Fred Pearce, BioMedNet News, www.bmn.com
Amsterdam — Planet Earth is on the verge of a “great restoration” of nature – or it will be, provided humanity takes the right tack in the coming decades, claimed a leading environmental scientist today at a major conference here on global change that saw an outpouring of optimism from technologists about their ability to solve the world’s problems.
“Since the middle of the 20th century, humans have begun to reverse the pattern they followed for millennia of extending further into nature to meet needs for food and materials,” said Jesse Ausubel, director of the Program for the Human Environment at The Rockefeller University in New York. “I am convinced that a great reversal is under way,” he told delegates at the Global Change Open Science Conference, organized by the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme. The IGBP comes under the auspices of the International Council for Science (ICSU) at the Royal Academy of Sciences in Stockholm.
Global farm yields have risen by more than 2% a year for 40 years now, says Ausubel. If farmers continue that progress for another 60 to 70 years, average farm yields will reach those of the US corn farms and Chinese rice farms today. And as world population growth slows, “only half of today’s cropland will be needed,” he noted.
The key will be “environmentally responsible precision agriculture”, using technology to apply fertilizers, pesticides, and water only where they are needed. “High yield is the best friend of habitat,” said Ausubel.
Likewise, he says, forestry will concentrate on much smaller areas of highly productive plantations. By 2050, he calculates, “production forests” could diminish to “just about 12% of all woodlands.” The new plantations would mostly be established on abandoned farmland.
Far from declining, the world forest cover could increase by 300 million hectares, or 10%. The spare land could go back to nature. In the US alone, “an area twice the size of Spain could be newly spared for nature in the coming century,” he noted. “Smart aquaculture in highly productive closed systems” and a few iron-fertilized ocean farms will replace hunting for fish on the high seas. “Adding the right nutrients in the right places might lift fish yields by a factor of hundreds,” he said.
The result will be a resurgence of marine biodiversity and “the preservation of traditional fishing where communities value it.”
Ausubel’s optimistic vision extends to urban landscapes, where he sees cities surrounded by nature and connected by underground maglev
(magnetically levitated) trains. “We already have a Faustian bargain with technology. Having come this far with it, there is no road back,” he insisted. Now, he says, we can have a technological future – and nature, too.
The public reaction against the benefits of technology had to be halted, said many delegates.
“We have become so terrified of the downside of technology that we tend to pay little attention to the risks of not doing things,” warned William Clark, professor of international science, public policy, and human development at Harvard. “Technology can mess things up – you only have to think of Chernobyl – but we have to find ways of using it positively.”
Scientists behind the green revolution in farming joined in claiming credit for saving nature from the plough.
More than 400 million hectares of forests and grasslands have been saved through planting high-yield green revolution crops on existing farmland, according to Louis Verchot of the Nairobi-based International Research Centre for Agro-forestry (ICRAF), based in Nairobi. That is, an area almost half the size of the US.