*Disclaimer – This blog reflects the current state of my knowledge. It does not reflect the opinion of any institution, and my understanding will change as I learn more. The purpose of this blog is to summarize information, stimulate thought, raise conversation, and serve as a basis for further studies.

Content

• How does the Living Landscapes narrative relate to the greenhouse gas narrative and the broader climate discussion?
  • The Greenhouse Gas Narrative
  • The Living Landscapes Narrative
  • Nature-based solutions
• Resolving goal conflicts in these two narratives.
  • Recognizing fundamental differences in these two narratives.
  • Goals and goal conflicts between the two narratives.
• Real climate solutions – managing tradeoffs for multi-solving
• Conclusion

A growing number of scientists and advocates and people are concerned how our planet is warming, its biosphere is degrading, species are going into extinction, land is desertifying, and the small water cycle is breaking down in many regions. Landscape regeneration practitioners also report that land regeneration is possible at local and even regional scale. Humans have tremendous agency in how they shape our living biosphere, both for the better and for the worse.

Meanwhile, climate scientists are surprised that land is warming faster than their models predict. They are now analyzing why their computer simulations predict cooler temperatures on land; models predict less temperature difference between land masses and oceans than we observe. Why are models unable to predict heat domes? Models already consider the changed reflectivity of land for light and heat (albedo), thus some aspects of human-driven land use change are being modeled. While multiple lines of reason persist about why climate models fail to predict the excessive heat on land, many experts now point at one culprit: the “shapeshifter” water that effortlessly re-constitutes itself as ice, snow, clouds, liquid, or vapour, while modifying energy flows massively. In short, our models are quite inaccurate in describing the cycling of water on land in a living biosphere, and inadequately capture how human degradation of the biosphere can change energy flows and the water cycle ([1]).

Meanwhile, policies are pushing new uses of land in the name of climate action – especially the use of plant-grown energy. Pastures are turned into cashcrop land, and corn is turned into ethanol and added to gasoline; jungle is turned into palm plantations and palm oil is turned into diesel; forest is turned into badlands and their biomass into wood pallets. In many parts of the developed world, bioenergy is the fastest-rising land use, corn ethanol the fastest-growing product made of farmland. All of these forms of bioenergy have devastating impact on biodiversity and soil health, and often disrupt the water cycle. We are degrading soils and watersheds, we are desertifying land, and we do that in the name of climate action.

Meanwhile, the general public has increasingly embraced the simplistic climate narrative that media is formulating – carbon dioxide emissions are responsible for the warming of earth, and the increase of extreme events that we experience on land. Flooding? Greenhouse gases. Droughts? Greenhouse gases. Fog, or dust, or storm? Greenhouse gases are to blame. Dustbowl? It must be greenhouse gases. So calls for strong climate policies get louder, and economic actors are offering ever-more profitable strategies that promise help. What can go wrong?

How does the Living Landscapes narrative relate to the greenhouse gas narrative and the broader climate discussion?

To start off, I summarize the Greenhouse Gas narrative and the Living Landscape narrative – the problem, as well as its solution. Please note that the complex problem description of living landscapes comes along with straight-forward solutions, while the relatively simple problem description of the GHG narrative brings along extremely difficult solution barriers.

The Greenhouse Gas Narrative

Problem description

Global warming is driven by an increase of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. Humans emit greenhouse gases – especially carbon dioxide, but also Nitrous oxide (N2O), Methane (CH4), and other industrial gases. These gases interfere with heat radiation on its way to exit the atmosphere into space, but greenhouse gas pollutants scatter heat radiation, effectively trapping heat energy at the Earth’s surface. The Earth and its oceans warm up, glaciers and polar icecaps melt, and storms increase in severity. A warming planet impacts everything – corals bleach as the oceans are acidifying with more dissolved carbon dioxide, oceans birth more severe storms, continents experience more extreme weather events. By disturbing the dynamic Earth system, human action may push the system beyond a number of “tipping points”, and our climate changes irreversibly (at least within human-relevant time frames).

The solution

The solution is a coordinated action of all humans. All countries, especially the largest emitters and historically large emitters, need to reduce their emission of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide from fossil fuels. Especially developed nations, usually democracies that cater to the preferences of their majority population, need to invest into forms of energy that no longer depend on the burning of fossil fuels, so they can maintain or improve their perceived standard of living. Poor countries may leap-frog by accessing modern technologies, skipping the fossil fuel era entirely. Furthermore, some large-scale technologies can modify the Earth’s energy balance – geoengineering techniques that block off sunlight, reflect sunlight at a large scale, or remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

The Living Landscapes Narrative

Problem description

Living landscapes have a decisive role in regulating the cycling of water and nutrients, and the flows of energy on land. Spongy soils are teeming of life; these soils can absorb water even after large rainfall events of 5” to 6” in few hours. Spongy soils hold back rainfall and slowly release it to groundwater and to vegetation. Slowly, cooled and purified groundwater eventually returns to the surface through cold springs, streams and wetlands. Vegetation also takes up soil water; through transpiration this water is released into the atmosphere as vapour.

