These recent extreme fires are not isolated incidents. They are a symptom of something much more alarming. We have changed the nature of wildfires by completely altering the conditions and landscapes in which they occur. A dangerous mix of prolonged droughts, record-breaking heatwaves, warmer nighttime and winter temperatures, and human activity is fuelling unprecedented, fast-moving blazes of a severity and destructive power we have not seen before.

None of this means fire is becoming more common everywhere. Climate skeptics who wish to argue that climate change has not affected fire at all tend to point to the fact that satellite records show that the total area burned across the planet each year has declined by roughly a quarter since the late 1990s. However, they take the data out of context and ignore that the decline is driven almost entirely by land-use change in savannahs and grasslands, particularly in Africa, where the shift from nomadic and shifting-cultivation land use to settled agriculture has sharply reduced the burning that once maintained those ecosystems. Furthermore, looking at burned area alone does not tell you anything about a fire’s severity or environmental toll. A reduced global burned area is not an indication that wildfires are decreasing or becoming milder. Wildfires’ destructive power is actually becoming increasingly concentrated into acute mega-fires in forest ecosystems, with data analysed by the World Resources Institute (WRI) showing that wildfires today burn over twice as much tree cover globally than they did twenty years ago.

The Boreal Shift

Amongst the most concerning developments in global extreme wildfire events is their shift into the carbon-dense, boreal forest ecosystems of the northern hemisphere. Research shows that northern boreal forests (those that cover Canada, Alaska, Scandinavia, and Siberia) are experiencing the fastest acceleration of extreme wildfire activity on the planet. It’s estimated that more than 60% of all fire-related tree cover loss globally between 2001 and 2025 occurred specifically within boreal regions, where fires also have a particularly devastating climate cost.

What makes boreal forest fires uniquely dangerous for the climate is that boreal forests hold roughly 40% of global terrestrial carbon, mostly stored in their deep, organic peat and permafrost. Today’s boreal fires burn so hot that they ignite this underground peat, releasing 10 to 20 times more carbon per hectare than fires elsewhere and threatening to turn boreal forests from a vital global carbon sink into a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. Canada’s catastrophic 2023 fire season alone resulted in carbon emissions that ranged from roughly 480 to over 600 million tonnes, which is in the same range as the annual fossil fuel emissions of major industrialised nations, and several times Canada’s own annual greenhouse gas output.

Making matters worse is the disproportionate impact of climate change in northern boreal regions, where temperatures are rising more than twice as fast as the global average, creating prolonged heatwaves, drying out vegetation, and causing more frequent droughts, which in turn melt more permafrost, exposing more flammable peat that fuels more fires that release more stored carbon. That combination, of a warming rate roughly double the global average, a carbon reservoir built over centuries now becoming flammable, and no reliable historical analogue for how these fires will behave once large-scale peat burning becomes routine, is what makes the boreal belt the single most consequential region for global climate stability among all the world's fire-prone ecosystems. However, it is not the only region where wildfires are becoming more frequent, severe, and dangerous as temperatures continue to rise.

A Burning Europe

In recent years, Europe has become a global wildfire hotspot. The World Health Organization (WHO) reported that just between 2022 and 2025, there has been a 57% surge in land burned across the European region, rising from a record-breaking 1.4 million hectares in 2022 to 2.2 million hectares in 2025; another reminder that looking at global burned area glosses over the scale of wildfires in specific regions. As of this writing, the 2026 season is already exceeding that record pace, with EU burned area roughly a third higher than the same point in 2025 and nearly two and a half times the 20-year average. Fire danger and civilian deaths have also extended well beyond the traditional Mediterranean hotspots into France and the British Isles, where France set a new record in terms of area burned within a single week, making France’s 2026 wildfires the most widespread in modern records.

The reason why fire has increased so significantly in Europe shouldn’t surprise us. Europe is warming faster than any other continent. Across the Iberian Peninsula, France, Italy, and Greece, the number of summer days with extreme fire-prone weather has more than doubled since 1981. Extreme fire weather — heat, drought, and wind occurring together — is now a regular feature of the region’s climate rather than a rare anomaly; a shift that is overwhelming decades-old firefighting capacity built for a different, milder fire regime. Meanwhile, historically cooler zones like the United Kingdom, Germany, and parts of Scandinavia are facing increasingly extreme heatwaves that are leaving landscapes parched and severely vulnerable to fire. Currently, almost three-quarters of England is now in drought, after having recorded its driest July since records began in 1836.

Adding fuel to the flames is the fact that Europe has undergone extensive land-use change. Across Europe, rural exodus and land abandonment are the primary drivers, aside from climate-driven extreme heat, behind the escalating wildfire crisis. As rural populations have declined, millions of hectares of traditional farmland, vineyards, pastures, and woodlands that created natural fire breaks in the landscape have been left abandoned. Without livestock to graze through grass or farmers to clear undergrowth, brush and vegetation accumulates, creating dense scrubland that connects existing forests into one uninterrupted, highly dense carpet of fuel that ignites easily during heatwaves. In Spain, the country with the largest area of abandoned agricultural land in the European Union, nearly half of the total burned area during the record-breaking 2025 fire season consisted of scrubland, meaning land abandonment is a major driver behind the massive scale and unprecedented speed and heat of recent fires precisely because it can act as a bridge between what would otherwise be isolated areas.

Compounding the problem, extensive commercial timber monocultures of highly flammable non-native species such as Eucalyptus and certain Pine varieties now cover many parts of Europe, replacing the traditional, fire-resistant multi-species forests and wetlands that once created natural fire breaks in the landscape. Of the Landes/Gironde forest that burnt outside Bordeaux this summer, about 82% was a pine plantation that actually also suffered massive, historic destruction from the wildfires in 2022. These kinds of unbroken monocultures, with their densely packed and resin-rich pines, act as massive fuel loads that allow fires to crown (spread through the treetops) and move with terrifying speed. Research shows that they are more than twice as likely to burn compared to natural mixed forests with fire resistant deciduous trees.

What is happening in Europe is a stark example of how climate change, land abandonment, and human activity can combine to create the perfect conditions for extreme destruction, with massive costs for society, people, wildlife, and the planet.

Fire-Prone Rainforests

Moving away from the forests of the boreal regions and Europe, the Amazon represents the most unsettling shift in global wildfire behaviour because tropical rainforests are not supposed to burn easily at all. Their humidity has historically made them some of the most fire-resistant ecosystems on the planet, but that resistance is breaking down. Research from the European Commission's Joint Research Centre found that fire-driven degradation across the Amazon reached its worst level in more than two decades in 2024, affecting 3.3 million hectares and releasing an estimated 791 million tonnes of carbon — a sevenfold jump from the average of the two preceding years.

The Amazon's vulnerability is genuine climate-human hybrid. The 2023–2024 drought that set the stage for the 2024 fires was the region's worst on record, intensified by climate change acting on top of a strong El Niño. But drought was not the only reason behind the fires. Decades of deforestation has fragmented the forest and broken it into smaller patches where far more forest edge is exposed to drying winds and scorching sunlight, making the formerly humid interior forest measurably drier. It’s into this drier landscape that humans are deliberately introducing fire, with researchers at Brazil's Amazon Environmental Research Institute noting that in a fragmented, drought-stressed forest, fire becomes a cheap and effective tool for degrading land ahead of future illegal clearing.

What makes the rise of fires in the Amazon most concerning is the scale of what's at stake and the risk of irreversibility. The Amazon does not simply lose trees when it burns; each fire event adds to the damage already done by deforestation by leaving the surviving forest more fragmented, more exposed, and drier than before, priming it to burn again more easily the next time drought strikes. This self-reinforcing cycle could push large parts of the basin past a tipping point beyond which they cannot recover as rainforest at all, transitioning instead toward a drier, degraded savannah-like state. Because the Amazon plays an outsized role in regulating rainfall across South America and in storing carbon at a scale few other ecosystems can match, that transition would not stay contained within the basin, but would reshape regional climate and remove one of the planet's most important carbon sinks at precisely the moment the world can least afford to lose it.

The Answer Nature Already Has

As climate change and modern land management combine to make forest fires more frequent, severe, and destructive than they have ever been, the need for new fire management solutions and strategies that fit this new reality has never been greater. The most promising fixes are not new technologies. They are the deliberate restoration of the natural mechanisms and ecosystems, that not only support the greatest biodiversity and capture the most carbon, but used to interrupt fire before it could become catastrophic.

In Europe and the boreal regions, the restoration of natural mixed forests and wetlands represent two of the most powerful natural fire mitigation solutions that also create co-benefits for biodiversity. Both work best when combined with the reintroduction of key species such as beavers; whose dams naturally and cheaply trap water and slow river currents, creating sprawling wetland complexes that do not easily catch fire, and large herbivores such as tauros; whose grazing naturally removes the scrubland and vegetation that is fuelling so many modern mega-fires.

In the Amazon, restoring the forest's degraded condition and intrinsic humidity should be the top priority for reducing the risk of fire and protecting the intact forest that remains. Indigenous stewardship and participation are an essential part of this. Through ancestral fire management strategies, which include small, low-intensity prescribed burns during the early dry season, indigenous communities help to safely clear dead organic fuel on the ground before the dangerous dry season peaks, preventing the massive, uncontrollable wildfires that have become so common in the Amazon today. Furthermore, empowering Indigenous populations to legally manage their ancestral lands functions as a natural barrier as forests actively guarded by indigenous people experience vastly lower rates of illegal clearing and arson, thereby halting the fragmentation that is making the Amazon more flammable.

None of this amounts to a claim that fire can or should be eliminated from landscapes, or that any of these measures alone will be sufficient against a climate that keeps loading the odds. What these solutions point towards is a genuinely different paradigm than the one that has dominated fire management for the past century and which has led to the situation we have today. Instead of treating landscapes as static things to be defended against fire with ever more suppression and engineering, these approaches treat the landscape’s own defences and defenders as the most effective solution. After all, they are the mechanisms that worked for centuries before they were interrupted.

That is the scariest part of the latest Red List. It’s not a list of rare species clinging to the margins, but a record of ordinary, once-common species disappearing in real time.

The numbers behind it are stark. Of 24,829 species assessed, 6,156 are now red-listed and 2,910 are classified as directly threatened. This represents the fourth consecutive assessment in which the proportion of threatened species has risen. And the pattern is not simply a story of poor knowledge catching up with reality. The species groups Sweden monitors most rigorously; birds, mammals, fish, and butterflies, are also some of the ones faring worst. Forty-five percent of assessed bird species, 36% of mammals, 32% of fish and 22% of butterflies are now red-listed.

What's Driving Species Loss, On Land

The Red List doesn’t just count species; it also identifies what affects them. On land, there are two main drivers of biodiversity loss.

The single largest threat is modern forestry itself. It negatively affects 1,744 red-listed species, more than a third of everything on the red list. Species tied to structures found only in old forests with long, unbroken continuity are particularly affected. This includes many species of fungi, moss, lichens and beetles. Their loss is particularly concerning because these are the organisms that build the structures that entire ecosystems and food chains depend on.

Fungi are amongst the most affected. Of the more than 5,000 larger fungi species found in Sweden, nearly a quarter (1,348) are now red-listed, and almost 80% of those depend on forest ecosystems as their primary habitat. An example is the laxrosa ticka (Aurantiporus priscus), a rare wood-decaying polypore fungus that is strictly dependent on old-growth, undisturbed conifer forests in Sweden. It is now classified as Critically Endangered and the population continues to decline as the area of old natural forests containing high-quality coarse woody debris shrinks. Most red-listed fungi follow the same pattern. Species that partner with old trees, depend on structural complexity and specific microclimates, or decompose dead wood, end up with nowhere to go after old forests are cut down. With them, go over 150 other red-listed species that either directly live and feed on these fungi or depend on the wood and trees they decompose.

Beetles tell a similar story. Of 4,362 Swedish beetle species evaluated, 370 are now directly threatened. Of these, more than 50 are saproxylic beetles that depend on dead or decaying wood, wood mould in hollow trees, or fungi growing on old trees. They are all now Endangered or Critically Endangered due to the continued loss of old-growth forests with dead and fallen trees in different stages of decomposition. Like many fungi, a large share of these disappearing beetles perform unglamorous but essential ecological work. They break down dead wood, carrion, and leaf litter so their loss quietly degrades a forest’s capacity to recycle nutrients, recover after disturbances, and support everything else in the food web. When these beetles start to disappear, other species follow, adding to the domino effect already in motion.

When it comes to lichens and mosses, of 2,615 species assessed, 676 are now red-listed, of which 113 are either Endangered or Critically Endangered. The overwhelming majority of these are epiphytes and lignicolous species tied to old bark, dead wood, or the humid, stable microclimate that only closed-canopy old-growth forest provides. Among them is the giant lichen (Lobaria amplissima), a large lung lichen now Critically Endangered in Sweden. It grows only on the trunks of old broadleaf trees in mixed forests with consistently high humidity, often in sheltered ravines or gorges, and cannot establish on young trees or in recently disturbed stands no matter how long they're subsequently left alone. Its disappearance is a warning sign for the wider community of lichens, fungi, moss, and insects that depend on the same slow-forming, irreplaceable habitats.

Beyond the loss of old-growth forests, the second-largest threat to land-based biodiversity in Sweden is land abandonment. As small-scale, low-intensity farming disappears, roughly 1,300 species are threatened by the overgrowth of formerly open habitats such as meadows, pastures and grazed woodland edges that depended on continuous, gentle human use to stay open. The six-spot burnet (Zygaena filipendulae) and other burnet moths, once common in traditionally farmed countryside, have moved from Near Threatened to Vulnerable as this habitat vanishes, with several species halved in number in a single decade.

Even the common European hedgehog (Erinaceus europaeus), a garden animal most Swedes would consider unremarkable, has moved from Least Concern to Vulnerable, having nearly halved in number over the last decade. The loss is mostly driven by the fragmentation and disappearance of small-scale, structurally diverse agricultural landscapes and the poor dispersal possibilities that are left between habitat patches, which are often separated by roads where cars run over an an estimated 33% of the population annually. What is happening to hedgehogs highlights not only the urgent need for greater habitat protections, but also the importance of ensuring protected areas remain sufficiently connected to be able to support the many other species that also need to move through and between habitats and ecosystems.

To further compound biodiversity loss on land, invasive pathogens, driven further North as temperatures rise, are killing trees outright and, with them, the lichens, fungi and invertebrates that depend on them. Climate change is also reshaping which species can survive where, with heat-favoured species expanding as cold-adapted ones retreat. Nowhere is this clearer than in Sweden’s mountain regions, which recorded the sharpest increase in red-listed species of any landscape type in the assessment.

What's Driving Species Loss, At Sea

If the picture on land is one of well-documented decline, the marine assessment is one of decline compounded by not fully knowing its scale. The Species Information Centre is explicit that scientific understanding of marine environments lags well behind that of terrestrial ecosystems, with a disproportionate share of marine species still classified as Data Deficient. But where the threats are known, they are unambiguous: bottom trawling, eutrophication, and coastal development are the factors affecting the greatest number of aquatic species.

The 2025 list identifies 21 commercial fish species that are now struggling. Herring (Clupea harengus) and salmon (Salmo salar), once abundant, join the list as Near Threatened, alongside sole (Solea solea) and saithe (Pollachius virens). Cod, already Vulnerable in 2020, has been moved up to Endangered, with Ann-Britt Florin of SLU Aqua noting that more sustainable catch management alongside other environmental measures will be needed to reverse this trajectory. The European eel (Anguilla anguilla) remains Critically Endangered. Other species, like the Atlantic wolffish (Anarhichas lupus) and the European hake (Merluccius merluccius), have moved to higher threat categories and are now classified as Critically Endangered and Endangered. The common blue mussel (Mytilus edulis), which is ecologically important as a natural water filter, appears on the list for the first time as Near Threatened. Among marine mammals, the Baltic harbour porpoise (Phocoena phocoena) population remains Critically Endangered and the harbour seal’s (Phoca vitulina) Baltic population continues to be Vulnerable as conditions and fish populations decline.

These findings sit inside a larger, well-documented Baltic Sea crisis. HELCOM, the intergovernmental body overseeing Baltic environmental protection, has found that key indicators, like water turbidity, toxic algal blooms and deep-water oxygen depletion, actually deteriorated across most of the sea between 2016 and 2021, despite decades of nutrient-runoff-reduction efforts. Seven of the world’s ten largest marine dead zones are now found in the Baltic. Together they cover an estimated 42,000 square kilometres and, in worse periods, expand until they cover an area the size of Ireland. Rising water temperatures are making the problem even harder to reverse as warmer surface water increasingly settles into a stable layer above colder, saltier deep water, reducing the natural mixing that would otherwise carry oxygen down to the seabed. Nutrient pollution and a warming climate are now, in effect, reinforcing each other in a negative feedback loop that will impact more species if not reversed.

What Went Right and What Needs to Happen

The latest Red List is not all bad news. Amongst the losses, there are also stories of recovery. The sea eagle (Haliaeetus albicilla) and otter (Lutra lutra), for example, have all left the list entirely in 2025, moving to the category of Least Concern. The otter’s recovery is the clearest illustration of what sustained intervention can achieve. Hunting ended in the 1960s, and the environmental toxins that had devastated its reproduction were banned in the 1970s, but it took until the 2020s for that recovery to fully register in the data. As Henrik Thurfjell, the mammal group coordinator at the Species Information Centre, put it, measures begun half a century ago have only now delivered results.

That is the message policymakers should take from this list. Species decline is reversible, but only if action starts well before a species becomes so rare that recovery is difficult or impossible, and only if it is sustained across political cycles rather than abandoned after a term or two. Recovery takes time and restoration and protection efforts that start today, and are implemented properly and consistently, will set the stage for biodiversity to recover in the long-term so that twenty years from now Sweden can be a country where ecosystems are thriving and full of life.

The forest floor here is not a clean carpet of green moss between evenly spaced trunks. It’s a chaos of textures and uneven surfaces, with raised mounds and deep pits where large trees have been uprooted, covered in multiple kinds of ferns and mosses, with a thick layer of decomposing leaf litter where all kinds of insects can be found. There are fallen logs in every stage of decay, some still hard enough to stand on, others so soft they crumble into red-brown dust underfoot, slowly returning their carbon and nutrients into the soil so it can feed the next generation of trees.

Most people in the industrialised world have never stood in a forest like this. What we call “the forest” in everyday life is almost always a managed forest of evenly aged, evenly spaced trees that were planted in rows after the last clear-cut. It looks green. It looks like nature, but it does not represent what a forest can be and the richness it can contain when it has been developing under its own internal logic for centuries, shaped only by fire, wind, insects, and time. These forests contain structures and relationships that simply cannot be rushed into existence by any amount of careful management.

Where Trees Tell Stories

Beyond the incredible structures they can develop and the variety of life they can contain within them, one of the most beautiful and distinctive aspects of old-growth forests is the trees. There is nothing quite like the beauty of trees that have been growing for centuries, with their oddly twisted shapes, strange growths, massive circumferences, and deep hollows. They are very different from the tall, straight specimens favoured by the timber industry. They look like they’ve led long, interesting lives and, more importantly, they look lived in.

If you look closely at the trees in an old-growth forest you will see distinct features that only accumulate on trees nobody has interrupted for a very long time. These are what foresters call tree-related microhabitats, or TreMs for short, and old trees can have more than fifty of them. You might spot a dark openings low on the trunk where a branch broke off years ago and the wood slowly rotted inward. This is not damage. It’s real estate. A woodpecker likely carved the first version of the cavity, and once abandoned, it was reused for years afterward by a rotating cast of tenants, including other birds, bats, and insects, each one dependent on the particular, decaying microclimate inside. Researchers studying these "nest webs" in old boreal mixedwood forests have found that this kind of structural richness supports not just more species, but more complicated webs of species sharing the same physical structures over time, generation after generation, in a way a young, uniform forest simply can't replicate.

You might also see places on the trunks of old trees where the bark has separated slightly from the wood beneath. There's a narrow pocket underneath that you could just about slide a finger into. You shouldn’t, but if you could see inside, you'd find an entire miniature community living there. Researchers cataloguing life inside these bark pockets have found that they host distinct assemblages of mites, nematodes, and other micro-invertebrates found almost nowhere else on the tree, each one a tiny food web of its own.

Higher up, in the crown of old trees, you might see dead branches still attached among the living ones. This crown deadwood is one of the most common microhabitats found in old-growth boreal forests, and it matters more than its modest, scruffy appearance suggests. Standing, slowly drying wood high in the canopy is a completely different habitat from deadwood lying on the ground, and it supports its own specialised decomposers that depend on exactly that height and exposure.

When old-growth forests are cut down, we not only lose the beautiful old trees and release all the carbon they have accumulated over their long lives, we also lose the entire web of habitats they create and all the species that depend on them.

Where Rare Lichens Grow

Another characteristic that makes old-growth forests so special is the presence of rare lichens that paint the forest and trees in splashes and tassels of green, blue, yellow, and red. In Sweden, one of the most quietly remarkable of these is Lobaria pulmonaria, commonly known as lungwort lichen or tree lungwort, a large, leafy, blue-green lichen which can often be found near the base of old deciduous trees.

Lungwort is one of the most studied indicator species in European forest conservation for a simple reason: it is almost never found anywhere except forests with long, unbroken continuity. It disperses slowly, grows slowly, and depends on a stable, humid microclimate that only develops under an intact canopy over many decades. It is also essential for biodiversity. Swedish researchers have found that stands where this lichen is present host, on average, around nine other red-listed lichen species alongside it, while comparable stands without it host only about one. This is why ecologists treat the lichen as an umbrella species, because wherever you protect its habitat, you're very likely protecting a whole community of other rare species with it.

Crucially, Lungwort is also vulnerable in a way that should give pause to anyone tempted to think a logged forest can simply regrow its old-growth character on a human timescale. Studies have shown that even where the lichen survives logging, changes to microclimate and light exposure afterward can suppress its growth, meaning it likely cannot survive once old-growth forests disappear even though it might appear to do so initially.

Where Death Supports Life

Perhaps one of the most distinctive features that separates an old-growth forest from a managed forest is the presence of dead wood. In managed Swedish forests, dead and dying trees are almost always removed. They're considered a waste, or a fire risk, or simply unprofitable to leave standing, but in an old-growth forest, deadwood represents some of the most biologically valuable material in the entire landscape. It exists in two main forms: standing dead trees, sometimes called snags, which decay slowly from the outside in over years or decades; and fallen logs, which decompose from contact with the moist forest floor, eventually becoming "nurse logs" that can sprout new seedlings directly out of their own decaying mass.

It’s worth taking a closer look at these fallen logs given the amount of life that they support. Roughly a third of all forest-dwelling insect species worldwide are saproxylic, meaning they depend, directly or indirectly, on dead wood to complete their life cycle. In Sweden alone, around 570 saproxylic invertebrates are red-listed, the vast majority of them beetles, and when researchers have compared Swedish nature reserves to nearby production forests, they've consistently found dramatically lower deadwood volumes and lower beetle diversity in the managed stands. The gap is especially wide among the rarest, most specialised species that have nowhere else to go once fallen logs disappear from the landscape.

What makes dying and decaying logs so interesting is that they represent different points in a long, continuous process. Decay isn’t a single moment but a long sequence of changing conditions, with different organisms specialising in the different stages. A beetle that depends on freshly dead wood with bark still attached needs an entirely different resource than a fungus that only colonises wood that has already softened past a certain point. This is why ecologists emphasise continuity of deadwood supply, not just total volume. In other words, a forest needs dead wood being produced at every stage, all the time, to support its full community of specialists. A 2021 study using the black-backed woodpecker as an indicator species found that forests with a continuous, ongoing supply of deadwood across decay stages offered meaningfully more value than forests with deadwood concentrated in only one or two stages, even if the total volume looked similar on paper.

A forest that contains decay in all its different stages and forms is not something that can be manufactured or recreated quickly. It’s a process that takes centuries of continuous death, decay, and rebirth.

Where The Woodpeckers Live

No animal makes the case for old-growth structure more directly than woodpeckers as they don’t just depend on old-growth features, they create them, generation after generation, for everyone else.

Sweden is home to eight woodpecker species, and several are tightly bound to old, structurally complex forest. The Eurasian three-toed woodpecker (Picoides tridactylus), first formally described by Linnaeus from a Swedish specimen in 1758, specialises in bark-boring insect larvae found mainly in mature and old-growth spruce stands, and the presence of its distinctive sap-feeding marks on trees is used by researchers as a field indicator of its presence.

The white-backed woodpecker (Dendrocopos leucotos) is rarer still and more specialised. It depends on deciduous forest rich in old, decaying trees, particularly aspen, alder, and birch, and excavates a brand-new nesting cavity every single year, abandoning the old one for the next tenant. In Sweden, the white-backed woodpecker’s decline has been so severe that only a small number of breeding pairs remain, and conservationists have used captive-reared birds to try to rebuild the population; a stark illustration of how quickly a species tied to old-growth habitats can collapse once those habitats fragment and disappear.

What makes woodpeckers so valuable to the conservation of old-growth forests and their biodiversity is that, like the lungwort lichen, they’re an umbrella species. An estimated 200 or more threatened plant and animal species in Sweden depend on the same old, decaying deciduous woodland that the white-backed woodpecker needs. This is why the presence of either the three-toed woodpecker or the white-backed woodpecker in Swedish forests is supposed to trigger specific guidance from the Swedish Forest Agency on whether logging can proceed nearby at all. However, logging often continues to take place in forests despite their presence, highlighting the urgent need to ensure protections are implemented for old-growth forests.

A Vanishing World Worth Saving

There are so many other incredible characteristics and essential functions of old-growth forests that could be mentioned in this article, such as their vast networks of mycorrhizal fungi, their ability to store immense amounts of carbon in the soil, and their great resilience against natural threats. It’s simply impossible to overstate how important they are for the planet and biodiversity. Despite this, they are quickly disappearing around the world to make way for agriculture, managed forests, and urban expansion.

In Sweden today, more than three-quarters of all forest land is actively managed for timber. Estimates from Swedish government agencies suggest only around 8 to 10 percent of forest land outside formally protected areas still qualifies as natural old-growth, a share that is shrinking every year as unprotected stands continue to be logged. A 2022 study from Lund University found that almost a quarter of Sweden's last unprotected old-growth forests were logged between 2003 and 2019 alone, a loss of roughly 1.4 percent annually. If that rate continues without stronger protections, researchers project that Sweden's last unprotected old-growth boreal forests could disappear entirely by the 2070s, fragmented first into isolated, disconnected stands too small and too cut off from one another to sustain the species that depend on large, continuous old-growth landscapes.

The consequences of this loss are not hypothetical. Over half of all threatened species in Sweden depend specifically on old-growth forest that hasn’t been significantly affected by forestry. This includes the lichens, fungi, mosses, and insects described above, along with the woodpeckers and countless other species that rely on them in turn. The Swedish Forest Agency’s own evaluations warn that this kind of loss is effectively permanent on any timeframe that matters. Endangered species do not simply reappear once a clear-cut area regrows, even decades later, because regrowth produces structurally simple young forest, not the deep architecture of cavities, deadwood, and lichen-rich bark that makes old-growth forests so special.

The good news is that what's left can still be saved, but only if it's recognised and protected in time. Learning to see the signs of an old-growth forest, to notice its cavities, its deadwood, its lichens, and its woodpecker holes, is therefore not just a pleasant afternoon outdoors. It's a way of appreciating and understanding, firsthand, exactly what stands to disappear and exactly why no amount of replanting will bring it back once it's gone.

Over the past two decades, an alternative vision has emerged. Rather than focusing narrowly on protecting individual species or managing habitats to maintain a particular condition, rewilding takes a different approach: restore the missing species and ecological processes, then step back and let nature regulate itself. It’s based on a simple but radical premise: ecosystems possess an extraordinary capacity to heal and self-organise when given the right conditions and the species that once shaped them.

Rewilding is not preservation in the conventional sense. It’s active restoration, but restoration oriented toward ecological function rather than maintaining a fixed ideal. The focus shifts from ‘managing nature’ to ‘restoring natural processes.’ Instead of asking “how do we prevent this ecosystem from changing?” rewilding asks “what species and processes are missing, and what would happen if we restored them?” The results are often astonishing, with cascading effects through food webs, ecosystem-wide transformations triggered by the return of a single keystone species, and landscapes healing themselves without constant human intervention..

This represents a fundamental philosophical shift in conservation. It acknowledges that many of the most damaging effects on ecosystems come not from the active presence of harmful species, but from the absence of critical ones—the predators that regulate herbivore populations, the large herbivores that create structural diversity, the smaller species that sustain entire ecosystems. Remove these keystone species and entire ecosystems collapse toward simplified, impoverished states. Bring them back, and nature’s own self-regulating mechanisms begin to restore complexity and function.

Across Europe, rewilding is proving that this approach works. Species thought to be permanently lost are returning. Degraded landscapes are healing. Ecosystems are becoming more resilient in the face of climate change. Perhaps most importantly, rewilding is demonstrating something that traditional conservation has sometimes obscured. Ecosystems don’t just need protection. They need the species that make them work.

European Bison: Architects of Mountain Landscapes

In the Țarcu Mountains of Romania’s Southern Carpathians, one of Europe’s most ambitious rewilding projects is demonstrating how a single species can transform an entire landscape. Since 2014, over 110 European bison have been reintroduced to mountains where they vanished more than 200 years ago due to hunting and habitat loss. Today, the free-roaming population exceeds 180 individuals, including more than 40 calves born in the wild.

But the remarkable story isn’t just about population numbers, it’s about how these massive herbivores are reshaping the mountain ecosystem itself. European bison are a keystone species, meaning they have an impact on their environment that far exceeds what their numbers alone would suggest. Each bison consumes approximately 32 kilograms of vegetation daily, grazing on grasses while feeding on shrubs and saplings. Through this feeding, they create and maintain a mosaic landscape of forest, scrub, and grassland that would otherwise succeed entirely to dense woodland.

The ecological effects ripple outward in ways both obvious and subtle. Bison strip bark from trees, break through dense undergrowth simply by walking through it, and create bare soil patches through wallowing. These are all behaviours that allow pioneer plant species to establish themselves, creating micro-habitats that benefit butterflies, ground-breeding wasps, and bees, which in turn support birds and bats. Through their dung and movement across their territory, bison also disperse the seeds of over 200 plant species, helping to increase floral biodiversity and providing essential support to pollinators.

