RP: In terms of the climate change targets that we have, where we were going to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. We shot through that target. We’re not going to be able to hold it. And we’re seeing the repercussions of that.
Honestly, we’re in trouble. Even if we stop all emissions this very minute, we’re gonna face the impacts of warming for years to come. That means we have to think about how to live in a changing world.
And while that may seem really daunting, there is some good news. We’ve got nature on our side.
HN: We need to be thinking ecologically.
Ecosystems do a lot for us – from soaking up carbon emissions to protecting us from worsening storms. But for them to keep doing that, we need to keep them healthy. And although we haven’t been doing a great job of it so far, it’s not too late to fix it.
The time is now. This is our turning point.
Welcome to In Our Nature, a podcast by the ECOBARI Collaborative that uncovers what we need to do to protect ecosystems, so that they can protect us. I’m your host, Isha, and in this series, we explore our deep connections with the natural world, and how restoring nature can help us adapt to climate change. ECOBARI is a shared initiative of nine founding partners, and is convened by the Watershed Organisation Trust.
This episode is your how-to guide on Ecosystem-based Adaptation. But before we go into the what’s and the how’s and the who’s, let’s talk about the why. Why does this matter?
HN: The stakes are higher than we know, and the situation is far scarier than I think any of us anticipate. And that is something that is really I find very much challenging my own optimism, even as a die hard optimist.
The optimist in question is Dr. Harini Nagendra, an ecologist at Azim Premji University, who leads their School for Climate Change and Sustainability. She’s been studying urban ecosystems across India’s cities for the last 30 years, and also moonlights as an author of mystery novels.
HN: Writing a book requires plotting, and it took me from 2007 onwards, it took until 2020 to get that book published. I wrote it and rewrote it three times, you know. And yeah, the third plot eventually came to what, what you see it as.
Plotting is kind of looking into the future. You have to predict what is going to happen in your story, and you have to make sure your characters can deal with the crises that come up in front of them. Adaptation? Not all that different. Just, in real life.
RP: One of the things that I learned while riding a bicycle for the first time was that if I didn’t look far enough ahead in the road, I was going to fall off my bicycle. So this adaptation thinking is about looking over the horizon, looking ahead, not just looking down immediately. We’re not looking far enough. We’re going to fall off our bicycles.
That’s Dr. Ravi Prabhu, who has been studying and working in forested landscapes across multiple continents since 1983. He’s a senior advisor to the Center for International Forestry Research and World Agroforestry.
So what’s this whole thing about falling off a bicycle? What does it actually mean to fall off our bicycles? Harini and Ravi both have good examples, but we’ll start with Ravi’s.
RP: I was doing some research in Anantapur district in Andhra Pradesh, where they moved the entire farming system towards groundnut or peanut. And then these farmers were stuck in a commodity market. So what happened then, when the prices fell, because there was a global glut, the only way they could make up the income was to increase the area under groundnut. So they cut trees to use the last amounts of and then when they had the next drought, they lost the livestock that they had, so they went into a spiral of debt and poverty.
It’s a pretty devastating story. And it reveals a lot of fault lines, right? We’ve made some decisions about how our farmers should farm, and that’s not really working for us. Especially not now that climate change is throwing everything for a loop.
The main thing is, you’ll never find just one plant growing anywhere in nature. Nature is all about diversity, and diversity keeps us resilient. If these farmers were growing other crops, maybe even some fruit trees, not getting the right price for peanuts might not have affected them as much. But they didn’t have that, and so they were pushed off the edge when the drought hit. And unfortunately, droughts are going to keep hitting.
So this is what adaptation is all about. Making sure that when the next drought or flood or heatwave or tornado hits, we have enough of a buffer to tide us through.
RP: The difference between sleeping on a mattress and sleeping on bare rock, yeah, nature is the mattress that we can actually use.
Now the farmers in Ravi’s example cut down the trees out of desperation, to make space for land to grow crops, but they lost a lot more than they gained from it.
RP: You think about life on land, right? And we are dependent on a number of things. What we are very dependent upon is water. And when we look at nature, you know, just look very simply at a tree as a machine that pumps water up from soil like a hydraulic pump and pumps it into the atmosphere and into the surrounding. It’s a machine that offers shade. It’s a machine that also puts water back in the soil. So it stores.
