Sustainability author Dr Wayne Visser discusses how to meet SDG 15 - restore ecosystems and halt biodiversity loss.
The UN's Sustainable Development Goal 15 is 'Life On Land' - Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss.
Dr Wayne Visser has a clear vision on how to go about meeting this goal. He is the author of more than 40 books on sustainability and is recognised as a world expert on nature, society and the economy. In this episode Dr Visser discusses with host Kate Hutchinson how nature can often be forgotten as climate change takes centre stage in environmental discourse and debate.
This episode discusses how we need to put nature and biodiversity at the heart of our current future actions as a planet, because the rates of land degradation and species loss are truly startling.
Kate and Wayne take a practical and positive approach, breaking down the challenge into 7 missions that will make a real difference - Donating, Off-setting, Greening, Sourcing, Innovating, Transforming, Tipping.
There is no doubt that SDG 15 is a real challenge - so much damage has been done to fauna and flora already, but listeners will leave this episode with a far greater understanding of an often under-featured issue and also with hope... as shown by the examples of change and innovation that Dr Visser is able to highlight.
As a published poet, Wayne Visser takes the chance to end the episode with a poem that warns, challenges and inspires.
Welcome to The17. This is a podcast dedicated to sustainability. It's structured around the UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals. They represent, in essence, a plan to protect the planet. I'm Kate Hutchinson and I'm the founder of Yorkshire Sustainability Week and my goal is to help the UK's regions to play their part in delivering a sustainable future.
Each episode of The17 is themed around a different one of the UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals. A new episode drops on the 17th of each month and each time I'll be joined by a new guest who has real expertise and influence related to one of those UN goals. We will explain and analyse the goal itself, look at the current situation and discuss what actions we can take at an individual, regional and even global level to make progress.
The goal we are tackling today is goal number 15. Our guest is Dr. Wayne Visser, an academic, social entrepreneur and a futurist. Wayne, welcome to the podcast.
Thanks for having me. Great pleasure to bewith you. Thank you for joining us. So Wayne, tell me a little bit about the challenge that we're facing here.
How big is it? Well, the challenge is existential, uh, and without wanting to be melodramatic, we are living through the sixth mass extinction event of the world. And what do we mean by that? Well, we're seeing extinction rates of species at a hundred to a thousand times more than the natural background rate.
There are a million plant and animal species at risk of extinction right now. Three quarters of those are on the land, two thirds in the sea. We have lost, since 1970, two thirds. of the wildlife populations on the planet. So if you think about that, it took us 3. 8 billion years to build up the life on this planet.
It's taken us just 50 years to wipe out two thirds and I could go on and on, right? 40 percent decline in insect species. But essentially this is the web of life, the fabric which Keeps life going that is severely being frayed and is in many cases at risk of collapse So it's a pretty serious issue.
Why are you so passionate about this goal particularly?
Well, I think it's because Working in the space of sustainability now for more than 30 years. I got involved just before the original Rio Earth Summit I was passionate about environmental issues, then spent a lot of time in Africa growing up in and around nature. So there's a personal reason, but there's a professional reason as well, which is, I think that this issue is the silent killer.
It's, it's the issue that has largely been ignored, and climate has come to dominate the sustainability space. Of course, they're related, but I work mainly with companies, with business, and they really struggle to make this link, to find the business case, to see how this is relevant for them. And unless we can make it visible, I think, you know, we're, we're facing some pretty catastrophic futures.
But at the same time, a lot of my work is on breakthroughs and innovation. There's so much exciting that's happening in this space. And that's really where I want to put the energy.
I know that you've crafted seven strategies to help us to understand why biodiversity is crucial to the future of the planet.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to read to you each one of them and if you can give me a statement after every single one to explain what you mean by this. then that would be great. So we'll start with number one,
donating. Yes. I mean, let me frame this up first and just say that this is an area of risk for, for business, for the planet, nature related risks.
The estimates are that, uh, it's 1. 9 trillion worth of, uh, market risk there because we are so dependent on nature, even if we don't realize this and that most of this is related to land use change. Of which, you know, the biggest driver is agriculture. So we'll, we'll talk more about that. But it is also an opportunity.
So, uh, some estimates say that, uh, it could be 93 billion worth of investment opportunity by 2030. Um, so how are companies responding to that? That's really your question. And the, the most basic way And in some ways, the least impactful but still important is donating. And an example here would be the 10 billion Bezos Earth Fund.