The climate implications are equally profound. Recent modelling by Yale University’s School of the Environment revealed that the 180 bison currently roaming the Southern Carpathians help grasslands in the area capture roughly ten times more carbon than before their reintroduction. The bison’s grazing, trampling, and fertilising activities promote the capture of atmospheric carbon in both vegetation and soil. According to the study, this carbon capture is equivalent to removing up to 84,000 petrol cars from the road annually—an astonishing demonstration of how wildlife restoration can serve as a natural climate solution.

The success of the bison reintroduction extends beyond ecological metrics. In the village of Armeniș, a sociological study found that the vast majority of the local community now perceives the bison as beautiful animals worthy of protection and suitable for the local landscape. This acceptance is critical, as the bison population’s range is steadily expanding. It is now estimated to be around 230 square kilometres and growing, making it the fastest range expansion of any reintroduced European bison herd. In 2023, a herd even crossed into Domogled-Valea Cernei National Park, a sign that these ecosystem engineers are reclaiming their ancient territory.

What makes the Carpathian bison story particularly instructive is how it reveals the interconnected nature of ecosystem health. The bison aren’t operating in isolation—they’re part of a landscape that also supports wolves, lynx, and bears, all of which play their own roles in maintaining ecological balance. Together, these species create what ecologists call trophic complexity, where multiple layers of the food web interact to produce resilient, self-regulating systems.

Iberian Lynx: From Extinction’s Edge to Mediterranean Recovery

In the oak and cork-covered hills of Spain’s Andalusia region, another conservation miracle has been unfolding. The Iberian lynx, once the world’s most endangered cat species, is staging one of the most remarkable wildlife comebacks in conservation history. In 2002, fewer than 100 individuals remained in the wild, confined to two isolated populations. Scientists had nearly written the species off as functionally extinct.

Today, more than 2,200 Iberian lynx roam across eight distinct populations in Spain and Portugal—a staggering 2,400% increase over two decades. This extraordinary recovery represents not just the success of coordinated breeding and reintroduction programs, but a fundamental shift in understanding how predators shape Mediterranean ecosystems.

The lynx’s primary prey is the European rabbit, which means lynx populations help regulate rabbit numbers in the Mediterranean scrubland and forest ecosystems where they hunt. This predator-prey relationship creates a trophic cascade, creating changes at one level of the food web that trigger effects that ripple through the entire ecosystem. By controlling rabbit populations, lynx prevent overgrazing of young vegetation, allowing native plants to regenerate. This vegetation recovery, in turn, provides habitat and food for countless other species, from insects to birds to small mammals.

The recovery of the Iberian lynx demonstrates another crucial principle of rewilding: the importance of habitat connectivity. The success of the reintroduction program depended not just on breeding animals in captivity, but on restoring and connecting Mediterranean cork oak forests and scrubland that make up the lynx habitat. These habitat corridors allow lynx to move between populations, maintaining genetic diversity and allowing the species to recolonise new areas. The lynx now roam across landscapes in the Parque Natural de la Sierra de Andújar and other protected areas, with sightings becoming increasingly common as the population expands.

The lynx recovery also highlights the economic dimension of rewilding. Wildlife tourism focused on lynx watching has become a significant source of income for rural communities in Andalusia, creating jobs for local guides and supporting hotels, restaurants, and other businesses. This demonstrates that conservation can generate tangible economic benefits for the people who live alongside wildlife—a crucial factor in securing long-term local support for rewilding efforts.

Beavers: Wetland Engineers Returning to British Rivers

Along Scotland’s River Tay in Perthshire, a different kind of ecological engineer is remaking the landscape. European beavers, extinct in Britain for over 400 years after being hunted for their fur, have returned to reshape rivers and create habitats that simply didn’t exist before. Walk along the riverbank today and you’ll encounter a transformed ecosystem: ponds backed up behind ingenious dams, wetlands teeming with dragonflies and amphibians, and willows and aspens regenerating in areas that were once monotonous grassland.

The beaver’s return to Scotland, which began with official reintroductions in 2009, followed by natural establishment in other areas, represents one of Europe’s most successful rewilding stories. These animals are perhaps the ultimate ecosystem engineers. A single beaver family can transform a simple stream into a complex wetland ecosystem supporting dozens of species, from fish and invertebrates to birds and mammals.

The mechanics of this transformation are deceptively simple. Beavers fell trees to build dams across streams, creating ponds that slow water flow and trap sediment. These ponds function as natural water filtration systems, removing contaminants before they flow downstream. The wetlands created behind beaver dams provide crucial habitat for species including otters, water voles, kingfishers, red squirrels, and rare amphibians. The standing dead trees become homes for woodpeckers and cavity-nesting birds, while the submerged wood provides habitat for aquatic invertebrates that form the base of the wetland food web.

Another significant benefit of beaver reintroduction has been their role in natural flood management. Beaver dams create natural flood storage, slowing the movement of water downstream during storm events. This function has become increasingly valuable as climate change brings more intense rainfall events to Britain. The UK government, recognising this ecological service, confirmed in recent years that it will permit licensed releases of beavers into the wild and formally recognise free-living populations already established in parts of England.

The beaver’s impact demonstrates how rewilding can address multiple environmental challenges simultaneously. Their dams trap sediment and nutrients that would otherwise pollute downstream waters. The wetlands they create function as carbon sinks, with anaerobic conditions in beaver pond sediments storing significant amounts of carbon. The habitat complexity they generate supports biodiversity recovery across multiple taxonomic groups, from plants to invertebrates to vertebrates.

The Promise and Challenge of Rewilding Europe

The rewilding projects unfolding across Europe reveal that ecosystems possess an extraordinary capacity to heal themselves when given the right conditions. From mountain grasslands to Mediterranean scrublands to river ecosystems, the evidence is overwhelming that restoring nature’s architects—the species that shape entire landscapes through their behaviours—can trigger cascading recoveries that exceed even optimistic conservation predictions.

Today, the EU has approximately 20,300 gray wolves—two and a half times as many as the much larger contiguous United States. European bison populations have increased from just over 2,500 individuals a decade ago to around 9,000 today. The Iberian lynx has moved from critically endangered to endangered status. Beavers are recolonising rivers across the continent. Each of these recoveries demonstrates that bringing back keystone species creates ripple effects throughout entire ecosystems, restoring the complex web of relationships that sustains biodiversity and ecosystem function.

The benefits extend beyond biodiversity. Research increasingly shows that rewilding delivers crucial climate benefits through enhanced carbon sequestration in restored forests, grasslands, and marine habitats. Restored ecosystems provide natural solutions to flooding, drought, and water quality problems. Wildlife-based tourism creates economic opportunities for rural communities facing depopulation and economic decline. In this sense, rewilding offers a vision of conservation that enhances rather than conflicts with human wellbeing.

Yet significant challenges remain if rewilding is to achieve its transformative potential across Europe. Perhaps the most fundamental barrier is the question of coexistence between people and wildlife. Europe is one of the world’s most densely populated and heavily modified continents. Unlike the vast wilderness areas of North America or Africa, European landscapes are thoroughly human-shaped, with cities, roads, and agricultural land fragmenting natural habitats. The return of large predators like wolves and bears inevitably generates conflicts, particularly with farmers concerned about livestock predation.

These human-wildlife conflicts are not merely technical problems to be solved through compensation schemes or protective fencing—they touch on deep questions of cultural identity, land use traditions, and who has the right to shape the landscape. In Romania’s Carpathian Mountains, where bear populations are recovering, dozens of human-bear conflicts erupted in summer 2023, with some residents feeling their safety and livelihoods were being sacrificed for conservation goals. In other regions, farmers see rewilding as a threat to agricultural traditions that have shaped both their identities and their landscapes for generations.

Yet these challenges, while real, are not insurmountable. The success stories from across Europe demonstrate that solutions exist when stakeholders commit to finding them. Compensation programs for livestock losses, combined with non-lethal deterrents like electric fencing and guard dogs, can reduce human-wildlife conflict. Participatory governance approaches that give local communities genuine voice in rewilding decisions build support and ensure that nature recovery delivers local benefits. Policy reforms that value ecosystem services and redirect agricultural subsidies toward nature-based solutions can align economic incentives with conservation goals.

What emerges from examining both the successes and challenges of European rewilding is a vision that is realistic about the difficulties ahead yet fundamentally optimistic about what’s possible. The goal isn’t to return Europe to some imagined pristine past—that ship sailed centuries ago. Instead, it’s about creating dynamic, self-regulating ecosystems that can adapt to changing conditions while providing space for both wildlife and people to thrive.

What the Directive created was a continental framework for protecting habitats and species. It established the Natura 2000 network, which now covers 18% of the EU’s land area and 10% of its marine waters, as a patchwork of designated Special Areas of Conservation (SACs). It required member states to monitor the conservation status of 233 habitat types and 1,389 species and to report their findings to the European Commission every six years. It also imposed a legal obligation: governments could not simply designate protected areas on paper. They were required to take active, measurable steps to maintain or restore habitats to what the Directive calls “favourable conservation status.”

Thirty-three years later, the evidence is in and the verdict is not encouraging.

The Overall Picture: Failure to Protect Habitats

Although the Habitats Directive requires EU member states to implement protections for key habitats and species by law, most have failed to do so. The most authoritative measure of implementation is the European Environment Agency’s Article 17 assessment, the six-yearly health check that aggregates member states’ own reporting on habitat condition across the EU. The most recent complete dataset covers 2013–2018 and it shows that 81% of assessed habitats in the EU have a poor or bad conservation status, with only 15% showing a good conservation status. Of habitats already in an unfavourable condition, just 9% are improving, while 36% show continued deterioration.

The table below shows the percentage of assessed habitats with good conservation status per member state, and the data reveals a geographic and agricultural pattern that tells its own story.

The pattern revealed by the data deserves careful reading. The four countries with the highest proportion of habitats in good status—Cyprus, Estonia, Greece, and Romania—are not necessarily the countries with the best conservation policies. They tend to be countries that have retained larger areas of relatively undisturbed land, partly due to lower agricultural intensity and later industrialisation. Cyprus’s high proportion of habitats in good conservation status, particularly, comes with a critical caveat: the EEA notes that unknown assessments there exceed 75%, meaning major data gaps may be inflating apparently positive results.

The worst performers tell a more revealing story. Belgium and Denmark have the lowest share of habitats with good conservation status and, together with the United Kingdom, report more than 70% of their habitats as having a bad conservation status. In Belgium, just 3% of its assessed habitats have a good conservation status and in the Netherlands, about 90% of habitat types have an unfavourable-bad to unfavourable-inadequate conservation status. These are wealthy, well-governed countries with strong administrative capacity, which means the problem with implementation isn't institutional capability, it's agricultural intensity and political will.

The North Sea farming belt, which all the worst performing countries are a part of, is the most intensively cultivated landscape in Europe. It’s an area that has been drained, ploughed, and chemically managed to a degree that is fundamentally incompatible with the Directive’s objectives. Although the legal designations exist; in this area, the habitats largely no longer do. However, this does not mean that the habitats that do remain should not be protected or restored. In fact, with so little of them left, it’s urgent to protect the few natural safe havens for biodiversity that remain.

The Legal Picture: Widespread Non-Compliance

The fourth EU Environmental Implementation Review (EIR), published in July 2025, which assesses how well each of the 27 member states is actually putting EU environmental law into practice on the ground, confirms that the nature and biodiversity implementation gap remains among the most serious in EU environmental law. Of 96 priority actions recommended to member states across all areas of environmental law, 28 concern nature and biodiversity, making it the largest single category after water and pollution. The 2025 EIR is also notable for its framing: it links the implementation deficit explicitly to economic costs, noting that nature currently provides an estimated €234 billion in ecosystem services annually to the EU economy, and that failure to protect it is a failure of economic stewardship as much as environmental stewardship.

Beyond the EIR, the European Commission’s own infringement cases against member states that fail to comply with the Habitats Directive confirm that the nature directives generate some of the most persistent legal disputes in EU environmental law, with cases often remaining open for years or even decades. The Commission’s infringement data from 2022 to early 2026, shows that at any given time, roughly 10–20 member states have at least one active infringement procedure related to the nature directives, with only a handful having no known open cases. Currently, there are 70 active infringement cases related to the nature directives. Below is a selection of some active Habitats Directive cases that provide a sense of what is happening on the ground throughout the EU:

Austria has two concurrent open cases: one (INFR(2022)2056) for failure to designate Special Areas of Conservation and set conservation objectives across multiple sites; another (INFR(2023)2045) for incorrect transposition of the Directive in the law governing the High Tauern National Park, including failure to subject plans and projects to appropriate environmental assessment.

France has an open case for failure to prevent damage caused by agricultural, forestry and fishing practices in Natura 2000 sites, including bycatch of marine species—an application of the Directive's Article 6(2) non-deterioration obligation.

Ireland (INFR(2010)2161), in one of the longest-running Habitats Directive infringement cases in EU history, is still being pursued over failure to halt peat-cutting activities in Special Areas of Conservation designated for raised bogs and blanket bogs—a case opened fifteen years ago that remains unresolved.

Portugal (INFR(2024)2050) is facing an infringement procedure for failing to correctly transpose the Directive’s requirements for appropriate assessments of plans and projects affecting Natura 2000 sites.

Spain (INFR(2025)2214) was issued a letter of formal notice in January 2026 for failing to submit its Habitats Directive implementation report for the 2019–2024 reporting cycle, which was due in July 2025—meaning Spain has not even completed the basic reporting obligation, let alone addressed the substance of habitat protection.

Taken together, these cases document non-compliance that spans some of the continent's wealthiest and most powerful economies. The most important contextual note is that these documented cases represent only a fraction of the real picture. The Commission focuses its infringement actions on systemic or structural issues affecting large numbers of people or habitats. Isolated failures at the site level—a protected bog drained, a Natura 2000 forest logged, a coastal meadow built over—are rarely pursued through the infringement mechanism and must instead be challenged through national courts.

What the implementation gap is doing to European biodiversity

The gap between what the Habitats Directive requires and what member states are delivering is not an abstract administrative problem. It is producing measurable, accelerating losses in the living fabric of European ecosystems.

The EEA’s Article 17 data already documents the broad pattern: 36% of assessed habitats are continuing to deteriorate; grasslands, bogs, coastal dunes, and old-growth forests—precisely the habitats the Directive was designed to protect—show the highest rates of decline. The cost is cascading through the species that depend on them: over half of all threatened species in Europe are associated with these habitats, a figure that reflects not just the loss of individual sites but the cumulative erosion of ecological systems that took centuries to develop.

Although multiple habitat types throughout Europe are deteriorating, nowhere is the cost of non-compliance more visible than in Europe’s freshwater systems, which are among the most ecologically neglected ecosystems on the continent.

In April 2025, the IUCN published the updated European Red List of Freshwater Fishes; the most comprehensive assessment of the continent’s freshwater fish in fifteen years, covering all 558 native species. The findings are stark. 42% of European freshwater fish species are now threatened with extinction, while a further 18% are classified as Near Threatened. Together, nearly six in ten native freshwater fish species in Europe are now of elevated conservation concern. The proportion of threatened species has risen by 5% since the previous assessment in 2011, and the report documents little evidence of recovery across the region.

The threats driving these numbers map directly onto the Directive’s failures. Dams and other physical barriers affect 69% of assessed species, making habitat fragmentation the single most pervasive threat. Migratory species face particularly acute pressure: approximately 39% of migratory freshwater fishes are declining, compared to around 14% of non-migratory species—a disparity that reflects the devastating cumulative effect of barriers to movement on species whose life cycles depend on connectivity between rivers, tributaries, and seas. The European eel, which requires free-flowing rivers to complete its lifecycle, is critically endangered.

Pollution, primarily from agricultural runoff and urban wastewater, affects more than 65% of species. Invasive species affect 56%. And while climate change currently affects 35% of species, it is projected to intensify as a driver, particularly across southern Europe, compounding the damage from habitat degradation and fragmentation already in place.

The freshwater fish data is a particularly clear window onto the impact of the implementation gap on biodiversity because fish are excellent ecological indicators: they integrate the condition of entire catchments, from land use on the slopes above to water management decisions downstream. When freshwater fish are disappearing, the rivers are being mismanaged. And when the rivers are being mismanaged, the Habitats Directive is not being implemented.

This picture extends well beyond fish. The EEA’s State of Nature data shows that 81% of habitat assessments EU-wide are unfavourable, that grasslands supporting pollinating insects are declining precipitously, and that the Common Agricultural Policy, despite its scale and reach, is still failing to reverse the destruction of the agricultural habitats that make up much of Europe’s Natura 2000 network. The 2025 EIR notes bluntly that no real progress has been made toward the target of optimising agriculture for biodiversity, with 46% of agricultural habitat assessments showing bad conservation status.

What needs to happen

None of this means the Habitats Directive has failed. It means the Habitats Directive has not yet been seriously tried.

The legal architecture is sound and, as a growing body of European case law confirms, genuinely powerful. Civil society organisations have used the Directive to win landmark rulings against forest logging in Natura 2000 sites, to challenge peat extraction that has been ongoing for decades, and, in the Netherlands, to force a national reckoning with nitrogen pollution from intensive livestock farming that the political system had refused to initiate on its own. These cases demonstrate that the Directive works when it is used.

What is needed, therefore, is not primarily better law. It is better enforcement, more ambitious implementation, and a political culture that takes the legal obligations seriously rather than treating them as items for negotiation. Specifically:

Monitoring and reporting must improve. The 2019–2024 reporting cycle results are still being compiled. Spain failed to submit its report altogether. Data gaps in countries like Cyprus mean that apparent compliance may mask real losses. The Directive cannot be enforced if governments do not generate accurate data about what is happening in their own protected areas.

Agricultural policy must align with nature law. The single most significant driver of habitat loss across the EU is intensive agriculture. As long as the Common Agricultural Policy continues to subsidise practices that degrade key habitats, the Habitats Directive will be fighting against the weight of the EU’s largest spending instrument. The 2025 EIR’s identification of agriculture as the dominant pressure on biodiversity is not new knowledge. It has been documented in every reporting cycle. What is new is the political urgency created by the combination of the Nature Restoration Regulation, the Biodiversity Strategy for 2030, and the accumulating scientific evidence that the window for action is closing.

Freshwater connectivity must be restored at scale. The single most effective near-term intervention for reversing freshwater biodiversity loss in Europe is the removal or modification of obsolete barriers to fish movement. Europe has an estimated one million dams and weirs, the majority of which are small, low-functionality structures that serve no current economic purpose but fragment river connectivity for hundreds of kilometres. The EU’s new Water Resilience Strategy, published in 2025, recognises this. Translating that recognition into funded, coordinated dam removal programmes—linked to Habitats Directive compliance obligations—could produce measurable biodiversity gains within years, not decades.

Civil society and NGOs need stronger access to justice. One of the Directive’s most important functions is providing legal leverage for conservation organisations to hold governments accountable. But access to justice in environmental matters remains uneven across member states. Strengthening the procedural rights of NGOs to bring complaints, challenge project authorisations, and monitor compliance is essential to making the enforcement mechanism work from the bottom up as well as the top down.

The political moment matters. The European Commission is currently conducting a “stress test” of both the Birds Directive and the Habitats Directive, due to conclude in 2026. The purpose is ostensibly to assess whether they are fit for purpose in a changed context. The risk is that this process becomes a vehicle for weakening habitat protection standards in the name of simplification, a direction already visible in the broader EU deregulation agenda. The scientific evidence points clearly in the other direction: the problem is not that the Directive’s standards are too demanding, but that they are not being met.

Europe’s natural habitats are not a luxury. They are the system on which food production, water supply, flood protection, and public health all depend. The rivers are telling us something. The fish are telling us something. The question is whether the political systems of 27 member states are prepared to listen, and act accordingly.

Not a single smell but a layering of them: wet earth, decomposing leaves, something green and sharp that had no name yet in his waking mind. It pressed through the dark like a hand on his chest, insistent, pulling him up from the long sleep.

He did not open his eyes immediately. His body was still deciding whether it trusted the warmth that had found its way into the den, the faint suggestion of light around the entrance he had sealed in November. His breathing had been eight, maybe ten breaths a minute for months. Now it quickened. His heartbeat, which had idled at nine beats per minute through the coldest weeks, began to climb.

He shifted his bulk and felt the stiffness of it—all three hundred and forty kilos of him, reduced now as the fat reserves he had spent the autumn building burned slowly down to something leaner. His muscles had barely atrophied. This had always seemed a small miracle to him, though he had no word for miracle. Things simply were what they were. His body had kept him. It always had.

He pushed his nose toward the gap at the den’s entrance and breathed.

April, something in him said, though not in words.

He emerged slowly, the way he always did—nose first, testing, reading. The forest received him as it always did, with some old snow still lying in the shadows under the spruces, loose and melting, and purple flowers creating patches of colour on the newly exposed forest floor.

He stood at his full height for a moment, swaying slightly, looking across the valley before him, getting used to the sky again.

The world was loud. He had forgotten how loud. A pair of cranes called from somewhere in the distance, their ancient rattling cry bouncing off the hillside. Beneath that, the constant threading sound of water moving everywhere, through moss and over stone, down every crease of the forest. A woodpecker knocked against a dead birch twenty metres away with a force that seemed reckless.

He dropped to all fours and began to move.

His first hunger was not for food. It was for information. He quartered the slope with his nose to the ground, reading the winter’s aftermath—the trail of a fox, days old; the sharp musk of another bear, a younger male who had passed through perhaps a week ago; the neutral mineral smell of exposed rock. He urinated at the base of a large pine, clawing the bark above it in a motion that felt less like intention than reflex. Here. Still here.

Then the real hunger came.

He found the sedge first, down where the ground softened toward a brook. The new growth was only a few centimetres high, pale green almost to the point of yellow, tender in a way that the sedge would not be again until next spring. He ate steadily for a long time, moving through the stand with the methodical patience that defined his kind during this season. It was not much in terms of sustenance, some carbohydrates, a bit of protein, but that was not the point. His gut needed to wake up. His digestive system, like everything else, had been running at the barest minimum and needed to be coaxed back into operation. The sedge was medicine as much as meal.

A memory surfaced, loose and non-linear the way bear memories often were: his mother’s flank against his, both of them eating sedge like this, her breathing audible and slow. He had been perhaps eighteen months old, still following her, still learning the ways of this landscape.

She had moved to show him something. Pushed through the undergrowth toward the brook’s edge, then stopped. He’d seen only mud at first. Then she nosed at the ground and revealed a patch of horsetail, the prehistoric-looking shoots just emerging, and bit carefully.

He’d watched her jaw move, watched her eyes, and understood: here, now, this.

He was at that same brook now, or one like it. The valley held several. He found the horsetail and ate it the way she had shown him, selectively, taking the young growth, moving on before stripping any patch bare. He had never been taught the word for what this was. He simply knew, somewhere below knowledge, that you did not eat a place into silence.

He worked upslope through the late morning, following the melt line where south-facing ground had thawed but north-facing hollows still held ice. This was the edge where things happened. Where the first insects moved. Where the frost-heaved ground had pushed up roots and tubers that could be reached with minimal effort.

He stopped at a rotting birch log, got his claws under the soft wood, and peeled it back. The colony of wood ants beneath it surged into defensive formation and he lapped them efficiently, log after log, walking the long dead trunk. The formic acid was not pleasant but he had stopped minding it years ago. The protein and fat were what mattered. His body was in what the biologists would call hyperphagia’s mirror—not yet the desperate caloric acquisition of autumn, but a steady, purposeful rebuilding. He needed to eat almost continuously to recover what the winter had taken.

His mother again. She’d been the one who showed him how to smell the difference between a recently vacated ant colony and an active one, how to read the soft punky wood that meant the rotting was advanced enough to work with without exhausting yourself.

She’d been matter-of-fact about everything. There had been no drama in her teaching. She simply moved through the world with complete authority and he’d moved behind her, watching, and the world had organised itself around her.

He missed her in a way that had no particular edge to it anymore, just a dull geographic sense of absence, like a valley without trees.

By early afternoon he had found his way to the marsh at the valley’s low point, drawn by the smell of last year’s cattails and the muddy richness of the shallows. The ice that had covered the marsh during the winter was gone. He waded in to his shoulders without hesitation—the cold no longer registered as unpleasant—and began rooting through the bottom sediment for the rhizomes and tubers he knew were there.

She had taught him this carefully. Marshes were not like forests or meadows. You could not see what you were eating. You had to learn to read the surface—the patterns of old growth, the way certain stems clustered—and trust your nose through water and mud to find the starch below.

He found a mass of yellow water-lily rootstock and ate it where he stood, the mud streaming from it, the starchy dense bulb requiring real work from his jaw. Around him, the marsh was busy with its own returning life. A pair of mallards regarded him from a careful distance. A bittern stood motionless in the reeds, committed to its disguise. Water striders had appeared on the calmer margins, gliding on the surface from one side to another, then again, as if they could not decide where to go on their long insect legs.

He thought of nothing and everything. Bears did not separate the two.

In the late afternoon, he came to rest on a rocky outcrop where the sun still had warmth in it, the valley spread below him and the forest climbing the far slope in its multiple greens—the blue-green of spruce, the yellow-green of new birch leaves just beginning to unfurl, the ochre of last year’s bracken still standing.

He was not full. He would not be truly full for weeks, perhaps months. But the first hunger—the one that had woken him, the deep animal need to confirm that the world was still there and still edible—had eased.

He was thin and stiff and somewhat confused by the loudness of April. But he was here.

He put his chin on his forepaws and watched the light change on the far slope, and listened to the cranes, and waited for nothing in particular, which was how all the best waiting was done.

Below him, the forest moved in the small restless way it always moved, always had, always would—moss absorbing snowmelt, fungi threading through root systems, beetles emerging into the first warmth. His mother had known all of this. Her mother had known it. And somewhere in him, below language, below thought, the knowledge had been passed forward—not as instruction but as attention, as the simple act of moving through a world and noticing what it offered.

He slept.

The forest continued around him, as it always had, patient and in constant movement.

Brown bears (Ursus arctos) emerge from winter dens in Scandinavia between March and May, with timing influenced by temperature and food availability. They exit in a state of “walking hibernation” in which metabolic functions remain suppressed for days to weeks. Spring diets are dominated by newly emerging vegetation—sedges, horsetails, and grasses—before shifting to insects, carrion, and tubers. Cubs remain with their mothers for approximately 1.5–2.5 years, learning foraging behaviours through direct observation.

Walk to the opposite edge—where rocky shore meets open ocean. Descend beneath the surface and you enter a different world entirely. Golden-brown fronds of kelp tower overhead, their holdfast anchors gripping stone, their stipes reaching toward filtered sunlight forty meters above. Fish weave through the canopy. Sea urchins patrol the understory. Seals hunt in the shelter of the forest. The water is cold, nutrient-rich, alive with motion.

These are the productive margins—the ecosystems that exist at the boundary between worlds. Wetlands at the interface of land and water. Kelp forests where rocky coastline meets the open sea. Neither terrestrial nor fully aquatic, they occupy the transitional zones that most classification systems struggle to account for, and that most conservation frameworks have historically overlooked.

Yet these edge ecosystems punch massively above their weight in every metric that matters. Wetlands cover roughly 6% of Earth's land surface but store up to 35% of terrestrial carbon and support 40% of the world's species. Kelp forests fringe approximately 30% of the world's coastlines and provide ecosystem services valued at $500 billion annually—primarily through fisheries production, nutrient cycling, and carbon removal. Both are collapsing at rates that exceed losses in almost any other ecosystem type, and both remain chronically underprotected and underfunded despite their extraordinary functional importance.

In this fourth and final article of the Pillars of the Earth series, where we take a close look at each of the essential ecosystems sustaining life on our planet, we will examine these highly productive edge systems that demonstrate, perhaps more clearly than any others, that ecosystem extent tells you almost nothing about ecosystem value. The pillars holding up planetary habitability are not distributed evenly. Some of them exist precisely at the margins we have spent centuries draining, filling, and ignoring.

Wetlands: Life Between Worlds

The challenge with wetlands begins with definition. They are neither consistently wet nor consistently dry. They exist in the gradient—river deltas where fresh water meets salt, floodplains that inundate seasonally, peatlands where water tables sit just below the surface, prairie potholes that fill with snowmelt and evaporate by summer. The Ramsar Convention defines them broadly as areas where water is the primary factor controlling the environment and the associated plant and animal life. It is a definition that encompasses extraordinary diversity: mangrove swamps and mountain bogs, rice paddies and coral lagoons, the Amazon Basin and the Okavango Delta.

What unites them is not appearance but function. Wetlands are the places where water moves slowly enough for sediment to settle, where anaerobic conditions in waterlogged soils create chemical environments fundamentally different from upland systems, and where the interface between land and water generates biological productivity that rivals any ecosystem on Earth.

Ecosystem Services: Nature’s Kidneys and Carbon Vaults

The functional services flowing from wetlands are staggering in scope. Wetlands act as nature’s water treatment systems, filtering pollutants and excess nutrients from surface water through the combined action of wetland plants and soil microorganisms. They regulate water flow, storing excess precipitation during floods and slowly releasing it during droughts—a service that becomes increasingly critical as climate change intensifies precipitation extremes. Coastal wetlands, particularly mangroves and salt marshes, buffer shorelines against storm surges and erosion, protecting human communities from the impacts of sea-level rise and extreme weather.

But perhaps wetlands’ most important service, and the one most invisible to casual observation, is carbon sequestration. Despite covering only 6% of Earth’s land surface, wetlands store up to 35% of terrestrial carbon. Peatlands alone—wetlands characterised by deep accumulations of partially decomposed organic matter—cover just 3% of land but store approximately 550 gigatons of carbon, roughly twice as much as all the world’s forests combined. This carbon has accumulated over millennia under waterlogged, anaerobic conditions that prevent full decomposition. In healthy peatlands, a single inch of peat can take 250 years to form, layer upon layer, decade upon decade, building carbon stores that represent geological timescales of atmospheric regulation.

