforestation or forest degradation.

Saunders’s idea for NatureHelm came from a decade of working with her other for-profit company, Wildlife Drones, which sells aerial drones that can track radio-frequency wildlife tags. In working with biologists and conservation organizations, Saunders saw just how much data new technology was collecting — images from camera traps, animal tracking paths, satellite measures of tree cover, bioacoustic surveys — and yet that this information was rarely used to measure the health of whole ecosystems. When the EU adopted the Kunming-Montreal Framework, she saw an opportunity to put all of that data to good use.

Take, for example, a hypothetical coffee grower with a small farm. Upon subscribing to NatureHelm, the company deploys an algorithm that scrapes global databases and scientific papers about the region, looking for significant local biodiversity targets. This could be an endangered bird that needs protection, an invasive rat that could be targeted for removal, or local pollinators known to be key for coffee plants.

As managers begin tracking any of these measures — say, conducting surveys, placing bioacoustic monitors, or installing camera traps — they can automatically upload or manually add their findings to their individual portal. Graphs and charts will show how metrics change across space and time. Every year, subscribers receive a report of how biodiversity indicators on their lands have changed and, ideally, in response to conservation actions.

NatureHelm also offers consulting to any customers who want to learn how to deploy new technology for monitoring.

“Wherever possible, we want to empower them to do the work themselves, because that’s the most affordable and sustainable way.” Saunders says. “And it means that they’re really engaged in it as well.”

In addition to smallholder farms, the company is targeting its services to large corporations, which might track the same metrics across their supply chains, especially as new regulations come into force. NatureHelm is currently a venture of Wildlife Drones, but Saunders says they plan to split it off as its own company within the coming year. The company recently hired Julia Haake, a French economist and chair of the European Association of Sustainability Agencies, as its director, bringing on experience in the European market.

“We are not going to be the database of all biodiversity data; there are already massive organizations building really amazing databases that people can access, but those are still just the data,” Saunders says. “There are no insights with that. There’s no meaning for people. They need something that they can relate to, and so a big part of this is just that pulling-together of things.”

This is one of the appeals for the company Aluan, which produces virgin organic coconut oil from Indonesia and is an early partner of NatureHelm. Aluan has multiple conservation projects across 300 smallholder farms, including restoration projects for several species of sea turtle and the re-release and monitoring of locally important birds, including two subspecies of white-rumped shama (Copsychus malabaricus). While Aluan currently sells its coconut oil to some large companies, including U.K.-based Lush Cosmetics, it’s actively looking for more buyers attracted to its conservation credentials.

“We’re already collecting quite a lot of data from rangers in the field, but we’re not presenting that well at all,” says Luke Swainson, Aluan’s co-founder. “One of the big things we’re looking at is a way to bring that data together and present that in an interactive way.”

Vince Heffernan, another early subscriber and the owner of Moorlands Biodynamic Lamb, a 1,214-hectare (3,000-acre) sheep farm in New South Wales, Australia, says he also has active conservation programs, such as planting trees to create habitat for migrating birds, like Latham’s snipe (Gallinago hardwickii) and the rainbow bee-eater (Merops ornatus). He says having data from NatureHelm proving the impact of his work could help him sell to more conservation-minded buyers. But he also sees the potential for it to improve the system more broadly.

“Banks seem to be absolutely thrilled at the idea of running ads talking about a better greener world, and I’d like to hold them to account by saying: ‘If you want a better greener world, when a client like me can prove [that’s] what I’m doing, shouldn’t you therefore give [me] a better rate of interest on my mortgage?’” Heffernan says. “I think it’s the opposite of greenwashing — it’s adding integrity to the processes, and that’s what we all want. We want to buy products and deal with banks that walk the talk.”

This is, ultimately, Saunders’s big vision: ensuring that there’s transparency in biodiversity accounting, and to see that transparency leading to change.

“What I want to see is that biodiversity uptick,” she says. “I want to see people improving their lands, and to be part of that change. To think beyond a Band-aid, and actually improve things, is so badly needed.”