And because of their hydraulic pumping tendencies, trees influence rainfall, especially in inland areas. In fact, scientists at IIT Bombay have actually attributed declining rainfall to a loss of forest cover. And that’s why rainforests like the Amazon have tipping points – because if you cut too many trees, they won’t be able to bring in the rain you need to sustain the forest – and it can turn into a grassland.
Trees also provide a home for critters that are really important for our farming systems.
RP: We’ll talk about the role of trees as refugia in their roots for earthworms and what we call macrobiota, or for other living organisms, which in the rainy season comes out from the trees and into the soil, and makes the soil fertile, and then comes back.
And they are a buffer in times of need.
[RP 26:16] If you’ve got nothing to feed your cows around during the dry season, but you have woody vegetation, acacias that give them forage, you can keep up your cattle. You know, for a smallholder farmer, who are the vast majority of our farmers, it’s really important.
Ravi contrasts Anantapur’s farmers with an example of a woman named Purity, who he met while working in Kenya.
RP: She started off living under a tin shed because they had no money, but simply by doing an intense management of land, trees, crops, fish and livestock on two hectares, they were able to generate, you know, a tremendous amount of value so that they could have the surplus to educate their children. At the same time, they added biological diversity, they added carbon, they created a resilient system, they adapted to, you know, the conditions they’ve got.
This kind of a farming system is much more aligned with nature, it serves the planet better, and it would keep Purity much safer from shocks – whether from climate change or from the market.
But it’s not just our farming systems or rural areas that need to change. It’s also our urban jungles.
[interlude]
If you start digging into the literature on adaptation, you’ll come across something that I like to call ‘the anatomy of risk’. It essentially describes the different factors that make up a climate risk, and was put together by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The first, of course, is the event itself, which is called a ‘hazard’. The second, how many people, ecosystems, infrastructure, and other resources are exposed to that hazard, that’s ‘exposure’. And how capable are they to withstand it, that’s their ‘vulnerability’. The last, how we choose to deal with the risk, that’s our ‘response’. Now whether or not you’ve gotten stuck for hours in Bangalore’s traffic, or tried to get on a local train at rush hour in Mumbai, it’s pretty easy to understand that cities are high on exposure.
These are big, hunking blocks of metal, glass, cement, and asphalt – pretty much a recipe for disaster when it comes to heat and floods. And coastal cities are especially in danger, because of storms and sea level rise. So one of the responses we’ve come up with to deal with this risk is seawalls, which are usually made of concrete and built parallel to the shore, to reduce wave force and coastal erosion.
Sounds good, but there’s one teeny tiny problem…
HN: A coastline is always rebuilding itself. Rivers bring sand to the sea, and that builds up the coastline, and there are two things that can damage that. One is, if you have a large dam upstream, and your river is, the silt is dammed, it’s not good for the side of the dam, because it’s getting silted. But it’s also not good for the coastline, which doesn’t get built up. For instance, a lot of Indonesia, Jakarta, is sinking largely because of the dams that are upstream, not so much because of anything else. Sea level rise hasn’t yet hit, but it’s a problem of the large dams that are not allowing the shoreline to build up. What a sea wall would do is exactly the same thing. The waves come in, and it helps this entire system to redistribute the sand, so that it’s not just at the coast, but it goes a little outside the coastline and creates these natural barriers to the sea.
Imagine that! We built a wall to protect ourselves, and that’s fair enough, but we didn’t fully understand the dynamics of the ecosystem. So now, that wall is blocking off the silt and waves that build our coastline, causing it to erode faster than ever. So we’ve done something to protect ourselves in the short-term, which ends up causing a lot more problems down the line. This right here is a classic case of maladaptation.
Now this isn’t to say that we should never build infrastructure or that nature is a sure-shot solution to everything. But we need to understand how our infrastructure interacts with nature and make sure that it’s aligned. In many cases, solutions that prioritise nature can help us avoid unintended consequences. In the case of coastal protection, Harini says, it could be restoring a mangrove forest.
HN: The mangroves are your best buffer and resilience to sea level rise. And we saw this during the tsunami. You know, it was very clear across, of course, the Chennai coast, that the areas that were protected along Tamil Nadu were the ones that had their mangroves intact.
