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Pragmatism, not idealism, will give Brazil's Atlantic forests the best chance of survival. Guilmann/Wikimedia Commons

Earth is in a land degradation crisis. If we were to take the roughly one-third of the world’s land that has been degraded from its natural state and combine it into a single entity, these “Federated States of Degradia” would have a landmass bigger than Russia and a population of more than 3 billion, largely consisting of the world’s poorest and most marginalised people.

The extent and impact of land degradation have prompted many nations to propose ambitious targets for fixing the situation – restoring the wildlife and ecosystems harmed by processes such as desertification, salinisation and erosion, but also the unavoidable loss of habitat due to urbanisation and agricultural expansion.

In 2011, the Global Partnership on Forest and Landscape Restoration, a worldwide network of governments and action groups, proposed the Bonn Challenge, which aimed to restore 150 million hectares of degraded land by 2020.

This target was extended to 350 million ha by 2030 at the September 2014 UN climate summit in New York. And at last year’s landmark Paris climate talks, African nations committed to a further 100 million ha of restoration by 2030.

These ambitious goals are essential to focus global effort on such significant challenges. But are they focused on the right outcomes?

For restoration projects, measuring success is crucial. Many projects use measures that are too simplistic, such as the number of trees planted or the number of plant stems per hectare. This may not reflect the actual successful functioning of the ecosystem.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the scale are projects that shoot for outcomes such as “improve ecosystem integrity” – meaningless motherhood statements for which success is too complex to quantify.

One response to this problem has been a widespread recommendation that restoration projects should aim to restore ecosystems back to the state they were in before degradation began. But we suggest that this baseline is a nostalgic aspiration, akin to restoring the “Garden of Eden”.

Beautiful, but not particularly realistic. Wenzel Peter/Wikimedia Commons An unrealistic approach

Emulating pre-degradation habitats is unrealistic and prohibitively expensive, and does not acknowledge current and future environmental change. While a baseline that prescribes a list of pre-degradation species is a good place to start, it does not take into account the constantly changing nature of ecosystems.

Instead of a “Garden of Eden” baseline, we suggest that restoration projects should concentrate on establishing functional ecosystems that provide useful ecosystem services. This might be done by improving soil stability to counter erosion and desertification, or by planting deep-rooted species to maintain the water table and reduce dry land salinity, or by establishing wild pollinator habitats around pollinator-dependant crops such as apples, almonds and lucerne seed.

Natural ecosystems have always been in flux – albeit more so since humans came to dominate the planet. Species are constantly migrating, evolving and going extinct. Invasive species may be so prevalent and naturalised that they are impossibly costly to remove.

As a result, land allocated for restoration projects is often so altered from its pre-degradation state that it will no longer serve as habitat for the species that once lived there. Many local, native species can be prohibitively difficult to breed and release.

And present-day climate change may necessitate the use of non-local genotypes and even non-local native species to improve restoration outcomes. Newer, forward-thinking approaches may result in the generation of novel gene pools or even novel ecosystems.

Projects should focus on targets that are relevant to their overarching goals. For example, if a restoration project is established to improve pollination services, then the abundance and diversity of insect pollinators could be its metric of success. As we argue in correspondence to the science journal Nature, restoration should focus on helping to create functional, self-sustaining ecosystems that are resilient to climate change and provide measurable benefits to people as well as nature.

An excellent example of a successful, large-scale restoration project with targeted outcomes is Brazil’s ongoing Atlantic Forest Restoration Pact. This has committed to restoring 1 million hectares of Atlantic forest by 2020 and 15 million hectares by 2050.

This project has clear objectives. These include restoring local biodiversity (for conservation and human use, including timber and non-timber forest products); improving water quality for local communities; increasing carbon storage; and even creating seed orchards that can be either sustainably harvested or used to provide more seeds for sowing as part of the restoration.

This project has clear social objectives as well as ecological ones. It has created new jobs and income opportunities. Local communities are contributing to seed collection and propagation, while the project gives landowners incentives to abide by laws against deforestation. For forests, this is the kind of pragmatic approach that will bear the most fruit.

Martin Breed is an ARC DECRA Fellow who receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Andrew Lowe receives funding from the Australian Federal and State governments to undertake research on habitat restoration. He is Principal Advisor - Biodiversity Research Partnerships, for the South Australian Department of Environment, Water and Natural Resources; a member of the Board and Chair of the Technical Advisory Committee for Trees for Life - a not for profit restoration organisation; and on the Scientific Advisory Committee of Greening Australia - a not for profit restoration organisation.