This story was originally published on Mongabay.com. Read the original story here.

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Yesterday, representatives of 185 countries officially agreed to launch a new fund to ramp up investment in meeting major global biodiversity goals.

The new Global Biodiversity Framework Fund (GBFF) was ratified at the Global Environmental Facility’s (GEF) seventh assembly in Vancouver, Canada, with wildfires in British Columbia as a backdrop. This comes after global delegates at the U.N. biodiversity conference (COP15) committed last December in Montreal to meet a set of goals inked into a Global Biodiversity Framework. This framework is designed to help halt and reverse biodiversity loss and put nature on a path to recovery by 2030.

The fund will mobilize and accelerate investment from governments, philanthropy, and the private sector to support nations in the conservation and sustainability of wild species and ecosystems whose health is threatened by wildfires, flooding, extreme weather, and human activity, including unsustainable industrial agriculture, consumption and production pressures, and urban sprawl.

According to an in-depth assessment by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, or IPBES, in 2019, one million species of plants and animals face extinction.

“The creation of this biodiversity fund is a game-changer for countries’ ability to protect, restore, and ensure the sustainable use of nature,” said Carlos Manuel Rodríguez, GEF CEO and chairperson, in a meeting last month.

So far, two countries announced initial contributions to start the fund’s capitalization and support budget-stressed industrially developing countries, many of which are some of the most highly biodiverse in the world. This included $146.8 million (CA$200 million) from Canada and $12.58 million (£10 million) from the United Kingdom.

Canada’s Minister of International Development also announced the country is providing an additional $16.75 million (CA$22.8 million) in funding for the GEF’s eighth replenishment to support global efforts to tackle the triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution.

As much as 20% of funds from the GBFF is targeted to support Indigenous and local action to protect and conserve biodiversity, and at least 36% of the fund’s resources are aimed to support the most vulnerable people, small island developing states, and least developed countries. About 25% of the fund will be delivered through selected international financial institutions to increase resources through private sector involvement and ensure policies are streamlined.

Indigenous organizers around the U.N. biodiversity convention, known as the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity (IIFB), welcomed the target of 20% of funds directed to Indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLCs). Indigenous organizations frequently report being sidelined in receiving biodiversity and climate funds.

“The approval of this trust fund with a specific commitment to Indigenous peoples and local communities motivates and gives us hope that support will be achieved for the efforts to conserve biodiversity at local level,” said Lucy Mulenkei, co-chair of the IIFB and member of the Indigenous advisory group to the GEF, while speaking at the assembly.

The Global Biodiversity Framework adopted in Montreal last year recognizes the role and rights of IPLCs in the conservation of biodiversity in their lands and territories. Several targets also highlight their full and equitable participation in decision-making in the implementation of the framework.

This fund also provides an increase of support to the least developed countries and small island developing countries who are among the most vulnerable regions to the impacts of biodiversity loss and climate change.

To meet the ambitious biodiversity targets, countries need a substantial increase in resources, as was recognized by COP15 and in related decisions on resource mobilization and the financial mechanism. The Montreal agreement seeks to raise international financial flows from developed nations to developing countries to at least $20 billion per year by 2025 and to at least $30 billion per year by 2030. However, this is far shorter than the total some industrially developing countries desired, with some parties like the Democratic Republic of Congo calling for a total of $100 billion a year.

Agreement on these financial matters, from the amount of funds allocated to how they should be distributed, was the most difficult part of the negotiations in Montreal.

The GBFF will provide an opportunity to receive funding from all sources quickly disburse through streamlined procedures, said David Cooper, acting executive secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity, in a statement.

Additional resources will need to be mobilized from domestic sources at all levels of government, the private sector, and innovative mechanisms.

“We are off to a good start. We now call for further pledges from countries and from other sources so that the first projects under the new fund can be launched next year ahead of COP 16 [the next U.N. biodiversity conference],” he said.