Wetlands also provide direct provisioning services that hundreds of millions of people depend upon. Over two-thirds of the world’s fish harvest is linked to the health of coastal and inland wetlands, which serve as spawning grounds and nurseries for species that spend their adult lives in open water. Rice—a wetland plant—is the staple diet of more than half the global population. Wetlands supply freshwater for agriculture, drinking water for communities, and building materials for coastal populations. They provide these services at no direct cost, functioning as natural infrastructure that would cost trillions to replicate through engineered systems.

Biodiversity: A Superabundance of Life

The biodiversity wetlands support is disproportionate to their extent by almost any measure. Wetlands and their surrounding areas support approximately 40% of the world’s species and an estimated 12% of all animal species, despite occupying a fraction of Earth’s surface. More than 100,000 species of freshwater animals—representing roughly 10% of all described species—depend on wetland ecosystems. This includes 40% of fish species globally, even though inland waters constitute less than 1% of Earth’s surface.

The reasons for this extraordinary biodiversity are multiple. Wetlands create habitat mosaics—shallow water, deep water, mudflats, vegetated zones—that support species with vastly different ecological requirements within small geographic areas. The interface between aquatic and terrestrial systems provides resources that neither purely terrestrial nor purely aquatic habitats can offer. Nutrient-rich conditions support high primary productivity, which in turn supports complex food webs. For migratory species, wetlands serve as critical stopover points where birds, fish, and other animals can rest and refuel during long journeys.

Wetlands also support species found nowhere else. Freshwater biodiversity is disproportionately high in endemic species—organisms that exist in single wetland systems and nowhere else on Earth. Many amphibian species, for example, have life cycles dependent on specific wetland conditions, and habitat loss has driven amphibian populations to decline faster than those of birds or mammals. Similarly, many plant species adapted to waterlogged soils and fluctuating water levels exist only in wetland environments and cannot survive in drier uplands.

The dependence works both ways. Since 1970, populations of species dependent on inland wetlands have declined by 81%—a rate that surpasses declines in any other biome. An increasing number face extinction. The loss of wetlands and the loss of biodiversity are not separate crises—they are the same crisis viewed from different angles.

Current Condition: Vanishing Margins

A landmark 2025 report—the Global Wetland Outlook—synthesised the best available data on the state of the world’s wetlands and delivered findings that were both more precise and more alarming than previous assessments. Since 1970, an estimated 411 million hectares of wetlands have been lost globally—approximately 22% of the total. The annual rate of decline stands at 0.52%, which translates to wetlands disappearing three times faster than forests.

One quarter of the world’s remaining wetlands are already in poor ecological condition, with degradation accelerating across most regions. The steepest recent declines have occurred in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa, but deterioration is now spreading to Europe and North America. Even within designated Ramsar sites—wetlands of international importance supposedly protected under global treaty—approximately 12% are in declining ecological condition, demonstrating that formal designation alone is insufficient without effective management and enforcement.

The primary driver of wetland loss remains conversion to agricultural land—a pattern that has persisted for centuries. Wetlands with organic, carbon-rich soils have historically been viewed as prime candidates for drainage and cultivation, despite the fact that draining them releases massive stores of sequestered carbon and destroys their capacity to provide flood regulation, water purification, and biodiversity support. An estimated 3.4 million square kilometres of inland wetlands—roughly 95% of the original extent—have been lost since 1700, primarily due to conversion to croplands.

Urbanisation represents another major threat, particularly for wetlands near population centres. As cities expand, wetlands are filled, paved over, or fundamentally altered by changes to local hydrology. Water extraction for municipal and industrial use lowers water tables, drying wetlands that depend on groundwater inputs. Pollution from urban and agricultural sources degrades wetland water quality through nutrient loading, heavy metals, and persistent chemical contaminants.

Climate change introduces additional, compounding pressures. Altered precipitation patterns disrupt the hydrological regimes that wetlands depend upon. Increased temperatures accelerate evaporation, drying wetlands in regions already experiencing water stress. Extreme weather events—more frequent and intense under climate change—can overwhelm wetlands’ flood storage capacity or cause catastrophic damage through storm surges. For coastal wetlands, sea-level rise poses an existential threat, particularly where human development prevents wetlands from migrating inland as water levels rise.

Perhaps most concerningly, degraded wetlands can shift from carbon sinks to carbon sources. When peatlands are drained for agriculture or burned, they release stored carbon accumulated over millennia. Currently, degraded peatlands contribute approximately 5% of all human-induced CO₂ emissions globally—a figure that will grow as degradation accelerates without intervention.

Kelp Forests: The Rainforests of Cold Seas

Before diving deeper into the aquatic world of kelp forests, it’s important to note that kelp are not plants but brown algae—organisms that evolved the ability to build massive, complex structures without the lignin-based tissues that support terrestrial trees. The largest species, giant kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera), can grow more than 50 centimetres per day under optimal conditions, reaching lengths of 45 metres from holdfast to canopy. These are among the fastest-growing organisms on Earth, rivalling bamboo in their capacity for rapid biomass accumulation.

Kelp forests occur in cold, nutrient-rich coastal waters across approximately 30% of the world’s coastlines. They are most extensive along temperate shores—the coasts of California, Chile, South Africa, southern Australia, New Zealand, and the North Atlantic—but also extend into polar regions. They require rocky substrate for attachment, cold water temperatures (generally below 20°C), and sufficient light penetration for photosynthesis. Where these conditions align, kelp forests create three-dimensional habitat complexity comparable to terrestrial forests, complete with canopy, midwater column, and understory zones that support distinct biological communities.

Ecosystem Services: Cold Water Powerhouses

The ecosystem services kelp forests provide begin with fisheries production. A 2023 analysis published in Nature Communications found that kelp forests contribute an average of $29,000 per hectare annually through their support of commercial and recreational fisheries—the single largest component of their economic value. Kelp forests serve as nursery habitat for juvenile fish, hunting grounds for predators, and shelter for invertebrates. Species richness in kelp forest systems rivals that of tropical coral reefs, and over 1,800 species have been documented living in association with kelp habitats.

Nutrient cycling represents another critical service. Kelp forests remove excess nitrogen and phosphorus from coastal waters through their extraordinary growth rates, contributing an estimated $73,000 per hectare annually through water quality improvement. In regions experiencing nutrient pollution from agricultural runoff, kelp forests can significantly reduce eutrophication and harmful algal blooms.

Carbon sequestration in kelp forests operates differently than in terrestrial systems. While kelp biomass itself does not persist as long-lived carbon stores the way tree trunks do, a significant fraction of kelp-derived organic matter is exported to the deep ocean through several pathways. Kelp fragments break off and sink to the seafloor, where some fraction becomes buried in sediments beyond the reach of decomposition. Dissolved organic carbon released by living kelp can also be transported to deep water by ocean currents. A 2023 review published in Biological Reviews estimated that the protection, restoration, and improved management of kelp forests globally could provide climate mitigation benefits equivalent to removing 36 million tonnes of CO₂ annually—roughly the carbon-capturing capacity of 1.1 to 1.6 billion trees.

The total value of ecosystem services provided by kelp forests has been estimated at $500 billion annually across all kelp-dominated coastlines—a figure that accounts for fisheries production, nutrient cycling, and carbon removal but does not include additional services like coastal protection, tourism, or kelp harvest industries that operate in regions like Chile, Norway, and France.

Biodiversity: Sensitive Havens

Kelp forest biodiversity reflects their position at the rocky shore-open ocean interface. The holdfast—where kelp attaches to rock—creates microhabitat for hundreds of invertebrate species on the ocean floor. Fish use the midwater column and canopy. Marine mammals including sea otters, sea lions, and seals hunt and rest in kelp forests, relying on the habitat complexity these systems provide. Many commercially valuable fish species—rockfish, lingcod, kelp bass—spend critical life stages in kelp habitat, meaning kelp forest loss translates directly into reduced fishery productivity.

Kelp forests also demonstrate the power of keystone species. Sea otters, which prey on sea urchins—the primary grazers of kelp—can determine whether a coastline supports lush forest or a barren seafloor dominated by urchins. The presence or absence of a single predator species restructures the entire ecosystem. Sunflower sea stars play similar roles in preventing urchin population explosions that can devastate kelp. The disappearance of these key predators, alongside rising ocean temperatures, represents one of the biggest threats to kelp forests.

Current Condition: Silently Collapsing

While coral bleaching events generate global headlines, kelp forest collapses of comparable scale have occurred with far less public awareness or policy response. The numbers tell a stark story.

In Tasmania, more than 95% of the giant kelp forests that once fringed the eastern coast are gone—replaced by sea urchin barrens where virtually no other life exists. The forests that remain are confined to a few isolated refugia, and climate projections suggest even these are unlikely to persist. The primary driver: ocean warming. Sea temperatures around Tasmania have increased by nearly 3°C in recent decades, bringing warm, nutrient-poor water from the East Australian Current farther south. Kelp, adapted to cold temperatures and high nutrient availability, cannot survive these conditions. Meanwhile, long-spine sea urchins—a warm-water species—have moved into Tasmanian waters and begun consuming what kelp remains, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of ecosystem degradation.

In northern California, bull kelp forests collapsed catastrophically between 2013 and 2016, with kelp canopy reduced by more than 90% along 350 kilometres of coastline. The collapse resulted from a perfect storm of compounding stressors: a marine heatwave raised water temperatures, a mysterious disease wiped out sunflower sea stars (a key urchin predator), and purple sea urchin populations exploded in the absence of predation. By 2020, kelp forest density had declined by 72% compared to pre-heatwave conditions. Large areas remain urchin barrens a decade later, with no sign of natural recovery. The economic consequences have been severe: the closure of the recreational red abalone fishery (valued at $44 million) and the collapse of the north coast commercial red sea urchin fishery (worth $3 million).

Globally, research published in PNAS in 2016 documented kelp forest declines across 38% of ecoregions worldwide over the past 50 years. Some regions experienced losses exceeding 90%. The causes vary—marine heatwaves, pollution, coastal development, overfishing of key predators—but the trajectory is consistent: kelp forests are in retreat across much of their range and the urchin barren state, once established, tends to persist indefinitely. Crustose coralline algae that colonise barren areas can inhibit kelp settlement, reinforcing the degraded state. Recovery requires either urchin removal (through predator reintroduction or direct human intervention) or environmental conditions so unfavourable to urchins that populations crash. Natural recovery is rare.

Less than 3% of global kelp forests currently exist within highly restrictive marine protected areas—a protection rate far below what conservation science suggests is necessary for ecosystem persistence under intensifying climate stress.

Conclusion: What needs to happen

Wetlands and kelp forests occupy fundamentally different environments—one at the land-water boundary, the other at the rocky shore-open ocean interface—yet they share characteristics that make their loss particularly consequential.

Both are edge ecosystems. They exist in the gradient zones that classification systems struggle with and that conservation frameworks have historically under-prioritised. Wetlands are neither fully terrestrial nor fully aquatic. Kelp forests are neither open ocean nor terrestrial coast. This liminal status has made them easy to overlook, easy to categorise as marginal, easy to sacrifice for what appears to be more productive use. Both also provide services wildly disproportionate to their spatial extent. Wetlands cover 6% of land but store 35% of terrestrial carbon and support about 40% of known species. Kelp forests fringe 30% of coastlines but generate ecosystem services valued at $500 billion annually. If extent were the primary criterion for conservation priority, these ecosystems would be footnotes. But extent is not everything—function matters too.

In this series we have examined ecosystems across a gradient of visibility. Tropical forests and mangroves—charismatic and central to conservation discourse. Grasslands and deserts—overlooked despite providing critical services. Mycorrhizal networks and deep-sea vents—invisible yet foundational. Wetlands and kelp forests—high-productivity margins chronically undervalued. The intent was never exhaustive. Dozens of other systems merit attention—old-growth temperate rainforests, Arctic tundra, coral reefs, seagrass meadows. Each is essential. Each faces existential threats.

What these articles reveal is that ecosystem importance cannot be predicted from extent or visibility alone. The most critical systems often exist at margins, in extreme conditions, beneath our feet, far from sight. All are interconnected. All are under pressure. All need protection. The pattern is consistent: the ecosystems most critical to planetary function are collapsing. But the conclusion is not predetermined yet. All these ecosystems can still be protected, restored, and reconnected at landscape scales. This requires that we start putting ecosystems and their needs first. That we provide time and space for nature to recover from our excessive industry and extraction. Whether we choose to do so will say everything about whether we understand the systems sustaining us—or whether we will continue treating the foundations of habitability as disposable until the moment they give way.

Note: Originally this article was going to focus on coral reefs instead of kelp forests. Coral reefs are absolutely one of the ecosystems sustaining life on our planet and they deserve a place in this series, along with many other essential ecosystems, but I decided to focus on kelp forests instead because they have received far less international attention and coverage in mainstream environmental media despite their importance and how urgently they need our protection.

First, the semi-arid central plateau gives way to the foothills of the Sierra Madre Oriental and the roadsides thicken with xerophytic shrubland—the ancient, stubborn ecosystem that has survived on this earth for some 65 million years. Here, plants have solved the problem of aridity not by finding water, but by learning to live almost without it. Lechuguilla agave fans out in low silver-green rosettes, their leaf tips hardened to needle points. Candelilla euphorbia—waxy, pale green, pencil-thin—grows in tight clusters like frozen fountains. Between them, prickly pear cactus spreads its broad paddles, and the occasional solitary biznaga barrel cactus rises from the pale soil like a question mark. In autumn, when the rains have been kind, there are flowers—tiny and insistent, the colour of fire—that make the whole hillside look briefly, impossibly bright.

These are not landscapes people typically call beautiful. But there is something deeply compelling about xerophytic shrubland once you begin to understand it: the sheer efficiency of its adaptations, the fact that every form here is a solution. The waxy coatings and reduced leaf surfaces that minimise water loss. The deep, wide root systems that can draw moisture from rock. The seeds that can wait years—sometimes decades—for a single good rain. This landscape has survived ice ages and the slow drift of continents. It is one of the world’s oldest living ecosystems and it harbours species found nowhere else on earth, including Lophophora diffusa, the Querétaro or false peyote—a critically endangered cactus endemic to this region that is heavily trafficked due to the false belief that it contains mescaline (a psychedelic compound).

As the road climbs, the cactus begins to thin and then disappears almost entirely, replaced by something that takes a few moments to process: small, twisted oaks and low deciduous trees that arrive first as scattered individuals, then in thickets, then in something approaching forest. This is the sub-montane shrubland and low tropical deciduous forest that occupies the transitional zone between arid lowlands and the mountains proper—a community of drought-adapted trees that shed their leaves in the dry season, standing bare and bone-grey for months, then exploding into leaf when the summer rains arrive. Copal trees, their resinous bark peeling in papery curls. Wild figs anchoring themselves into cliff faces. Morning glory vines trailing over boulders. Bursera—the Mexican frankincense tree—releasing its sharp, resinous fragrance into the warm air. The colours, even in the dry months, are extraordinary: ochre and sienna and bronze, with bursts of green where a streambed holds moisture longer than the surrounding slopes.

The highway here is a curvy thing, meandering through the mountains, the next view constantly hidden around the next bend. With altitude comes moisture, and moisture brings even greater transformation as the road continues to climb higher. The trees grow taller and denser. Bromeliads appear, first on isolated branches, then everywhere, cloaking the upper limbs of oaks in cascades of grey-green leaves. Lichens spread across surfaces in patches of yellow and orange. The colour of the light changes—filtered now through a canopy, softer, more diffuse. This is the lower temperate forest zone, where oaks dominate, their leaves dark and leathery, their bark furrowed with age. In the deep gullies and along stream courses, Montezuma cypress—the sabino or ahuehuete—can be found, its massive, fluted trunk rising from the water’s edge, its feathery foliage hanging over the current like a benediction. These gallery forests, following the rivers like ribbons of extraordinary green, are among the most biodiverse habitats in all of Mexico.

At the highest points of the pass, before the road begins its descent toward Jalpan, the forest changes again. Pines appear alongside the oaks—first single trees, silhouetted against the sky, then in stands that darken the slopes with a blue-green that looks almost bruised in the afternoon light. Firs and cedars join them. The air is cooler here and smells of resin and damp earth. The Sierra Gorda’s temperate forests extend in some places to over 3,000 metres above sea level, and in the most favoured hollows—where clouds pile against the ridges and moisture condenses on every leaf and branch—the forest becomes something else entirely: cloud forest, draped in moss and fern, perpetually wet, perpetually extraordinary.

Then the road descends again, and the world opens. The mountains fall away on three sides and there below, cupped in a valley where the Río Jalpan curves through flat alluvial ground, is the town. The change in vegetation is almost theatrical: the temperate forest gives way again to tropical deciduous trees as the altitude drops, and the valley bottom is warm and lush, with mango trees overhanging garden walls, and the river threading through it all, its banks lined with sabinos and willows whose long reflections shiver in the current. From above, the mission church is the first thing you see clearly: its ochre façade rising above the flat rooftops, the stone tower catching the late afternoon light. Jalpan de Serra, at roughly 900 metres above sea level, sits at the ecological crossroads of everything you have just driven through.

A Town Where Two Worlds Meet

The name Jalpan comes from the Nahuatl—Xalli pan, meaning “place on sand”—a reference to the sandy alluvial soils of the valley floor where the town was established. The suffix de Serra was added in 1976 in honour of Fray Junípero Serra, the Franciscan friar who arrived here in 1750 and spent the better part of a decade completing the mission that would become both the first and most famous of five extraordinary churches scattered across the mountains of the Sierra Gorda.

The story of Jalpan is, in many ways, the story of the Sierra Gorda itself: a place that resisted, for a very long time, the ambitions of those who arrived from outside. The first peoples of this valley, connected to the Olmec, Teotihuacan, and Huasteca cultures in succession, were followed by the Chichimeca Pame, a hunter-gatherer people of formidable independence who held off Spanish military and religious incursions for more than two centuries. The Purépecha tried and failed to take the Sierra Gorda in the 1400s. The Aztecs exacted nominal tribute but never truly controlled the north. The Spanish, despite missions built from adobe and straw by Dominicans and Augustinians from the 1530s onwards, made little headway until the military pacification of the region in the 1740s and the subsequent arrival of the Franciscans.

What Serra and his fellow Franciscans built between 1751 and 1758 is, by any measure, one of the great architectural achievements of colonial Mexico. The mission of Santiago Apóstol stands at the heart of the modern town, its façade a dense, exuberant composition in carved stone and ochre stucco that manages to be simultaneously European Baroque and something uniquely of this place. Look closely and you find it: alongside the expected saints—Francis, Dominic, Peter, Paul—the double-headed eagle devouring a serpent, an image that fuses the Habsburg imperial symbol with the Aztec cosmology of the Mexica codices. The Virgin of Guadalupe, unmistakably Mexican, occupies a prominent position alongside the Spanish Our Lady of the Pillar. This is a façade that tells the story of cultural collision and negotiation, built by Pame hands directed by Franciscan minds, inscribing in stone the complicated transaction of colonisation.

Serra went on from Jalpan to found the California missions, becoming one of the most consequential—and contested—religious figures in North American history. But it is here, in the heat of a valley in Querétaro, that his story as a missionary began. The town wears this history lightly. The mission church is simply part of daily life: the backdrop to the main plaza where children play football in the evenings, where vendors set up their stalls on Sundays, where shared taxis gather at dawn and the drivers call out their destinations into the warm air. The church has been there for nearly 270 years. The birds in the plaza trees pay it no particular attention.

Jalpan was designated a Pueblo Mágico—a Magical Town—in 2010, a recognition of its historical and cultural heritage that has helped grow a modest but growing ecotourism economy. This designation came more than a decade after the more significant recognition: the establishment of the Sierra Gorda Biosphere Reserve in 1997, achieved through a remarkable story of grassroots environmental activism led by Martha Isabel Ruiz Corzo and the organisation she co-founded in 1987, Grupo Ecológico Sierra Gorda. In a country where protected areas are often decreed from above, the Sierra Gorda was fought for from below—by the communities that live within it, many of them aware from long experience of what the mountains hold.

The numbers that describe the Sierra Gorda biosphere are, in aggregate, almost impossible to comprehend. An elevation range of 200 to 3,160 metres above sea level. Rainfall varying from 350 millimetres in the arid lowlands to 2,000 millimetres in the cloud forests—a nearly six-fold difference within a single reserve. Fifteen vegetation types. More than 2,300 species of vascular plants, 363 species of birds, 131 species of mammals, and some 800 species of butterfly—more butterfly species than in the United States and Canada combined. The reserve sits at the convergence of the Nearctic and Neotropical bioregions, a geographical accident that makes it a meeting point for species adapted to the cold forests of the north and the tropical zones of the south. It is, the data confirms, the most ecologically diverse protected natural area in Mexico. It is also, as I am just beginning to understand, something more elusive than data captures: a living system of extraordinary complexity, every part of which is connected to every other part in ways that take a lifetime to trace.

The First Night

Grupo Ecológico Sierra Gorda’s headquarters are found near the reservoir, on a quiet street on the outskirts of Jalpan, surrounded by trees, including spiny ceibas that attract moths in the evening that blend perfectly with their bark and drought-resistant tepemezquite trees with their dark seed pods hanging like many tiny bats. The accommodation they provide is simple: a clean room, a ceiling fan, a window that opens onto a courtyard with a rainwater collection tank ready for the coming summer rains. There is no air conditioning. There is no need for it. At this altitude, in the dry season evenings, the air cools quickly after dark.

After several days in Mexico City, the silence of Jalpan’s evenings is its own kind of shock. Or rather, it is not silence at all. It is the opposite of the urban noise I have been immersed in: purposeful, living, layered. The birds begin at dusk. Jalpan sits in a valley where the Río Jalpan’s gallery forest—those ribbons of tall sabinos and willows along the water’s edge—provides a corridor for species moving between the surrounding ecosystems. The trees, filled with residents and activity all day, become increasingly noisy as the light fades: the rising, querulous chatter of grèbes and flycatchers settling into roosts, the sharp single-note calls of something larger and unseen further away, the repetitive calls of the pigmy owl.

The Sierra Gorda’s 363 confirmed bird species include everything from the military macaw—a large, spectacular parrot still found in the canyon forests of the reserve—to the tiny bumblebee hummingbird, barely five centimetres long, barely visible in flight. Many of the species here are migratory, using the Sierra Gorda as a stopover or wintering ground on journeys that span the Americas. The Jalpan reservoir, designated a Ramsar wetland in 2004 for its importance to migratory waterbirds, lies just a step away.

Listen to the sound of the birds at dusk in the video above.

Then, as the last light leaves the sky and the temperature drops several degrees, the insects begin. There is no other way to describe the sound of a tropical night in the Sierra Gorda except as orchestral: not in the metaphorical sense of pleasant or harmonious, but in the literal sense of multiple distinct parts performing simultaneously, each with its own rhythm and register, producing something that is more than the sum of its components. The cicadas begin first, a high, sustained frequency that seems to come from everywhere at once—from the trees, from the walls, from the air itself. Then the crickets layer in beneath them, slower and lower. Then the tree frogs, high and staccato.

The Sierra Gorda harbours approximately 600 species of butterfly alone, which gives some sense of the scale of its insect diversity—roughly 30% of all butterfly species in Mexico concentrated in one reserve. The invertebrate life of the region—the beetles in the bark of fallen logs, the moths drawn to flowers that open only at night, the fireflies that appear in the rainy season in such numbers that entire hillsides seem to pulse—represents a web of ecological relationships that underpins everything else. Insects pollinate the plants. They decompose the organic matter that feeds the soil. They are the primary food source for most of the birds. Without the insects, the silence would be total—and so would the collapse.

There is something that happens when you sit in the dark in a place like this, if you can stay still long enough and quiet enough for your nervous system to stop expecting the sounds of the city. It is not peace exactly, because the night is full of urgency—full of the press of life, of eating and being eaten, of calling and responding, of a thousand transactions happening simultaneously in the dark. What it is, more precisely, is scale. A reminder that human life is one set of signals among an enormous number, and that beyond the edges of our cities and our noise, the rest of life is always going on.

I have come to the Sierra Gorda to work, to learn something about conservation in practice, about what it takes to protect and restore a complex ecosystem in a region with 100,000 inhabitants and the full range of pressures that implies. I had read the reports, the biodiversity assessments, the conservation frameworks. I knew the numbers.

But numbers do not prepare you for this: for eight or more layers of insects and frogs negotiating the night in a language older than anything we have written down. They do not prepare you for the specific quality of the air at 900 metres in the dry season, warm and clean and carrying the faint, sweet scent of the copal trees on the hillside above town. They do not prepare you, entirely, for the understanding that you are sitting at the edge of one of the most biodiverse places on earth, and that the mountains around you hold more life in a single hectare than most of the places you have ever visited.

Mexico Field Notes From the Sierra Gorda is a three-part series documenting my time visiting Grupo Ecológico Sierra Gorda in the Sierra Gorda UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, Querétaro, Mexico.

Entry Two and Three will follow in the coming weeks.

Now descend further. Not into soil but into the ocean. Down past where sunlight penetrates. Past where most life can survive. Down 2,000 meters to the abyssal plain where the crushing pressure and near-freezing temperatures create an environment as hostile as deep space. Then descend another thousand meters to the ocean floor and you’ll find yourself in an ecosystem we barely understand yet, powered not by sunlight but by chemical energy and Earth’s internal heat, where giant tube worms cluster around superheated vents, where bacteria have evolved to thrive in 300°C water, where entirely new forms of symbiosis support communities in perpetual darkness.

These are the unseen ecosystems. The ones that are fundamentally beyond human sight and experience. We walk over one without realising it’s there. The other lies so far beneath the sea that it was seen for the first time in 1977. Yet both are foundational. Both sustain impressive biodiversity. Both provide services we’re only beginning to understand. And both face threats from human activities penetrating ever deeper into Earth’s hidden places.

In this third article of the Pillars of the Earth series, where we take a close look at each of the essential ecosystems sustaining life on our planet, we will examine these unseen systems—the fungal networks threading beneath every forest on Earth and the hydrothermal vent communities existing in an alien world in the ocean’s deepest reaches—and reveal that the ecosystems we cannot see may be the most critical of all.

Mycorrhizal Networks: The Wood Wide Web Holding it all Together

Before digging deeper into mycorrhizal networks, it must be acknowledged that they are generally considered a critical, specialised component within terrestrial ecosystems rather than a completely distinct ecosystem themselves. They function as fundamental, hidden, below-ground subsystems, connecting terrestrial plant and tree roots via fungal hyphae (microscopic threads) to facilitate nutrient, carbon, water, and information exchange. However, their complexity and the scale of their importance—they regulate Earth’s climate and are essential to soil health and biodiversity, as well as for the stability and resilience of forests and grasslands around the world—places them at the ecosystem level. It’s truly no exaggeration to say that mycorrhizal networks represent a distinct underground world unto themselves that deserves to be treated separately from the above-ground ecosystems they help sustain.

In essence, mycorrhizal networks aren't just part of terrestrial ecosystems; they are active engineers, shaping and connecting them through complex below-ground interactions without which much of terrestrial life could not exist. We overlook them at our own peril.

Ecosystem Services: The Foundation of Terrestrial Life

The importance of mycorrhizal networks for life on our planet cannot be overstated. Some 400 million years ago, when the first plants were attempting to colonise bare rock, they faced an almost impossible challenge: how to extract the phosphorus and nitrogen needed for photosynthesis, growth, and reproduction locked in mineral soil that their rudimentary root systems couldn’t access. Evolution’s answer was a partnership so successful that it has persisted, largely unchanged, across the entirety of life on land. Plants began sharing the sugars produced through photosynthesis with fungi in exchange for the nutrients those fungi could mine from deep in the soil—a transaction so mutually profitable that today more than 80% of all plant species on Earth maintain it.

What began as a survival mechanism has become the backbone of terrestrial life. The mycorrhizal relationship is not passive. Fungal hyphae extend far beyond the reach of any root system—up to 100 times the length of the roots they serve—probing mineral particles, secreting acids to break down rock, and delivering a constant stream of phosphorus and nitrogen back through the network. In return, plants allocate up to 30% of their photosynthetically fixed carbon to their fungal partners. It is, by any measure, one of the most consequential trades in the history of life on Earth.

The services flowing from this ancient arrangement are extraordinary in their scope. At the most fundamental level, mycorrhizal networks are the primary mechanism by which terrestrial ecosystems cycle nutrients. They function as an invisible circulatory system, without which the phosphorus and nitrogen locked in soil minerals would never reach plant communities—a bottleneck that would constrain the biological productivity of virtually every forest and grassland on the planet.

But nutrient cycling is only the beginning. A landmark 2023 study published in Current Biology, drawing on nearly 200 datasets, found that mycorrhizal fungi draw an estimated 13 billion tons of carbon (about 36% of annual global fossil fuel emissions) from plant roots into the soil annually. This carbon does not simply disappear into soil; much of it becomes stabilised in fungal structures and the compounds fungi produce, including glomalin, a protein that can persist in soil for decades. Ecosystems with thriving mycorrhizal networks store an estimated eight times more carbon than ecosystems without them. These networks, it turns out, are not peripheral to the global carbon cycle—they sit at its very centre.

The networks also regulate water distribution across landscapes with a sophistication that only recently has been fully appreciated. During drought, fungal hyphae—which can access water in soil pores too small for roots to penetrate—become critical water delivery systems, helping plant communities survive conditions that would otherwise be fatal. As climate change intensifies droughts and extends dry seasons across multiple continents, this function is becoming increasingly indispensable for terrestrial ecosystem survival.

There is one more function worth emphasising here, and it remains among the more scientifically debated: the capacity for trees connected by common mycorrhizal networks to transfer carbon and stress signals between individuals. Robust evidence has confirmed that carbon transfer occurs through shared fungal networks, including from canopy trees to seedlings. What remains more contested is the scale of this transfer and whether it constitutes a form of “support” from older trees to young trees. What is not contested is that mycorrhizal networks create conditions in which seedling survival is significantly higher—and that forests with intact fungal networks regenerate faster, more reliably, and with greater diversity than those whose networks have been disrupted.

Biodiversity: Beyond What We Can Visualise

What mycorrhizal networks enable above ground is inseparable from what they sustain below it. In soil, these networks support a cascade of life that most conservation frameworks have barely begun to account for. Fungal hyphae themselves constitute up to a third of the living biomass of healthy soils, creating the three-dimensional architecture upon which an entire microscopic world is built.

