Ecosystems & Climate
Everything is connected. This becomes abundantly clear when looking at the vital interplay between climate and ecosystem: each affects the other. It can be a beautiful thing.
The reasons behind climate change are also pretty obvious – but the results are not so pretty. We emit anthropogenic (human-caused) greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere when burning fossil fuels for energy, trapping solar heat. As this process continues, so too does our planet continually warm, disrupting the careful balance of Earth’s ecosystems and threatening all life therein.
Feedback Mechanisms
But it gets worse (sorry). Just as cause and effect is evident from human activity in the natural world, resultant changes likewise gather influence as they grow. This is known among scientists as a climate feedback loops, defined as “processes that can either amplify or diminish the effects of climate forcings” – forcings here meaning the subtle ecological changes that can potentially tip the climatological balance, starting a vicious cycle of nature degradation that triggers an ever-ongoing pattern of global warming.
If every action has an equal and opposite reaction, then it’s no wonder this phenomenon has sprung up in response to our carbon-intensive, extractive global economies. Put simply, it’s the domino effect in motion: one falls (or in this case, is pushed over by human forcings) and creates a reaction, knocking all the subsequent dominoes in an infinite line. Everything is thus affected in a disastrous mechanism that will continue beyond our power to rectify once passed a certain point: a situation known as “runaway climate”. World leaders and local communities alike desperately hope to avoid this by capping emissions below (a precarious) 1.5°C by 2030, or else face dire consequences. Yet these remain ever-nearing on the horizon should meaningful changes not be implemented, and quickly. We’re currently on track for 3°C buy the end of the century…
Facts & Figures
Man-made terrestrial feedback mechanisms come from agriculture, fossil fuel combustion, and deforestation, and lead to largescale shifts in nature’s previously stable systems. Disappearing ice, for example, showcases how forcings impact the planet as a whole: reduced sea ice deregulates global temperatures; when abundant, sea ice provides a large reflective surface, off which the sun’s rays bounce away from the Earth (a process called “albedo”, which is vital for climate stability). But these protective white sheets are diminishing, with 2007, 2012, 2016, and 2020 having the lowest recorded ice extent on record.
Rising temperatures have implications elsewhere too. Arctic permafrost, as well as frozen peat bogs under the sea floor, safely hold ancient methane and carbon. However, as climate change gradually—and now, quite rapidly—begins thawing these stores, warming gasses are released and add yet more emissions to the atmosphere, thereby causing more warming, more thawing, and further release… and on it catastrophically goes. Other notable positive (i.e., heating) forcings in nature include forest fires, desertification, increased methane emissions, peat decomposition, and rainforest depletion.
And there are tragic everyday consequences which are only set to get worse if the situation isn’t sufficiently managed on our end. Particularly visible in the ravaged climates of the poorer Southern Hemisphere, such as drought in the Maharashtra region of India, these effects are now unavoidably spreading into the wealthy western world, whose activities are largely the cause of such incidents. The coming ripple effect of (unchecked) ecosystem degradation on overall quality of life is made plain when considering the exponential growth of feedback mechanisms; the world’s poorest, most marginalised, and least equipped still set to be the worst afflicted, as these loops will compromise food, water and energy security on a vast scale.
But there are also solutions: the fault is mismanagement of natural resources, and so this must be actively amended in our economic practices. It’s time to listen to what scientists and Indigenous cultures have advocated for years, and time to begin implementing environmental restoration policies to protect our ecosystems and redress the imbalances in our climate.
Restoring ecosystems is a profoundly effective way to not only slow, but even reverse climate change, by bringing back lost soil health, reviving biodiversity , rebuilding our protections against threat like Zoonotic disease and climatological crises such as flooding, droughts, wildfires, extinction, and mass-thawing.
Sustainable development can dramatically reduce the risks of climate change: reformed farming practices, rewilding our green spaces and greening our urban ones, decarbonising and localising our economies, as well as switching from a growth-based to circular economy, would combine to not only provide many jobs and mend our fractured relationship with our ecosystems, improving well-being, but also prevent this deadly feedback paradigm from having dire and unstoppable effects. However, we need time to do this properly.