Whatever we may think of Amazon and Jeff Bezos, he's using at least some of his fortune and setting it aside and saying, can we use this to Protect and regenerate nature. Uh, two billion of that is going into the Congo Basin, which many people forget is one of the lungs of the Earth. We have the Amazon, we have in Indonesia, big tropical rainforest, and in the Congo in Africa.
So, you know, this is an important response. Uh, we need to protect what we have, and, uh, if possible, restore, bring it back, uh, for future generations. Offsetting. Ooh, now this is a controversial one because this is really about, uh, the idea that we can link this to the climate agenda. So nature based solutions like reforestation, um, of course have carbon benefits.
Trees absorb carbon, but we've seen the offsetting market really in a credibility crisis because there's been a lot of greenwashing in that space. We don't yet have the correct accounting rules, the correct transparency, but we're getting there and it's good that it's being challenged right now. And I'm one who believes that we do need offsetting as part of the solution for science based targets.
It can be no more than 10 percent of a company's Response. You need to reduce 90 percent your own direct and indirect emissions, but offsetting can be used as one of the solutions. So an example here would be Apple. So they partnered with Conservation International to restore 27, 000 acres of mangrove forests in Colombia.
Mangroves, by the way, are even more effective at storing carbon than tropical rainforests. So these are important solutions, and if we can use the market through carbon offsetting to give nature a boost, then I think we need to do it. Greening. So, greening, uh, is really referring to green walls and green roofs.
I mean, a lot of our land use, of course, is now in urban spaces, lots of construction, lots of buildings, and just a lot of wasted space. When you think about green walls, living walls that have plants on them, and living roofs, this could not only cool the buildings, but also promote biodiversity. Already, studies show that green roofs in London have more biodiversity on them than the surrounding countryside.
That also tells us something about the agricultural system, which is wiping out biodiversity. But there are many companies starting to engage with this. IKEA has a living roof in Greenwich in the UK, which is 3, 500 square meters, so big space, absorbing carbon and giving habitats for, for biodiversity.
Sourcing. Sourcing is key. This is really talking about the supply chain. Where do we get stuff from? A lot of the, uh, loss of biodiversity is simply because of that land use change. Because we, we want, uh, and perhaps we need many commodities. Whether that be wood, or palm oil, or Now here, a big breakthrough actually is a recent law that the EU has agreed that all imports of commodities, including beef, soya, palm oil, coffee, cocoa, rubber, charcoal and paper, need to prove that they are deforestation free.
And so, You know, that puts the emphasis back onto the suppliers of those and hopefully will be one strategy for cleaning up those supply chains and ensuring that we're not wiping out forests in order to produce the stuff that we want. Well, it gets more and more exciting, right? Because innovation, I think, is something that leads to breakthrough and leads to scaling of solutions.
And, uh, here, you know, if you look at what's happening in the food space with startups like Impossible Foods or Beyond Meat, what they've done is taken a science based approach to creating alternative choices. Protein plant based, but the implications of this for biodiversity are huge because, you know, at the moment, the beef or the meat industry is one of the biggest culprits.
It takes vast amounts of land and resources to produce just 2 percent of the world's protein. So if you take an impossible foods. plant based burger, and you compare that to a standard beef burger, the numbers are startling. It uses 96 percent less land, 92 percent less water pollution, 89 percent less global warming potential, 87 percent less water consumption.
So this is a great hope. If we can start to move to more plant based diets, we free up. An enormous amount of land which at the moment is used for either livestock or for growing crops to feed livestock. Transforming. Well, it gets bigger and deeper as we go, right? So transforming even beyond innovating.
How can we transform whole sectors? Let's stick with food because this is such a huge impact on biodiversity. We know that we have to get off of the agroindustrial system that we've had for the last 50 years where it's been very chemical intensive, very much about single crops and really killing off the life in the soil.
Unfortunately, that's what's been happening. According to the UN, there are less than 60 harvests left before the soil is completely dead. And yet we have an alternative. And so regenerative agriculture has been rising. This is simply the idea of putting the life. Back in the soil through lots of techniques, cover crops, crop rotation, organic fertilizers, and many other techniques.
And some big companies are starting to take this seriously, whether that be Nestle or Danone, for example. Danone has already committed that 100 percent of the ingredients produced in France, at least, will come from regenerative agriculture by 2025. That's just around the corner. General Mills, one of the big food companies of the world, wants to advance a million acres of farmland to regenerative Nestle wants to source 20 percent regenerative by 2025 and 50 percent by 2030.