The soil community supported by active mycorrhizal networks includes bacteria, protozoa, nematodes, mites, springtails, and thousands of invertebrate species—a food web of staggering complexity that drives decomposition, nutrient cycling, and soil formation across every terrestrial ecosystem. It is estimated that a single teaspoon of healthy forest soil contains more individual organisms than there are humans on Earth, and that this community is almost entirely dependent on the conditions created by fungal networks.

Above ground, the consequences of healthy mycorrhizal networks extend across entire forest communities. Studies have consistently shown that tree seedling survival, plant species diversity, and forest resilience to disturbance are all higher in systems where mycorrhizal networks are intact. This is not coincidence. The networks function as an equalising infrastructure—redistributing resources from areas of surplus to areas of deficit, reducing the competitive advantages of any single dominant species and thereby creating space for greater biological complexity. They are, in the most literal sense, the foundation on which the visible diversity of forests rests.

Mycorrhizal networks themselves also represent immense biodiversity, with tens of thousands of species of mycorrhizal fungi estimated to exist, most of which can be divided into one of two main types. Arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi, found mostly near the Equator, represent an estimated 300 to over 1,600 species and are the most common type, dominating in grasslands, tropical forests, and agricultural systems. They tend to support greater plant biodiversity above ground by enhancing nutrient uptake in plants. Meanwhile, ectomycorrhizal (EcM) fungi, represent over 20,000 species worldwide and typically associate with the trees and woody plants of temperate and boreal forests, forming complex structures around the roots that enable higher carbon sequestration in the soil. There is a lot that we still don’t know these two types of mycorrhizal fungi, but what is clear is that both types are essential for ecosystem function.

Current Condition: An Increasingly Disconnected Network

A 2025 study published in Nature, representing four years of global sampling by the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN), generated the first high-resolution global map showing the distribution of AM and EcM fungal biodiversity. Their findings are sobering: less than 10% of mycorrhizal fungi biodiversity hotspots fall within existing protected areas. The vast majority of the underground architecture sustaining terrestrial life has no formal protection whatsoever.

Explore mycorrhizal biodiversity around the world using SPUN’s Underground Atlas.

These networks are also in active decline in ways that remain largely invisible to mainstream conservation. The most extensive disruption comes from industrial agriculture, which attacks fungal networks in multiple ways. Aggressive tillage physically shreds the hyphal threads and networks, with studies showing severe reductions in fungal biomass and diversity on tilled land compared to no-till systems. Simultaneously, chemical fertilisers short-circuit the mycorrhizal exchange: when plants receive phosphorus and nitrogen directly from synthetic inputs, they reduce carbon allocation to fungal partners, weakening or severing the relationship entirely and becoming dependent on human inputs. Additionally, fungicide applications—now routine in industrial crop production—directly kill mycorrhizal fungi, with research showing phosphorus uptake reductions of more than 40% in treated croplands. We are killing that which helps crops grow.

Beyond industrial agriculture, deforestation and land conversion destroy the above-ground plant partners without which mycorrhizal fungi cannot survive. When a forest is cleared, even when new trees are planted afterwards, the fungal network it was connected to—often centuries old—collapses with it. The damage extends beyond the cleared area, with higher rates of nitrogen pollution from agricultural and industrial sources and declining tree health found in areas near forests where mycorrhizal relationships had been severed. Climate change introduces additional pressure through more severe wildfires, which soil fungal communities can take more than a decade to recover from, and through drought and heat events that exceed the thermal tolerance of specific fungal species.

The consequence is a growing disconnection between what should be a planetary-scale network and the increasingly fragmented reality on the ground. Where networks are severed—by roads, agricultural fields, urbanisation, or logging—the carbon, water, and nutrient flows they mediated cease, forests become less resilient, and the above-ground biodiversity they supported begins to unravel. If we want healthy and thriving terrestrial ecosystems, it’s therefore imperative that we start paying attention to what is happening beneath our feet because the underground is not the backdrop to life on land. It is its engine.

Deep-Sea Hydrothermal Vents: Life at the Absolute Edge

Let’s now leave land behind and head into the deepest ocean where in February 1977, a team of geologists descended to the Galapagos Rift (~2,600 metres below sea level) in the research submersible Alvin, expecting to find barren ocean floor. What they found instead overturned one of biology’s most fundamental assumptions. In the total darkness, under crushing pressure, clustered around fissures in the ocean floor from which superheated mineral-rich water billowed like black smoke, was life—dense, diverse, and completely unlike anything science had documented before.

The significance of what they had found took years to fully grasp. These communities were not dependent on sunlight, or on the photosynthetic productivity that was assumed to underpin all life on Earth. They ran on a different energy entirely: the chemical energy released when hydrogen sulphide and other compounds venting from deep in Earth’s crust were oxidised by specialised bacteria. This process—chemosynthesis—was not new in theory, but no one had imagined it could support ecosystems with such high complexity and biomass. Vents can host communities more biologically productive than tropical rainforests, in a world without light, without seasons, and without any connection to the surface.

Since that first discovery, approximately 700 vent fields have been identified across the global ocean floor, and scientists estimate that only around 10% of the total vent system has been explored. What we do know is that these ecosystems represent something genuinely different—not just a variant of what exists above the seafloor, but an entirely separate biological world, built on a different energy source, populated by organisms found nowhere else, and governed by ecological rules that science is only beginning to understand.

Ecosystem Services: The Chemical Powerhouses of the Ocean

The functional importance of hydrothermal vents extends well beyond the extraordinary life they support. These ecosystems perform roles in global ocean chemistry that have consequences far beyond the seafloor. As superheated water circulates through the ocean crust and emerges through vents, it carries a complex mixture of dissolved minerals—iron, manganese, zinc, copper—that enter the ocean water column and are transported across ocean basins by deep currents. Research has shown that hydrothermal iron plumes spread thousands of kilometres across the South Pacific, fertilising surface waters and contributing to phytoplankton blooms that form the base of nearly all marine food webs, produce over half the oxygen we breathe, and draw down immense amounts of atmospheric carbon. The carbon cycle implications of this, long invisible in global climate models, are now recognised as deeply significant as phytoplankton account for roughly 40% of all carbon fixation.

Beyond their role in nutrient and mineral cycling, the chemical productivity at vents—the oxidation of hydrogen sulphide by chemosynthetic bacteria—provides the energetic foundation for entire deep-sea food webs that require no solar input whatsoever. This self-sufficiency makes vent ecosystems uniquely valuable as natural experiments in what life is capable of without sunlight, and as models for potential life in other planetary bodies where liquid water and geothermal heat might combine in similar ways.

Vent ecosystems also provide ecosystem services of direct relevance to humanity through their pharmaceutical potential. The extraordinary organisms that thrive in vent conditions have evolved biochemical tools—enzymes, proteins, and compounds—that function under extreme heat and pressure. These extremophilic biochemicals have already contributed to fields as diverse as biotechnology and medicine, and they represent a largely untapped reservoir of potential applications. The heat-stable enzyme Taq polymerase, for instance, discovered in thermophilic bacteria from hot springs, underpins modern PCR technology—now foundational to medical diagnostics and forensic science. Vent organisms offer analogues, with characteristics potentially far more extreme.

Perhaps most importantly for science, vent ecosystems serve as living archives of evolutionary history. The bacteria and archaea that form the base of vent food webs represent some of the oldest lineages of life on Earth, offering direct windows into how life originated and what conditions it requires—knowledge with both fundamental scientific value and practical implications for understanding life’s limits. And all of this just represents what we have learnt about hydrothermal vents so far. We are yet to understand the full scale of their ecological contributions and functions, not to mention their biodiversity, which is a key reason these ecosystems should be left untouched.

Biodiversity: An Isolated World Like Nowhere Else

Hydrothermal vent ecosystems support one of the highest proportions of endemic species of any habitat on Earth—organisms that exist only at specific vent fields and nowhere else. Giant tube worms (Riftia pachyptila), which can reach two metres in length and have no mouth or digestive system, relying entirely on internal symbiotic chemosynthetic bacteria, are among the most dramatic examples of evolutionary adaptation to extreme conditions. Yeti crabs blind to their environment, snailfish capable of surviving pressures that would crush a submarine, and microbial mats of archaea thriving in water at 300°C are the result of millions of years of evolution producing life forms specifically calibrated to a habitat that exists nowhere else.

A comprehensive 2024 analysis published in PNAS, covering more than 500 vent species worldwide, found that half of all global vent species are functionally unique—meaning they perform ecological roles that are not replicated by any other species anywhere on the planet. The study also found that regional vent communities are highly differentiated from each other, with distinct evolutionary trajectories reflecting differences in geological setting and history. These are not interchangeable ecosystems: each vent field represents a unique evolutionary experiment that, once destroyed, is lost forever.

The connectivity between vent fields adds another layer of vulnerability. Most vent species disperse in larval form through ocean currents, meaning that individual vent communities are linked in networks across ocean basins. Research from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology has shown that destroying key “hub” vents—those with high connectivity to others—can trigger cascading biodiversity losses across vent fields hundreds of kilometres away. It’s similar to how the loss of connectivity in mycorrhizal networks can lead to cascading negative effects on biodiversity far from the point of disruption. Both mycorrhizal fungi and vents form what can be though of as continuous webs where damage in one place blocks essential flows to all the places it’s connected to.

Current Condition: Vulnerable and Unprotected

Despite existing at a depth that places them far from human activity, hydrothermal vent ecosystems are already facing an existential threat: deep-sea mining. The same mineral deposits that make vents biologically extraordinary, make them commercially attractive to an emerging industry that has moved from prospecting to seeking mining licenses with an alarming speed that has surpassed many protection efforts.

Despite meeting every international criterion for protection as Vulnerable Marine Ecosystems (VMEs), Ecologically or Biologically Significant Areas (EBSAs), and areas of particular sensitivity, the protection afforded to hydrothermal vents is grossly inadequate by any measure. A 2023 analysis found that while 25% of known active vent fields fall under some form of conservation intervention, only 8% receive full protection. Additionally, these interventions are implemented by 17 sovereign states, three regional fisheries management organisations, and one international treaty—a fragmented patchwork that leaves the majority of known vent ecosystems, and all unknown ones, effectively unprotected.

The situation is further compounded by the fact that only around 10% of the global vent system has been explored. Mining regulations are being written for a system whose full extent, biodiversity, and ecological function remain unknown. Scientists have called this what it is: proceeding to extract resources from ecosystems we don’t yet understand is not just environmentally reckless—it is scientifically indefensible. The consequences of mining at active vents would be immediate and total: the physical destruction of vent communities, the release of toxic sediment plumes that would smother surrounding life, and the severing of the hydrothermal circulation that sustains vent ecosystems and the wider ocean.

Climate change can also not be discounted as a threat, despite the depth at which vent ecosystems are found, as it is altering ocean chemistry through acidification and changing deep-water circulation patterns. While vents are not directly threatened by warming in the way shallow marine ecosystems are, the shifts in deep ocean currents could alter the conditions that specific vent species and communities depend on. This is simply just one more area where we do not know enough about these ecosystems to be able to judge how they will be impacted and, in turn, how those impacts will affect the rest of the planet.

To Be Continued

Let’s now step back and look at mycorrhizal networks and hydrothermal vents together. What may initially seem like two worlds apart—one exists beneath every forest on Earth and the other lies in the deepest ocean where only specialist technology can reach—they are both essential planetary infrastructure for nutrient transport and carbon sequestration. They also share the single most consequential characteristic from a conservation standpoint: they are invisible to casual human observation, and that invisibility has made them among the least understood and most poorly protected ecosystems on the planet.

The deep-sea vents take this invisibility to its extreme. They require technology, funding, and institutional will simply to reach. And yet they represent a biological and evolutionary heritage that exists nowhere else in the universe we have explored—life in conditions we once assumed were sterile, organised into communities of extraordinary functional uniqueness, providing services to ocean chemistry that flow into the climate systems we depend upon. The network beneath the forest and the community around the vent chimneys are not peripheral. They are, in the most fundamental sense, what life on Earth is built from.

In Part Four of this series we will return to a world we can see with our own eyes to examine wetlands and coral reefs—ecosystems that, unlike those explored here, we can experience directly and yet continue to face threats and deterioration, showing that visibility and knowledge, although they help, are often not enough to protect vital ecosystems. For effective protection and long-term restoration, we need so much more, but that is a topic for Part Four.

In March 2025, Arctic winter sea ice reached its lowest annual maximum extent since the satellite record began in 1979. The Arctic is losing approximately 78,000 square kilometres—an area roughly the size of South Carolina—of summer sea ice annually.

Arctic ice loss is not just an environmental crisis. It’s a geopolitical powder keg wrapped in an ecological catastrophe, exposing fundamental contradictions in how the world approaches environmental commitments when strategic interests are at stake.

The Ecological Significance of What We’re Losing

To understand what’s at stake in the CAO, you first need to grasp its role in planetary stability. It’s no exaggeration to say that the CAO functions as one of Earth’s most critical systems. Its waters drive global ocean circulation patterns that influence weather systems worldwide. The spring phytoplankton bloom in the Nordic Seas, enabled by the region’s unique currents and topography, supports a vast biomass of zooplankton that sustains key species including herring, mackerel, and blue whiting—fish that feed larger marine animals and support commercial fisheries across the North Atlantic.

Most importantly for climate regulation, the CAO acts as a massive heat-reflecting ice shield, with sea ice reflecting up to 80% of incoming solar radiation back into space. When the ice disappears, it is replaced by dark ocean water that absorbs 90% of solar radiation, which is creating a feedback loop that accelerates Arctic warming. The result: temperatures in the Arctic have risen more than twice as fast as the global average.

Even the oldest, thickest Arctic sea ice—the multi-year ice that has survived multiple summer melts—has not been immune to the accelerated rate of warming. Since the 1980s, over 95% has disappeared. What remains is largely confined to the area north of Greenland and the Canadian Archipelago. This transformation from thick, resilient multi-year ice to thin, seasonal ice fundamentally alters the Arctic Ocean’s ability to maintain stable ecosystems.

The CAO supports approximately 2,000 species in ice-based food webs that simply cannot exist anywhere else. Seven species of marine mammals are endemic to the Arctic and rely on sea ice for survival. Polar bears hunt ringed and bearded seals on sea ice; Pacific walrus use ice as platforms for resting and leaving calves while diving for food; narwhals, belugas, and bowhead whales depend on ice-edge habitats for feeding and migration.

The cascading effects of ice loss are already devastating these populations. Over the past two decades, polar bears and Pacific walrus have fundamentally changed their behaviour as sea ice recedes earlier each summer. More polar bears now den on land instead of sea ice. Pacific walrus form huge, crowded groups along coastlines, often far from feeding grounds, creating conditions that make them vulnerable to disturbance from people, aircraft, and predators, leading to crushing stampedes.

Reindeer populations across the Arctic have declined by more than half in the past two decades. Caribou herds in Alaska-Canada have seen population declines of up to 90% with no signs of recovery. The narwhal’s habitat is expected to see a 25% decline in area by 2100, shifting north by 1.6 degrees latitude as sea temperatures rise and ice becomes scarcer, leading to potential localised extinction if they cannot adapt to these rapid changes.

These aren’t just statistics. They represent the unraveling of ecological systems that have existed for centuries, affecting not only Arctic biodiversity and communities but the stability of the planet.

The Fishing Moratorium: A Rare Victory for Precautionary Action

Against this backdrop of accelerating ecological crisis, one recent development stands out: the Central Arctic Ocean Fisheries Agreement (CAOFA), which entered into force in June 2021.

The agreement represents something genuinely unusual in environmental governance—proactive protection rather than reactive damage control. For the first time in history, ten nations (Canada, China, Denmark in respect of Greenland and the Faroe Islands, the European Union, Iceland, Japan, Norway, Russia, South Korea, and the United States) agreed to ban commercial fishing in an area around the size of the Mediterranean Sea before any fishing had ever taken place there.

The ban remains in effect until at least 2037, with automatic five-year extensions unless a party objects. During this period, parties are committed to a joint program of scientific research and monitoring to understand the CAO’s ecosystems and determine whether fish stocks could be harvested sustainably in the future.

What makes CAOFA particularly significant is its explicit application of the precautionary approach: in the face of scientific uncertainty about potential harm, abstain from potentially destructive activities until adequate knowledge exists to make informed decisions. As one diplomat involved in negotiations noted, governments acted “in advance to prevent the initiation of unregulated commercial fishing in a wide swath of the Arctic Ocean—fishing that could have caused significant harm to the marine environment.”

The agreement also breaks new ground by including non-Arctic nations—particularly China—as full parties, recognising that Arctic governance cannot be the exclusive domain of Arctic coastal states when ice loss makes these waters increasingly accessible to global fishing fleets.

However, while CAOFA prevents commercial fishing and demonstrates that precautionary environmental action is possible when nations choose it, it offers no protection against the other destructive activities that are now penetrating the once-inaccessible CAO. The fishing ban will mean little if the ice-dependent ecosystems it’s meant to protect have already collapsed as a result of other industries.

The Race for Power: When Strategic Interests Override Environmental Concerns

What’s important to understand about the melting Arctic is that it isn’t just an unfolding environmental crisis—it’s a territory and power grab happening in plain sight; one in which environmental protections and ecosystem concerns are systematically overlooked when they conflict with military positioning and economic ambitions.

Consider the United States’ escalating pursuit of Greenland. President Trump has made no secret of the fact that his Arctic interests are simultaneously strategic and extractive. He calls Greenland acquisition essential for “national security,” but he’s been equally explicit about his economic interests, describing Greenland as a “great real estate deal” and emphasising its rare earth reserves and deposits of iron ore, graphite, tungsten, copper, gold, and oil.

Even though Trump may be the most vocal about them, the U.S. is not alone in its Arctic ambitions. While Trump’s Greenland threats dominate headlines, Russia has been systematically militarising the Arctic for over a decade with far less international attention. Russia now controls over 50% of the Arctic coastline, having built more than 475 military bases along its northern border. Let that number sink in and what that level of military activity and construction can do to the sensitive habitats and wildlife of the Arctic.

Although Russia’s Arctic strategy documents claim “preservation of the Arctic ecological system” is a national priority and central part of their military expansion, they continue to build military infrastructure directly in fragile ecosystems, including in tundra, coastal areas, and protected Arctic islands that host critical wildlife habitat and breeding grounds, without requiring the environmental impact assessments, habitat protections, or mitigation measures that would be required for comparable civilian development projects in those areas. Environmental considerations and protections exist only on paper when military operations are concerned.

Beyond its territorial ambitions, the reason Russia is so keen to expand its Arctic presence, no matter the cost (environmental or otherwise), is that it wants to control access to Arctic shipping routes, particularly Russia’s Northern Sea Route (NSR). The NSR follows Russia's Arctic coast from the Bering Strait to the Kara Sea, offering a shortcut between Asia and Europe that could reduce shipping distances by up to 40% and travel time by 30% compared to routes through the Suez Canal.

Moscow aims to carry 80 million tons annually along the NSR, positioning it as a "global transportation route" essential to Russia's economic future. Russia is still far from reaching that goal, with the total tonnage transported along the NSR in 2025 being just about 3.2 million tons, but even this level of shipping traffic has proven to hurt Arctic ecosystems, with the noise from ships already interfering with narwhals’ ability to hunt and communicate, and shipping emissions, particularly black carbon, accelerating ice melt. What 80 million tons of shipping traffic would do is a question that is being conveniently ignored.

Fundamentally, what U.S. and Russian activities in the Arctic reveal is a sobering truth: environmental considerations are treated as relevant for some activities (fishing under CAOFA) but completely optional for others (military installations, shipping, resource extraction).

The Hunt for Minerals: When Environmental Commitments Get In The Way

While shipping and military positioning dominate Arctic geopolitics, access to resources is playing a bigger role as more of the Arctic opens up. Norway’s proposed deep-sea mining plans expose the clearest example of how environmental commitments collapse when new resources are exposed.

In 2020, Norway committed to sustainably manage 100% of its ocean areas by 2025 through the High Level Ocean Panel for a Sustainable Ocean Economy—an international initiative promoting ocean protection and sustainable practices. Just four years later, in 2024, Norway became the first country to open Arctic seabed areas to commercial deep sea mining, approving exploration licenses for a 281,000-square-kilometre zone—roughly half the size of France—in the Norwegian and Greenland Seas where metal-rich sulfides and manganese crusts valuable for renewable energy technologies have been found. This was not a subtle contradiction. It was a direct reversal: from committing to sustainable ocean management to then approving an extractive industry that scientists unanimously warn will cause irreversible ecological damage to ecosystems we barely understand yet.

What we do know is that the Arctic seabed harbours extraordinary biodiversity, including “hairy” shrimps, stalked jellyfish, armoured crustaceans, forests of tube worms, and hydrothermal vent communities. The region supports globally significant populations of seabirds and is a critical habitat for deep-diving whales like sperm whales.

As of December 2025, the Norwegian Parliament has halted plans for deep-sea mining in the Arctic, pausing all exploration licenses until at least the end of 2029. This policy u-turn only came about as a result of intense international and political pressure, as well as opposition from major companies like Google, BMW, Volvo, and Samsung, showing that national commitments and protections don’t mean much in and of themselves when economic opportunities arise without mass public pressure to uphold and respect them.

Confronting the Contradictions

The melting Arctic exposes a fundamental problem with global governance: nations champion conservation rhetorically while pursuing industrial exploitation in practice. They sign fishing moratoria while expanding military presence and shipping. They commit to ocean protection and then approve deep-sea mining.

The critical question becomes: Can we really protect what remains of the Arctic—or any other essential planetary system—when environmental commitments and international agreements are treated as optional and selectively applied?

The honest answer is no. If explicit commitments are not respected, protection means very little. The Arctic is already a battleground where nations pursue strategic positioning and resource access while simultaneously participating in environmental agreements that those very activities undermine, with ecosystems paying the price. But the question points toward what’s needed: mechanisms that make environmental commitments binding and serve to actually constrain industrial and military activities that can harm ecosystems and the planet. This shift won't come from governments acting on their own. As what happened in Norway shows, it requires:

• Scientific communities continuing to document Arctic changes and biodiversity threats

• Environmental organisations maintaining pressure for expanded protections

• Indigenous peoples asserting rights and leadership in Arctic governance

• Global civil society demanding that Arctic protection match the rhetoric of climate leadership and the commitments made in international agreements.

• Media coverage connecting Arctic militarisation to climate crisis and biodiversity loss

• International institutions like the High Seas Treaty and Arctic Council being strengthened rather than weakened

Whether we manage to do this or not will determine not just the Arctic’s future, but whether international environmental commitments mean anything at all when they conflict with national interests.

The fishing and mining moratorium offer a window of opportunity. What we do in that time—whether environmental protection becomes binding constraint on industrial activity or remains performative rhetoric—will define our generation’s relationship with the natural world and each other.

Even though grasslands and deserts cover approximately 60% of Earth’s land surface, provide ecosystem services worth trillions of dollars, and face degradation rates that dwarf forest loss, they remain in the shadows of conservation priorities—overlooked until they’re gone. This is the crisis of the ecosystems we don’t picture when we hear the word conservation, the ones that never captured our imagination enough to warrant protection. They disappear without us noticing.

In this second article of the Pillars of the Earth series, where we take a close look at each of the essential ecosystems sustaining life on our planet, we will examine these forgotten ecosystems—the grasslands rolling across continents and the deserts thriving in Earth’s harshest conditions—and reveal what we lose when we fail to see the extraordinary in landscapes we’ve dismissed as empty.

Grasslands: Overlooked Carbon and Biodiversity Hotspots

Grasslands may not have the charismatic scenery that has historically dominated conservation campaigns. There are no towering trees, no vivid coral reefs, no dramatic waterfalls. Instead, grasslands boast a horizon that stretches endlessly in every direction. They are places where wind moves through native grasses in waves that resemble ocean swells and the sky dominates everything.

What may initially seem like an empty landscape is actually one of Earth’s great carbon sinks, with a biological community as complex as any rainforest, just arranged horizontally rather than vertically. These are ecosystems that regulate water for billions of people, feed livestock that sustain entire economies, and maintain biodiversity found nowhere else on the planet.

Ecosystem Services: Much More Than Open Space

Walk through a tall grass prairie in peak growing season and you might see grasses reaching two meters high, wildflowers creating palettes of colour, the occasional tree dotting the landscape. But this visible abundance is only a fraction of the system. For every gram of plant material you see above ground, there are four to six grams below—a massive root system extending meters deep into the rich soil.

This invisible underground architecture is why grasslands matter so much for climate. While forests store much of their carbon in trunks and branches vulnerable to fire, grasslands store up to 97% of their carbon below ground in root systems and soil organic matter—often as much as thousands of tons per hectare—representing a huge carbon sink that contains approximately 20% of global soil organic carbon. An additional benefit of carbon being below ground is that when fire does sweep through—a natural part of grassland ecology—the above-ground material burns, but the carbon stored in roots and soil remains intact, with grasses regrowing within weeks.

But carbon storage isn’t the only service happening beneath the surface. Grassland soils, with their dense root networks, excel at water infiltration and retention. Their roots act like sponges that absorb rainfall that would run off compacted agricultural soil, storing it in soil pores and releasing it slowly to streams and aquifers, thereby preventing soil erosion, recharging groundwater supplies for ecosystems and communities, and regulating both floods and droughts.

The combined value of these ecosystem services is immense. Research in China found that in 2020, the annual ecological value of grassland ecosystems reached 246 trillion CNY, with investment in conservation and restoration yielding ecological benefits with an input-output ratio of 1:446. That’s a 44,500% return on investment—among the highest of any ecosystem restoration effort globally. And this is not even considering the incredible value of grassland biodiversity.

Biodiversity: Dismissed and Essential Richness

The biodiversity of grasslands has been systematically underestimated. Without the vertical structure of forests or the visual drama of coral reefs, grassland diversity has been dismissed. However, a closer examination reveals an incredible richness that deserves our attention and protection.

A single square meter of healthy grassland can contain 80 or more plant species that change along with the seasons. Spring ephemerals give way to summer grasses, fall wildflowers create entirely new colour palettes. Along with the seasonal variety, different species also have different rooting depths, accessing water and nutrients from different soil layers and creating vertical stratification below ground comparable to forest canopy layers above ground.

The diversity of fauna found in grasslands is equally remarkable. Grasslands support incredibly rich species numbers, including rare insects and ground-nesting birds and amphibians that can be found nowhere else, as well as iconic mammals like bison, elephants, lions, and vast herds of ungulates that demonstrate the immense wildlife populations grassland productivity can support.

The biodiversity of grasslands is not only a source of impressive beauty, it’s essential for ecosystem functions. Recent research on Tibetan alpine grasslands revealed that although moderate grassland degradation actually increased plant species richness, opening up new ecological niches, ecosystem multifunctionality—the ability to simultaneously maintain multiple ecosystem services like nutrient cycling, carbon storage, and productivity—declined dramatically.

This illustrates a fundamental principle: grassland biodiversity and ecosystem function are linked. Degraded systems may have high species counts, thanks in part to the presence of more invasive species, but the loss of complexity leads to the loss of the functional capacity that makes these ecosystems valuable in the first place.

Current Condition: Degraded and Disappearing Quickly

The statistics on grassland condition are damning. Half of the world’s grasslands have already been degraded to some extent and less than 10% are safeguarded from threats at a global level. In southern Africa—home to iconic African wildlife—research found that indigenous grassland lost 31.5% of its cover between 1986 and 2020, with bush encroachment and land transformation increasing by 16.8% and 24.7% respectively, highlighting the substantial loss of grassland biodiversity and ecosystem services that has happened over the last few decades.

The patterns vary regionally but the degradation trends are global. In temperate zones, such as the Great Plains of North America or the European Steppe, roughly 50% of grasslands are degraded, with only 1% of native tall grass species currently remaining in the world. Think about that—99% of native tall grass prairie has been lost. The ecosystem that once dominated the interior of North America, that fed massive bison herds numbering in the tens of millions, has been reduced to scattered fragments representing 1% of its original extent.

Threats: Conversion and Development

By far the greatest threat to grasslands is conversion. By 2035 in some regions, cropland expansion is expected to increase by over 22%, directly at the expense of native grasslands. The process is straightforward: plow up the grass, plant corn, wheat, or soybeans, eliminate the complex root systems that took centuries to develop, and replace diverse native communities with monocultures.

The soil degradation follows predictably. Without the dense root networks holding soil in place, erosion accelerates. Without the diversity of root depths and types, soil structure deteriorates. Without the variety of plant species supporting diverse microbial communities, soil biological activity declines. Within years, formerly productive grassland becomes dependent on fertiliser inputs to maintain agricultural yields.

Intensified livestock grazing represents another major threat. Grasslands evolved with grazing pressure from wild ungulates, but the intensity and continuous nature of modern livestock grazing often exceeds what ecosystems can sustain and regenerate naturally. Overgrazing leads to soil compaction—reducing water infiltration and increasing runoff. Native plants adapted to periodic grazing get replaced by species tolerant of constant pressure. Bare soil appears where continuous plant cover should exist.

The effects cascade. Soil compaction reduces the habitat for soil organisms. Reduced plant diversity diminishes food sources for insects. Fewer insects mean fewer birds. The simplified ecosystem becomes more vulnerable to drought, disease, and invasive species.

Fire suppression has emerged as another threat. Many grasslands are fire-adapted ecosystems that depend on periodic burning to maintain their character. Fire removes accumulated dead material, stimulates new growth, controls woody plant encroachment, and releases nutrients. Decades of fire suppression have led to woody plant invasion in many regions, transforming grasslands into scrublands and eliminating habitat for grassland-specialist species.

Climate change adds another layer. Changing rainfall patterns, increased drought frequency, and shifting temperature regimes stress grassland species and alter the competitive balance between grasses, forbs, and woody plants. A growing body of research shows climate change is causing grassland loss through desertification in already marginal areas—not expanding grasslands into new territory, but converting them to something else entirely.

Deserts: Fragile and Irreplaceable Resilience

Picture the Mojave Desert as the sun sets. The temperature plummets as heat radiates into the clear night sky. A kangaroo rat emerges from its burrow, having spent the day in underground coolness, to forage for seeds it will store for months. A Joshua tree stands silhouetted against the horizon—a species adapted over millennia to the harsh landscape.