While some human rights and environmental activists welcome the first commitments to the GBFF, they say contributions so far fall short by $40 million to make the fund operational. The initial contributions for the GBF Fund are set at $200 million from at least three donors by December 2023, while current contributions by Canada and the U.K. total approximately $160 million.

The GEF Council should also take immediate action to allocate these funds to Indigenous groups to continue conserving biodiversity, said Avaaz, a global human rights group, in a statement. In addition, these pledges should turn any “aspirational” share of funding for Indigenous groups into a firm target of the agreed 20% share.

The GEF’s seventh assembly ends on August 26 and delegated may convene again in four years.

Over the past three decades, the GEF has provided more than $22 billion and mobilized $120 billion in co-financing for more than 5,000 national and regional projects.

This article was first published by Mongabay. 

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If it weren’t for the plastic tags in the cows’ ears and the overhead drone of occasional passenger planes, we could be 600 years ago. That’s about the last time storks nested wild in England, Isabella Tree told me. A writer, farmer and owner of the Knepp Estate, Tree strides across this magnificently disheveled landscape crafted by herself and her husband, Charles Burrell.

Rewind 23 years and this place was a debt-ridden, subsidy-dependent farm, its already poor soil made worse by intensive agricultural practices. There were certainly no storks.
Old English longhorns resting under an oak tree at Knepp.
Old English longhorns resting under an oak tree at Knepp. Disturbance from large herbivores has restored this landscape by reactivating natural processes that foster healthy ecology. Image by Elizabeth Fitt for Mongabay.

But Tree and Burrell have helped nature reestablish its course at Knepp since then, in a process known as rewilding. Reintroducing white storks (Ciconia ciconia) is merely the icing on the cake. Fencing has been ripped down, large mammals introduced, drains smashed, even a river rewiggled. Reintroduced beavers have masterminded a whole new wetland.

Now the place is thriving. Harvest mice (Micromys minutus), hedgehogs (Erinaceus europaeus) and hobby falcons (Falco subbuteo), dormice (Muscardinus avellanarius), dung beetles and dingy skipper butterflies (Erynnis tages), among many others, have established themselves here. Surveys have found an astounding 1,800 invertebrates species (almost 10% of the U.K.’s known vertebrates).

Humans have increased too: When a stork couple at Knepp became the first since 1416 to naturally breed in the U.K. during one of the 2020 lockdowns, the BBC show Springwatch featured it. The day lockdown was lifted, more than a thousand people rushed to see this marvel, Tree told me.

“Storks are this kind of symbol of hope and rebirth and regeneration. And I think rewilding is giving a lot of people hope, and the storks are such an amazing emblem for that,” lead ecologist at Knepp, Penny Green, told Mongabay.

“Every day I feel like what we’re learning here is actually making a huge difference. It really does you know, we get land owners, whether smallholders or large landowners coming here on workshops learning about how they can make a difference on their land — whether it’s regenerative farming, nature friendly farming or rewilding – whatever you can take away from this that might suit what your doing.” Penny Green, Lead Ecologist and Safari Manager at Knepp told Mongabay. Image by Elizabeth Fitt for Mongabay.

Rewilding Knepp

Tree and Burrell inherited the Knepp estate in 1987. They spent 13 years battling the farm’s heavy clay landscape, which they said is “like concrete in summer and the rest of the year unfathomable porridge.”

They made money, dependent on subsidies, just twice in all that time. Something had to give.

In 2000, they sold off their dairy herds and machinery to offset huge debts and contracted out their arable land. But that was also the year Grazing Ecology and Forest History, by Dutch conservationist Frans Vera, was translated into English. The book so inspired Burrell and Tree that they went to see Vera and the landscape he stewarded in Oostvaardersplassen, the Netherlands.

The following year, armed with a Countryside Stewardship government grant, they withdrew their first fields from intensive agriculture.

“We weren’t brave enough just to say, ‘let’s rewild the whole thing,’” Tree said. It took six years to bring it all out of production, worst first.

