plodder wrote: ↑Wed Sep 30, 2020 7:02 am
Right. So how long will this take and what are the levers and micro levers to make this happen? What are the priorities? How much time is there? What are environmentalists current priorities?
We are not heading in the right direction, and the scale of the task and its implications are not properly understood or communicated.
I think for a long time the issues have been represented by "environmentalists" and "conservationists", and are basically only now becoming mainstream in all sorts of sectors, from agronomy to energy and infrastructure planning, and financial markets. I think you're right that the those movements have often picked a lot of small battles without being clear about how they fit into the big picture, and have often prioritised conciliatory compromise approaches that haven't been very successful - e.g. the whole farce around agri-environment payments. I would really like to see an environmental movement presenting a bold vision on a broad front: what's the science, what do we need to do and how should we do it? what do the lawyers think? economists? What about development and social justice? We really need to infect politicians with the kinds of ambitious ideas that are already discussed by NGO and academic ecologists alike.
The levers currently being pulled are legal and financial. I did start a thread and I'd love to continue it.
viewtopic.php?f=10&t=1644 One incredibly straightforward target, backed up by mountains of evidence and very simple to communicate, is reducing carbon emissions. We see markets starting to reorganise around overvalued carbon assets that can never be burned, for instance; there is a role for regulators to take a stronger stance, for example where investment funds are failing in their fiduciary duties by investing folks' pensions in stranded assets. Heathrow Airport expansion was blocked on climate grounds, based on the Paris agreement, creating legal precedent that will be observed in other jurisdictions. The EU, and likely the USA, are increasing carbon-reduction targets, and China has just entered the race. Those targets need to be more ambitious to match the science, and need enforcement mechanisms to be developed, but they are happening in all the world's biggest economies.
The biodiversity crisis is much, much harder to articulate. Payment for Ecosystem Services goes some way to quantifying the value of some kinds of species/habitats in some contexts, but a lot of the people motivated to work in such a depressing and unrewarding field mostly make unexamined value judgements asserting the inherent value of all forms of life. It's a lot easier not to give a sh.t about non-edible wildlife than it is to ignore the climate. The Convention on Biological Diversity is currently meeting to discuss why the last decade was such an acknowledged abject failure (coincidentally the decade I've been a student and/or professional ecologist, so forgive my gloomy outlook). They currently have sensible targets, but no meaty levers to pull in the financial department, and little of weight legislatively.
In terms of relatively straightforward stuff we could do in the next year, we could go for some joined-up thinking with public accounts. We should stop giving public money to landowners for damaging natural capital, for instance by overgrazing, burning moorland or causing soil erosion. Brexit means these rules are being rewritten anyway, and conservation groups have been presenting plans to DEFRA since 2016. No subsidies for fossil fuels either. We're about to have a huge fuckoff recession, so the government will be printing loads of money again: instead of giving it to bankers to siphon offshore, invest it economic activities that also tackle the climate and biodiversity crises, like green infrastructure or regenerative agriculture. Make sure there's jobs for people in obsolete industries, instead of shafting them like the miners. This is explicitly Biden's "Build Back Better" plan (dyqik mentioned this above), and the EU are discussing similar plans, but it's a bit more complicated to get a sense of how those discussions are going as there are 27 national governments involved, and some of them really like coal (waves at Poland). Stuff's going on.
I'm really interested in this question of directing policy towards ecologically ends, within the existing politico-economic framework rather than depending on a complete overhaul of global society (you may recall discussions along this line with millipede in about 2014-16). (That's not to say a complete overhaul of global society wouldn't be lovely, it just might not be quick enough so let's hedge our bets, eh?) I've rewritten my PhD around relevant protected-area legislation, building on what was IMHO already a pretty cool basic science project to address an imminent conservation threat. I'm going to court and everything. Like, I'm doing my best here. I've seen a lot of very cool smallish-scale projects, and worked for a few of them - what I want to happen is those kinds of visions getting joined up in the minds of people who make overarching long-term plans at a national level.