This is what we’ve been taught to see as wasteland. Barren, inhospitable, and empty, when the truth is radically different. Deserts aren’t failed ecosystems struggling to become something else—they’re finely-tuned biological communities providing essential ecosystem services, where highly specialised species have evolved extraordinary adaptations to survive conditions that would quickly kill organisms from more temperate regions.

Ecosystem Services: Function from Scarcity

Desert ecosystem services have been frequently underestimated because of their low biological productivity. Deserts, given the extreme conditions in which they exist, have an extremely limited capacity to generate biomass (organic matter) through photosynthesis, resulting in the characteristic sparse vegetation. This does not make them worthless. From a purely monetary perspective, a study of the Big Bend region of the Chihuahuan Desert found an annual value of $504 per hectare. Although markedly lower than other terrestrial biomes, this represents $1.61 billion in total for the study area. As deserts cover approximately one-fifth of Earth’s land surface, their total ecosystem service value is therefore considerable and should not be discounted.

Raw materials, climate regulation, ornamental resources, and cultural services contribute the most value. Deserts provide essential minerals and rare earth elements critical for modern technology and the unique landscapes support significant tourism industries worth billions globally.

Critically, deserts play an important role in climate regulation through complex mechanisms. Desert surfaces with their high albedo (reflectivity) influence atmospheric circulation patterns. The particles and aerosols from desert regions affect cloud formation and precipitation patterns far beyond desert boundaries. The Sahara Desert, for instance, influences weather patterns across the Atlantic and contributes vital mineral dust to the Amazon rainforest, blowing phosphorus and other nutrients across the ocean to fertilise the world’s largest rainforest.

Desert soil crusts—fragile living carpets of cyanobacteria, lichens, and mosses—stabilise soil, fix nitrogen, and facilitate water infiltration. Step on one and you’ve destroyed decades of slow biological development. Yet these crusts are critical for preventing erosion and supporting the limited plant growth that does occur, as well as sustaining what may be one of the most overlooked desert ecosystem services: carbon storage.

Carbon markets, conservation funding, and climate policies have overwhelmingly ignored deserts, overlooking that they are significant global carbon sinks. Desert soils and biological crusts sequester carbon slowly but persistently, accumulating it over millennia in stable forms. Research indicates hundreds to thousands of petagrams of carbon are likely held in desert soils worldwide, potentially containing more carbon than living plants on land. While desert vegetation is sparse and stores less carbon per hectare than forests, desert soils' sheer area and deep storage capacity make them crucial, accounting for about 15-28% of current land carbon uptake.

When we plow up deserts for mining, construction, or agriculture, we are unwittingly releasing all the stored underground carbon—often not realising how much is actually there—and destroying the unique biodiversity that call deserts home.

Biodiversity: Living in the Extremes

Desert species are impressive. They are all adapted to extreme temperatures, aridity, and intense solar radiation. The adaptations they had to evolve represent solutions to some of biology’s hardest problems, such as, how do you photosynthesise when opening stomata to take in CO2 means losing precious water? In response, desert plants like Cacti have evolved CAM (Crassulacean Acid Metabolism) photosynthesis, opening stomata at night when it’s cooler and water loss is minimised, storing the absorbed CO2 and processing it during the day when stomata are closed.

Other desert plants can remain dormant for years waiting for enough rainfall to reproduce, then bloom spectacularly after rare rains, completing their entire life cycle in weeks. Some seeds can even remain viable for decades, waiting for conditions favourable enough to germinate. There is a tree in the Namib Desert—the ancient Welwitschia mirabilis—that can live for over 2,000 years, sustaining itself on fog moisture in one of the driest places on Earth.

Desert fauna is also impressive. Their bodies evolved to reduce the amount of water needed and the amount of water that is lost. Kangaroo rats, for example, almost never drink. Instead, they are able to extract all needed moisture from dry seeds by transforming fats from the seed into water through digestion. Some desert beetles even harvest water from fog on their backs through specialised surface structures that channel tiny droplets into their mouths.

The challenges of deserts don’t stop at water scarcity, however. Desert species have also had to learn to endure temperature swings from near 50°C during the day to near freezing at night. This is why many species are nocturnal, avoiding the extreme heat entirely, with small body sizes to reduce thermal mass and allow faster cooling.

These adaptations aren’t just interesting biological facts—they’re evolutionary innovations that took millions of years to develop. Each species represents a unique solution to survival in extreme conditions. When we lose desert biodiversity, we’re therefore losing irreplaceable evolutionary lineages that can be found nowhere else.

Current Condition: Expanding and Disappearing Simultaneously

Desert ecosystems face an unusual conservation paradox. While we must prevent the expansion of deserts into currently productive lands (desertification), we must simultaneously protect existing desert ecosystems from degradation and biodiversity loss.

Climate change is amongst the greatest threats to desert regions. Some deserts are becoming hotter and drier, pushing even desert-adapted species beyond their tolerance limits. Alongside growing human pressures and habitat loss, this has led to alarmingly high extinction rates that far exceed historical norms. In the Sahara, a 2013 study found 12 out of 14 large endemic species were either extinct in the wild or threatened, with 9 losing over 90% of their range, showing just how extensive the the damage to desert regions is.

Meanwhile, other desert regions, like India’s Thar Desert and China’s Mu Us Desert, are experiencing increased precipitation and vegetation growth due to climate change. This may sound positive, but it actually threatens desert-adapted species. Increased moisture risks converting deserts into different ecosystem types. Species that exist only in specific desert regions and conditions could face extinction as their habitats transform. Furthermore, increased rainfall often comes as intense downpours, leading to flash floods and erosion rather than gentle watering, which damages the fragile desert ecosystems.

Research on Welwitschia mirabilis—the incredibly sturdy tree of the Namib Desert that can live on nothing but moisture from fog—found that just moderate degradation already affects population health, with climate change serving as a detectable stressor on these ancient plants. The study confirms that desert-adapted species are vulnerable to climate change effects, contradicting earlier hypotheses that desert ecosystems would somehow be minimally impacted.

Threats: Resource Extraction

Aside from climate change, the most severe direct threat to deserts is mining. It’s estimated that over 45% of mining areas in arid regions today are located in deserts given the high concentration of mineral resources found there. In specific desert regions, such as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China, over 73,000 hectares of land have already been destroyed by mining. This destruction is generally permanent as desert ecosystems, despite their incredible adaptations, exist under a delicate balance, at the extremes of what is possible, and it takes very little to push them over the edge. Combined with their naturally low biological activity and slow growth rates, recovery is very difficult, especially once the soil and vegetation have been destroyed.

Aside from the often irreversible destruction of vegetation and soil, mining also severely degrades already scarce water sources through over-extraction and contamination. Mining operations heavily extract water for dust suppression and processing, pumping deep into aquifers and contaminating groundwater with processing chemicals (like cyanide or sulphuric acid) and heavy metals, creating toxic conditions that render the water dangerous for people and ecosystems.

With all of this in mind, it should be highly concerning that mining operations in the Sahara—the world’s largest hot desert and a major global climate regulator—are expanding with minimal environmental oversight.

Although not nearly as destructive as mining, a more recent source of concern for deserts is energy development. Desert regions receive abundant solar radiation, making them attractive for solar energy installations. While renewable energy is critical for climate mitigation, large-scale solar developments can destroy fragile desert ecosystems, disrupt wildlife corridors, and release stored carbon if not carefully sited. As with any activity in sensitive ecosystems, we must proceed carefully to ensure we don’t cause any permanent damage on our way towards a more sustainable world.

To Be Continued

Let’s now step back and examine grasslands and deserts together. These ecosystems share a common challenge: they have not captured our imagination the way forests or coral reefs have. Grasslands lack vertical drama. Deserts appear barren. Neither fits our cultural narrative of what “nature” should look like.

This perception problem has consequences. Less than 10% of grasslands and deserts globally are protected, compared to roughly 18% of forests, and desert protected areas often focus on geological features or archaeological sites rather than biological communities. Additionally, while forest loss is obvious and instantly recognisable—clear-cutting creates scars that are visible from space—grasslands and deserts degrade and disappear gradually and silently. The process is insidious: the biodiversity and ecosystem services deteriorate in ways that are not easily observable, and by the time we notice the ecosystem has already passed the point where simple management changes might reverse degradation.

The trajectory for grasslands and deserts doesn't have to be one of continued degradation, however. Research has identified priority areas. We know which grasslands store the most carbon, support the greatest biodiversity, face the severest threats. We know which desert systems harbour the most endemic species, provide the most essential services, risk the greatest loss. The challenge isn’t scientific understanding—it’s valuing what we don’t immediately see. Convincing people that “empty” grasslands and “barren” deserts are actually complex, valuable ecosystems worth protecting requires changing fundamental perceptions about what nature and conservation looks like.

In Part Three of this series we will examine mycorrhizal (fungal) networks and the deep sea—ecosystems that are not only forgotten but truly hidden from human sight and therefore receive even less attention and funding than grasslands and deserts, despite the fact that they are the foundation upon which all life on Earth depends. Their disappearance and degradation rates should alarm anyone paying attention.

The story of Earth’s major ecosystems is ultimately about choices—what we value, what we protect, what we’re willing to sacrifice, and what we refuse to lose. The pillars holding up planetary habitability include both the charismatic and the overlooked, the dramatic and the subtle, the visible and the invisible, and they’re all fracturing. All require urgent action. The question is whether we’ll act to repair them before they collapse.

The Darkening Picture

2025 delivered unequivocal evidence that our climate emergency is accelerating faster than many predicted.

Record Heat and Extreme Weather

Scientists confirmed that 2025 ranks among the three hottest years ever recorded. For the first time, the three-year temperature average from 2023 to 2025 exceeded 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels—the threshold established by the Paris Agreement as a critical guardrail against catastrophic climate impacts. This milestone arrived despite the presence of La Niña conditions that typically cool global temperatures, underscoring how profoundly fossil fuel emissions have destabilised Earth’s climate system.

The human toll was devastating. The World Weather Attribution project identified 157 severe extreme weather events in 2025—heat waves, floods, hurricanes, typhoons, droughts, and wildfires—that collectively killed thousands and displaced millions. Heat waves emerged as the deadliest threat, with some events becoming 10 times more likely due to climate change compared to just a decade ago. In Southeast Asia, overlapping tropical cyclones triggered catastrophic flooding that claimed more than 1,800 lives. Prolonged droughts fuelled wildfires across Greece and Turkey. Torrential rains and flooding killed dozens in Mexico. Super Typhoon Fung-wong forced over a million people to evacuate in the Philippines.

Political Backlash Against Environmental Protection

In the United States, the Trump administration launched an unprecedented assault on environmental safeguards. Since January, nearly 100 actions have been taken to dismantle climate, water, and air regulations. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced what he called the biggest deregulatory action in U.S. history, including proposals to overturn the endangerment finding—the scientific basis for all EPA climate regulations—and weaken standards for soot pollution, power plant emissions, and vehicle fuel economy.

The administration also moved to roll back protections for endangered species, open federal lands to oil drilling, halt funding for climate research programs, and undermine state climate laws. While courts will likely block many of these actions, the regulatory uncertainty and weakened enforcement have already begun reversing years of environmental progress. The full consequences won’t be visible for years, but scientists warn that delays in climate action compound exponentially, making each year of inaction far more costly than the last.

Arctic in Crisis

The Arctic experienced its lowest winter sea ice extent in the 47-year satellite record. In March 2025, sea ice peaked at just 14.33 million square kilometres—80,000 square kilometres below the previous record low set in 2017. The region also recorded the hottest air temperatures in 125 years of modern record-keeping, with the last 10 years representing the 10 warmest on record. The Arctic is now heating up to four times faster than the global average.

This isn’t just about ice. The Arctic acts as the world’s refrigerator, regulating climate for the entire planet. As dark ocean replaces reflective ice, more heat is absorbed rather than reflected back into space, accelerating global warming in a vicious feedback loop.

The First Climate Tipping Point Crossed

In October, 160 scientists from 23 countries released the Global Tipping Points Report with a sobering conclusion: Earth has crossed its first major climate tipping point. Warm-water coral reefs, home to a quarter of all marine life and supporting nearly one billion people, have entered a state of widespread decline that scientists describe as irreversible at current warming levels.

Since 2023, more than 84% of the world’s coral reefs have suffered through the most extensive bleaching event ever recorded. Current global warming of approximately 1.4°C has already exceeded coral reefs’ thermal tipping point of about 1.2°C. Even if temperatures stabilised at 1.5°C, reefs would likely continue to collapse. The loss threatens not just marine biodiversity but also coastal protection, fisheries that feed three billion people, and the livelihoods of communities across the tropics.

The report warns that other systems are perilously close to their own tipping points, including the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, the Amazon rainforest, and the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC)—the ocean current system that regulates weather patterns across continents.

Tropical Forests Flip from Carbon Sink to Source

In a development that compounds the climate crisis, key tropical forests—particularly in the Amazon and parts of Africa—have shifted from acting as carbon sinks to becoming net carbon sources. Driven by deforestation, rising temperatures, and increased drought stress, these ecosystems now release more CO₂ than they absorb.

Additionally, new research released in November revealed an alarming trend: an overheating planet is causing forests and land to absorb 25% less carbon dioxide than they would without climate impacts, with the tropics driving this reduction. This feedback loop—where warming reduces forests’ capacity to absorb CO₂, leading to more warming—represents one of the climate crisis’s most dangerous accelerators.

Reasons for Hope

Despite all the concerning developments, 2025 also demonstrated that when we marshal resources and political will, remarkable progress and recovery is possible.

Green Sea Turtles Make Historic Comeback

In October, the International Union for Conservation of Nature reclassified green sea turtles from endangered to least concern on the IUCN Red List—a triumph of decades-long conservation efforts. The global population has increased by approximately 28% since the 1970s, even as threats like habitat loss, climate change, and fishing gear entanglement persist.

This recovery was driven by comprehensive strategies: protecting nesting beaches, reducing egg harvesting, implementing turtle excluder devices in fishing gear, and community-based programs. Conservation efforts in places like Ascension Island, Brazil, Mexico, and Hawaii have been particularly successful, with some populations rebounding to near pre-commercial exploitation levels.

The green turtle’s journey proves that conservation works when sustained over time. It demonstrates that with coordinated international action, legal protections, and community engagement, we can reverse the trajectory of species decline.

Latin America Expands Forest Protection

More land is being protected in Latin America than ever before. In August, Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize signed a historic trilateral agreement to create the Great Maya Forest Biocultural Corridor—the largest of its kind in the world. Spanning 5.7 million hectares (14 million acres), this initiative coordinates conservation, restoration, and community-based management across the second-largest rainforest in the Americas after the Amazon.

The corridor encompasses 50 existing protected areas across the three countries and provides habitat for approximately 7,000 species, including some of Central America’s healthiest jaguar populations. The Maya forest, largely intact since ancient Maya times, represents a critical carbon sink and biodiversity hotspot.

Colombia, Ecuador, and other Latin American nations also expanded protected forest areas throughout 2025, demonstrating growing recognition that forest conservation must be a regional priority. This cross-border cooperation with strong community inclusion offers a model for how nations can work together to protect shared ecosystems.

High Seas Treaty Ratified

After nearly two decades of negotiations, the High Seas Treaty was ratified in September when Morocco became the 60th country to ratify the agreement. The treaty will enter into force in January 2026, creating the first global legal framework for establishing marine protected areas in international waters.

This is monumental. International waters beyond any country’s jurisdiction cover nearly two-thirds of the ocean—yet until now, there was no mechanism to protect this vast realm. Only 1.5% of the high seas are currently safeguarded within marine protected areas. The High Seas Treaty is essential for achieving the Global Biodiversity Framework’s goal of protecting 30% of the world’s oceans by 2030.

The treaty establishes rules for creating marine protected areas, conducting environmental impact assessments, sharing benefits from marine genetic resources, and supporting capacity building for developing countries. Governments and stakeholders are already laying groundwork to protect critical biodiversity sites like the Salas y Gómez and Nazca Ridges, the Sargasso Sea, and the Thermal Dome in the Eastern Pacific.

Rewilding Gains Official Recognition

In October, the IUCN launched comprehensive rewilding guidelines at its World Conservation Congress in Abu Dhabi, formally recognising rewilding as a legitimate and distinctive approach to nature conservation and recovery. Developed by over 60 organizations and experts, these guidelines mark a paradigm shift in how humanity relates to nature.

Rewilding aims to restore self-sustaining ecosystems by reinstating natural processes and complete food webs. The IUCN’s recognition means that governments, international institutions, and funding bodies now have a clear framework for implementing rewilding projects. With recognition also comes funding which means rewilding initiatives will be able to expand around the globe in 2026, bringing back wild spaces and rebuilding healthy ecosystems across landscapes.

The guidelines emphasize that rewilding isn’t about returning to some imagined pristine past, but about allowing ecosystems to regain their autonomy and resilience. From European grasslands to African savannas to degraded farmlands, rewilding offers a practical, hope-filled approach to healing damaged landscapes.

Renewable Energy Surpasses Coal for the First Time

2025 marked a historic turning point in the global energy transition. For the first time on record, global electricity generation from renewables surpassed that of coal during the first half of the year. Renewables supplied 34.3% of global electricity, while coal fell to 33.1%.

Solar and wind growth outpaced the entire increase in global electricity demand, meeting all new demand and starting to displace fossil fuel generation. Solar alone grew by a record 306 TWh (31%), with China accounting for 55% of global solar generation growth. Solar’s share in the global electricity mix jumped from 6.9% to 8.8% in just six months.

This isn’t just about climate—it’s about economics. Solar and wind are now the cheapest sources of new electricity generation in most of the world. As costs continue to fall, clean energy becomes increasingly attractive not just for environmental reasons, but for economic competitiveness, energy security, and public health.

Research shows that environmental impacts from offshore wind energy will be reduced by approximately 20% per megawatt-hour from 2020 to 2040 due to technology innovation, size expansion, and lifetime extension. The clean energy sector is not just growing—it’s getting better every year.

Tropical Forests Forever Facility Launched

At COP30 in Belém, Brazil formally launched the Tropical Forests Forever Facility (TFFF)—a groundbreaking mechanism to provide long-term, predictable financing to countries that protect and sustainably manage their tropical forests. While not without flaws and with much room for improvement, the TFFF represents a crucial starting point for addressing one of conservation’s most persistent challenges: how to make forest protection economically competitive with deforestation.

The facility aims to raise $125 billion through blended public-private finance, with at least 20% of funds reserved for Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities. More than 70 countries with tropical forests are eligible to participate. So far, Norway, Brazil, Indonesia, France, and other nations have pledged over $5.5 billion in initial funding.

What makes the TFFF significant is its payment-for-performance model: countries receive ongoing funding for each hectare of standing forest they maintain, with payments decreasing based on deforestation or fire-related degradation. This creates a direct financial incentive to keep forests standing rather than merely preventing deforestation.

The facility is designed by and for the Global South, reflecting local realities and priorities. It sets a precedent for tropical countries to shape their own climate solutions. While challenges remain—including ensuring adequate funding reaches critically underfunded conservation projects and truly benefits local communities—the TFFF brings countries and conservationists around the world together with a shared framework for protecting remaining tropical forests.

What Needs to Happen in 2026

The contrast between 2025’s disasters and victories reveals a fundamental truth: we know what needs to be done, and we have the tools to do it. What we lack is the collective will to act at the necessary scale and speed.

If 2026 is to be a turning point rather than another year of accelerating crisis, several critical shifts must occur:

1. Accelerate the Clean Energy Transition: The renewable energy milestone of 2025 proves that clean energy can outpace demand growth. But we need this trend to continue and accelerate globally, not just in leading nations. This means massive investment in grid infrastructure, energy storage, and transmission capacity. It means removing regulatory barriers that slow renewable energy deployment. And it means ensuring that emerging economies have the resources to leapfrog fossil fuel development entirely.

2. Protect and Restore Forests at Scale: The Great Maya Forest Corridor and TFFF offer blueprints for forest protection that must be replicated worldwide. With tropical forests flipping from carbon sinks to sources, we have no time to waste. This means not just preventing deforestation but also restoring degraded lands, recognising Indigenous land rights, and making forest protection economically competitive with extraction.

3. Scale Up Marine Protection: The High Seas Treaty entering into force in 2026 creates the legal framework for ocean protection, but countries must now use it. The 30x30 goal—protecting 30% of oceans by 2030—requires immediate action to identify priority areas, establish marine protected areas, and ensure they have meaningful enforcement. We must also address the threats that know no boundaries: plastic pollution, overfishing, and ocean acidification.

4. Defend Environmental Protections: The assault on environmental regulations in the United States demonstrates how quickly progress can be reversed when political will falters. Around the world, environmental protections and climate policies must be strengthened, not weakened. This means holding governments accountable, supporting the scientists and agencies that inform policy, and mobilising public demand for environmental action that transcends political cycles.

5. Implement Rewilding at Scale: With IUCN recognition, rewilding can now access mainstream conservation funding and technical support. The priority for 2026 is translating guidelines into action: identifying landscapes suitable for rewilding, engaging communities in restoration efforts, and building the policy frameworks that allow ecosystems to regain their autonomy. Rewilding offers one of our best chances to rebuild ecosystem resilience in the face of climate change.

6. Avoid Crossing Additional Tipping Points: We’ve crossed the coral reef tipping point. The Amazon, the ice sheets, and the AMOC are perilously close to their own thresholds. Once these systems tip, the changes become self-reinforcing and irreversible on human timescales. Preventing additional tipping points requires immediate, dramatic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions—not pledges for future action, but measurable decreases starting now.

7. Center Justice and Community in Conservation: The success stories of 2025—from green turtles to the Maya Forest Corridor to the TFFF—all share a common thread: they involve communities as partners, not obstacles. Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities are the most effective guardians of forests and biodiversity. Conservation that excludes or displaces communities will fail. Conservation that empowers them can succeed at a transformative scale.

Overall, 2025 was a year of contradictions—devastating losses alongside remarkable gains. It showed us both what happens when we fail to act decisively and what becomes possible when we do. The coral reefs we’ve lost, the Arctic ice that’s vanished, the extreme weather that’s killed thousands: these are the costs of decades of delay.

But the green turtles rebounding, the forests being protected, renewable energy surpassing coal, the ocean treaty coming into force: these demonstrate our capacity for collective action when we choose to prioritise the future over short-term profits.

We stand at a threshold. The planetary systems that make life possible are being pushed to their breaking points. Yet we also have more tools, more knowledge, and more momentum for change than ever before. The question for 2026 isn’t whether we can turn things around—it’s whether we will.

In this first article of the Pillars of the Earth series, where we will take a close look at each of the essential ecosystems of our planet, we will explore the important functions that tropical rainforests and mangroves perform for our planet, their current status, and existing threats. Understanding these systems and their importance is the first step towards ensuring they are protected and their incredible value is recognised.

Tropical Rainforests: The Planet’s Life Engine

Picture a tree. Not just any tree—a massive emergent giant in the Peruvian Amazon, its crown breaking through the canopy 50 meters above the forest floor. Within its branches live more species of ants than exist in the entire British Isles. The canopy hosts orchids that will never touch ground, bromeliads cradling pools of water—entire aquatic ecosystems suspended in the sky, complete with tadpoles and insects.

Scale out and the numbers become almost absurd. In less than one square kilometre of Malaysian rainforest, you’ll find more tree species than in all of the United States and Canada. That Peruvian tree is one of perhaps 16,000 tree species in the Amazon Basin. For comparison, there are only about 1,400 tree species in temperate North America.

This isn’t just biological exuberance—it’s functional complexity that took millions of years to develop and become planetary life-support machinery.

Ecosystem Services: More Than Tree Cover

The ecosystem services provided by tropical rainforests are difficult to overstate. They regulate global climate patterns through carbon sequestration, water cycling, and atmospheric circulation. Tropical forests store an estimated 229-247 billion tons of carbon—roughly equivalent to 25 years of global human carbon emissions at current rates. The carbon isn’t just in massive trunks. It’s in leaf litter, in root systems extending dozens of meters, in fungi forming mycorrhizal networks connecting trees across vast distances, in soil microbes accumulated over millennia.

But rainforests’ climate value extends far beyond carbon storage. Tropical rainforests literally make their own weather. The Amazon rainforest generates as much as 50 percent of its own rainfall through evapotranspiration and cloud formation. The mechanism is elegant. Trees pull water from the soil, transport it through their vascular systems, and release it through their leaves. The Amazon’s trees release approximately 20 billion tons of water into the atmosphere every day—more than the Amazon River discharges into the Atlantic. This moisture then rises, forms clouds, produces rain, which falls back to the forest and gets absorbed by roots, creating a self-sustaining water cycle.

An emerging body of research indicates that even the particles emitted by tropical forests—pollens, bacteria, and spores—serve an important role in condensation and cloud formation. Highly productive ecosystems emit more particles, making it easier for droplets to form and rain to fall. Research tracking tropical wind and rainfall has found that winds passing over forests produce twice as much rain as winds passing over deforested areas. When you destroy the forest, you therefore don’t just lose trees—you disrupt the entire regional climate system.

The soil formation services provided by rainforests are equally critical. Despite occurring in areas that would otherwise struggle to sustain life, rainforests maintain soil quality by constantly providing organic materials through falling leaves and branches. Tree roots anchor the soil, preventing erosion and nutrient leaching from high rainfall. Rainforest soils are actually poorly adapted to agriculture because they’re so dependent on the forest itself. Remove the trees, and the soil rapidly degrades. This is why slash-and-burn agriculture moves every few years—the cleared land becomes unproductive almost immediately.

Biodiversity: An Irreplaceable Wealth

Beyond the extensive ecosystem services provided by tropical forests, their biodiversity defies easy comprehension. These forests cover less than 7% of Earth’s land surface yet contain more than half of the world’s plant and animal species. A single hectare can contain over 300 tree species. The complexity extends from the canopy to the soil, where vast networks of mycelium connect trees and facilitate nutrient exchange across kilometres.

This biodiversity isn’t just aesthetically valuable—it’s functionally essential. Research shows that biodiversity generally enhances ecosystem functioning, with positive effects on productivity, decomposition, soil respiration, and plant mortality. The relationship between biodiversity and carbon storage is complex, but studies demonstrate that diverse tree assemblages often achieve higher carbon stocks than monocultures.

Asian tropical forests stand out as particularly important. They are not only among the most diverse in the tropics but also among the most carbon-dense. Research comparing 360 plots across the tropics found that forests in Asia function as a triple hotspot for biodiversity, carbon, and threat—they have the highest species richness and carbon storage, while simultaneously facing substantial pressure from conversion to oil palm plantations and intensive logging.

Current Condition: An Unfolding Crisis

The scale of tropical forest destruction represents one of humanity’s most profound environmental failures. Tropical forests are disappearing at alarming rates, primarily due to conversion to agriculture, logging, and infrastructure development. Between 2001 and 2015, the world cleared approximately 45.1 million hectares of forest—an area larger than Sweden—for agricultural expansion alone.

Tropical deforestation is responsible for 10.3 billion tons of global CO2 emission each year—roughly twice the total greenhouse gas emissions of the United States. This makes forest conservation and restoration critical not just for biodiversity but for any serious climate strategy.

Degradation extends beyond outright deforestation. Even where forests remain standing, human activities such as selective logging, fragmentation, pollution, and invasive species reduce their ecological integrity. Research shows that areas degraded by pasture particularly impact soil porosity and permeability, restricting plant growth and biomass recovery. A comprehensive analysis of tropical forest restoration found that while natural regeneration can recover much of the lost ecosystem services, intact ecosystems still retain a far greater proportion of services compared to restored areas. This underscores a critical point: preserving remaining tropical forests is more effective than trying to restore what we’ve lost.

Threats: A Perfect Storm

The threats facing tropical rainforests form a deadly convergence of local and global pressures. Immediate drivers include agricultural expansion, particularly for cattle ranching and commodity crops like palm oil and soy. Logging, both legal and illegal, fragments forests and opens them to further degradation. Infrastructure development—roads, dams, mining operations—creates access points that accelerate forest loss.

Climate change itself now threatens tropical forests as well. Rising temperatures and changing precipitation patterns stress tree species adapted to specific conditions. Droughts make forests vulnerable to fires, creating feedback loops where burned areas become more susceptible to future fires. With rising temperatures, the delicate balance that allows rainforests to create their own weather can quickly tip into a downward spiral of drying and degradation.

The interconnections are what make the situation so perilous. Forest loss reduces rainfall, which stresses remaining forest, which reduces carbon storage, which accelerates warming, which intensifies droughts—each impact amplifying the next.

Mangroves: The Blue Carbon Guardians

Walk the boundary between land and sea in the tropics, and you’ll find yourself in one of Earth’s most remarkable transition zones. Here, trees grow with their roots submerged in salt water, their breathing roots reaching above the surface like fingers grasping for air. This tangled architecture creates underwater nurseries where juvenile fish shelter before venturing to coral reefs. Above, thousands of birds nest and call from the canopy.

These are mangrove forests—ecosystems that thrive in conditions that would kill most plants, and in doing so, provide some of the most valuable ecosystem services on the planet.

Ecosystem Services: Coastal Protection Powerhouses

Mangroves provide a suite of ecosystem services that are disproportionate to their limited extent. The complex system of roots and branches helps protect coastal populations and properties from flooding, strong winds, and extreme weather. During storms and tsunamis, mangrove forests can dramatically reduce wave energy and storm surge, protecting lives and infrastructure. Studies have found that mangroves can reduce wave heights by up to 66% and flood water depths by over 16% for every 100 meters of mangrove forest width.

The coastal protection value is enormous. Research estimates that optimising the placement of mangrove conservation efforts to protect 30% of global mangroves could potentially safeguard an additional 16.3 billion USD of coastal property value and 6.1 million people from coastal hazards. However, mangroves’ most extraordinary characteristic might be their carbon storage capacity. Unlike terrestrial forests that store most carbon in trunks and branches, mangroves store the majority in their root systems and neighboring soil. They absorb and store three to four times more carbon than terrestrial forests per hectare. The carbon storage of mangroves (0.096 Tg C km²) exceeds that of rainforests (0.024 Tg C km²), peat swamps (0.041 Tg C km²), salt marshes (0.059 Tg C km²), and seagrasses (0.014 Tg C km²). This “blue carbon” sequestration makes mangroves invaluable for climate mitigation.