Beyond its role of protection, an ecosystem also offers a lot more benefits for people than a chunk of concrete would. Harini shares a similar example of wetlands in a city like Bangalore.
HN: They are going to protect against floods, because they are going to be the sponge that traps your excess rain. But also during droughts, they’re going to release this water more slowly, back into the wells and back into the groundwater, and that’s going to actually provide resilience during droughts as well. But if you look at the fact that you have wetlands, is also very important for the poor, because it protects them from heat stress and it also provides a place for them to fish and to forage and to collect firewood, and that’s really important for especially migrants to the city. But also, you know, women. We did a study, and we looked at 200 women from low income backgrounds and across the city, and when we asked them, they knew over 100 different species that they actively foraged for and cooked with, so that’s a lot. So people are actively foraging in cities like Bangalore and cities like Bombay and that foraging is very important to the nutritional health of their children.
We can also look at another part of our risk anatomy, which is vulnerability. Not everyone experiences climate stressors the same way – someone working an office job is much safer in a heatwave than a construction worker. And like Ravi said, nature provides a buffer for the people who are most at risk.
HN: One needs to look at resilience from two perspectives. One is the resilience of the city itself to, let’s say flooding or heat and and the second is who in the city gets affected. And like I said, you know, there I think we should be focusing on the poorest of the poor. And clearly, our attention is on the wealthiest who can manage. Because most of our media coverage is when wealthy sections of the city get flooded, for instance, right? If you think of both of those, I think nature has a massive role to play.
[interlude]
Adaptation is not limitless. Nature has real thresholds, called tipping points, and once we cross them, there’s no coming back.
HN: Once biodiversity has collapsed, once an ecosystem has collapsed, how are you going to bring it back together? It’s not just about carbon, and that’s something I don’t think we’re realising.
That means that time is of the essence.
RP: Are we assuming we have more time than we’ve got? In other words, are we assuming that if we start small and grow incrementally, and continue to grow incrementally, that eventually we’ll get there? I think time is a pendulum that swings this way and that and if you’re not big enough to withstand it, it will wipe you out.
Ravi and Harini both push for the idea of scale – that we need these solutions to go beyond isolated pockets and really come into the mainstream.
HN: The challenge really that we have is that these are such small areas. We need to be doing something far more, at scale.
But it’s near impossible to expand on a massive scale if we don’t work together. Especially because there’s so much uncertainty about the future.
RP: Do not expect to design the future. Expect to explore the future one hypothesis at a time, but design to learn as fast as you can. And learn not just an individual, learn as a group, yeah, collaborative learning. So all projects should look at a scale in which they’re uncomfortable, and look to learn as fast as possible in social learning.
So, essentially, we need to work together, to push boundaries and get out of our comfort zones, while being deeply invested in the landscapes we want to restore.
Harini talks about a project that’s been underway in Mumbai since the 1940s – an unthinkable timeline for the fast-paced, project-cycle world we live in today.
HN: Godrej has a very good example in Bombay, right, their entire restoration of mangroves, because they’re doing it in a very in a way that is very attuned to biodiversity. Often, mangrove restoration projects have been critiqued, and rightly so, for just planting one or two species and basically making it a monoculture. But what makes the mangrove resilient is the different heights of the trees and the different ways in which the patterns of the roots spread out.
Diversity! We’re all about diversity. This one-species thing is a no-go.
HN: So yes, exactly what Godrej has done is being committed to a place, put in the time to recognize the place. For instance, they allow the original fishing community to fish there who have been descendants of that landscape. You know, justice is very well worked into that landscape. They’re also looking at the street dogs. There’s a lot of dogs, and mangroves have birds, and they need to nest, and you need to be careful of the rights of the dogs. But they’re also dealing with solid waste then, because when the dogs eat a lot of solid waste, then they’re well fed, and then they have more children, and then you have to spay that, and that becomes a wicked cycle, right? So they’re looking at every single problem that comes in, and they’re vested in the landscape and willing to look at each new thing that springs up. And that I think is really important, that being vested in a place, not being agnostic to place. And secondly, being committed that we’re going to stay in the long term and fix it. You know, it might be dogs today, it might be solid waste tomorrow, it might be a third problem the day after, but we are there. We’re going to fix it.