The energy flow impacts of living landscapes are less known and even more complex for shaping local weather: Moist soils in hydrated landscapes carry over the sun energy from daytime into the night, leveling diurnal temperature fluctuations and increasing the nocturnal heat release into space. Daytime plant transpiration absorbs additional energy from the surface when water becomes vapor. This transpiration enables cloud formation, by pushing existing air humidity above the condensation threshold. Plants further lower this condensation threshold by releasing biological aerosols that stimulate vapour condensation. Vibrant living landscapes also impact the water cycle and energy balance of entire regions: vegetation fosters low clouds that reflect sunlight and shade the land; through transpiration, vegetation moves the energy of incoming sunlight away from the surface and, through condensation, releases this energy in the cloud layer of the sky, bypassing the greenhouse gases that would reflect radiative energy. Vegetation governs what happens with solar energy on land!

By modifying energy flows, landscapes in many regions govern the long-range transportation of water in our atmosphere. From Yukon to Tierra del Fuego, the coastal mountains of the Western Americas naturally block the flow of air and clouds from the oceans. If coastal valleys and mountainsides are bare, air and land heat up and block clouds from traveling over the mountains to their East flanks. This keeps the prairies dry. Vibrant coastal wetlands and forests, however, had prevented this heat blockage and helped moist clouds travel East, keeping the prairies hydrated. Similar effects happen in Southern Spain and Portugal (Lewis, 2023), and likely in many other places. The process of desertification has changed rainfall patterns, temperatures, day-night-variability of energy and water flows, cloud shading, water transport in clouds.

Today, entire continents have dried out – colonial agriculture was developed for temperate regions, and turned Australia from a green Savannah into a desert. India was deforested under colonial rule, and large areas desertified likewise. Mesopotamia and the Middle East dried out long before, when living landscapes were degraded by human degenerative agricultural practices. During summer months, desertified land areas heat up surface and air, creating relatively dry air without low clouds. This dry atmosphere no longer protects from excessive sunlight and accumulates more energy, creating heat domes. Heat domes (a large-scale version of urban heat islands above disturbed landscapes) form high-pressure zones that block off incoming airflows, and often stagnate for long periods. They are prone to wildfires – until a large storm gathers enough energy to blast through this blockage, re-establishing  balance with cooling torrential rainstorms and subsequent flooding.

The drying of degraded continents, and the moisture-holding capacity and cooling ability of living landscapes, have existed long before the burning of fossil fuels released greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Desertification and soil degradation contributed to the collapses of many civilizations – the copper age cultures in Eastern Europe, the Mesopotamian agricultural civilizations, the Middle East and the empires of Greece and Rome, the empire of Cartago in Northern Africa, the Maya empire in Central America. Less than 100 years ago, the dustbowl in the United States and Canada was a stark reminder how food production systems may collapse under the human plow.

The solution

Each one of us can ensure that landscapes remain vibrant and living, by maintaining water on the land and ecosystems healthy, and regenerating disturbed water cycles and ecosystems within everyone’s agency:

• Through our purchases we can support regenerative land use;
• On the land that we manage in person, we can ensure lush and biodiverse vegetation cover and water retention;
• On the land that we own through our investment assets, we ensure that the land users maintain healthy ecosystems and regenerate disturbed ecosystems;
• On public lands, we can reforest and restore ecosystems;
• Public policies can support soil health and water retention landscapes. Roosevelt’s decisive policies still model our human response to land degradation after the dustbowl in the US, and Ontario’s 2 Billion Tree program in Ontario’s dust-bowl.

Two narratives – two epistemological challenges.

Interestingly, the Living Landscape narrative encompasses several feedback loops that criss-cross through academic disciplines. As such, the Living Landscape Narrative is entirely disrespectful to how academic institutions are organizing knowledge: in disciplines, in departments, in model modules. The LLN can only be studied at the interfaces between these disciplines. Projects require deep collaboration between departments, which still faces administrative and linguistic and conceptual and epistemic barriers. Calibrating any computer model across these many disciplines and modules require totally different approaches to parameterization, uncertainty analysis, and cyber-infrastructure. And due to its trans-disciplinarity, no single expert realm is useful to describe these interactions, which creates conflicts with the incentive structures for academic careers (compare Arnold et al., 2020 and my recent blog on Makarieva’s critique to climate models). Meanwhile, the GHG narrative is substantially simpler: it is firmly based in the physics of the atmosphere and the oceans, with some chemical and geological considerations that pose enough challenges to a departmentalized research context.