By 2022, a green paper from the U.K. government’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs was hailing Knepp as a “huge success,” showing how restoring natural dynamics can quickly lead to nature recovery.

The estate’s income stream now includes renting out converted farm buildings as offices and event spaces, ecotourism safaris and accommodation, organic meat and their ongoing Countryside Stewardship grant.

“[The grant] is important to us and we hope that it will continue,” Tree said. “But if it doesn’t, we feel that we are actually now a self-sufficient business, which we never would have been if we’d have had subsidies removed from us when we were farming.”

On top of all the nature-hungry tourists, the farm now provides jobs to more than 50 workers.

The depths of success

The success of Knepp runs deep, quite literally. Today, the soil alone is storing carbon at least as fast as models predict 25-year-old broadleaf woodlands do, according to research using new technology from the soil sampling company Agricarbon.

The U.K. government-funded research found that the rewilded soil absorbed up to 4.8 tons more carbon dioxide per hectare per year than soils in a conventional farm close by.

These data are “absolutely crucial for underpinning any kind of incentive or investment in the restoration of carbon to the soil,” Annie Leeson, the CEO of Agricarbon, said. “You can’t go to investors and say, ‘I want you to invest in 0.2% increase in soil carbon.’ You have to say, ‘I want you to invest in something that’s going to deliver 3,000 or 30,000 or 300,000 tons of carbon removal.’”

Knepp’s soil data is the first to show that rewilding a farm can lead to statistically robust carbon sequestration in soils.

“It’s wonderful to have projects like Knepp producing the credible evidence that can help to convince policymakers that this is a viable way forward,” Global Rewilding Alliance director Alister Scott said. “In order for rewilding to grow rapidly and scale globally, we clearly need to enable the flow of finance into a myriad of rewilding projects.”

Tree hopes the research will help secure a seat for rewilding at the carbon market table, as so far there are no investment products or market mechanisms that support rewilding.

“If you don’t have the [carbon] measurements you just cannot build any of that structure,” Leeson said. But Agricarbon’s technology and new findings unlock “a level of integrity that allows soil carbon to become part of carbon accounting.”

Buying carbon credits allows companies to compensate for their greenhouse gas emissions. But researchers have found the true quantity of carbon saved through regulated carbon credits is questionable. Carbon credit investment is going through an “ethical shakedown,” said Ivan de Klee, the head of natural capital at the U.K.-based nature recovery investment company Nattergal. There is a “cry for integrity” for real data, rather than modeling-based carbon offset options, de Klee added.

Nattergal is using Agricarbon’s analysis of how much carbon is stored in Knepp’s soil, together with field analysis of how much carbon is stored in the scrubland’s woody biomass, to develop a more comprehensive, nature restoration investment tool.

“It’s a set of guidelines for people to use to make sure that what they’re selling is real, and that they’re maximizing the potential of rewilding systems,” de Klee said.

Birds and butterflies

One of Knepp’s achievements is its sheer diversity of life. Biodiversity, put simply, can clean our water, protect us from flooding and drought, increase how much food we grow and regulate our climate.

To rewild depleted areas, you have to “add stimulus to get the dynamism happening,” Tree said. Following Vera’s recommendations, Tree and Burrell introduced “stimulus” in the form of old English longhorn cattle, red (Cervus elaphus) and fallow deer (Dama dama), Tamworth pigs and Exmoor ponies. These animals act as proxies for their ancient cousins, aurochs, elk, wild boar and wild horses — former architects of English landscapes in bygone eras.

“Almost everything they do is contributing in a domino effect to a more functioning system that’s sequestering carbon,” Tree said.

This gradual tango between animal disturbance and plant growth is crucial to Knepp’s success. Tree explained that it’s the “constant competition” between vegetation and large herbivores — including their use of hooves and antlers as well as their eating habits — that creates homes for so many creatures.

“We cannot understand how these things reach us; it is extraordinary! I mean, we have a dung beetle, the violet dor beetle (Geotrupes mutator) that hasn’t been seen in Sussex for 50 years. And it’s proliferating here!” she said, poking a cowpat with the toe of one of her navy ASICS.