So we're about to see a complete transformation of an entire sector. And tipping? Tipping is referring to tipping points because when we get change in a complex living system like A society, the economy, uh, it tends to happen at first very slow and then it reaches an inflection point and it tips. So we, we then have very, very rapid, uh, an exponential change.
And here there's, there's, um, a wonderful publication by Exeter University, which talks about super tipping points. So these, there are three areas where. Transformation is happening and it will change everything else, uh, for the better. The one is around energy, it's renewables together with batteries and electric vehicles.
We're quite far advanced, I would say we're even beyond the tipping point on that one. Uh, the second is around green hydrogen and green ammonia. So we don't talk about those two now, but the third again is around food. And it's not only about going to regenerative food or plant based diets, that's part of it.
It's also about technologies, and there are two especially that are very exciting. The one is, uh, cultivated meat, so literally growing meat from stem cells, so, uh, this again vastly reduces the resources that go into meat production. But it is real meat, if you like, for those who really want their meat, uh, bleeding and real.
Then there's also precision fermentation, which is a technique for taking microorganisms and working with them to produce all of the ingredients that go into our food. Everything that goes into making meat, meat, for example. So here we can produce protein at, uh, vastly, uh, reduced resource intensive, uh, methods.
Also, we can scale it very fast and it can be very local. So every hotel, every restaurant or, or city can have its own little Biogenerator, which, uh, you know, sort of grows these bacterias and, uh, creates alternative protein. And, I mean, here, just to, to put this into perspective of how significant this could be.
Precision fermented protein. compared to beef or lamb could use between 138, 000 and 157, 000 times less land than the meat alternative. So, I mean, we're talking about a revolution here that, again, should free up an enormous amount of land. And then we can get to exciting things like rewilding and real restoration of nature.
Tell me how integrating plays a part in all of this. Well,
integrating is really just the sort of meta challenge, which is we have all of these seven strategies, the best companies and the best cities will, will take these and do them all together, will actually make protection and restoration of nature using all of these strategies core to their business.
And here, probably the best example is Patagonia. outdoor clothing company, but many people don't know they actually got into food a couple of years ago and are very much supporting regenerative agriculture, uh, for a long time have committed to all kinds of actions, going to 100 percent organic cotton, pledging 1 percent of sales to, uh, to environmental NGOs.
They just have it in their DNA to be as much a part of the solution as possible. And, uh, just last year, The founder, Yvon Chouinard, put the company into a trust, the voting shares, so that now all the profits of this multi billion dollar company have to be spent on tackling the environmental crisis we face in the world.
So, they're really integrating all of this into the core of their business.
That's a brilliant sign of progress. So it leads me perfectly into my next question, which is, where are there signs of progress across the world? So I'd love to hear another example of another, you know, another organization or a company or a country that you feel is doing particularly
well.
Yeah, and again, there are many. I, I, one of the reasons I wrote my book Thriving, which is subtitled, you know, The Breakthrough Movement to Regenerate Nature, first. Society and the economy. One of the reasons I did that was just to collect together the examples and there are literally hundreds in in the book and thousands around the world of these breakthroughs that are happening right now.
So let's let's see if I can get a few examples on the table country wise Costa Rica. Amazing. One of the not only one of the few countries that doesn't have a military, so they, they got rid of their, their defense sector, but also a country where biodiversity has been increasing year on year. And no surprise that ecotourism is now one of their biggest sectors.
But I think they're a great example of what you can do. If you have the political will, they had a real problem, like many country. Uh, Latin American countries with deforestation, but at some point, 10 or 15 years ago, they made a decision to reverse that and they put the policy behind it. And it's, you know, they're, they're showing that nature can come back.
So, so that's pretty exciting on companies. There are so many startups now that are, that are exciting. I, I get very excited about biofabrication because again, this is. Working with nature is showing that we don't need synthetic materials. We can Learn from the genius of nature. One example is Biomason.
This is a company that literally grows bricks. Uh, now if you know anything about building materials, you'll know that they, they go through an airing process, literally in the fire, taking huge amounts of temperature and energy in order to make construction materials. Bricks, cement, so on. Biomason does it all at room temperature because that's how nature does innovation.
Everything is at ambient temperature, creates a construction material which is durable, lightweight, and very low carbon. So, you know, working with nature, what some call also biomimicry or natural intelligence, I think is a big part of the solution. What
we like to do on this podcast is make sure that we look at the global outlook, the national outlook, and the regional outlook.