Mangroves also provide crucial provisioning services. The fish, shellfish, and other food sources obtained from mangrove ecosystems play a vital role in food security for coastal communities. Studies suggest that strategic mangrove conservation could protect 50.7 million fisher days per year.

Biodiversity: Salt-Adapted Specialists

The biodiversity of mangrove forests is as unique as the ecosystems themselves. A recent comprehensive review found that 1,533 species are associated with mangroves globally, with nearly half of relevant mangrove-associated mammals, 22% of fish, 16% of plants, 13% of amphibians, and 8% of bird and reptile species threatened with extinction.

The biodiversity of mangroves supports ecosystem functioning in complex ways. Research demonstrates that both taxonomic diversity and functional diversity drive carbon storage in mangroves. The functional distinctiveness of species—how different they are in their ecological roles—has the strongest correlation with carbon storage capacity, indicating that blue carbon in mangroves is driven by the functional composition of diverse tree assemblages, not just species counts. You can’t just plant any mangrove species anywhere and expect optimal carbon sequestration—you need the right functional diversity for the location.

The invertebrate fauna associated with mangroves also displays extremely low functional redundancy globally, meaning that losing species rapidly translates to losing unique ecological functions. This makes mangrove ecosystems particularly vulnerable to biodiversity loss.

Current Condition: Half at Risk of Collapse

The first global mangrove assessment for the IUCN Red List of Ecosystems revealed a sobering reality: more than half (50%) of the world’s mangrove ecosystems are at risk of collapse, classified as either Vulnerable, Endangered, or Critically Endangered.

Despite only 13.5% of mangrove distribution currently being strictly protected, this protection is inadequate. The assessment found that all mangrove species are not adequately represented in protected areas, and many areas providing disproportionally large ecosystem services are missed entirely in conservation planning. Currently, more than 50% of protected mangrove ecosystems suffer high human pressure and are threatened by conversion, fragmentation, and degradation.

A 2018 study of disturbed versus undisturbed mangroves revealed the scale of degradation’s impact. Disturbed mangrove areas showed a loss of 20% of benthic biodiversity, with the local extinction of four entire phyla. There was an 80% loss of microbial-mediated decomposition rates, benthic biomass, and trophic resources. The altered biogeochemical cycles affected not just the mangrove itself but neighboring ecosystems—since meiofaunal biomass is the main food target for juvenile reef fishes, mangrove degradation cascades to affect connected marine habitats.

Threats: Climate Change at the Coast

Mangroves face multiple interacting threats, but climate change emerges as the most severe long-term danger. Sea level rise directly threatens mangroves, particularly where human development prevents them from migrating inland. Rising temperatures affect mangrove physiology and species distribution. Increased frequency and intensity of storms cause physical damage and mortality. Ocean acidification potentially affects the carbonate chemistry that some mangrove species depend on. Changing rainfall patterns alter the freshwater-saltwater balance that mangroves require. Research indicates that approximately half of total mangrove area (40-56% depending on emissions scenarios) will be at high to severe levels of risk by 2100 due to climate-modified tropical cyclone disturbance regimes and sea level rise.

Critically, areas with high levels of biodiversity and ecosystem service provision—including coastal protection, carbon sequestration, and fishery benefits—are at proportionally higher levels of risk. The ecosystems we most need are the ones most threatened.

Beyond climate, direct human impacts remain severe. Mangroves are threatened by deforestation for aquaculture, particularly shrimp farming, coastal development, pollution, and dam construction that alters freshwater flows and sediment delivery, while overexploitation of timber, fish, crustaceans, and shellfish degrades ecosystem structure and function.

To Be Continued

Stand back and examine tropical forests and mangroves together. Despite vast differences—one towers 50 meters in the air on dry land, the other grows in coastal mud with roots in salt water—they share fundamental characteristics.

Both are carbon storage champions. Both support extraordinary biodiversity. Both create their own environmental conditions—forests creating rainfall, mangroves building land through sediment trapping. Both provide ecosystem services wildly disproportionate to their spatial extent. These ecosystems represent evolutionary innovation accumulated over millions of years. They are solutions to biological problems, refined through countless generations.

When we destroy these ecosystems, we’re not just releasing carbon or losing species—we’re eliminating information. Genetic information encoded in organisms found nowhere else. Ecological information embedded in community structure. Evolutionary information representing millions of years of problem-solving. Once lost, this information is unrecoverable.

In Part Two of this series we will examine grasslands and deserts—systems that have remained in forests’ shadow in conservation priorities despite providing essential ecosystem services. Like tropical forests and mangroves, they face severe threats.

The story of Earth’s major ecosystems is ultimately about choices—what we value, what we protect, what we’re willing to sacrifice, and what we refuse to lose. The pillars of the Earth are fracturing. The question is whether we’ll act to repair them before they collapse completely.

Andreas Bräuning Arcos, CMO at Hyphen, describes a different path forward. Hyphen develops atmospheric monitoring technology that directly measures how much carbon forests remove using eddy covariance flux towers and satellite data. This approach replaces theoretical models with empirical proof, creating the foundation for markets built on verified performance rather than promises. In this interview, Bräuning Arcos explains why measurement matters, how it enables genuine climate justice, and what systemic changes are needed to properly value nature and its protectors.

1. Carbon markets were supposed to help address climate change by putting a price on carbon. Why have they failed, and what needs to change?

Carbon markets today stand at a crossroads. They were born from an urgent and noble idea: that it should be possible to reduce emissions efficiently by putting a price on carbon. In theory, markets would channel capital toward those capable of cutting or removing emissions most effectively, creating both climate and economic benefits. In practice, much of the early architecture was built on an unstable foundation of counterfactual accounting. Credits were issued for avoided emissions based on scenarios of what might have happened if a project had not existed. These imagined baselines turned the market into a space of speculation rather than measurement. For a time, this fiction was tolerated because it allowed the appearance of progress. However, as evidence accumulated, the illusion collapsed. Satellite data and independent reviews revealed that many of the largest forest offset programs generated insufficient or negligible real climate benefit. In a sense, the atmosphere exposed the lie.

The problem isn’t just technical, but structural. Much of the world’s GHG removal originates in developing nations, yet methods, data, and certification authority have been controlled by private actors in the Global North. This asymmetry perpetuates a form of carbon colonialism, where local communities become passive hosts for external projects rather than active agents in producing climate stability. The lack of transparency and equitable revenue sharing has compounded the problem, turning what could have been instruments of empowerment into instruments of dependency. Moreover, the market’s obsession with the cheapest possible ton has pushed prices so low that genuine conservation rarely becomes financially viable.

The path forward is not to abandon carbon markets but to rebuild them on scientific truth and moral clarity. For markets to work, they must reflect ecosystem reality. This means grounding all crediting in measured performance: tonnes of CO₂ actually removed from the atmosphere or emissions verifiably avoided through direct observation. Atmospheric-based monitoring allows continuous measurement of carbon fluxes in ecosystems and makes additionality practical. If the measured outcome depends on funded stewardship, the case is clear. Credits then become payments for verified services rather than wagers on hypothetical worlds.

Rebuilding markets also means redefining value distribution. Successful markets must direct the majority of revenue to those who maintain ecosystem function: communities, Indigenous peoples, and nations who act as custodians of carbon sinks. This requires sovereign measurement capacity, transparent benefit sharing, and legal frameworks that treat data and land rights as integral to value creation. In such a system, nature-rich countries are not offset providers for industrialised economies. They are producers of a measurable global service and should be paid accordingly.

2. There’s clearly a lot that needs to change for carbon markets to not enhance existing inequalities. What are some of the challenges of building effective but also fair carbon markets?

The main challenges in building effective and fair markets sit at the intersection of science, economics, and ethics. The first challenge is epistemic: we must replace models and promises with measurements and proof so that each credit is anchored in atmospheric reality. A second challenge is permanence. Nature-based projects operate in living systems that change constantly. For example, traditional accounting has treated permanence as a box to tick, mitigated by buffer pools or insurance, but those are partial solutions. True permanence depends on continuous monitoring and adaptive management. With atmospheric-based MRV (Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification), we can see removals as they happen and verify that they remain over time. Continuous flux data makes permanence measurable, it reveals reversals early, will eventually crediting to adjust dynamically, and turns the system into a self-correcting cycle grounded in what the atmosphere actually shows.

A third challenge is additionality. In theory it ensures that credits pay for outcomes that would not have happened otherwise. In practice, it has become an exercise in creative storytelling. To avoid this, we should redefine additionality in practical terms. Rather than asking whether a project would have occurred without credits, ask whether the revenue is functionally necessary to maintain or improve the measured outcome. Additionality becomes empirical: does the flow of finance demonstrably sustain the flow of removals and broader ecosystem services? When markets are tied to measured performance, the answer rests in data rather than conjecture.

Beyond technical issues, the most dangerous challenge is moral. Markets can be used to delay emissions reductions or to reproduce patterns of environmental injustice. Avoiding these outcomes requires new principles. Every project must begin with Free, Prior, and Informed Consent. Land rights, data ownership, and benefit sharing must be codified before a single credit is issued. Revenue must flow to those who manage and protect the land, not only to developers or intermediaries. Buyers must be held accountable and use credits to complement internal decarbonisation, not replace it.

Equally important is integrating carbon markets with broader ecological integrity. A credit should never be issued for an activity that harms biodiversity, water systems, or community well-being. The goal is not to monetise carbon in isolation but to recognise the ecosystem service bundle that underpins climate stability. A genuinely regenerative market measures multiple indicators—carbon fluxes, soil health, hydrology, biodiversity, habitat quality—and ensures that all move in the right direction.

In essence, integrity depends on aligning truth, fairness, and care. Truth comes from direct measurement. Fairness comes from equitable governance and shared ownership. Care comes from ensuring that capital sustains living systems, not abstract tons. When those three principles are embedded in design, misuse becomes structurally difficult. The market ceases to be a mechanism for moral outsourcing and becomes a vehicle for accountability.

3. You’ve emphasised the importance of atmospheric-based measurement. How does this actually work, and why is it so essential?

Accurately measuring a forest’s carbon removal is both a scientific and philosophical question. Scientifically, it asks how much carbon is moving between land and atmosphere. Philosophically, it asks whether we are willing to anchor value in reality rather than imagination. The traditional approach relies on indirect methods: occasional field plots, biomass models, and remote sensing estimates that extrapolate from limited data. These methods are useful for research but were not designed for financial integrity. They provide snapshots, not continuous truth. What is needed is a shift from estimation to observation, from inference to evidence.

The most advanced way to measure GHG removals or emissions in ecosystems is atmospheric-based MRV. At its core is the eddy covariance method, which directly measures the exchange of gases between ecosystems and the atmosphere. A gas analyser measures the molecular composition of the air as it moves in vertical eddies. If the number of GHG molecules moving upward exceeds the number moving downward, the flux is positive, and vice versa. This gives a real-time measure of net carbon flux. When flux towers are placed within a forest, the ecosystem speaks for itself. The data reveal whether the forest is acting as a carbon sink or source across seasons and stress events. This method has been validated over decades and its costs have fallen to the point where it can be scaled for carbon finance.

What makes this approach transformative is that it eliminates the need for counterfactual baselines in carbon removal projects. We no longer have to imagine what might have been emitted or absorbed. The atmosphere becomes the auditor. Each tonne of CO₂ removed is documented through empirical observation, creating a transparent chain of evidence that can anchor both trust and price. When this data is integrated with remote sensing, which provides wall-to-wall coverage of structure and disturbance, and biometric field measurements, which validate biomass and species composition, we get a complete picture of performance. This model-data fusion is the backbone of high-integrity accounting because it merges the precision of local measurement with the scalability of satellite observation.

Beyond carbon, the same systems can quantify broader ecosystem services that underpin a forest’s true value. Flux towers measure water vapor and energy exchange, allowing us to track evapotranspiration, canopy cooling, and rainfall regulation. Remote sensing adds forest moisture, biodiversity proxies, and habitat connectivity. In combination, these indicators translate ecological function into measurable economic value. A healthy forest not only removes carbon but stabilizes rainfall patterns and cools surrounding landscapes. These services should be integrated into economic accounting through national ecosystem accounts so that budgets and investments reflect their importance.

Long-term measurement transforms conservation from a static promise into a living practice. A forest is not a fixed object. It is a dynamic system whose behavior changes with seasons, climate, and care. Short-term observations capture fragments of this story, but only continuous, long-duration measurement reveals its true character. In ecological terms, this is the difference between a photograph and a film. In economic terms, it is the difference between speculation and performance-based value.

To value forests correctly, we must build an observation-based economy that pays for what nature demonstrably delivers. Measurement becomes the foundation of dignity and sovereignty. It allows countries and communities to prove their contribution to climate stability and to be compensated accordingly. When data is transparent, continuous, and verifiable, the forest is no longer a passive asset or abstract store. It is recognized as living infrastructure performing measurable work, and its stewards become recognized service providers with rightful claim to revenue. This is not just a technical upgrade—it is a moral and epistemic correction. By grounding value in empirical truth, we replace speculation with accountability.

4. You’ve mentioned “active conservation” as opposed to traditional approaches. What does this mean, and why is it important?

Active conservation means treating ecosystems not as passive spaces to be protected from human interference, but as living systems that require continual care, management, and measurement to function. It is a shift from set-aside thinking to performance thinking, from guarding nature in isolation to working with it to sustain health and productivity. In the old model, conservation often meant fencing off land and hoping that non-intervention would preserve it. In a changing climate, that assumption no longer holds. Forests burn, pests spread, rainfall patterns shift, and stressors accumulate. Without active human engagement, many ecosystems degrade even in the absence of direct exploitation. Active conservation recognises this reality and invests in the people, infrastructure, and knowledge needed to keep ecosystems resilient and alive.

Practically, this means funding the ongoing work that allows ecosystems to continue delivering services. It includes controlled burning and firebreak maintenance, invasive species removal, assisted regeneration, water management, soil restoration, and community-led monitoring. It also means using real-time data to adapt interventions dynamically. Atmospheric and ecological measurement systems enable managers to see how ecosystems are performing, how they respond to stress, and where intervention is needed. Conservation becomes a feedback loop: measure, understand, act, and measure again. Stewardship adopts the operational logic of maintaining infrastructure. You do not build a power plant and walk away. You operate, maintain, and optimise it. The same must now be true of the natural systems that regulate our climate.

The importance of this shift cannot be overstated. Passive conservation has struggled to attract sustained finance because it generates no measurable output. It depends on philanthropy or government budgets that are finite and volatile. Active conservation creates a measurable value stream. When you can quantify services—tonnes of CO₂ removed, cubic meters of water regulated, degrees of local cooling—you can structure payment mechanisms around performance. This transforms conservation from a moral appeal into an investable asset class. It gives communities and nations a financial reason to maintain ecosystems proactively rather than reactively. Active conservation makes protection durable because it is embedded in economic logic as well as ethical commitment.

It also redefines the role of people in nature. Instead of viewing local and Indigenous communities as potential threats, it recognises them as essential operators of ecological systems. Their knowledge, presence, and labor are part of the metabolism that keeps landscapes alive. When properly valued, they are not beneficiaries of conservation—they are its professionals. Active conservation creates jobs, skills, and dignity by formalizing this role. It pays for expertise in fire management, hydrology, soil health, and biodiversity stewardship. It creates a new form of rural infrastructure employment that maintains the natural systems on which all economies depend.

In essence, active conservation transforms climate and biodiversity finance from a passive transfer of guilt into an active partnership with nature. It gives the living world a voice through data and a livelihood through stewardship. It replaces avoidance, which pays to prevent harm, with production, which pays for the ongoing creation of ecological stability. That is how forests can sell services credibly and how communities can build durable livelihoods around regeneration.

5. Looking ahead, what systemic changes are needed to create an economic system that properly values and protects nature?

To create an economic system that truly values and protects nature, we must begin by acknowledging that the existing one was built on omission. It priced labor, capital, and commodities, but not the living systems that make all of them possible. Forests, oceans, soils, wetlands were treated as free infrastructure, absorbing wastes and sustaining economies invisibly. The result has been a metabolic rift, a rupture in the material exchange between society and the Earth. Repairing that rift requires a new foundation that measures and rewards the regenerative work of ecosystems as part of the economy’s core functioning rather than its periphery.

The first step is to ground value in truth. Economic worth must flow from physical reality, not from models or narratives. This means building an observational infrastructure that continuously measures the planet’s metabolic functions—carbon fluxes, water cycles, biodiversity integrity—so that value reflects what ecosystems actually do. Atmospheric-based monitoring, satellite sensing, and ecological data platforms form the empirical base for this transformation. They allow nature to speak in the only language markets can understand: verified performance. When data reveals how much carbon a forest removes, how much water a wetland purifies, or how much cooling a mangrove provides, those services can be priced and paid for transparently. The atmosphere becomes both witness and auditor.

Second, we must redefine ownership and rights. A system that values nature must be governed by those who live with it. This means embedding Free, Prior, and Informed Consent into every transaction, legally recognising land tenure and data sovereignty, and structuring revenue so that the majority flows to local custodians and Indigenous peoples. Value should follow responsibility. When those who protect ecosystems share equitably in proceeds, conservation ceases to be charity. It becomes livelihood and governance. This is how we replace extractive hierarchies with sovereign measurement: the ability of nations and communities to generate, control, and profit from their own environmental data. It is the anti-colonial foundation of a just market.

Third, we need institutions that treat nature as infrastructure. Just as power grids or transport systems are maintained through continuous investment, the Earth’s regulatory systems require ongoing care. Forests are carbon utilities. Wetlands are water regulators. Grasslands are nutrient recyclers. Recognising them as infrastructure allows public budgets, development banks, and private investors to allocate capital accordingly. Tools like national ecosystem accounts already point in this direction. Integrating such frameworks into fiscal policy—national accounts, balance sheets, and bond markets—would make ecosystem health a matter of macroeconomic stability rather than philanthropy.

Finally, this new system requires a cultural transformation. Economics alone cannot save nature if the underlying worldview remains one of separation. We are not external observers of the planet. We are participants in its critical zone. A regenerative economy must reflect that entanglement. Its success cannot be measured solely in profit, but in the stability of the biophysical systems that sustain life. This means redefining growth as the expansion of ecological capacity rather than the extraction of material throughput. It also means embracing a positive vision for the Global South. Forest nations can build export economies around verified climate services, earning ecological dividends for stabilising the atmosphere. With sovereign measurement and fair contracts, forests can sell their services on their own terms, and communities can fund schools, clinics, and jobs from stewardship rather than extraction.

Looking ahead, the goal is not to add a green layer to an old system. It is to design an entirely different architecture of value: an economy of truth rather than fiction, of reciprocity rather than extraction, of stewardship rather than consumption. The tools now exist—real-time measurement, open data, fair governance, and financial mechanisms that reward performance over promise. What remains is moral alignment: the courage to replace aspiration with accountability. When truth, technology, and justice converge in this way, nature will no longer need to plead for protection. It will be recognised as the foundation of all value and the most essential infrastructure humanity possesses, and developing countries will have a clear, dignified pathway to prosperity through the sale of verified ecological services.

The timing is deliberate. Gates wrote the memo explicitly for COP30, urging world leaders to ask “whether the little money designated for climate is being spent on the right things.” His answer? A “strategic pivot” away from emissions reduction targets toward poverty alleviation and disease prevention.

Why This Framing Is Dangerous

Gates’ memo isn’t just a shift in emphasis—it’s a fundamental reframing that creates a false choice between climate action and human development. In a moment when we need integrated climate policies that address both mitigation and adaptation, both emissions and equity, Gates is offering world leaders a convenient excuse to deprioritise the hard work of decarbonisation.

The danger lies not in what Gates says, but in how it will be used. Within 24 hours of the memo’s release, Donald Trump celebrated on Truth Social: “I just won the War on the Climate Change Hoax. Bill Gates has finally admitted that he was completely WRONG on the issue.”

This is predictable. When a figure as influential as Gates—someone who literally wrote a book called “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster” just four years ago—suddenly argues that climate “will not lead to humanity’s demise” and that we’re focusing “too much on near-term emissions goals,” he hands ammunition to those actively blocking climate policy.

Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, called the memo “pointless, vague, unhelpful and confusing.” More pointedly: “There is no reason to pit poverty reduction versus climate transformation. Both are utterly feasible, and readily so, if the Big Oil lobby is brought under control.”

This is the crux of the problem. Gates presents poverty alleviation and climate action as competing priorities requiring trade-offs. But the climate crisis itself is the greatest threat to development gains, particularly in the poorest countries Gates claims to champion. You cannot separate these challenges—they are fundamentally intertwined.

The framing is particularly insidious because it masquerades as pragmatism while fundamentally misrepresenting both the science and the economics of climate action. It arrives at precisely the moment when climate science tells us we’ve exhausted the time for anything but immediate, dramatic emissions cuts. It creates permission structures for exactly the kind of delayed action that has characterised failed climate policy for decades. And it comes from someone whose own investments tell a very different story about where his priorities actually lie.

Why This Framing Arrives at the Worst Possible Moment

To understand why Gates’ memo is so problematic, you need to understand where we are in the climate crisis right now.

The 2024 data is devastating. For the first time in recorded history, a full calendar year exceeded 1.5°C of warming above pre-industrial levels. The World Meteorological Organisation forecasts a 70% chance that the next five years will exceed 1.5°C on average. Recent climate modelling suggests we’ve likely already entered the 20-year period during which the long-term average will cross this threshold—possibly as early as 2028.

This isn’t an abstract future threat. The cumulative death toll from climate change since 2000 will pass 4 million in 2024. In the last two decades, the 55 most climate-vulnerable economies have experienced climate damages exceeding $500 billion. In 2022, disasters triggered a record 32.6 million internal displacements, with 98% caused by weather-related hazards.

The IPCC is unequivocal: to limit warming to 1.5°C with no or limited overshoot requires that global greenhouse gas emissions peak by 2025 and decline by 43% by 2030 relative to 2019 levels. We need to reach net zero CO2 emissions by around 2050. Concretely, this would involve phasing out unabated fossil fuel consumption, dramatically scaling up zero-carbon power, expanding sustainable transport, electrifying transport and industry, and halting deforestation.

The problem? We’re not following those pathways. Not even close. Under current policies, the world is on track to reach as much as 3.1°C above preindustrial levels by 2100. At that level of warming, in many parts of the world, humans and ecosystems will be unable to adapt.

This is the context in which Gates released his memo urging a pivot away from emissions reduction.

Examining the “Three Tough Truths”

Let’s look at the main claims Gates is making.

Truth #1: “Climate change is a serious problem, but it will not be the end of civilisation”

Gates’ first “truth” is that climate change is a “serious problem” but won’t be “the end of civilisation.” He acknowledges we’re falling short of climate goals but argues that “people will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future.”

This statement is technically accurate but misleading. The question isn’t whether humans will survive climate change—most scientists agree we will. The question is what kind of world we’ll inhabit and how many people will suffer catastrophically if we take the “moderate action” path that Gates suggests.

The 2025 State of the Climate Report, published in BioScience by leading climate scientists, paints a very different picture than Gates’ reassuring framing. The report notes that for more than 11,000 years, Earth’s climate remained stable during the Holocene epoch, creating environmental conditions that allowed both ecosystems and societies to thrive. That stability is now giving way to “a period of rapid and dangerous change.”

The report continues: “Since the Industrial Revolution, human activities have dramatically increased concentrations of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. As a result, over the last 50 years, global temperatures have likely increased at a greater rate than at any other time in the last 2000 years.”

The IPCC’s assessments show that at current policy trajectories (around 2.7°C-3.1°C warming), every world region will face severe increases in climate hazards. Risks include heat-related deaths, food-, water- and vector-borne diseases, poor mental health, flooding in coastal cities, and decreased food production in multiple regions. Many climate impacts—particularly sea-level rise from ice sheets and ocean acidification—are essentially permanent for many generations and will take centuries to thousands of years to restore.

Gates’ framing that climate change won’t “end civilisation” creates the false impression that we can tolerate significant warming without civilisational-scale disruption. This fundamentally misunderstands how interconnected modern civilisation is. As Princeton climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer noted in his response to Gates, what about the natural world? The ecosystems that provide the foundation for human prosperity?

The “won’t end civilisation” framing also ignores that climate impacts are already triggering what scholars call “threat multipliers”—exacerbating existing vulnerabilities, destabilising political systems, triggering migration crises, and increasing conflict over resources. A 3°C world may not be “the end of civilisation,” but it would represent a civilisational transformation characterised by mass suffering, ecosystem collapse, and the destruction of countless communities.

Truth #2: “Temperature is not the best way to measure our progress on climate”

Gates’ second “truth” argues that instead of focusing on limiting temperature rise, we should measure progress using the UN’s Human Development Index (HDI). He points out that the 30 countries with the lowest HDI scores produce just “one-third of 1% of global GDP” despite being home to one of every eight people.

Gates is not wrong that human development matters—but he’s profoundly wrong in suggesting we can separate development from temperature limits. Temperature is a useful metric precisely because it correlates with human welfare impacts. Gates himself acknowledges: “Every tenth of a degree of heating that we prevent is hugely beneficial because a stable climate makes it easier to improve people’s lives.”

Here’s what Gates omits: those 30 countries with the lowest HDI scores are also the nations that will be hit hardest by climate change. They’re the countries with the least capacity to adapt, the most vulnerable populations, and the greatest exposure to climate impacts. Every tenth of a degree of additional warming makes their development challenges exponentially harder.

The science is clear on this. The IPCC shows that climate change impacts are already measurable and will worsen significantly with additional warming.

The difference between 1.5°C and 2°C of warming, seemingly small, translates to:

• Hundreds of millions more people exposed to climate-related risks and poverty.

• Several hundred million more people exposed to water stress.

• Up to several hundred million more people at risk of climate-related health impacts.

• Dramatically increased risks to ecosystems, with coral reefs facing near-complete die-off at 2°C.

Temperature limits aren’t arbitrary targets chosen by “doomsday” activists. They represent scientifically determined thresholds beyond which adaptation becomes increasingly impossible, particularly for the vulnerable populations Gates claims to care about.

Gates’ suggestion that we focus on HDI instead of temperature is like suggesting we measure the success of flood control by looking at economic growth while ignoring whether we’re building levees. Development matters, but it can’t substitute for preventing the underlying crisis.

Moreover, there’s compelling evidence that climate action itself drives development. Renewable energy is now cheaper than fossil fuels in most contexts. Energy access through distributed renewables is transforming development in off-grid communities. Climate adaptation investments create jobs and build resilience. The notion that we must choose between temperature limits and human development is false—and conveniently ignores who benefits from delaying climate action.

Truth #3: “Health and prosperity are the best defence against climate change”

Gates third “truth” argues that economic development is the greatest tool for climate adaptation, and that blocking developing countries from using natural gas for development is counterproductive.

There is some truth here but it’s wrapped in dangerous oversimplification. Yes, wealthy countries are better positioned to adapt to climate impacts. But this ignores several critical facts:

First, the relationship between development and climate resilience isn’t linear. At some point, no amount of wealth can protect against extreme climate impacts. You can’t adapt your way out of 3°C of warming. At that level, adaptation in many regions would be so expensive and extensive that it would actually prevent the development Gates claims to prioritise.

Second, the fossil fuel development Gates advocates for developing nations will make climate impacts worse for everyone, including those same developing nations. The pathway to prosperity for developing nations cannot follow the fossil-fuel-intensive development model of the Global North—there’s simply not enough carbon budget remaining.

Third, this framing ignores the rapidly falling costs of renewable energy, which in many contexts is now cheaper than fossil fuel development. Renewables now represent a more affordable developmental pathway for developing nations than natural gas that also limits emissions and prevents further warming, thereby protecting people from the worst effects of climate change.

Climate scientist Chris Field has noted that “We should invest for both the long term and the short term. A vibrant long-term future depends on both tackling climate change and supporting human development.”

The idea that we must choose between these is false. What’s actually needed is massive investment in clean development pathways that leapfrog fossil fuels entirely—something wealthy nations have a responsibility to fund.

Moreover, Gates’ emphasis on health and prosperity as climate defences ignores that climate change is already undermining both. Heat stress reduces labor productivity. Extreme weather destroys infrastructure and livelihoods. Changing disease vectors spread illness. Crop failures threaten food security. Climate change isn’t just something wealthy people can adapt to—it’s actively preventing the prosperity and health outcomes Gates says he wants.

Gates, Fossil Fuels, and AI: Following the Money

Understanding Gates’ shifting stance requires looking at his investments and interests. Despite claiming to divest from fossil fuels in 2019, a Jacobin investigation of IRS records found that the Gates Foundation Trust actually increased its fossil fuel holdings from $216 million in 2019 to $287 million in 2023. This includes stakes in BP, Occidental Petroleum, and coal giant Glencore.

Meanwhile, Gates has invested billions in AI and the energy infrastructure to support it. His company TerraPower is building nuclear reactors specifically designed to power AI data centres, with Nvidia as an investor. Gates has called AI “not some stupid mania thing” and “the biggest change agent,” defending the massive energy demands of AI systems.

Here’s the uncomfortable reality: AI’s energy consumption is projected to account for 8% of global electricity by 2030—double today’s usage. Tech companies are scrambling to secure energy sources, often turning to fossil fuels or nuclear when renewables can’t meet demand fast enough.

Is it coincidental that Gates—heavily invested in AI infrastructure and the energy systems to power it—is now arguing that economic development (and the energy growth it requires) should take priority over emissions reductions? That developing nations should be allowed to exploit fossil fuels? That we’re focusing “too much” on near-term emissions goals?

In 2025, Gates scaled back Breakthrough Energy, the initiative he founded to accelerate the development of clean energy technologies to combat climate change, reducing policy operations, laying off staff, and cutting grants. The same year, he released a memo arguing for deprioritising emissions reductions. This isn’t just a philosophical shift—it aligns perfectly with business interests in an AI-driven economy that demands enormous amounts of energy that cannot yet be met by renewables.

COP30: What’s Actually at Stake

Gates explicitly wrote his memo “for COP30,” the UN climate conference happening in Belém, Brazil in November 2025. He calls it “a chance to refocus on the metric that should count even more than emissions and temperature change: improving lives.”