Nick Gellie is a PhD candidate who receives scholarship funding from the Australian Research Council

Peter Mortimer does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

Ruling the roost: flying-foxes can suddenly arrive in huge numbers when the right trees bloom. Justin Welbergen, CC BY-NC-ND

The conflict between urbanites and wildlife recently developed a new battleground: the small coastal New South Wales town of Batemans Bay, where the exceptional flowering of spotted gums has attracted a huge influx of grey-headed flying-foxes from across Australia’s southeast.

In response to intense and highly publicised community concern, federal Environment Minister Greg Hunt has announced he will seek an immediate National Interest Exemption to facilitate dispersal of these bats – a move that risks undermining legal protections afforded to this and other threatened species.

Similar conflicts are occurring elsewhere in NSW, such as the Hunter region, where some unscrupulous members of the public lit a fire in a flying-fox roost at Cessnock.

With the ongoing expansion of the human urban footprint, animals are increasingly confronted with urban environments. Human encroachment into natural habitats generally negatively affects biodiversity. However, urban landscapes can present wildlife with an irresistible lure of reliable food supplies and other resources. While urban wildlife can provide a range of benefits to health and wellbeing, it can also be cause for frustration and conflict.

Urban human-wildlife conflict is a growing area of management concern and scientific research. But the research suggests that the current strategies for addressing NSW’s conflicts between humans and flying-foxes might not have the intended results.

Flying-foxes increasingly find themselves in urban areas. Justin Welbergen Ruling the urban roost

Australian flying-foxes are becoming more urbanised, and the noise, smell and droppings from their roosts can have huge impacts on local residents.

A fundamental problem underlying current approaches to urban roosts is a lack of understanding of the extraordinary mobility of flying-foxes. They are some of the most mobile animals in Australia, with movements that range from foraging trips of up to 120 km in a single night to long-distance nomadism covering thousands of kilometres in a single year.

Nomadic movements of an adult female grey-headed flying-fox, tracked over a period of four years and currently at Batemans Bay. John Martin & Justin Welbergen, unpublished

While roosts can remain active for decades, they are more like backpacker hostels than stable households, housing a constantly changing clientele that comes to visit local attractions. Roosts are connected into large networks through which flying-foxes move in response to changes in local food resources.

This explains the sudden influx in places such as Batemans Bay where preferred food suddenly becomes abundant. But it also highlights the importance of a national approach to flying-fox management and conservation.

Intense local flowerings of Eucalypts, such as spotted gums, produce copious amounts of nectar and pollen, which attract large numbers of flying-foxes and other species for several weeks. When a relatively small local flying-fox population that is tolerated by its human neighbours suddenly increases tenfold, it can place severe pressure on the local community.

Despite their transient nature, these influxes are often wrongly interpreted as population explosions, leading to calls for culling. In comparison, more humane tactics – such as using loud noise or vegetation removal to disperse the flying-foxes – can seem like a more balanced response. But does dispersal actually work?

Council workers in Charters Towers, Queensland, using ‘foggers’ to disperse flying-foxes from a local roost. Australasian Bats Society Shifting the problem elsewhere

There is now ample evidence to show that dispersals are extremely costly and can exacerbate the very human-wildlife conflict that they aim to resolve.

Most dispersals result in the flying-foxes returning the original roost as soon as the dispersal program ends, because naïve new individuals continue to arrive from elsewhere. Overcoming this can take months or years of repeated daily dispersal.

Other dispersals result in flying-foxes establishing new roosts a few hundred metres away, typically within the same urban environment in locations that we cannot control. This risks shifting the problem to previously unaffected members of a community and to other communities nearby.

Former flying-fox roost at Boonah, Queensland, that contained thousands of flying-foxes before it was destroyed in June 2014. Justin Welbergen

While flying-foxes are often portrayed as noisy pests, they serve our economic interest by providing irreplaceable pollination and seed-dispersal services for free. What’s more, those same bats that annoy people during the day work tirelessly at night to maintain the health of our fragmented forests and natural ecosystems.

So it is in our national interest to manage conflict at urban roosts, by using approaches that balance community concerns with environmental considerations.