What can we do? The question to you is, what can we do from a global perspective, from a national perspective, and a regional perspective? You're in charge. We'll start with global.
Well, global, there are real glimmers of hope. I set up the piece telling you the bad news, and it really is an existential crisis we face here.
But finally, the world is coming together and realizing this. So, in December 2022, we got the Kunming Montreal Agreement, which is a little bit like the Paris Agreement for climate, but for nature. And one of the biggest goals agreed to by almost all the countries of the world there was that we should protect and restore 30 percent of our land and oceans by 2030.
That's a very ambitious target. But we now have some real targets to aim for. There are other targets as well. So we have a framework internationally. And the other thing I've seen happening is that In the last 12 to 18 months, nature and climate have been more and more integrated. If you look at COP 27, it was a disappointment in many respects, but one of the things it did was bring the voice of indigenous people, which by the way is Another real way to get nature protected is put the land back into the hands of indigenous people.
And the second thing was that we really started to see nature being integrated into the climate agenda. Because not only does climate devastate nature when it's It gets catastrophic, but it's also one of the solutions, right? Nature based solutions. It's, it's the way that we absorb carbon and its effects.
So very, very optimistic about the global level. Nationally is a mixed story. I'm not very impressed with the current national government and their policies in general on nature and on climate. I think that we've lost our global leadership on this. Having said that, uh, we do have an Agricultural Act, which brings with it some real potential, because what, what it says is that, um, there should be public money for public goods.
What that means is that If I'm a farmer, I'm no longer just paid to produce crops or to produce food. I'm paid for the services I deliver also to nature. So if I'm absorbing carbon or protecting wetlands or bringing species back, I can actually be paid for that now through government subsidies. And that's pretty exciting, and I think it will help us to make this transition.
Uh, to kind of restorative food system that we really need in this country. So, uh, you know, there's, there's a lot to fight for in this country. I've been hearing a little bit about what's going on regionally here in the north of England and also in, in, in Scotland and so on. I actually think. In some ways, there's a lot more happening here than further down south, where we're in the grip, perhaps, of a, of a conservative government and a very urban environment.
So, I do actually see lots of, uh, policy progress, lots of political will in the region up here. And, uh, sometimes that's the way of things, when you have a little bit Less central control, uh, where you have a bit more flexibility to be creative, to be ambitious, then you make more progress. So I'm quite, uh, quite inspired by that.
We always like to end the podcast with something that people can stop doing now and something that people can start doing. Our listeners are passionate about being able to make a difference. So if you could give them any two pieces of advice, what would you ask them to stop doing today and what would you ask them to start doing today?
I mean, I could get very practical and, and talk about stop eating so much red meat, stop flying as much, stop driving on petrol cars and so on. But actually, I think it's, it's a bigger issue. I think it's, it's about stop getting caught in the problem, because that just makes you feel disempowered. So stop listening to the, the bad news to the extent.
that it paralyzes you and start tuning in to the innovation that's happening to the, the message around tipping points and realizing that change is not linear. It doesn't happen, uh, step by step. It happens very fast when it happens. And so try to be the, the amplifier. of the solutions, um, rather than being caught in the problems.
Wayne, it's been such a pleasure to have you on the podcast. Thank you so much.
Thank you. I, I'll be cheeky now and just, um, make a little suggestion, which I, I often do on podcasts, which is to suggest maybe that I finish with a poem. Absolutely. I just find that we need to engage with us at the level of the heart.
As well as the head, and this is what I try to do by writing and sharing poetry. So this one is called A Place to Thrive. Is the world a better place because we lived and loved and learned? What will our children have to face because of what we built and burned? Are people better than before because we gave them dignity?
What happened to the sick and poor while we were living strong and free? Is the world a fairer place because we fought for human rights? Who lost for us to win our race or did we open up new heights? Is nature thriving great and small because we walked upon the earth? Did oceans rise and species fall with every breath we took since birth?
Is the world a dying place because our enterprises grew? Did we destroy our living space or did we seed the world anew? Each day we get to use our voice to raise the tide or let it ebb. Each day we face a simple choice to nurture life or fray its web. Let's let the world be better still for every moment we're alive because we choose to use our will.
to make our earth a place to thrive. So thank you.
Beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing and thank you so much for joining us today. It's been a great pleasure. Thank you for listening to The Seventeen. We really appreciate your support. We're a new podcast looking to grow so please hit the subscribe button on your podcast provider and please do leave us a review and tell all of your friends about us too.
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