Good things take time – whether it’s the growth of a forest or plotting for Harini’s stories. And we need to dedicate that time, to focus our attention on a place and holistically at its challenges to be able to really make a difference.
Also, speaking of fishermen – here’s a rule of thumb. You gotta talk to the locals.
HN: It’s very important for the success of any restoration project to have the local communities involved, because their knowledge of the land is so intimate and so real. I mean, let’s take fishermen, for instance, in Bangalore lakes. They know the channels through which the water comes. Some are officially marked on the maps, but there are many, many small channels that, when blocked, can help to flood the lake or not provide water, and they would know what’s in the lake.
Local communities not only have an intimate knowledge of the ecosystems they live in, they also have real skin in the game.
[HN 42:43] Their livelihoods are at stake. So they’re the ones on site. Again, if you take Bangalore lakes, a big challenge that they face is people coming and dumping trash at any hours of the night or letting in sewage in the middle of the night. But a fisherman has his fish there, and so he’s sleeping next to the lake, and can actually put sandbags and stop it and alert whoever the trustees are, so that the next day they can go and talk to the police or whoever they need to talk to fix it. If no one’s there at midnight, then they just come the next morning and they find mass fish death, right?
[interlude]
Intuitively, these things make sense to most of us. We want to live on a beautiful planet with clean air, clean water, and clean food. But the problem is that we’re in a little too deep with the way things work right now.
RP: Jobs are dependent, people’s wealth. A lot of wealth is created. And, you know, lobbies are created. So that’s a political economy that’s going to prevent any shift, because people are going to lose. What we haven’t thought about enough in such cases – what’s the alternative for them? Where’s the transition? We need to get things to start sliding towards a new future and get that momentum to build. I don’t think we’re thinking about transition points enough in this, there’s too much lecturing from each side.
I mean, Ravi’s got me there, I’m pretty guilty of lecturing the other side. But I see his point – we have to do better at finding the middle ground. And while a part of that is…
RP: What levers could I be pulling that somebody who currently is really fearful of losing out in future sees, oh, okay, I have an opportunity to build something in the future. I might lose some now, but I might win more later.
It’s also about looking at ourselves and being happier with what we have. The world has enough to support a good life for everyone, but it can’t provide in excess.
RP: The shift from consumption to care is one of those transition points. It’s access to nature, which is good for the soul. And suddenly you realise that time spent there is probably better for you than time spent doing something which is much more materially oriented. And I think we’ve lost this because we, as a species, have evolved with nature. It’s only the last 100 years or even less, perhaps, where we’ve actually acutely lost touch with that sense, and I think it’s playing havoc with us.
So go out and spend more time in nature. The natural world is an astounding place, and it’s yours to discover. And when you do, it will change your life. I speak from experience, because it changed mine.
Thanks for listening to In Our Nature! Our podcast is supported by Honeywell Hometown Solutions India Foundation. If you like this episode, please share it far and wide to help us get the word out there. We’re super grateful for your support and your attention.
ECOBARI stands for Ecosystem-based Adaptation for Resilient Incomes. Our collaborative aims to spotlight and enable solutions that build climate resilience and sustainable livelihoods by restoring, protecting, and enhancing nature. It’s a shared initiative of nine founding partners with diverse areas of expertise, including rural development, action research, sustainable finance, nature conservation, and policy engagement. To learn more about ECOBARI, visit our website at www.ecobari.org
Speakers
In order of appearance
- Dr. Ravi Prabhu, Senior Adviser, The Center for International Forestry Research and World Agroforestry (CIFOR-ICRAF)
- Isha Chawla, Anchor, ECOBARI
- Dr. Harini Nagendra, Director, Research Centre, and Lead, Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability, Azim Premji University
Sources
Abrams et al., 2023: Committed Global Warming Risks Triggering Multiple Climate Tipping Points. AGU Journals: Earth’s Future, Vol 11 Issue 11.
Paul, S., Ghosh, S., Oglesby, R. et al., 2016: Weakening of Indian Summer Monsoon Rainfall due to Changes in Land Use Land Cover. Sci Rep 6, 32177.
Ayesha Tandon, 2023: Drying of Amazon could be early warning of ‘tipping point’ for the rainforest. Carbon Brief.
Credits
Produced by Isha Chawla
Original score by Anurag Baruah
Sound effects from Freesound.org
Listen to the series here