Flying-foxes perform irreplaceable ecological roles in our natural environment. Steve Parish

To be considered “successful”, a dispersal should permanently reduce conflict to a level that is acceptable to the community without causing significant harm to the animals. However, dispersals are currently implemented at the local council level with little or no monitoring of the impacts in or outside the immediately affected area. This makes it hard to assess whether they have been successful.

For example, it is not uncommon for flowering to cease and flying-fox numbers to decline naturally during the period of active dispersal. This gives the community a false sense that a permanent solution has been achieved, when in fact the issues will recur the next time the trees blossom. There is thus an urgent need for urban roosts to be managed with properly defined and applied criteria for success.

Evidence-based management

Unfortunately, lack of research effort directed at “ugly” and “less popular” Australian animals means that very few evidence-based management tools are available to deal with contentious roosts.

Research targeting a few key areas would greatly help efforts to improve urban roost management. For instance, we do not know how flying-foxes choose their roost sites, which leaves us unable to design “carrot solutions” by creating more attractive roost sites elsewhere.

Intensive tree-flowering events are relatively infrequent and hard to predict. This means that it is difficult to prepare communities for a sudden influx of flying-foxes.

Furthermore, the acceptability of various flying-fox management options differs between sections of the community, so it is difficult to find optimal solutions. Social scientists are currently trying to help identify priority areas that promote long-term viability of flying-foxes while also easing conflict with humans.

The extreme mobility of flying-foxes means that a uniform federal approach for management is needed. Justin Welbergen/WildPhotos.org

Local, state and federal governments continue to allocate considerable funds for dispersal responses, even though such actions are high-risk activities for local communities and are unlikely to provide long-term solutions. We argue strongly that targeted research is needed to better inform land managers and affected communities of flying-fox ecology and provide them with low-cost, low-risk, evidence-based tools for dealing with urban roosts.

Flying-foxes don’t care about legislative borders, and state-based responsibility for wildlife management leads to discontinuity in approaches between jurisdictions. While flying-foxes are being monitored at the national scale, this initiative needs to be combined with a uniform federal approach for managing flying-foxes in our human landscapes. Otherwise, conflicts such as those faced by the residents of Batemans Bay will continue unabated.

Justin Welbergen is President of the Australasian Bat Society, a not-for-profit organisation that aims to promote the conservation of bats, and receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Peggy Eby represents the scientific community on the NSW Flying-Fox Consultative Committee, a not-for-profit stakeholder group that assists government in developing strategies for conserving and managing flying-foxes in NSW. She works as an ecological consultant to government and industry.

Exclusive: All mentions of Australia were removed from the final version of a Unesco report on climate change and world heritage sites after the Australian government objected on the grounds it could impact on tourism

Revealed: Guardian Australia has obtained the Unesco report Australia didn’t want the world to see. Read it now

Every reference to Australia was scrubbed from the final version of a major UN report on climate change after the Australian government intervened, objecting that the information could harm tourism.

Guardian Australia can reveal the report “World Heritage and Tourism in a Changing Climate”, which Unesco jointly published with the United Nations environment program and the Union of Concerned Scientists on Friday, initially had a key chapter on the Great Barrier Reef, as well as small sections on Kakadu and the Tasmanian forests.

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Mayor of London will submit statement and evidence in high court case brought by ClientEarth on the air pollution crisis in the capital

The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has joined a high court challenge against the government over its air pollution plans, overturning the position of his predecessor, Boris Johnson. Khan filed legal documents on Thursday and can now submit a witness statement and evidence to the court on the air pollution crisis in the capital.

Environmental lawyers ClientEarth are suing the government for the second time in a year, having won a case at the supreme court in 2015 which ordered ministers to fulfil their legal duty to cut pollution in “the shortest time possible”. The new case argues the government is still failing to do this.

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Hundreds of millions of people could be displaced by the end of the century due to conflict caused by global warming, says Ségolène Royal

Global warming will create hundreds of millions of climate change migrants by the end of the century if governments do not act, France’s environment minister has warned.

Ségolène Royal told ministers from 170 countries at the UN environment assembly in Nairobi that climate change was linked to conflicts, which in turned caused migration.

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‘Urgent and clear need’ to limit temperature rises to protect key sites from warming, rising seas and harsher weather

Some of the world’s most famous heritage sites – from the Statue of Liberty and Venice to the Galapagos Islands – could be irreversibly damaged by climate change, a report has warned.