But COP30 isn’t just another climate conference. It’s the moment when nations must submit updated Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement—their commitments for climate action through 2035. These commitments will largely determine whether we have any hope of limiting warming to 1.5°C or even 2°C.

The conference comes at a critical juncture. The world has already warmed approximately 1.1-1.2°C above pre-industrial levels. We’re on track to blow past 1.5°C within years, potentially by 2027-2028. UN Secretary General António Guterres has warned of “devastating consequences” as humanity misses climate targets.

What COP30 needs:

• Ambitious NDCs: Countries must commit to cutting emissions 42% by 2030 and 57% by 2035 to have any hope of limiting warming to 1.5°C.

• Climate finance: At COP29, countries agreed to mobilise $300 billion per year in climate finance by 2035 for developing nations, with a broader target of $1.3 trillion from all sources. This must be delivered.

• Fossil fuel phase-out: Clear commitments and timelines for transitioning away from all fossil fuels.

• Loss and damage funding: Resources for countries already experiencing climate catastrophe.

• Adaptation support: Yes, helping vulnerable nations adapt—but alongside aggressive mitigation, not instead of it.

Gates’ memo explicitly calls for COP30 to represent a “strategic pivot” away from these priorities. He urges world leaders to ask “whether the little money designated for climate is being spent on the right things”—with his answer being that too much focus is on emissions reduction rather than poverty alleviation.

This fundamentally misunderstands both the science and the economics at stake.

First, the “little money designated for climate” Gates references is already far below what’s needed. The climate finance gaps are massive and growing. Adaptation finance is particularly inadequate—the UN Secretary-General warned in releasing UNEP’s 2025 Adaptation Gap Report that funding gaps are “leaving the world’s most vulnerable exposed to rising seas, deadly storms, and searing heat.”

Second, climate finance isn’t separate from development finance—it’s essential for development. Without climate action, development gains will be washed away. The World Bank has made this clear: climate change threatens to push over 100 million people into extreme poverty by 2030 if current trajectories continue.

Third, the emissions cuts needed this decade aren’t optional if we want any chance of limiting warming to tolerable levels. The IPCC couldn’t be clearer: emissions must peak immediately and decline by 43% by 2030. That’s less than five years away. Every year of delay makes the necessary cuts steeper and more disruptive.

Fourth, the renewable energy transition is already underway and accelerating. In the first half of 2025, renewables surpassed coal as the leading source of electricity globally. China is the clear driver, but renewable generation is growing faster in some emerging economies than in wealthy nations. The question isn’t whether to pursue the transition—it’s whether to accelerate it or allow fossil fuel interests to slow it down.

What Gates’ memo provides is a convenient rationalisation for wealthy nations to scale back ambition. It provides permission for delay. It creates intellectual cover for those who want to slow climate action. It suggests we can separate human development from planetary stability when they’re inextricably linked.

The Path Forward: Rejecting False Choices

The fundamental flaw in Gates’ argument is the false choice at its heart. We don’t have to choose between fighting poverty and fighting climate change. We don’t have to choose between human development and emissions reductions. We don’t have to choose between adaptation and mitigation.

What we need—what COP30 must deliver—is integrated climate policy that addresses multiple crises simultaneously:

Clean energy development that brings power to the 759 million people without electricity while building zero-carbon infrastructure.

Climate finance that helps developing nations leapfrog fossil fuels rather than locking in decades of emissions.

Just transition that creates green jobs while supporting workers and communities dependent on fossil fuel industries.

Nature-based solutions that protect ecosystems while supporting livelihoods.

Health systems that address both climate-sensitive diseases and the health impacts of fossil fuel pollution.

Adaptation and mitigation together, because we need both to protect human welfare.

This isn’t naive idealism—it’s the only viable path forward. The climate crisis and the development crisis are the same crisis. Solving one requires solving the other.

Gates concludes his memo by saying governments should “be rigorous about measuring the impact of every effort in the world’s climate agenda.” He’s right about that. So let’s be rigorous about the impact of his memo.

Giving world leaders permission to deprioritise emissions reductions weeks before COP30 isn’t pragmatism—it’s sabotage. Creating false trade-offs between climate and development isn’t realism—it’s misleading. Arguing that we’re focusing “too much” on near-term emissions goals when we’re catastrophically off track isn’t wisdom—it’s soft denial.

The billionaire who wrote “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster” has now provided a roadmap for accepting one. Whether that’s due to shifting business interests, genuine belief, or naive faith in technological salvation, the result is the same: a dangerous message at the worst possible time.

COP30 will determine whether we maintain any hope of a liveable climate future. The last thing negotiators need is a convenient excuse to lower ambition. Gates has provided exactly that.

The choice at COP30 isn’t between climate action and human welfare. It’s between integrated solutions that address both, or catastrophic failure that ensures neither.

Sources:

Bill Gates. (2025). “Three Tough Truths About Climate.” GatesNotes.

Multiple news sources covering Gates memo: PBS NewsHour, NBC News, Newsweek, Heatmap News, The Wire, Bloomberg, ABC News (October 28-30, 2025)

IPCC Assessment Reports on 1.5°C warming and climate impacts

World Meteorological Organization. (2025). State of the Global Climate 2024.

Nature Communications Earth & Environment. (2025). “A traceable global warming record and clarity for the 1.5 °C and well-below-2 °C goals.”

BioScience. (2025). “2025 state of the climate report: a planet on the brink.”

World Resources Institute. “The 1.5 Degrees C Temperature Target: 8 Things to Know.”

United Nations. “1.5°C: what it means and why it matters.”

Jacobin. (2025). “Bill Gates Is Playing Both Sides of the Climate Crisis.”

Vice. (2019). “Bill Gates Says He’s Fighting Climate Change While Cashing in on Oil.”

Techzine Global. (2024). “Bill Gates sees no problem in growth of energy consumption due to rise of AI.”

CNBC. “Utilities grapple with a multibillion question: How much AI data center power demand is real.” (October 2025)

Network World. (2025). “Microsoft will invest $80B in AI data centers in fiscal 2025.”

Chatham House. (2025). “What can COP30 achieve, following US withdrawal and underwhelming climate plans?”

House of Commons Library. (2025). “COP30: The 2025 United Nations Climate Change Conference.”

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The Nature Conservancy. “COP30: Your Guide to the 2025 UN Climate Change Conference.”

European Council. (2025). “COP30: Council sets EU position for the climate conference in Belém.”

That moment changed something in me. Not dramatically, not all at once. But quietly, persistently. It made me want to protect what I’d experienced. It made me want to return to it. Most importantly, it made me believe that protection was possible.

This is the power of awe. And we’re not talking about it nearly enough when we discuss climate change and environmental action.

The Psychology of Hope and Despair

Human emotions are not just fleeting internal states—they are powerful drivers of behaviour, shaping how we think, what we pay attention to, and ultimately, how we act. And when it comes to complex, overwhelming challenges like climate change, the emotions we experience can mean the difference between engagement and paralysis.

Positive emotions—hope, awe, wonder, joy—do something remarkable to our psychology. They broaden our thinking, expand our perspective, and open us up to new possibilities. When we feel hope, we look outward. We scan for solutions. We connect with others. We build resilience and personal resources that help us navigate difficulty. Positive emotions create what psychologists call an “upward spiral”: good feelings lead to broader thinking, which leads to better outcomes, which generate more positive emotions.

Negative emotions, on the other hand, narrow our focus. Fear makes us vigilant for threats. Sadness turns us inward. Despair makes us withdraw. These emotions evolved for good reasons—they help us respond to immediate dangers—but when applied to vast, long-term challenges like climate change, they can create what researchers describe as a “paralysing effect.” We become overwhelmed. We feel powerless. We turn away.

We need the negative emotions too, of course. The research is clear on this: negative emotions about climate change can sometimes motivate action and spark engagement. After all, we need to understand the stakes and feel appropriate concern to take action, but not to the extent that we are crushed into inaction. We desperately need a counterbalance—something that keeps us engaged, that makes us want to fight even when things get hard, that reminds us what we’re fighting for.

How We Talk About Climate Is Failing Us

Walk into any conversation about climate change and you’ll likely encounter a familiar narrative: doom and gloom. Rising temperatures. Extreme weather. Species extinction. Ecosystem collapse. The ticking clock. The point of no return.

Just take a look at some recent headlines:

All of this is true. All of it matters. But here’s what research on climate communication is increasingly revealing: this approach isn’t working the way we hoped it would.

Study after study shows that doom narratives can scare people, but fear alone rarely translates into sustained action. In fact, in the United States, climate doomism—the belief that catastrophic warming is now inevitable and effective mitigation is impossible—is now more prevalent than climate skepticism. It has become the primary reason people cite for opposing climate action.

Think about that. We’ve spent decades trying to make people understand how serious the crisis is, and we’ve succeeded so well that many now believe it’s too late to do anything about it. The behaviours resulting from doomism are comparable to those from climate denial: both produce inaction.

Recent research found that while exposure to doom-and-gloom news stories about climate change created fear, that fear often didn’t lead to the hoped-for behaviour change. In some contexts, scare tactics actually reinforced negative attitudes among people who were already skeptical. In Norway, dire warnings were among the least effective measures for increasing political support for climate action.

The problem isn’t that people don’t know climate change is serious. Eighty-six percent of participants in one study believed climate change poses a threat. The problem is that accurately understanding the crisis doesn’t correlate with believing we can successfully address it. Scientific accuracy alone won’t encourage climate action—we also need to communicate agency, possibility, and meaning.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: we’ve become very good at communicating what we’re losing. We’ve become experts at conveying threats, but we’ve been far less skilled at communicating what we’re protecting, what we love, what fills us with wonder, and why any of it is worth the fight.

We need a different story. Not instead of the warnings—alongside them. A story that doesn’t ask people to act from fear alone, but invites them to act from love, connection, and awe.

The Transformative Power of Awe

Awe is a complex emotion that occurs when we encounter something vast, something that transcends our current understanding of the world. It’s that spine-tingling feeling when you stand before a sweeping landscape, when you witness an act of extraordinary courage, when you’re moved by music that seems to touch something beyond words.

For thousands of years, poets and mystics have tried to capture awe in language. Only in the past two decades have scientists begun to understand it systematically—and what they’re discovering is extraordinary.

Awe reduces our self-focus. It makes us feel part of something larger than ourselves. And this shift from “me” to “we” has profound implications. An amplified focus on the self is associated with depression, anxiety, aggression, and everyday incivility. Awe, by contrast, creates what researchers call a “small self”—not diminished, but properly positioned within a larger whole.

This isn’t just philosophical. Awe changes behaviour. People who experience awe become more generous, more cooperative, more willing to help others. They’re less likely to focus on material goods and more likely to value experiences. They report greater life satisfaction and well-being. They even show lower levels of inflammation markers associated with chronic disease.

Most importantly for environmental action, awe strengthens our connection to nature and increases pro-environmental behaviour. When people feel awe in response to nature, they’re more likely to want to protect it. Awe awakens what researchers call “ecological consciousness”—a sense of responsibility to help protect the natural world.

The mechanism is elegant: awe makes us feel interconnected with the world around us. It diminishes social dominance orientation—the belief that some groups are naturally superior to others—and increases feelings of equality and shared humanity. When we feel awe, we’re less focused on hierarchy and competition, and more attuned to cooperation and collective well-being.

Research consistently shows that self-transcendent emotions like awe can cause pro-environmental behaviour. Not just correlate with it—cause it. In experiments where people were induced to feel awe, they subsequently made more environmentally friendly choices, expressed greater willingness to make personal sacrifices for the environment, and reported stronger intentions to engage in pro-environmental behaviour.

The Magic in Both the Vast and the Minute

What makes awe so powerful is that it’s so accessible: you don’t need to visit the Grand Canyon to experience it. You don’t need to witness the Northern Lights or stand beneath towering redwoods, though those experiences can certainly inspire awe.

Awe lives in the grand and the tiny, the dramatic and the everyday.

It’s there in the way morning light filters through leaves, creating a cathedral of green and gold. It’s in the perfect geometry of a spider’s web beaded with dew. It’s watching a bee navigate from flower to flower with impossible precision, each landing a small miracle of evolution and instinct. It’s the sound of rain on a roof. The pattern of bark on an old tree. The way a murmuration of starlings moves like liquid across the sky.

Research on “everyday awe” shows that these small moments are just as powerful as dramatic ones. College students who spent time in nature—even just walking through a park—reported greater well-being on those days, attributable to the higher level of awe they felt. Simply watching awe-inducing videos or reading awe-evoking stories improved people’s mood and life satisfaction.

The key is attention. Awe requires us to slow down, to actually see what’s in front of us, to let ourselves be moved by it. In our distracted, overwhelmed lives, this kind of attention is rare. We walk through forests looking at our phones. We pass remarkable things every day without noticing them. We’re so focused on the catastrophic that we forget to see the miraculous still all around us.

When you pause to watch wind move through grass, when you really look at the intricate architecture of a flower, when you let yourself feel the strangeness and beauty of a beetle navigating a leaf—something shifts. You remember that you are part of this. That this intricate, improbable, ancient web of life includes you. That its loss would be your loss, not just abstractly, but intimately.

This creates what I think of as a sense of magic—not supernatural, but the real magic of existence. The fact that any of this is here at all. That you can stand in a forest and feel connected to every living thing in it. That billions of years of evolution have created this specific pattern of light and shadow, this particular bird call, this moment.

And when you feel that magic, you want to protect it. Not because someone told you to, not because you’re afraid of what will happen if you don’t, but because you’ve tasted something precious and you don’t want to lose it.

Creating Space for Wonder

So how do we integrate more awe and wonder into environmental and climate work? How do we create space for these emotions alongside the necessary warnings and calls to action?

First, we need to change how we talk about what we’re protecting. Instead of leading only with loss and threat, we need to also communicate beauty, connection, and meaning. Show people what they love before asking them to fight for it. Remind them of the feeling of standing in a forest, of swimming in the ocean, of watching birds overhead. Make the abstract concrete and the catastrophic personal by grounding it in specific, awe-inspiring experiences.

This doesn’t mean being dishonest about the crisis. It means being honest about why the crisis matters—not just in terms of survival, but in terms of what makes life worth living.

Second, we need to create more opportunities for direct encounters with nature. Not just advocating for environmental protection from a distance, but facilitating actual experiences of awe. Nature documentaries help, but they can’t replace the embodied experience of being in nature. We need to prioritise outdoor education, community gardens, urban green spaces, and accessible natural areas. We need to help people—especially children and those in urban environments—have their own moments of connection and wonder.

Third, we need to model this ourselves. As people working in environmental and climate spaces, we need to reconnect with what drew us to this work in the first place. Many of us started because we loved nature, because we had experiences that moved us. But years of doom and frustration can erode that foundation. We need to tend to our own capacity for awe, not as an indulgence but as a necessary resource for sustained engagement.

The research on this is clear: pro-environmental behaviour doesn’t just help the planet—it improves the mental health of the people taking action. There’s a feedback loop here. Acting to protect what we love makes us feel better, which makes us more resilient, which allows us to keep acting. But we need the foundation of love and connection to start that loop.

Finally, we need to recognise that awe and wonder make environmental topics more accessible. Not everyone responds to scientific data or policy arguments. But nearly everyone responds to beauty, to the feeling of being part of something larger, to the experience of wonder. Awe is a democratic emotion—it doesn’t require education or expertise, just attention and openness.

When we lead with awe, we invite people in rather than overwhelming them. We give them something to move toward rather than only something to flee from. We build emotional resilience that can sustain them through setbacks and bad news. And we remind them—and ourselves—that the world is still full of beauty worth protecting.

The Choice We Face

Climate change is real. The threats are serious. The timeline is urgent. None of that changes.

But we get to choose how we engage with these truths. We can let them crush us into despair, or we can let them focus our attention on what matters most. We can see only what we’re losing, or we can see what remains and fight for it with everything we have.

Awe doesn’t solve climate change. Wonder doesn’t reverse ecosystem collapse. But they do something perhaps more important: they give us reason to keep trying. They remind us what we’re fighting for. They connect us to each other and to the living world in ways that make action feel not like a burden but like an act of love.

I think about that moment under the trees often. The wind in the leaves. The feeling of being held within something much larger and older than myself. The quiet certainty that this—this specific, unrepeatable beauty—mattered more than I could articulate.

That moment didn’t make climate change less frightening. It didn’t make the work easier. But it made it feel worthwhile. It made me want to fight not because I was afraid, but because I loved something.

And love, it turns out, is one of the most powerful forces we have.

So yes, let’s be honest about the crisis. Let’s communicate the urgency and the stakes. But let’s also communicate the beauty, the wonder, the intricate magic of what we’re protecting. Let’s create space for awe alongside the warnings. Let’s remind ourselves and each other why this matters—not just in terms of what we’ll lose, but in terms of what we love.

The world is still full of moments that can stop us in our tracks with their beauty. Still full of small miracles that remind us of our connection to everything that lives. Still full of reasons to feel awe, to feel wonder, to feel that spine-tingling sense of being part of something vast and precious and worth defending with everything we have.

We just need to pay attention. We just need to remember. We just need to let ourselves feel it.

And then, maybe, we need to act from that feeling—not from fear alone, but from love, from wonder, from the fierce determination to protect what makes us feel awe in the first place.

Because that’s how we save the planet. Not just with policy and technology, though we need those. But with the fundamental human capacity to be moved by beauty, to feel wonder at existence, and to fight for what we love.

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Its absence from mainstream environmental discourse reveals how colonial our understanding of environmental leadership continues to be, with the Global North positioned as climate champions while the rest of the world supposedly plays catch-up. This narrative couldn’t be further from the truth—but neither is the simplistic counter-narrative of China as a straightforward environmental hero.

The reality is far more complex, and far more revealing about the contradictions at the heart of today’s global environmental politics.

The Ecological Civilisation Initiative: Reimagining Development

China made its intention to become a global environmental leader clear in 2018 when China’s Communist Party made the historic move of incorporating “ecological civilisation” into its constitution, launching what may be the most comprehensive environmental policy framework any nation has attempted. The Ecological Civilisation Initiative (ECI) represents a fundamental rethinking of the relationship between economic development and environmental stewardship, moving beyond the Western model that treated environmental protection as an afterthought to industrialisation.

The scope is staggering. The ECI aims to integrate ecological considerations into every aspect of governance, from urban planning to industrial policy, from agriculture to energy production, in order to create greater harmony between humanity and nature. For a country of 1.4 billion people—the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases and second-largest economy—to pursue such a transformation isn’t just significant; it’s essential. If China cannot find a path to balance development with environmental protection, the global climate crisis becomes nearly impossible to solve.

While President Trump called climate change a hoax at the UN Climate Summit 2025, President Xi Jinping delivers a speech expressing the urgent need to address climate change and reduce emissions, pledging to cut Chinese emissions by 7-10% by 2035. The speech is another example of how China is positioning itself as a global climate leader.

China’s scale and developmental stage make the ECI particularly important and impressive. Unlike wealthy nations that industrialised when environmental consequences were poorly understood and resource extraction could happen without a second thought for the environment, China is attempting to correct course mid-development, showing that economic growth and environmental protection need not be mutually exclusive.

More Than Just Words: Ecological Civilisation in Action

As the United States scales back environmental protections and funding for conservation services, China is doing the opposite. China is systematically placing more than one-tenth of its land mass—over 1.1 million square kilometres—under strict protection through its expanding network of national parks, aiming to establish 49 national parks by 2035.

China’s national park expansion is a crucial part of the ECI, as it serves as a major policy instrument for materialising the concept and achieving the goals of ecological protection, biodiversity conservation, and harmonious coexistence between humans and nature.

And the results speak for themselves. In Sichuan Province, the annual encounter count of giant pandas in field monitoring reached 185 animals, up from 178 the previous year. The panda population has recovered to the point that pandas have been reclassified from “endangered” to “vulnerable” by the IUCN. On top of that, more than 22,000 hectares of panda habitat have been restored within the Giant Panda National Park, along with over 1,300 hectares of ecological corridors.

Beyond the iconic panda, over 200 rare animal species and 100 endangered plants have shown population gains since the park program started in 2015. The Tibetan antelope population has rebounded from fewer than 20,000 in the late 1980s to over 70,000 today, while the Siberian tiger population now exceeds 70 (up from 27 in 2017) and the Amur leopard population has surpassed 80 (up from 46 in 2019) thanks to the Northeast China Tiger and Leopard National Park.

But conservation is just one dimension of the ECI. China has also become the undisputed leader in renewable energy deployment, installing more new solar and wind power capacity in the last few years than the rest of the world combined. The scale is almost incomprehensible—added solar capacity for January to May 2025 reached nearly 198 gigawatts, a 388% increase compared to the same period in 2024. Nowhere on the planet has the adoption and expansion of renewable energy been faster than in China. For context, the new solar and wind capacity added in May 2025 alone could generate the same amount of electricity as Poland, Sweden, or Norway.

Most significantly, in May 2025, China saw a decline in carbon emissions for the first time despite an increase in energy demand, suggesting the country may be reaching peak emissions ahead of its 2030 target—a critical factor in meeting international climate targets.

Reforestation efforts are equally impressive. Through programs like the “Great Green Wall,” China has added millions of hectares of forest, becoming one of the few countries to achieve net forest gains in recent decades. Air quality in major cities, while still problematic, has also improved significantly since 2013 when pollution levels regularly reached hazardous levels.

These achievements aren’t merely symbolic. They represent massive investments, policy coordination across multiple levels of government, and genuine shifts in how development is conceived and executed.

The Challenges That Remain

Through the ECI, China has demonstrated that it has the ability to become a global environmental and sustainable development leader. However, any honest assessment of China’s environmental efforts and leadership must grapple with serious challenges and issues that threaten to undermine its achievements and position, including:

Continued Reliance on Coal

Despite China’s renewable energy surge, renewable energy has not yet displaced coal—the most polluting fossil fuel, emitting toxic heavy metals and more carbon dioxide per unit of energy than oil or natural gas. China still generates roughly 60% of its electricity from coal and has continued to approve new coal power plants that threaten to undermine emissions reduction goals.

In 2024 alone, China began building 94.5 gigawatts of new coal-power capacity and resumed 3.3 gigawatts of suspended projects, representing the highest level of construction in the past decade. Meanwhile, retirement and mothballing of old coal plants remains low, with the amount of capacity being closed down each year dropping sharply from around 13 gigawatts in 2020 to 2.5 gigawatts in 2024. This stands in direct conflict with President Xi Jinping’s pledge in 2021 to “strictly limit the increase in coal consumption” between 2021 and 2026.

If China continues to burn coal at this rate it will be very difficult for it to meet its climate goals and those of the Paris Agreement, even with its expanded renewable energy capacity.

Governance and Implementation Gaps

While ecological civilisation has become the broad rhetorical and policy umbrella under which all environmental initiatives in China are situated, the program’s weakest point remains its purely environmental dimension, with China’s leaders needing to bring local governments into line who are less convinced by environmental goals than Party strategists.

Local governments, still primarily evaluated on economic growth metrics, sometimes pay lip service to environmental regulations while prioritising industrial expansion. Enforcement of environmental standards varies dramatically across provinces, with poorer regions often lacking the resources or political will to implement protections rigorously.

The national park system, for example, faces tensions with local communities whose traditional livelihoods may be disrupted by conservation boundaries. The top-down nature of much environmental policy can mean insufficient consultation with affected populations, raising questions about the long-term sustainability of conservation efforts that don’t adequately address local needs.

Extractionist Foreign Policy

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of China’s environmental transformation lies in the stark discrepancy between an environmental domestic policy and an extractionist foreign policy. While building an ecological civilisation at home, China is simultaneously driving environmental destruction abroad through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)—a $1.3 trillion overseas investment program that has funded ports, railways, power plants, and infrastructure in developing countries around the world.

Launched in 2013, the BRI was meant to deepen Beijing’s sway across the Global South while securing lucrative contracts for Chinese firms. However, scores of these projects have harmed local communities and sensitive ecosystems, revealing a troubling pattern: the environmental standards China increasingly enforces at home are not being applied abroad.

The Belt & Road’s Environmental Shadow

The contradiction between China’s domestic and foreign policy is starkest when it comes to fossil fuels. As China works to clean up its domestic energy system, it has been exporting the very pollution sources it’s phasing out at home.

Over the past decade, China has financed more than 250 coal-powered plants around the world under the BRI, investing around $160 billion between 2014 and 2020. Over half of these plants were found to be high emission, low energy plants with poor carbon capture technology—the exact kind China would no longer approve domestically. Additionally, even after President Xi Jinping promised to eliminate coal from the BRI at the United Nations General Assembly in 2021, China has continued to build coal-powered plants overseas. In fact, Chinese banks continue to finance over 70 percent of coal power plants in the world.

The pattern extends beyond coal. China remains the biggest producer of concrete in the world at the cost of excessive sand digging and destruction of coastlines and habitats. Since the introduction of BRI, China has closed many of its domestic cement plants under new domestic pollution guidelines while concurrently investing in hundreds of heavily polluting cement plants in other countries.

By promising to increase the GDP of BRI host countries, China is effectively fostering geoeconomic relationships while repositioning itself in important regional arenas. However, it’s a Catch-22 situation: first China outsources coal, cement, and oil plants to developing countries, effectively outsourcing dirty industries, then these countries become dependent on polluting energy sources, and finally they face political and economic pressure to continue the relationship despite the environmental costs and international pressure to clean up their economies.

Countries like Pakistan have seen the consequences first hand. After joining the BRI, Pakistan’s CO2 emissions increased fourfold, even as the country suffers from climate change impacts like devastating floods and heatwaves.

Extractive Industries: Mining Away Protected Ecosystems

Nowhere is the environmental toll of the BRI more visible than in mining operations across Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. As demand for minerals driven by the renewable energy transition has surged, Chinese mining companies have pushed into some of the world’s most biodiverse and protected areas.

In Africa, Chinese companies often don’t carry out adequate environmental impact assessments or uphold safeguards. There is deforestation and habitat destruction as forests are cleared for mining infrastructure. Improper handling of mine tailings and wastewater often means the release of toxic substances into rivers and streams that local communities depend upon. Mining activities also lead to soil erosion and degradation as well as reduced agricultural productivity. A lack of air quality control measures means that air pollution and dust emissions, including fine particulate matter, can have adverse effects on community health and the surrounding environment.

The consequences are severe. A Chinese-operated gold mine is encroaching on a UNESCO World Heritage site in the Congo basin, the world’s second largest rainforest and home to endangered okapi, bonobos, and forest elephants. In Sierra Leone, local landowners and conservationists have decried plans for a Chinese-funded port they say will impact traditional fisherpeople, degrade sensitive rainforest, and endanger whales, dolphins, and turtles.

Meanwhile, in Southeast Asia, a railway in Malaysia under construction since 2017 will fragment and deforest habitats of endangered Malayan tigers, panthers, and elephants—cutting through the connected forest corridors these species need to survive.

Green Infrastructure with Hidden Costs

Not all BRI environmental damage comes from obvious sources like coal plants or mining operations, however. Projects marketed as sustainable energy investments have wreaked havoc on sensitive ecosystems.

Take the Batang Toru hydropower plant in Indonesia. Marketed as a sustainable energy investment through the BRI, the project requires substantial deforestation that will disrupt the Batang Toru rainforest, threatening the world’s last 800 living Tapanuli orangutans—a critically endangered species discovered only in 2017. The environmental impacts may also cause floods that can damage homes, farms, and water systems for locals.

Hydropower projects may reduce carbon emissions compared to fossil fuels, but the ensuing extraction of critical raw materials, deforestation, habitat destruction, and flooding create new environmental problems. It’s a shell game of environmental destruction—shifting the symptoms from one sector to another while calling it “green growth.”

The fundamental problem is that China’s vision of ecological civilisation, however genuine domestically, has not been extended to its foreign investments. The same country that is creating some of the world’s most ambitious national parks is funding projects that destroy World Heritage sites. The same government that is phasing out domestic coal plants is financing dirty coal power abroad. The same nation that is restoring panda habitats at home is enabling the destruction of orangutan habitats overseas.

This isn’t just hypocrisy—it’s a strategic choice. By outsourcing pollution and resource extraction, China can pursue environmental goals at home while still accessing the cheap energy and raw materials its economy requires. Developing countries desperate for infrastructure investment have little choice but to accept projects that come with extensive environmental damage.

The BRI, in this sense, represents not just China’s foreign policy but a microcosm of global environmental injustice: wealthy nations and powerful corporations exporting environmental destruction to places with less power to resist, while claiming leadership on climate and conservation at home.

The Path Forward: Confronting the Paradox

China’s environmental story resists simple narratives. It is simultaneously a global leader in renewable energy deployment and national park expansion, and a major driver of environmental destruction through extractive projects abroad. It has achieved conservation successes that would be the envy of many Western nations while continuing to build coal plants at alarming rates both domestically and through the BRI.

This paradox reveals something fundamental about our current moment: environmental progress and environmental destruction are not opposites on a spectrum—they can, and do, coexist within the same system, often by design. China’s approach mirrors what Western environmental policy has been doing for decades—championing climate action at home while their companies harmfully extract resources across the Global South.

The critical question is whether credit and accountability will continue to be selective. The colonial legacy in environmental discourse means that environmental leadership from the Global North is often celebrated uncritically, while similar achievements from developing countries are ignored or dismissed. Meanwhile, environmental destruction by Western companies abroad receives less scrutiny than similar actions by Chinese firms. If we demand that China apply its domestic environmental standards to Belt and Road projects—and we should—we must equally demand that European companies operating globally meet the standards their home countries enforce domestically.

It is time for the EU and the Global North to stop looking only at themselves for climate leadership and environmental policy development. There are genuine lessons in China’s rapid renewable energy deployment, its use of policy banks to finance clean energy at scale, and its integration of conservation into national development planning. These approaches could accelerate global climate action if adapted appropriately. Equally, China could learn from the transparency and public participation mechanisms that, despite their flaws, provide some accountability in democratic systems. The question we should be asking is not “what can they learn from us?” but “what can we learn from each other?”

As we face the climate crisis, we need to move beyond simplistic narratives of environmental heroes and villains. We need honest accounting of both achievements and failures, from all nations. We need to recognise climate leadership wherever it emerges, while maintaining scrutiny of environmental destruction wherever it occurs. Only then can we build the global ecological civilisation our planet desperately needs, one that doesn’t simply export its costs to those with less power to resist.

