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Rewilding projects are often most successful when self-contained. A single island can undergo a process of rewilding and restoration, for example, much more easily than a diverse and diffuse area of land and sea. So how do scientists and ecologists upscale these efforts to have a global impact?
The science is clear. The capabilities are there. But the next step is less clear. Individual projects can offer “snapshots” of conservation in action, but they can also fuel bigger projects if properly harnessed.
This requires a change in thinking. It’s not just a case of adding more zeroes to the budget and doing more of the same. You might need to change how you approach these smaller scale projects so that you can build on them later.
There are a few places, including islands, that still look today the way they did 40 years ago.
To explore that idea and the implications of scale for conservation, we sat down with three experts in conservation and restoration at huge scales.
Rob Dunbar, a professor at Stanford University, is interested in climate change and marine ecology, oceanography, and biogeochemistry. His work has spanned carbon dioxide removal projects, Antarctic ice sheet instability, and climate impacts on coral reefs.
Patty Baiao has led island conservation projects across the United States since 2016, including rat and mouse removal projects, particularly on Midway Island in the south Pacific.
Nick Graham is a professor and chair of marine ecology at the Lancaster Environment Center in the United Kingdom, and a Royal Society research fellow. In his work, Graham takes a socio-ecological approach to investigating how and why coral reefs change and the implications.
Together, they discussed ways to deepen scientists’ understanding of ecosystems and how they can scale conservation and prioritize future growth.
I want to start by asking all three of you to tell us about the projects you’re currently working on in conservation.
Rob Dunbar: I got into this through scuba diving. I went on my very first dive in 1967 in Haiti in Port au Prince harbor. The reef there was spectacular. It’s hard to imagine today, because the situation has changed so much. But that’s when I knew I wanted my life’s work to take me to some of these spectacular places, and for me, that has meant the polar regions and coral reefs. The poles and reefs are connected in many different ways. I’ve spent my career seeking the most pristine wildernesses, and there are a few places, including islands, that still look today the way they did 40 years ago. Currently, my projects mainly involve using physics and chemistry to understand whether coral reefs are building up their architecture or if they are decaying, and in turn, how they affect the ecosystem around them.
Patty Baiao: I’m originally from Brazil, and I have always enjoyed having nature around me. I am a seabird ecologist by training, but I have since migrated into field work and in particular, island conservation and restoring islands across the globe. Islands are a place where we can have an outsized impact for biodiversity, oceans, and people. They are home to an incredible amount of plant and animal species and cultural diversity. At the same time, they are on the front lines of the global climate crisis we are in. Invasive species are a huge threat to islands—some 75 percent of all the extinctions we have recorded today have happened to island species, and invasive species are implicated in the vast majority of these events. We have a great opportunity to remove a threat by eradicating invasive species. That one action leads to incredible ecosystem benefits for biodiversity, oceans, and people. We can holistically restore and rewild island ecosystems, making them more resilient to climate change impacts and building a healthier planet.
Right now, I’m working on the Island Ocean Connection Challenge, which aims to connect islands to the marine ecosystems and put islands at the center of marine conservation and break down some of the silos in science, financing, and politics to help restore, conserve, and build up our understanding in a way that also supports the traditional cultural knowledge of the communities who live on these islands.
Nick Graham: My work is in coral ecology and coral science, but I have always been interested in finding solutions and ways to make conservation work for the communities that rely on coral reefs. I’ve worked in the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, and in places that are heavily populated as well as those that are uninhabited and remote.
I spent the first decade of my career looking at how many fish live on particular reefs and how human use changes a reef, as well as issues like climate change and the impacts of coral bleaching on the reef population and fisheries. I also look at how effective marine protected areas are. Often, marine protected areas are in very remote places, and these can be important, but they also maintain the status quo. These areas are already not really being fished, and there aren’t people present, and the water quality is generally excellent. Yet while these areas are seemingly pristine, and that’s important, they are not necessarily at their full potential or effecting transformational change.
A big “aha” moment for me was when I was on an expedition with an ornithologist and I realized that the seabirds nesting on islands and the nutrients they produce are critical for the coral reefs and the wider ecosystem. For example, we have evidence that manta rays feed close to seabird colonies in Palmyra, which is an atoll in the South Pacific, because there’s more and larger plankton present in the water. The seabird nutrients integrated all the way through the coral reef food web and beyond the reef. The fish grew faster, they are bigger, there is less algae. We’ve taken that insight and we’re using it to study other reef and island systems, and it is completely clear. The way to improve coral reefs is to eradicate rats and, if necessary, restore native vegetation. It’s transformational.
Islands represent a very small portion of Earth’s landmass, but they’re home to an incredible amount of biodiversity.
If we look forward to the next few decades, where do we need to go? And, in turn, what do we need to do to get there?
Dunbar: We already know that we need holistic, coupled management of marine systems and terrestrial systems, the restoration of vegetation and the removal of rats. But I also want to talk about the challenge of ocean acidification and sea level rise.