Historic and natural world heritage sites are already feeling the brunt of increasing temperatures, with rising seas, erosion and storms hitting Orkney’s neolithic coastal treasures and important tropical coral reefs being “bleached” by warmer seas.

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In a rare move to shun tourism profits for environmental protection, 10 popular dive sites have been shut down in a bid to slow a coral bleaching crisis

Thailand has shut down 10 popular diving sites in a bid to slow a coral bleaching crisis, an official said Thursday, in a rare move to shun tourism profits to protect the environment.

The tropical country’s southern coastline and string of islands are home to some of the world’s most prized white sand beaches and scuba sites, and the booming tourism industry props up Thailand’s lagging economy.

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A halt is called to the deployment of a new, expandable "room" on the International Space Station when it fails to open up as expected.

Increase fuel efficiency of heavy good vehicles that cause a quarter of Europe’s traffic carbon emissions to meet climate targets, says clean corporate alliance

An alliance of companies including Ikea, Nestle and Heathrow airport have called on the EU to pass new laws cutting truck emissions within two years, to meet promises made at the Paris climate conference.

Heavy duty vehicles make up less than 5% of Europe’s road traffic but chug out a quarter of the sector’s carbon emissions – more than airplanes – and their fuel efficiency has hardly changed in two decades.

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Stone rings thought to be created by Neanderthals have been found in France

A collection of zoological wonders from May 2016, featuring brave new rhinos, brand new pandas, earthworm engineers and more

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Author and passionate lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov once said: ‘Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.’ His scientific drawings and watercolours of butterflies have now been collected into one volume, Fine Lines

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On climate change, is Trump uninformed, or playing his voters?

Donald Trump has consistently expressed his conspiratorial and misinformed beliefs that global warming is a hoax.

Ice storm rolls from Texas to Tennessee - I'm in Los Angeles and it's freezing. Global warming is a total, and very expensive, hoax!

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The Royal Navy is investigating claims the wreckage of a British submarine lost during World War Two has been discovered off the coast of Sardinia.

Environmental protection order the first use of Queensland’s new chain-of-responsibility laws

An environmental protection order has been issued against Linc Energy’s former chief executive Peter Bond.

It is the first time the Queensland government’s new chain-of-responsibility laws have been put into use and comes after creditors on Monday unanimously voted to place Linc into liquidation.

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The sun-powered aircraft Solar Impulse has landed in Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania, after a near-17-hour flight.

HS2 is an over-priced, gold-plated project and will fail in many of its objectives a group of transport experts warns.

Ancient air bubbles preserved in Antarctic ice. The Ellsworth Mountains Project

The unfortunate manner in which the latest phase of restructuring of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) has played out has raised questions about Australia’s scientific capability and our ability to meet international responsibilities.

Faced with a budget cut of A$115 million, some 275 staff have apparently been identified for redundancy (though the final number may be as high as 317). Many of them are scientists contributing to long-term sea, air and climate science programs. The restructure is geared towards focusing CSIRO’s attention on the question, as framed by chief executive Larry Marshall, of “how can we find solutions for the climate we will be living with?”

The problem is that the programs at threat form the backbone of national and international research efforts. Virtually all of them are critical for helping us mitigate and adapt to future climate.

In 1979, the great scientist Carl Sagan wrote:

We live in an extraordinary age. These are times of stunning changes in social organisation, economic wellbeing, moral and ethical precepts, philosophical and religious perspectives, and human self-knowledge … Had we been born fifty years later, the answers would, I think, already have been in.

Australian scientists do indeed live in extraordinary times, but not necessarily for the best of the reasons. We may be living through a remarkable period of discovery, but recent events are a timely reminder that we must all work harder to manage the precious resources available to science if we’re not to threaten decades of investment and hard work.

Global response

The cuts have been met with very public protests, including those by former US vice-president Al Gore and the World Climate Research Program.

The most public of all staff to be earmarked (so far) for redundancy is Dr John Church. He is arguably the world’s leading expert on global sea level rise, a role that is more important than ever for adapting to the effects of climate change. It’s a decision so extraordinary it was even reported in The New York Times.

The facilities at risk from CSIRO cuts are used by research teams around the world.