Nature-based solutions – a bridging concept

Land use plays a relevant part in the greenhouse effect, mainly by absorbing or emitting carbon dioxide and other GHG but also how they reflect visual light. Some land uses can substitute fossil fuel use by producing various forms of biofuels, wood pallets or cellulose. Other land uses remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it in soils and living systems – these are “Nature-based solutions”. IPCC frames these as GHG sequestration that also increases overall climate resilience (see analysis by the Nature-based Solutions Initiative).

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and other organizations use a broader definition for “Nature-based solutions” which focuses on biodiversity and ecosystem functions, reflecting the Living Landscapes narrative, locating the Nature-based Solutions debate at the intersection of the GHG and the Living Landscapes narratives. Many people now support this term to bridge between both narratives. Attention is recommended on how the term Nature-Based Solutions is interpreted and utilized.

Resolving goal conflicts in these two narratives.

Recognizing fundamental differences in these two narratives.

Both narratives are true and based on solid science. However, few people move freely between them – most people favour one over the other. This may depend on  lived experience. The natural context where people live or work, and peers, also frames perception: those who live in dry-lands that were desertified with Western-style agriculture, those who remember the dust-bowl in their family legends, tend to favour the Living Landscapes narrative. Others who study the oceans and polar regions, mainly see greenhouse gases. So how are these two narratives different?

Goals and goal conflicts between the two narratives.

The goal of climate policies under the GHG narrative is clear: Reduce greenhouse gas emissions, or at least reduce the rate of their increase. As all emissions contribute to the same global pool of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (and those dissolved in the oceans), every GHG saving counts.

The goal of the Living Landscape narrative is to re-establish healthy soils, abundance of vegetation, and cycling of water in our landscapes, in order to maintain (or re-invigorate) nature’s own air conditioning unit – reduced heat radiation, and plant transpiration, cloud formation, precipitation.  The living landscape narrative mostly is directed to local action with local benefits (e.g. cooling urban heat islands), yet larger-scale regeneration will add additional layers of benefits for entire regions (cloud formation, rain) and globally (reduced greenhouse effect due to lower heat radiation on land, more carbon stored in the living biosphere, protection of biodiversity).

Several proposed solutions to one narrative are at the expense of the other. I will use three examples:

• Biofuels – Several governments now regulate the increased use of commercial biofuels, such as corn ethanol, palm oil or soy diesel, wood pallets. GHG accounting methods suggest that this leads to reduced GHG intensity in our gasoline mix (as emissions per energy unit). These accounting methods explicitly acknowledge that using agricultural land for fuel production will drive land use intensification elsewhere, to compensate for whatever was done before ethanol production. And this compensational land use change creates additional GHG emissions. For lack of a method to quantify these “indirect land use change emissions”, the Canadian Government currently define them to be zero – an acknowledged accounting loophole that builds an entire industry. Without this loophole, overall GHG emissions of ethanol mix are then even higher than pure gasoline (study).

Our current production system for grain-based biofuel has a hunger for prime farmland at huge scale. In particular, corn ethanol now utilizes >40% of North American corn acreage. Also, several countries are deforesting tropical rainforests in favour of palm oil plantations. Clear-cut logging in Canada produces wood pallets that earn carbon credits in the UK and Germany, another accounting loophole that offers a shortcut to Net Zero. Overall, biofuels are the fastest-growing driver of desertification of our Earth – in the name of climate action (see blog on ethanol for some numbers).

• Lithium – A shift from combustion engines to electric motors requires batteries. The most powerful batteries are currently using the element of Lithium, which is only mined in few spots on Earth. New mines are being proposed, e.g. in one of the world’s largest intact wetlands in Northern Ontario (Canada). Developing such a mine could drain a wetland as large as Germany, bringing along the massive release of carbon dioxide and methane into our atmosphere. Yet, Lithium may also be a key stepping stone to new forms of energy storage and the solar age. What sacrifices is worth it?
• Solar farms – Land mainly dedicated to electricity production with automated solar panels. Land now is covered by glass panels, and ground surface in between and below. The ecological impact of such farms, and the impact on living landscapes, strongly depends on how the land beneath the panels is managed – is it sprayed into bare ground, or covered in lush and biodiverse pastures that nurture sheep and insects and birds and cycle water?

The large interventions into our economic system also give new power to new actors. On one hand, it gives rise to new innovation and entrepreneurs. On the other hand, climate policies have favoured subsidies for very large economic actors, entangling government further with the corporate and the financial sector. Many of the problems of our society are directly related to the rise of short-term thinking in the corporate and financial world, with a tendency to externalize costs (environmental, social, economic) while concentrating profits in the hands of few. Our governments have so far failed to regulate these two sectors in ways that avoid negative externalities, partly due to strong resistance by these sectors. It remains unclear how these historic “environmental villains” may lead the transformation that our humanity requires for its survival – are we putting the fox in charge of the hen-house in a process that may be vital to humanity’s survival? How can we ensure that technologies offer real solutions, rather than economic bluff and profiteering?

