Biodiversity protection and restoration

Tom Crowther is one of the most sought-after ecologists in the world.

This is because the Welsh scientist, who is Professor of Ecosystem Science at ETH Zurich, is playing a pivotal role in the world’s efforts to protect biodiversity, which is becoming as urgent an environmental priority as fighting climate change.

Among his various ecosystem restoration initiatives, Restor is a flagship project that is transforming the way the world records and promotes biodiversity protection.

Developed at his namesake Crowther Lab at ETH in partnership with Google, Restor offers open-access information on landscape changes around the world, providing crucial insights needed to improve the way we measure changes in biodiversity.

Unlike climate change, biodiversity is notoriously tricky to quantify, not least because many of the planet’s species are poorly understood and remain unclassified.

Yet technological advances, such as artificial intelligence, machine learning or earth observation techniques, are paving the way for a more accurate and efficient analysis.

In the space of just a few years, Crowther and his team managed to grow Restor to a global hub offering site-level ecological insights of over 200,000 locations across 140 countries for as many as 18,000 users, which include businesses, investors and individuals. Crowther's engaging, innovative style in the otherwise rigid academic world has earned him the title of "Steve Jobs of ecology".

“People say Restor is like a Google Maps of restoration. But it’s also like an AirBnB of restoration," he tells mega.

"It's about community rather than a map.”

Governments, companies and local communities can publish their nature recovery commitments on the hub, making them traceable and accountable.Restor is used as an official tracking and monitoring tool for the Target 2 of the Global Biodiversity Framework and soon to be used for Target 3. https://www.fao.org/national-forest-monitoring/news/detail/en/c/1679735/

High-profile organisations such as the Group of 20 and the Bezos Earth Fund – the USD10 billion philanthropic body created by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos – also look for funding opportunities on Restor.

To date, Restor has financed projects in the order of USD6 million.

It may be a drop in the bucket, considering an estimated USD700 billion a year funding gap in biodiversity,https://www.nature.org/en-us/what-we-do/our-insights/perspectives/closing-nature-finance-gap-cbd/ but it represents a step in the right direction.

Crowther says Restor is helping shift capital away from financing activities which extract natural resources to those that regenerate them.

“Inequitable distribution of wealth leads to degradation. We need to turn this trend around,” Crowther says.

“The flow of wealth needs to go towards local communities, which are stewards of nature.”

Forest that turned silent

One of the successful restoration efforts featured on Restor is Costa Rica.

Through insights on biodiversity, carbon, water and land use, including timelapse series of satellite images, across hundreds of the country’s conversation sites, Restor documents Costa Rica's remarkable turnaround from the world’s deforester-in-chief to the global leader in nature recovery.

Just a few decades ago, this small central American nation, located between two bioregions with rich ecosystems, stood on the brink of an ecological collapse.

This is because during the second half of the 20th century, Costa Rica cut trees to grow crops and raise cattle in an economic transformation that slashed its tropical forest cover to just 25 per cent from 75 per cent. With the trees that fell went the thriving flora and fauna.

Alarmed by this, the government changed course in the 1980s and kicked off nationwide restoration efforts. It used an innovative Payments of Environmental Services (PES) programme to incentivise farmers to protect water sources, conserve biodiversity and mitigate carbon emissions.

The scheme has distributed a total of USD500 million to landowners over the past 20 years, saving more than 1 million hectares of forest – a fifth of the country’s total area – and planted over 7 million trees.https://unfccc.int/climate-action/momentum-for-change/financing-for-climate-friendly-investment/payments-for-environmental-services-program It also triggered a boom in ecotourism which contributed USD4 billion to the economy.https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenvs.2020.580724/full, World Bank, Earthshot Prize

The huge success has won Costa Rica the inaugural Earthshot Prize, launched by Prince William in 2021 to find innovative solutions for the world’s environmental challenges.

“We need to embrace these farmers. These people are heroes. Costa Rica is an incredible example. Nature is part of their identity and the economy has also recovered,” Crowther says.

Through the Earthshot Prize – where Restor was a 2021 finalist  – Crowther partnered with Costa Rica to track the country’s PES programmes as well as the total new forest cover and helped inform national policy decisions on reforestation.

Complementing Restor’s insights, he also uncovered a ground-breaking piece of evidence of the country’s restoration using a novel method to assess biodiversity.

Crowther and his researchers analysed the melody of the forest, composed by birds, monkeys and leaves, using an emerging technique called bioacoustics monitoring – which assesses the ecological status of an area through recordings of species’ vocalisations.

Detailed in an academic study due to be published later this year, the researchers discovered, for the first time, that the soundscape in forests across Costa Rica has recouped more than half of what was the natural state before human disruption.

“It’s the first evidence of its kind where we can show statistically that Costa Rica is achieving restoration at a national scale,” Crowther says.

“The soundscape of nature is diverse. It contains high and low frequency sounds and diverse notes. That’s also the sound humans like. In our 10,000-year evolutionary history, when you hear a diverse soundscape, we like it because we know there’s nature and there’s food. We don’t like music that has one tone.”

Biodiversity tipping points

Crowther shot to fame after his controversial 2019 research, which estimated the world had space for an extra trillion trees, triggered a global planting spree that even convinced climate sceptic Donald Trump to join in.https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/articles/president-trump-signs-one-trillion-trees-executive-order-promoting-conservation-regeneration-nations-forests/

But the seemingly simple solution to climate change came under heavy scientific and public criticism, because many believed that the paper was advocating mass tree plantations. Planting a wrong tree in a wrong place, for example, can actually accelerate biodiversity degradation.

“Some people latched onto the simplicity of trillion trees. But this paper was never about planting anything. Global restoration isn’t about buying up land and creating mass plantations. It is about empowering millions of local communities to promote the biodiversity that they depend on,” says Crowther.

“Everything we’ve ever had comes from nature. But the biggest challenge we have is our utilitarian mindset, where we focus on individual parts at the expense of everything else. We desperately need… to promote the diversity of entire ecosystems, rather than focussing only on individual parts.”

Four years on, Crowther clarified the message in a joint study with hundreds of scientists.Mo, L., Zohner, C.M., Reich, P.B. et al. Integrated global assessment of the natural forest carbon potential. Nature 624, 92–101 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06723-z The research, published in late 2023, shows the recovery of natural forests has the potential to help with a third of our carbon drawdown needs in the fight against climate change. But it also shows that these climate benefits will not be achieved without a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

Crowther feels momentum is building up behind nature protection. He observed at the most recent COP that the conversation on biodiversity centred around protecting indigenous rights and promoting the well-being of local communities, in a stark contrast to the tree-planting hype five years ago.

Policymakers are also rallying around. The landmark Kunming-Montreal Agreement on biodiversity in 2022 and the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures’ corporate reporting guidelines are helping develop the regulatory environment.

“There has been incredible momentum. Companies and governments are behind this. But we’re still losing more nature than we’re gaining,” Crowther says.

“But chaos always happens before change. I do believe positive tipping points are coming. It’s happening with green energy, with electric vehicles and even the food system to some extent. Nature is next.”