The threat to close the “Ice Lab” involves a facility unique in the world for analysing ancient air trapped in Antarctic ice, helping understand future climate-carbon feedbacks.

The Tasmanian Cape Grim atmospheric station is crucial for monitoring greenhouse gas levels in the southern hemisphere. Only last week it confirmed CO₂ concentrations now exceed 400 parts per million, likely the last location on the planet to do so.

And just last month, CSIRO staff (of which Dr Church was a senior author) led a Nature Climate Change article showing anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases have dominated global sea level rise since 1970. This is crucial work for understanding the source(s) of sea level rise. Such work can inform major infrastructure projects such as Brisbane Airport’s new runway, which is being constructed four metres above minimum required standards to accommodate future coastal flooding.

A wider problem

The funding gap CSIRO faces is a story common to many in the scientific community. Some sectors in the 2016 budget continue to enjoy some funding increases, such as the A$200 million for Antarctic science and A$100 million for Geoscience Australia.

But others have experienced cuts, most notably the Australian Research Council. The ARC has received a further 10% cut on the back of a succession of cuts over recent years.

Putting aside the effect on staff morale and the observation that government science spending has a strong multiplier effect on economic growth, the shortfall of funding in some quarters has immediate implications for how we best co-ordinate our efforts as a community.

Targeted, industry-focused projects are an essential part of a thriving scientific culture in Australia. But the threatened erosion of public science and the loss of capacity in areas of expertise CSIRO has taken decades to build represent a loss to all.

While the recent focus has been on climate science, there are salutary lessons from events of recent months if we are to minimise the impact on this research field and others in the future.

Where to from here?

Like any sector, science needs stability. The cuts have to stop and ideally reverse. If we keep trimming budgets, there will come a point where whatever capacity we have will only be a token effort.

The recent announcement that a CSIRO climate change centre will be established with 40 staff in Hobart is most welcome, but details are sketchy. A major concern regarding all these decisions are how these cuts and developments align with the efforts of the rest of the community.

Reports that the Bureau of Meteorology and Australian Antarctic Division learnt of the proposed cuts in capacity only after the decisions had been made are remarkable if true.

If a realignment of priorities in an institution is to take place, we need to make sure that these decisions are made with wider consultation and as much lead-in time as possible so the scientific community can make the best of a bad situation.

Recently, the Australian Academy of Science announced a welcome, urgent review of national climate science capability. (If you’re part of the community, submissions must be made by June 5, so hurry.)

Announcing cuts that have implications for others without discussion doesn’t help science, it only stifles findings. I hope the CSIRO climate change science centre has been developed in consultation with others and the 40 staff identified are the number truly required.

We need to make sure everyone is talking to one another. Only last week, the CSIRO released its Australia 2030 report, modelling various scenarios for Australia’s future. One scenario is called “weathering the storm”, in which geopolitical instability increases, driven by climate change and regional conflicts.

Faced with this situation, CSIRO suggests that “the energy market relies on tried and tested energy sources such as coal rather than further developing the potential of renewables”.

To suggest under future climate change we should continue to exploit fossil fuels is a remarkable statement from a national scientific body.

We may be half-way to the great leaps in knowledge Sagan prophetically described by 2030, but our understanding of the planet and how we mitigate and adapt to change has to be better co-ordinated as a community. We need to do a lot better.

Chris Turney receives funding from the Australian Research Council and undertakes research with colleagues in CSIRO. He is co-ordinator of the international Earth's Past Future Program (http://earthspastfuture.com/) and a director of CarbonScape (http://carbonscape.com/).

Male and female set free as part of five-year trial to monitor the impact of England’s only wild population of the mammals

A new pair of beavers has been released into a river in Devon to boost the genetic diversity of England’s only wild population of the mammals.

The male and female were set free on the river Otter as part of a five-year trial monitoring the impact of Eurasian beavers, a species hunted to extinction hundreds of years ago in the UK, on the surrounding landscape, wildlife and economy.

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Malcolm Turnbull’s $150m pledge to boost agriculture in northern Australia comes under fire from conservationists

Malcolm Turnbull has promised to spend $150m on dams in Queensland as part of a plan to double the agricultural output of northern Australia – but which would dump thousands of tonnes of pollution on the Great Barrier Reef, according to conservationists.

The prime minister committed $130m to one dam near Rockhampton and a further $20m to feasibility studies for 14 others across the state.

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