These goal conflicts from actions under the climate narrative and the living landscape narrative are well known, but rarely tackled. They reflect a miss-alignment of environmental groups, in a way that is typical to reductionist approaches to managing complex systems.

Real climate solutions – managing tradeoffs for multi-solving

Our need for climate action requires some form of political inventions into our GHG emissions. These interventions also impact living landscapes, and also change our socio-economic system at large. When comparing the three examples listed before, biofuels, lithium mining, and solar farms, they type of trade-offs are very different.

Trade-offs in climate actions

For the biofuel corn ethanol, my recent blog concluded that a (questionable) slight reduction in per-litre emissions from gasoline does not warrant the sacrifice of land, ecosystem regulation functions, desertification. Furthermore, economic gains from this new growth sector are captured by a very small number of people, while the farming sector receives another consolidation push.

The benefits of lithium mining are far more complex. Lithium is a keystone mineral in our energy transition, to store and transport renewable energies, along with our shift from combustion to electric engines. The impact on landscapes greatly depends on the eco-hydrological context: Ontario plans to drain parts of the world’s  second largest wetland, the “Ring of Fire”, potentially triggering massive CO2 emissions of soil carbon and methane along with habitat loss. This sounds far more impactful on ecosystems than mining in the Atacama desert, or even Jeff Bezos’ plan to capture mineral meteorites from out of space. Socio-economically, “electrify everything” will certainly create more growth, along with a surge in short-lived consumer products that clutter our landfills with electronic waste. Is it worth it, from an overall perspective?

Solar farms are land mainly covered by solar panels for electricity production. These are certainly interventions into ecosystems. However, overall environmental impacts on landscape vibrancy mainly depend on alternative land use, and on what happens on the land between the panels. The latter can be sprayed down to bare-soil, or converted into biodiverse meadow pastures full of insects and other pollinators, occasionally grazed down with sheep or other small grazers. One management strategy degrades soil and reduces water retention, the other preserves meadow ecology while maintaining healthy sols that infiltrate water.  Environmental impact also depends on what there was before the solar farm: natural forests with key ecosystem regulation functions, bushland with some ecosystem value, or degraded dry land?

These three climate actions elucidate tradeoffs with landscape and socioeconomic health, and how holistic impacts of climate action can be beneficial, neutral, or negative. Such assessment may depend on the intervention itself, on management choices, on location characteristics, or the overall regulatory contexts – an action can be beneficial or undesirable depending on other societal choices. Recently, a new FAO study lays out how this could be done in practice, at least in agriculture…

In all circumstances, our society needs to be cautious about false solutions, and ponder how alternative management can avoid negative externalities. Right now, the messaging of environmental organizations remains divided. The environmental movement could adopt decision criteria to either collectively embrace or reject actions that claim GHG mitigation benefits – based on well-accepted criteria, transparent, and salient. It could then speak with one voice, with greatly enhanced narrative power.

Conclusion

Without any doubt, greenhouse gases are warming the oceans and add energy to the Earth’s climate system. However, a good portion of the extreme events that we are experiencing on land today are actually consequences of our landuse. By the way we degraded soils and watersheds, disrupt the small water cycle. Even as greenhouse gases exasperate these extreme weather events, the greenhouse narrative can misguide us into false solutions, and distracts us from our agency of restoring vibrant living landscapes with definite local benefits as the climate is shifting. This is why we need a better climate change narrative that recognizes the role of living landscapes on land, and the urgency of global warming that is warming our oceans and poles toward ‘tipping points‘.

Our society is being bombarded with new technologies and strategies, many promising to tackle climate change. This bazaar of innovation is welcome and urgently needed. However, a time of innovation also requires caution. And smart and intentional choices of which technologies to promote, and in which context to promote them –  seemingly unrelated factors make or break the benefits of most inventions. It’s not the technology, its how a technology is embedded!

The continued acceleration of global warming warrants large-scale climate interventions, and many people feel a sense of alarm and urgency. Yet, our society has not yet established mechanisms to safeguard us from unintended consequences of these actions. The environmental voices who are calling out unacceptable trade-offs are few and weak and scattered. For example, 20 years of regulations supporting corn ethanol has turned it into the main disruptive force in agriculture, with no limit to growing demand for more cropland and irrigation water. The Genie is out of the Bottle and it is hungry, gobbling up food farms and ecosystems, and drying up entire landscapes – in the name of climate action. When will environmentalists come together and stop this monster? When will we develop decision frameworks that protect us from the dark side of climate action, and its negative impacts especially on our precious remaining living landscapes?

[1] An introductory summary by Dr. Michael Byrne here: https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-why-does-land-warm-up-faster-than-the-oceans :