We know that many reefs in the western Pacific are able to keep up with sea level rise of five centimeters a year. We know that because the last time the great ice sheets melted, that was how fast the oceans rose. At that point, the reefs were extremely healthy and there was little, if any, human presence. Today’s reefs are not in that same place. We know that there is less building up, for example, of the coral base that makes these islands what they are today and which helps them resist erosion from storms and keep up with sea-level rise. That’s happening now. That makes the need for restoration all the more urgent.
I’ve changed what I do—I used to be 100 percent focused on researching ecosystems but part of what I do now is study carbon dioxide removal from the ocean. We will have to do that. We’re going to blow past one and a half degrees of warming—the target limit for global warming above pre-industrial levels set forth in the 2015 Paris Agreement—and we will blow past 2 degrees sometime soon after that. We will have to remove carbon dioxide and there’s only one reservoir that can scale above 20 gigatons of CO2 removal per year and that’s increasing the alkalinity of the ocean. It just so happens that increasing the alkalinity of the ocean supports calcification by corals and everything else in the ocean that has a shell.
So there’s the challenge: A blue carbon opportunity for small island nations that can help finance this work and then with the alkalinity, we can put that to use and benefit these fragile ecosystems.
Baiao: For me, the Island Ocean Connection Challenge is that kind of visionary exercise. The vision is to restore 40 island-ocean ecosystems by 2030. And by doing that, we create a portfolio to help island restorations elsewhere and really understand what limits we have and where we can increase the scale and scope of a project. It gives a chance to look at the challenge at scale, rather than on a project-by-project basis and that gives the opportunity to really hone in on new technologies and new ways of developing things at scale. It can also help us get faster and lower the risk and cost of each project.
Graham: We need to be careful that we scale up the science that we’re doing at the same time as scaling up the practice. We’re scratching the surface at the moment. We need to understand the whole process of island restoration and the timescales over which benefits can accrue—and the amount of learning that we can do will inform future projects. But this will take decades of work. We need to develop networks of scientists to work alongside the practitioners.
One thing we know is that we need to get to scale, and we need to do it fast. New Zealand has an ambitious goal of removing invasive predators from their islands by 2050. How can we bring together all the different stakeholders to push these kinds of ambitious goals in other large island systems and beyond?
Dunbar: I think one thing we need to do is ensure there is continued support for sites like Palmyra where they are really looking at climate adaptation and resilience. They’ve been inviting people from all over the world to do things that haven’t been traditionally done there with the goal of learning what can be translated to other sites throughout the Pacific. We can do more of that on the Chagos Archipelago, or the Seychelles, for example.
But we also need to bring in the local communities and the people who will ultimately benefit from the work, and we need to do it early on. When I was working on Palau, for example, I had been going there every year for six or seven years before people would invite me into their homes. They wanted to make sure I wasn’t a flash in the pan. We can’t eradicate rats on every island, and we also can’t sever every island or coral reef from the wider world. But we can think more clearly about where we are putting our efforts in ways that benefit the community on a global basis.
Baiao: For me, partnerships are also what comes to my mind. We need trust and partnerships and to have shared visions that incorporate local values systems as well as the science. I think this kind of trust and partnership is ultimately the most powerful way for us to move faster and be more effective.
But we also need to increase awareness and share our success stories so we can inspire others.
Graham: Something else that we can do is to really identify the high priority islands at different scales, from archipelago to ocean basins, and prioritize these for restoration. It can get you a much bigger bang for your buck.
Do we need to take bigger risks in conservation?
Dunbar: I’m an absolute believer in pushing the envelope and accepting the risk of failure. I think that in too much of science, especially in the U.S., the risk is mitigated to the point that we lose out on some extraordinary discoveries.
Another area that needs work is that we are so far behind in setting up both large marine protected areas and mobile marine protected areas, even though we already know they work. We’ve got abundant data on the fact that setting up protected areas helps rewild that area. On land, one of the first national parks was Yosemite in 1878, but it took the Great Barrier Reef until 1978 to be designated as protected. We’re far behind in terms of the oceanscape.
Graham: There are limitations with some of our current tools, particularly with poisons for eradication—the issue is that they’re not target specific and you can harm other creatures. You want specificity. But there is a whole suite of work that is going on in developing genetic technologies to control mice and rats, and that work has been going on for about a decade. It won’t be available tomorrow, but it is in the pipeline. There’s also some development around creating rat-specific toxins, too.
Ultimately, rewilding is risky. And you need to do it in places where you’re willing to take those risks, and where you’re not risking other things that you’re not prepared to actually risk. You’re not going to trial really innovative or out there stuff in places where you may have catastrophic impacts or even extinctions.
Baiao: We need to be able to take risks but that is a cultural shift that we will all need to embrace. We’re so focused on success stories and good outcomes that we forget the process to get to those outcomes and learn through experience. But we need responsible risk. So the genetic tools, for example, years of work will be done so that when they are ready to use, we feel confident in using them. 
Lead image: haveseen / Shutterstock
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