Animating the Carbon Cycle 🐘🐳

Restoring biodiversity is crucial to stabilising the climate emergency

Dear ReWilder,

“The air that I breathe, is the air that you breathe

We share the ground on which we walk

The water in which we swim

And the resources we consume

Restoring wildlife populations is the missing link in the climate agenda

Together we must rewild the web of life.”

The web of life is a dynamic system. Revitalising natural ecological processes is a necessary step to help adapt and mitigate the effects of a changing climate. Within this newsletter, we look to discuss animating the carbon cycle, Systems Ecology & Coexistence.

Animating the Carbon Cycle | The role megafauna plays in sequestering carbon 🐳

Biodiversity is a game changer in the field of both Landscape and marine carbon offsetting. Restoring and conserving key species such as Forest Elephants and Wildebeest herds not only improves ecological functioning but can also magnify carbon uptake by 1.5 to 12.5 times across the world’s terrestrial,  freshwater and marine ecosystems.

ReWild Africa has been working on a project this year, that seeks to shed light on the role and impact of biodiversity on the climate. Natural ecological processes provide the necessary feedback loops that can help sequester carbon and regulate our climate. Beyond cutting emissions, restoring, rewilding and reconnecting with nature is one of the best solutions to solving climatic instability.

Watch the trailer below, for a sneak peak at the Animating the Carbon Cycle film that will be premiering next week - 7 April at 12pm. If you would like to join us for a screening in person, RSVP for our event next Thursday at 6pm - Climate Change Conversations in collaboration with Vondeling wines and Paardeberg Sustainability Initiative.

Systems Ecology  🌍

Last year we dedicated a film to the great Bob Scholes. We consider it to be one of the most important interviews we have conducted. It highlights the importance of having a systems thinking perspective when trying to engage with climate change.

“Systems Ecology looks to understand what the drivers of the problem are, rather than the symptoms of the problem.”

“ We can not treat the problem species by species, it wont work. We need to preserve the habitat and systems.”

- Bob Scholes

Bob was a giant in biodiversity conservation, climate science and systems ecology. His legacy lives on not only in the scientific research he conducted, but in his ability to inspire and connect people through multidisciplinary approaches and his naturally inspiring demeanor. 

Another great insight relating to Systems Ecology is from journalist Fred Pearce, he authored the paper Species or Ecosystems: How Best to Restore the Natural World?

He gathered this quote by Juan Cantalapiedra of the University of Alcala. “Actions carried out to preserve ecosystem functioning will last longer than actions oriented towards protecting individual species,”

What Juan Cantalapiedra and Bob Scholes are suggesting here is incredibly important in how we approach and engage with restoration and the UN Decade of Restoration. Understanding the relationship between carbon uptake and a species such as elephant, whale and wildebeest is critical in terms of its relative impact to initiatives that just focus on vegetation. We need to look at re-introduction and preservation in light of maintaining an ecological intact ecosystem. In other words, we need to protect the habitat where species can thrive.

“The problem today is not human use per se...The problem is the kind of land use we see in industrialised societies, with monoculture plantations taking over former forests and grasslands fenced and plowed.” - Fred Pearce

How we look to engage with land in the coming decade is going to determine how we are able to overcome the critical issues of climate change and biodiversity loss. Our current economic model with land needs to reinvent itself so that it encourages biodiversity to thrive. Restoration and Rewilding provides a great opportunity to regulate the climate.

In South Africa, it is imperative that we stop all carbon emissions by 2030 - and have solutions that will sequester carbon out of the atmosphere. This is our only chance of staying within 1.5 degrees. For further research related to this please watch - The IPCC Report: Implications for South Africa. How can we rethink our current approaches to carbon sequestration and include a systems ecology approach when we think about singular species within a landscape?

Have a look at the work of the Global Rewilding alliance & Open Forests for some exciting case studies of restoration in action. For some some African based case - studies and perspectives, have a look at this video that looks at OECM’s ( Other effective area-based conservation measures) that we made with the IUCN - OECMs | Overview.

Coexistence and Indigenous communities 🐘

“As we work to heal the earth, the earth heals us. ”
- Robin Wall Kimmerer

As Bob Scholes communicated, it is critical that we get into the lived landscape, where ordinary people live. We need to engage with restoration agenda, mindful of people who have lived as stewards of the land, who still hold a deep and tacit connection with the natural world.

Human societies have been shaping and living alongside and in between diverse socio-ecological systems across most of the terrestrial biosphere for more than 12,000 years. Areas under Indigenous management today are recognized as some of the most biodiverse areas remaining on the planet. Perspectives of indigenous and local people should be at the front of global negotiations.

“Conserving biodiversity is not about finding places without people, but about conserving the biodiversity cultural landscapes that people have shaped and sustained.” - Erle Ellis

News from ReWild Africa 🐾

• Come visit us on the 7th of April (this Thursday) at 6pm for our Animating the Carbon Cycle | Climate Change Conversations event. We look forward to sharing a glass of wine, meeting new people, and screening a film or two.

• If you feel like some inspiration, try out a Learn Biomimicry foundational course

• Megan is currently in Uganda 🐘 on an awesome story with WWF and BBC StoryWorks - watch this space!

• The team is gearing up to head to Cameroon next month to tell the inspiring stories of climate leaders at the forefront of community engagement and grassroots action with the African Climate Reality Project. More to follow soon…

Wild Regards,
Sam & Team ReWild Africa