Sources:

Understanding ecological civilization in China: From political context to science. PMC: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10654276/

Ecological civilization: China’s effort to build a shared future for all life on Earth. PMC: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8310764/

China’s growing national parks boost wildlife conservation. CGTN, August 2025.

China Energy Transition Review 2025. Ember.

Wind and solar generate over a quarter of China’s electricity for the first month on record. Ember, May 2025.

Analysis: Record solar growth keeps China’s CO2 falling in first half of 2025. Carbon Brief, August 2025.

Environmental Implications Of The Belt And Road Initiative. Yale Review of International Studies, February 2024.

China Is Reshaping Global Development. Inside Climate News, April 2025.

Examining China’s Impact on Mining in Africa. Wilson Center, 2023.

China’s construction of new coal-power plants reached 10-year high in 2024. Carbon Brief, February 2025.

Europe's Last Natural Heritage Under Threat

Sweden is home to an extraordinary part of the European Union's natural heritage: vast expanses of old-growth boreal forests that represent some of the world’'s last remaining primary forests. These forests are not merely collections of old trees—they are complex, irreplaceable biological communities that have developed over millennia.

Old-growth forests are more or less untouched forests that have not been managed by modern forestry and have therefore retained their natural life cycle. An old-growth forest has trees of all sorts and ages. There is dead wood in the form of 'deadwood' (dead tree trunks that are still standing), and 'fallen logs' (tree trunks that are lying on the ground and slowly decomposing).

These unique environments harbour biodiversity that simply cannot exist anywhere else. Over half of all threatened species in Sweden depend on old-growth forests that have not been significantly affected by forestry, including a rich variety of lichens, mosses, ferns, fungi, and vascular plants.

What makes these ecosystems so critical is their irreplaceability. As the Swedish Species Information Center at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) states: "Lack of continuity forests, i.e. forests that have never been clear-cut, is one of the main reasons why forest-dwelling species are listed on the Red List." Once these habitats are destroyed, they cannot be recreated within any meaningful human timeframe.

The Scale of Destruction in Sweden

If you fly over Sweden you will see that it’s a country covered in trees and forest. What most people don’t know is that the majority of these forests are actively managed by the timber industry and are often man-made. The majority were planted after previous logging or clear cutting and are 60 years or younger and although a lot of these forests have been allowed to grow older, they are not the same as naturally occurring unmanaged old-growth, primary, or continuity forests that have never been clear cut or majorly disturbed by human activity. They cannot match the ecological complexity of these ancient ecosystems, which are also critical carbon sinks.

Today, over 75% of Sweden’s forest land is actively managed for timber. Meanwhile, estimates for the amount of old-growth forest left in Sweden outside protected areas vary, indicating the urgent need to properly map where potential old-growth forests remain so they can be protected. According to the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA) and Swedish Forest Agency (SFA) only about 8-10% of forest land outside protected areas is still natural old-growth forest, but the percentage is rapidly shrinking as more unprotected old-growth forests are logged every year. A 2022 study from Lund University uncovered that almost one fourth of Sweden’s last unprotected old-growth forests were logged between 2003 and 2019, equivalent to a loss of around 1.4% per year.

The video below shows the growth of clear/cut areas (marked in dark brown) in the large municipalities of Vilhelmina, Dorotea, Åsele and Strömsund in the north of Sweden, where 84% of the forest has been clear-cut since the 1950s.

The implications are staggering. If current logging rates continue and protections are not increased, Sweden's last unprotected old-growth boreal forests will disappear by the 2070s, further fragmenting the areas of old-growth forest that remain in the north-west into individual stands that are more and more isolated from each other, and destroying the connectivity that leads to the large continuous areas of old-growth forest that many species of insect, fungi, lichens and moss depend on.

Meanwhile, despite international and scientific consensus that there are unprotected old-growth boreal forests in Sweden and that they are being logged at alarming rates, the Swedish Forest Industries Federation (SFIF) maintains that "there are very few forests with old-growth characteristics in Sweden" and that "these forests are not harvested."

What's happening to Sweden's old-growth forests represents one of the most underreported environmental crises in the developed world, and it's hiding in plain sight behind a carefully crafted image of sustainability and environmental leadership that has been exported to the rest of the world.

An Ongoing Climate and Ecological Crisis

The climate implications of Sweden's old-growth forest destruction extend far beyond the immediate loss of carbon storage, though that alone should be cause for alarm. Old-growth boreal forests store more carbon than tropical rainforests and are therefore essential for planetary stability in the face of rapid climate change.

But the climate value of old-growth forests goes deeper than their carbon stocks in soil and biomass. These forests demonstrate remarkable resilience to disturbance—they have survived ice ages, fires, storms, and pest outbreaks over millennia. This resilience is precisely what we need as climate change brings increasingly unpredictable environmental stresses.

The younger forests that replace old-growth systems lack this resilience. Monoculture forests are vulnerable to disease, pests, and extreme weather events in ways that diverse natural forests are not. As climate change intensifies, Sweden is essentially replacing climate-resilient ecosystems with climate-vulnerable ones.

It's truly absurd: while Sweden invests in renewable energy and touts its climate leadership, it's simultaneously clear-cutting the forests that hold the most carbon and provide the greatest resilience to climate change.

Government statistics also paint an alarming picture when it comes to the ecological impact of losing old-growth forests. An in-depth evaluation by the SFA in 2022 on the environmental quality objective pertaining to forests revealed systematic ecological degradation across multiple indicators. Urgent concern was expressed particularly for the "loss of high conservation value forests that cannot be recreated for the foreseeable future", i.e. old-growth forests. The evaluation emphasised that harvesting these forests can lead to an irreversible loss of biodiversity as "endangered species do not automatically reappear after a final felling just because the regenerated forest matures." In other words, once these old-growth forests are gone, they and the species that depend on them are gone forever.

Data from the Swedish Species Information Center latest IUCN Red List, the national compilation of species in Sweden at risk of extinction, confirms the depth of the biodiversity crisis. Currently, about 2,000 forest-living species are red listed and a lack of continuous forests is explicitly identified as one of the main causes for the growing number of threatened species in Sweden, which has been growing over the past 20 years.

Moreover, 14 of 15 forest habitats in Sweden listed under the EU Habitats Directive, meant to protect rare and natural habitats and the species that depend on them, have been found to have inadequate or unfavourable conservation status in all regions where they occur. Sweden’s latest report on the Habitats Directive found that only one forest habitat type in Sweden's alpine region had favourable conservation status.

Yet despite the scientific evidence and a growing body of research showing insufficient protection for key forest ecosystems and its consequences for climate and biodiversity, the Swedish government has cut budgets for environmental monitoring and habitat protection and has consistently tried to undermine the proper implementation of EU conservation and habitat protection laws.

Legal Limbo, Policy Gaps, and Certification Failures

Perhaps one of the most frustrating aspects of Sweden's forest crisis is the complete lack of clear legal protection for old-growth forests. To begin with, there is still no consensus regarding the definition for "old growth forest" in Swedish law; a situation that is taken advantage of by the forestry industry and the government to block policies meant to protect old-growth forests.

Instead of mapping, monitoring, and implementing greater protections for key forest habitats as required by EU laws, such as the Habitats Directive and Nature Restoration Law, and as recommended in its own reports, the Swedish government tasked the SFA with the exercise of defining "old-growth forests" in the Swedish context. This is despite the fact that most scientists agree on what makes a forest old-growth and that the EU already has a working definition that distinguishes between “old forest” and “old-growth forest”; the main area of contention that the forestry industry claims is “problematic” and needs to be resolved before any conservation or protective action can take place.

The motivation is clear: as long as there is no legally adopted definition, unprotected forests remain in limbo when it comes to their conservation and protection status and the forestry industry can continue as usual, logging in places that are supposed to be protected by the Habitats Directive and Nature Restoration Law, and which have all the indicators of being old-growth forest, including the presence of endangered species known to be dependent on old-growth and long continuity forest features.

The SFA’s 2022 evaluation found clear evidence of this happening in Jämtland, a region in the north-west where a large amount of the remaining old-growth forest is located. In the autumn of 2020, the County Administrative Board found highly endangered basiphilous coniferous forests in the area and informed the landowners that the identified forests had the highest priority for protection. Despite this, and given that there was no binding legal requirement to protect them, a large proportion of the these forests were harvested only a short time after the landowners were notified of their status, showing the severe limitations and lack of efficacy of Sweden's existing conservation and habitat protection laws, which continue to ignore and circumvent international standards and requirements.

The forestry certification system, another tool meant to prevent the logging of rare habitats and forests with high conservation and continuity values, is also not working.

A 2023 investigation commissioned by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) itself revealed systematic failures in protecting Sweden's old-growth forests, even within supposedly "sustainable" forestry operations.

The investigation found that "the provisions in FSC Sweden's normative framework – the NFSS and CNRA – about the protection of WKH [Woodland Key Habitats] are not rigorous enough to ensure that wood from these areas is not harvested." Research excursions by environmental organisations confirmed this. After surveying 12 forested areas in Västernorrland County where FSC-certified companies had registered logging notifications, they found 70 red-listed species, including the critically endangered wood-living fungus Resinoporia crassa, found in a 200-hectare old-growth forest planned for clear-cutting by SCA, an FSC-certified company. Furthermore, a comprehensive study published in Land Economics that analysed the effectiveness of both FSC and PEFC certification using official Swedish Forest Agency data from thousands of forest plots found no evidence that FSC or PEFC certification plots decrease the probability or the magnitude of noncompliance with environmental protections.

Meanwhile the SFIF continues to claim that "Swedish forest management is underpinned by robust legislation and comprehensive systems, ensuring sustainability across all ownership types."

The Path Forward: What Must Happen

Given the scale and speed of destruction, the path to protecting Sweden's remaining old-growth forests requires immediate, decisive action on multiple fronts:

Immediate Protection: All forests with identified conservation values must be protected through transparent, long-term, and legally binding mechanisms. The protection needs to be based on the preservation of large, connected forest areas that can maintain ecological processes and support viable populations of forest-dwelling species.

Expanded Protected Areas: In line with the EU biodiversity strategy and international agreements, at least 30 percent of the productive forest land should be protected, especially areas of particular importance for biodiversity and ecosystem functions. The target must be achieved by 2030 and be well-distributed across the different forest regions.

Policy Reform: The Swedish government must adopt the Swedish Forest Agency's holistic definition of old-growth forests into actual policy and law, closing the loopholes that currently allow destruction of high conservation value forests.

International Accountability: The global community must hold Sweden accountable for its forest destruction with the same intensity it applies to tropical deforestation. Sweden's green reputation should not shield it from scrutiny of its environmental practices.

Restoration Commitment: Significant restoration efforts are required for large areas to achieve functional protection. Degraded forests should be restored to natural forest conditions wherever possible.

Certification Reform: Both FSC and PEFC standards in Sweden require fundamental strengthening, with rigorous pre-harvest conservation assessments and meaningful enforcement mechanisms.

Beyond the Green Facade

Sweden's old-growth forest crisis reveals the fundamental hypocrisy of environmental policy in the Global North. While lecturing developing countries about forest conservation and climate responsibility, wealthy nations like Sweden systematically destroy their own irreplaceable ecosystems for industrial profit.

The evidence is overwhelming. Sweden has built an entire national brand around environmental leadership and sustainable forestry while conducting widespread ecological destruction. Government data confirms ecological crisis across multiple indicators. Scientific research reveals critical gaps in conservation science and practice. Independent academic studies demonstrate the failure of voluntary certification systems.

Most damning, the destruction continues despite readily available solutions and clear legal obligations under EU environmental directives.

But this crisis also represents an opportunity. Sweden's remaining old-growth forests could become a symbol of genuine environmental leadership if the country chooses to protect rather than exploit them. Indigenous Sámi communities offer proven models for sustainable forest management that could guide global forest policy.

The choice is stark: Continue the industrial destruction of irreplaceable ecosystems while maintaining a false green reputation, or genuinely lead by example through comprehensive forest protection and restoration.

The world is finally beginning to pay attention. The question is whether scrutiny will translate into action before Europe's last great forest ecosystems vanish behind the facade of Scandinavian environmentalism.

Sweden's forest crisis will ultimately be remembered as either the moment when environmental hypocrisy was finally exposed and addressed, or as the moment when one of Europe's last great natural ecosystems was sacrificed for industrial timber production. Which future Sweden chooses will say everything about whether the Global North is capable of genuine environmental leadership or merely expert environmental marketing.

The forests are still there. The species are still clinging to survival. But the window for action is closing rapidly.

Sources:

• Swedish Forest Agency. (2022). "Sustainable Forests - In-depth Evaluation 2023." [Report 2022-12].

• Swedish Species Information Center. (2020). Red List assessments and forest species data

• Ahlström, A., Canadell, J., Metcalfe D. (2022). "Widespread Unquantified Conversion of Old Boreal Forests to Plantations" Earth's Future, 10, e2022EF003221. https://doi.org/10.1029/2022EF003221

• Forest Stewardship Council. (2023). "Swedish Old Growth Forests Integrity Investigation Report"

• Villalobos, L., Coria, J., & Nordén, A. (2018). "Has Forest Certification Reduced Forest Degradation in Sweden?" Land Economics 94(2), 220-238. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/690445.

• Forest Monitor and Forest Insight forest protection and clear-cutting mapping data

• Swedish Forest Industries Federation policy statements and research portfolio analysis

• WWF Finland. (2025). "Primary and Old Growth Forests at Risk in Finland and Sweden" [Report 2025-01].

We're building thousands of these structures without fully knowing what they do to marine ecosystems. However, this is not a reason to stop offshore wind development—which is absolutely critical for addressing climate change—this knowledge gap represents our greatest opportunity to make renewable energy truly sustainable.

The question isn't whether we should build wind farms. It's whether we can use what we're learning to build them better.

Research being weaponised

Before diving into the real environmental science, we need to address the elephant in the room: how legitimate environmental concerns about wind power have been weaponised by fossil fuel interests to derail renewable energy development entirely.

Donald Trump has turned wind turbines into a political symbol, claiming windmills destroy everything, are the most expensive energy there is, ruin the environment, kill the birds, and drive whales crazy. His campaign against wind energy began not from environmental concern, but from his annoyance that offshore turbines would be visible from his Scottish golf course.

This personal vendetta has evolved into a broader political strategy. Trump has committed to increasing U.S. energy production, particularly fossil fuels, signing executive orders aimed at phasing out tax credits for wind and solar facilities. Meanwhile, onshore wind is one of the cheapest sources of electricity generation, with new wind farms expected to produce electricity around $30 per megawatt hour compared to $65 for natural gas.

The irony is profound: while Trump claims wind farms kill whales, there are no known links between large whale deaths and ongoing offshore wind activities, according to NOAA. The real threats to marine mammals—ship strikes, fishing gear entanglement, and climate change—continue largely unaddressed by fossil fuel advocates.

Like 19th century fears that telephones would spread diseases, wind farm conspiracy theories reflect deeper anxieties about change. They combine distrust of government, nostalgia for the fossil fuel era, and a resistance to confronting the complexities of the modern world.

But here's what makes this weaponisation so dangerous: it conflates legitimate scientific inquiry with climate denial, making it harder to have honest conversations about how to improve renewable energy technology.

The Real Environmental Research Story

The actual scientific story about offshore wind and marine environments is far more nuanced than either extreme position suggests. Researchers aren't trying to stop wind development—they're trying to make it better.

Much of the environmental research that has been conducted in relation to offshore wind energy has concerned the impact of sound exposure for marine mammals and the risk of collisions with turbines for seabirds. But what scientists have discovered is both reassuring and illuminating.

Monitoring studies have shown little or only local impacts of offshore wind farms on the marine environment, either during their construction or the operational phases. However, the key insight is that further research is needed to answer whether local short-term impacts may have consequences at the population level.

This isn't a contradiction—it's exactly how good science works. Individual impacts may be small, but understanding cumulative effects across multiple wind farms requires careful study. Current expectations for the expansion of energy production from offshore wind may lead to significant environmental impacts, making it both timely and vital to assess ecological risks to marine ecosystems.

The research isn't suggesting we stop building wind farms. It's helping us build them more thoughtfully.

Knowledge Gaps as Innovation Opportunities

What I find most exciting about the current state of offshore wind research is how knowledge gaps are becoming innovation drivers. Scientists and engineers are using what they learn about environmental impacts to develop better technologies and deployment strategies.

Results show that offshore wind energy-related environmental impacts, including climate change, marine ecotoxicity, marine eutrophication, and metal depletion, will be reduced by ~20% per MWh from 2020 to 2040 due to various developments including size expansion, lifetime extension, and technology innovation.

This improvement trajectory is happening precisely because researchers are identifying environmental concerns and engineers are solving them. For example, the fiber in turbine blades is currently difficult to recycle, however new technologies have been developed by the offshore wind energy industry to enable recyclable blades with organic materials.

NOAA Fisheries is partnering with The Nature Conservancy to study how fish populations off the coast of Virginia respond to offshore wind turbine installation and related construction noise. This study will inform environmental impact assessments and management of offshore wind energy projects.

The West Coast offers an even more innovative example. Ocean depths off the West Coast require developers to pioneer wind technology using floating platforms that have not yet been employed on a large commercial scale, creating opportunities to design environmental protection into new technologies from the start.

The Adaptive Management Revolution

Perhaps the most important shift happening in offshore wind development is toward adaptive management—using real-world environmental monitoring to continuously improve how projects are designed and operated.

As researchers work to model potential outcomes, they stress that they don't want to derail offshore wind, but rather seek to better understand it so that any negative effects can be minimised, and positive effects maximised. This represents a fundamental evolution from the "build first, study later" approach that characterised earlier industrial development.

The potential effects of offshore wind farm construction and operation will differ among species, depending on their likelihood of interaction with the structures and cables, their sensitivities, and avoidance responses. This species-specific understanding allows for targeted mitigation strategies rather than one-size-fits-all approaches.

For example, research has shown that large-bodied waterbirds like sea ducks and geese tend to avoid the turbines, which may mean less bird mortality offshore than initially feared. Meanwhile, some research suggests wind farms might even help fish and other marine life by creating artificial reef structures.

The key insight is that environmental impacts aren't uniform—they vary by location, species, and installation methods. This variability creates opportunities for optimisation and adaptation.

From Theory to Practice: Real-World Improvements

The knowledge we're gaining about offshore wind environmental impacts is already translating into practical improvements in how projects are developed and operated.

Strategically targeted data collection and modelling aimed at answering questions for the consenting process will also allow regulators to make decisions based on the best available information, and achieve a balance between clean energy targets and environmental protection.

NOAA has various roles in offshore wind that include supporting marine spatial planning and siting, and environmental review during construction, operation, and decommissioning. This comprehensive approach ensures environmental considerations are integrated throughout project lifecycles rather than treated as afterthoughts.

This isn't just about reducing environmental impact—it's about creating monitoring systems that ensure wind farms and marine ecosystems are compatible over the long term.

What the research on offshore wind environmental impacts ultimately reveals is that we don't have to choose between aggressive renewable energy targets and environmental protection. We can have both, but only if we're willing to invest in understanding and improving renewable energy technologies.

The fossil fuel industry's strategy of weaponising environmental concerns about renewables represents a false choice: accept environmental damage from wind farms or stick with fossil fuels. The real choice is between continuing to burn fossil fuels while ecosystems collapse from climate change, or investing in making renewable energy as environmentally beneficial as possible.

The knowledge gaps in offshore wind research aren't obstacles to renewable energy deployment—they're roadmaps for making renewable energy better. Every study that identifies an environmental impact creates an opportunity for technological improvement. Every monitoring program that tracks ecosystem responses provides data for optimising future projects.

The Innovation Imperative

As I reflect on that Nature paper quote about considerable gaps in scientific knowledge, I realise it represents something profound: we're at a moment where environmental science and renewable energy technology can evolve together.

The choice isn't between perfect renewable energy and imperfect fossil fuels. It's between continuing to use energy systems we know are destroying the climate, or improving energy systems that offer genuine solutions to both climate change and environmental protection.

The research showing that offshore wind energy environmental impacts are reduced by ~20% per MWh from 2020 to 2040 due to various developments proves that technology improvement is accelerating. The question is whether we'll support this improvement trajectory or abandon it in favour of technologies we know are fundamentally incompatible with a stable climate.

Trump's war on wind power isn't really about protecting whales or birds—it's about protecting fossil fuel profits. The real environmental protection happens when we invest in making renewable energy as ecologically beneficial as possible.

That Nature paper gap in scientific knowledge? It's closing every day, as researchers provide the knowledge needed to make offshore wind a genuine force for both climate stabilisation and marine ecosystem health.

The wind farms of 2040 will be dramatically better for marine environments than those of 2020, but only if we continue the research and innovation that makes improvement possible. The choice is ours: environmental progress through technological evolution, or environmental destruction through technological stagnation.

Sources and Further Reading:

• Nature journal offshore wind review: https://www.nature.com/articles/s44183-022-00003-5

• NOAA Fisheries offshore wind research: https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/topic/offshore-wind-energy/assessing-impacts-to-marine-life

• Environmental Science & Technology wind farm LCA: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9386896/

• Aquatic biosystems impact assessment: https://aquaticbiosystems.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/2046-9063-10-8

• Wind farm environmental impact review: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0964569123002971

• Wind farm misinformation analysis: https://theconversation.com/why-wind-farms-attract-so-much-misinformation-and-conspiracy-theory-262192

• Trump claims fact-check: https://www.factcheck.org/2019/04/trumps-faulty-wind-power-claims/

It was at a horse sanctuary in Western Sweden where I spent the first hour looking for pastures. Where were the open meadows? The fenced fields I'd grown up with? Instead, I found horses when I started looking between the trees.

There they were, wandering freely through dense forest, looking healthier and more content than any pasture horses I'd ever seen.

That's when it hit me: If horses can thrive in forests, can other animals like cattle do so too? If so, why are we clearing millions of hectares of forest around the world, especially in the Amazon rainforest, for cattle pastures?

The Forest Grazing Discovery

The question seemed almost naive at first: Can cattle graze in forests too? But as I started digging deeper, what I discovered challenged everything I thought I knew about modern agriculture.

Not only can cattle graze in forests—they did for centuries. The practice is called silvopasture, and it was the dominant livestock system across Europe until the mid-20th century. But that all changed with modern agricultural methods that favour neat monocultures and open land.

According to the World Resources Institute, between 2001 and 2015 we cleared around 45.1 million hectares of forest for pastures—an area larger than Sweden cleared every single year.

And we've been doing this while sitting on centuries-proven evidence that cattle actually thrive in forests and improve forest health when properly managed.

Research shows that silvopasture systems increase biodiversity, reduce wildfire risk, and sequester more carbon than either pure forest or pure pasture. We're not just missing an opportunity—we're doing the exact opposite of what traditional knowledge tells us works.

We've built a system that rewards environmental destruction while ancient sustainable practices sit forgotten.

The horses in that Swedish forest weren't just a charming nature scene—they were evidence of a completely different approach to land use that we somehow abandoned in favour of industrial monocultures.

The Global Pattern: Traditional Knowledge as a Climate Solution

What I discovered about silvopasture turned out to be just one example of a much larger pattern. Around the world, indigenous and traditional communities have developed sophisticated land management systems that modern science is only beginning to understand—and that hold profound lessons for healing our damaged planet.

The numbers are staggering. Indigenous peoples manage around 25 percent of the world's land, which contains much of the planet's biodiversity and the carbon stored in soil and biomass. Yet due to historical marginalisation and political and economic power imbalances, Indigenous Peoples have often been overlooked as key agents of change.

This oversight represents one of the greatest missed opportunities in environmental restoration. Research consistently shows that ecological restoration projects actively involving indigenous peoples, local communities and TEK (Traditional Ecological Knowledge) are more successful. After all, Indigenous Peoples were among the first to notice the early signs of climate change because of their deep, intergenerational ecological knowledge.

Yet most environmental policies continue to prioritise technological solutions over traditional wisdom, ignoring the blueprint for sustainable living that has been tested over millennia.

The Ahupua'a System: Hawaii's Holistic Blueprint

Perhaps nowhere is this traditional wisdom more sophisticated than in Hawaii's ahupua'a system—a land management approach that could revolutionise how we think about ecosystem restoration.

An ahupua'a is a traditional Hawaiian land division that extends from the mountains to the sea, encompassing various ecosystems and resources. Each ahupua'a was designed to be completely self-sustaining, containing nearly all the resources Hawaiians required for survival.

But the genius of the system wasn't just in its design—it was in its principles. As the native Hawaiians used the resources within their ahupuaʻa, they practiced aloha (respect), laulima (cooperation), and mālama (stewardship) which resulted in a desirable pono (balance). The Hawaiians believed that the land, the sea, the clouds and all of nature had a certain interconnectedness.

The system included sophisticated resource management: Sustainability was maintained by the konohiki and kahuna—priests, who restricted the fishing of certain species during specific seasons. They also regulated the gathering of plants. Fresh water resources were managed carefully for drinking, bathing and irrigation.

What's remarkable is that this wasn't just theoretical—it worked for centuries. The traditional land use in the Hawaiian Islands evolved from shifting cultivation into a stable form of agriculture. Each ahupua'a created multiple revenue streams and ecological services: irrigated taro systems in valleys, rain-fed agriculture on slopes, forest management in uplands, and sophisticated aquaculture systems including fishponds with ingenious sluice gates that allowed juvenile reef fish to enter and grow fat while preventing their escape until harvest.

Today, this ancient wisdom is being rediscovered. On O'ahu, Hawaiians are reviving traditional land management practices to restore a watershed, and the results are extraordinary. Papahana Kuaola, with six full-time employees, is part farm, part educational centre—a vibrant place that offers local students and community members hands-on lessons in traditional agriculture and native stream ecology.

The Global Renaissance: Traditional Knowledge in Action

Hawaii's ahupua'a revival is part of a worldwide renaissance in traditional ecological knowledge. Across the globe, communities are rediscovering that ancient practices often outperform modern alternatives in building ecosystem resilience.

In the Arctic, the Skolt Sámi people are leading peatland restoration efforts in Finland. The Linnunsuo project utilised Skolt Sámi's traditional knowledge, which offered vital insights into the peatland's original ecological conditions and relationships, to restore what had become barren land after being heavily mined for two decades. Restoration efforts involved rewetting the peatland by blocking drainage ditches and restoring natural water flows, which revived its role as a carbon sink and has turned Linnunsuo back into a thriving biodiverse ecosystem.

The results demonstrate the power of combining traditional knowledge with modern conservation: The success of Linnunsuo went beyond environmental benefits; it created economic opportunities for local communities through sustainable fishing and eco-tourism.

In Central America, Maya communities practice the milpa system—a sustainable agricultural model that involves rotating agricultural plots – usually with corn, beans, squash and other vegetables – within a forested area. This system maintains forest cover while producing food, creating a model for agriculture that enhances rather than degrades ecosystems.

These aren't romantic notions about the past—they're proven systems that modern science is validating.

The Scale of Forgotten Solutions

The more I researched traditional ecological knowledge, the more I realised we're not just missing a few interesting techniques—we're ignoring a completely different paradigm for human-environment relationships.

Indigenous Peoples are custodians of unique knowledge systems, innovations and practices that have been passed down through generations and have allowed different cultures and communities in many parts of the world to live sustainably, emphasising the balance between humans and the natural world.

Consider the scale of what we're overlooking: Indigenous peoples are intimately interconnected with landscapes, which are under mounting pressure from anthropogenic global environmental change. Yet scientific efforts at conservation and restoration are often rooted alongside the face of economic prerogatives.

The irony is profound. We are globally surrounded by communities of people that already know how to holistically manage the land, with the restorative and local nuance that still mystifies reductionist science. We continue to ignore and exclude them at our own peril.

Blueprints for a Different World

What traditional knowledge systems like silvopasture and ahupua'a reveal is that the environmental challenges we face aren't necessarily problems that need technological solutions—they're often the result of abandoning systems that worked sustainably for millennia.

The Swedish horses that started my investigation weren't just thriving in the forest—they were demonstrating a fundamental principle that indigenous communities worldwide have understood for generations: humans, animals, and ecosystems can exist in mutually beneficial relationships that enhance rather than degrade natural systems.

Traditional ahupua'a management centres on the understanding that all parts of a system are connected—a principle that modern science calls "ecosystem services" but that indigenous communities have been practicing for thousands of years.

Project Drawdown estimates that expanding silvopasture globally could sequester 31.19 gigatons of CO2 equivalent by 2050—roughly equivalent to taking every car in Europe off the road for 30 years. But silvopasture is just one example among thousands of traditional practices that could be scaled up.

Indigenous knowledge can greatly enrich climate policies and actions. By involving Indigenous Peoples as key players in climate planning and implementation, it is possible to develop more contextually relevant and effective solutions, fostering innovation, enhancing local ownership and ensuring a larger impact of climate initiatives.

Toward a New Paradigm

As I reflect on that encounter with forest horses in Sweden, I realise it wasn't just a charming nature scene—it was a glimpse of a different possible world. A world where agriculture enhances rather than destroys ecosystems. Where human communities are integrated into rather than separate from natural systems. Where the wisdom of thousands of years of sustainable living guides our response to environmental challenges.

The climate crisis has forced us to question many assumptions about progress and development. But we haven't yet fully grappled with the possibility that some of our most urgent environmental problems might be solved not by inventing new technologies, but by remembering and reviving practices that worked sustainably for millennia.

Traditional ecological knowledge isn't a romantic return to the past—it's a sophisticated, science-backed approach to ecosystem management that modern research consistently validates. It offers blueprints for agricultural systems that sequester carbon, watershed management that prevents flooding, fire management that reduces wildfire risk, and community governance systems that maintain ecological balance across generations.

The horses in that Swedish forest were living proof that we don't have to choose between human needs and ecosystem health. The ahupua'a system in Hawaii demonstrates that communities can be completely self-sufficient while enhancing biodiversity.

These aren't isolated examples—they're part of a global knowledge commons that represents thousands of years of research and development in sustainable living. The question is whether we have the wisdom to learn from it.

What traditional practices in your region have been forgotten that might hold solutions to current environmental challenges? Share your observations—every piece of traditional knowledge could be part of the blueprint for planetary healing.