Last year the large tortoiseshell butterfly (Nymphalis polychloros), thought to be extinct in the U.K., formed a breeding colony at Knepp. The estate is also home to all of the U.K.’s five owl species, 13 of its 17 bat species and breeding populations of a dozen birds on the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds’ Conservation Concern Red List.

Landscape management shake-up

Since leaving the EU, the U.K. is pivoting to a new environmental land management framework, in the most significant agricultural policy and spending reform in a generation.

Conventional agriculture practices erode topsoil, leaving it open to being washed away into the water system or blown away as dust, research has found. “We’re losing the foundation of all of our food production,” Leeson said.

The world loses 24 billion tons of topsoil every year, reducing net economic output by up to 8%, according to a 2019 address by U.N. Director General António Guterres.

“With some extra investments, some incentives for farmers, you can restore soil carbon,” Leeson said.

Restoring organic carbon improves soil structure, allowing it to hold water, meaning more drought and flood resilience.

“So, all of these things that we’re experiencing that are problematic as a result of climate change … are reduced if you can restore carbon to the soil,” Leeson said.

In the U.K., conventional farm subsidies that incentivize growing arable crops “irrespective of the damage it caused” according to Tree, are being removed and replaced with payments that incentivize biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services.

A government commitment of 2.4 billion pounds ($3.1 billion) in annual incentives for land management practices that restore soil health, peatland and forests is part of the first revisions to the U.K.’s environmental improvement plan in 25 years. There is still a likely shortfall of up to 6.9 billion pounds ($8.8 billion) per year that will have to come from private investment, according to an Environment Bank white paper.

“If we can generate a market whereby enhancements lead to sustainable revenue generation, then this enables investment from the private sector to bridge the funding gap,” Andy Slaney, a future funding specialist from the government-backed Natural Environment Investment Readiness Fund (NEIRF), said.

NEIRF is currently funding 86 projects, with up to 100,000 pounds ($127,650) each, to help build viable private sector investments for more ecosystem-centric land management. Their projects include both Agricarbon’s research and Nattergal’s investment tool.

Still, rewilding has its critics.

The National Farmers Union (NFU) prioritizes conventional food production and promotes the status quo. A press officer told Mongabay that NFU was interested in “maintaining the high levels of environmental protection we currently enjoy,” adding that rewilding is not a preferred staple land management option. The NFU considers it a threat to “treasured cultural landscapes” according to a consultation document submitted to the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee.

“NFU think that we’re the devil,” Tree said. “They’re kicking back as much as they possibly can but there’s a lot of farmers out there who see the sense.”

Rewilding goes “hand in glove” with farming, she said. Rewilding spills over even into conventionally farmed land in terms of better pollination, natural pest control and better soil activity, which all lead to better yields and increased sustainability. It also buffers against increasingly extreme weather events, protecting land from drought, flooding and wind.

“It’s the life support system that’s gonna actually hold agriculture and keep it sustainable,” Tree said. “If we don’t do this, we literally have only got a few decades of soil left, of anything that is going to produce food.”

Hope for the future

Rewilding has the potential to address both the climate and biodiversity crises, according to Scott with Global Rewilding Alliance. What’s needed, Scott said, is more awareness of its credibility and to establish viable investment mechanisms. Countries would never have signed the Paris Agreement without the belief that cutting emissions could be economically viable.

“It feels like a similar process is now happening with rewilding,” Scott said.

The cool shady depths of the massive beaver pen back at Knepp, impervious to the heat of the day and surrounded by an herb-rich pasture a-flit with butterflies, affords a flash of promise for a better future.

“That’s the real value of Knepp, isn’t it? It’s the hope, you know?” Tree said. “You’ve got climate change and biodiversity loss and it’s huge and you think, how can I ever do anything that’s going to make a difference? And then people come to Knepp and they see that miracles can happen in a very short space of time.”

This article was first published by Mongabay.

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