To save the planet, we need to sacrifice some of it by David Fickling, read by Roxanne Jansen. In the mid fifteen hundreds, a newlywed couple set up a small print shop in the bustling Flemish city of Antwerp. The revolution they inspired is still reverberating in the way we tackle the challenges of climate change and mass extinction on a planet that will soon be home to ten billion people. Fulk and Ducks and Hieronymous Cock specialized in engravings. They sold to the traders and bankers who had made Antwerp the financial capital of Northern Europe. Their shop was just a few streets away from one of the world's first stock exchanges. Many of their prints showed the fields, villages and rivers of the Netherlands in a naturalistic style unprecedented in Western art. Its obvious why these scenes appealed to their clientele. The Netherlands was becoming one of the most urbanized society on the planet, and by seventeen hundred, about seventy percent of its people lived in towns. The landscapes weren't so much a mirror held up to nature as an elegy for a world that seemed to be rapidly disappearing. For a newly minted urban middle class, these images were a symbol of yearning for a rural ideal from which their buyers were increasingly divorced. That sentiment was discernible at United Nations negotiations late last month over the Convention on Biological Diversity. The treaty between UN member states, which came into force in nineteen ninety three, is intended to preserve the natural environment in a world increasingly shaped by the needs of humanity. Attendees at the three day meeting in Rome agreed to look at setting up a two hundred billion dollar fund to reverse biodiversity losses, but put off a decision on actually establishing it until twenty twenty eight. With Donald Trump pulled out the US out of the Paris Agreement and freezing funding for climate related research, the prospect of US halting the destruction of ecosystems has rarely seemed more remote. Many scientists say we're already in the middle of a mass extinction to rival those that wiped out the trilobites and dinosaurs. But what if our efforts to preserve biodiversity are more esthetic than scientific. An attempt to recreate an imagine natural environment like the vanishing landscapes of the Dutch Golden Age. If so, one of the greatest threats to biodiversity may paradoxically be our efforts to preserve it. At this point, the measures we've adopted to safeguard the natural world are actually jeopardizing the energy transition that's needed to prevent its destruction. The term biodiversity first emerged in the nineteen eighties and encapsulates the importance ecologists attached to the variety of species and a landscape. Under a strictly utilitarian way of thinking, a plowed and fertilized field of soybeans is plainly more useful to humans than the rainforest that was cut down to make way for it. It can provide nutrition, income, and jobs for far more people than the native environment. The concept of biodiversity turns that logic on its head by enumerting all the benefits that even untouched habitats can provide. Mangrove forests, for example, are one of the most effective defenses against coastal flooding and storm surges, preventing about one point five billion dollars in damage to Florida counties hit by Hurricane Irma in twenty seventeen. Forests similarly can suck up climate warming carbon dioxide with unparalleled efficiency. Planting trees remove CO two from the atmosphere at a cost of about forty dollars per metric ton, well below the seventy one dollars per ton cost of European carbon credits and the five hundred to one thousand dollars per ton price tag for mechanical CO two removal, a still largely hypothetical technology. Protecting habitats can also help provide a natural inventory of promising pharmaceutical ingredients. The blockbuster weight loss drug Ozempec derives from the venom of the heathla monster, a lizard from the arid Us Mexico borderlands. The hypertension medication Captapril comes from Brazilian snake venom, while the anti malarial drugs chloroquin and artemisinin were developed from a South American tree and Chinese shrub, respectively. At the same time, the ways we think about biodiversity can be maddeningly vague. One of the challenges of talking about biodiversity is dueling definitions, says Mark Velland, a professor of ecology at Canada's Universite de Cherbruk. One is purely scientific. It's something that you can quie fi that reflects variety in an ecosystem. And then there's another definition used among the general public and also scientists, which is almost synonymous with the things we like most about a certain place. It allows people to move the goalposts. Take New Zealand. Thanks to the arrival of non native animals and plants such as cats, sheep, apples, grapes and kiwi fruit, its environment is now more biodiverse under a numerical definition than it has ever been. Populations of the Himalayan tar, a mountain goat introduced by hunters in the early twentieth century, are now far higher than they are in the animal's native range in South Asia, but in the process something has been lost. Before humans arrived, the world's largest eagles would hunt the world's tallest birds there, while a flightless parrot as heavy as a newborn baby forged the undergrowth. That parrot, the cocopo, is now clinging on. Thanks to strenuous conservation efforts, New Zealand's unique ecosystem has become a bit more like the rest of the planet. The climate crisis is pushing the tension between these two definitions of biodiversity to breaking point and challenging our perceptions of how best to protect it. A two thousand and five u N study made clear that global warming will soon be the single biggest contributor to biodiversity loss, as ecosystems are destroyed faster than they are able to recover. Averting this catastrophe will require an industrial revolution to decarbonize our economies with vast amounts of new infrastructure, including wind and solar farms, hydroelectric dams, nuclear power plants, electricity transmission lines, and high speed rail networks, but such projects routinely get bogged down in red tape, much of it justified on bio diversity grounds. Planning approval delays are one of the biggest barriers to renewable energy growth globally, according to the Global Wind Energy Council. When building a wind or solar project, developers typically spend far longer conducting environmental surveys and fighting off legal challenges than they do developing the infrastructure. It's not hard for even spurious claims of harmed biodiversity to drastically alter or block a clean energy project in Tennessee. Decades of dam building to generate clean electricity and in devastating flooding came to a halt in the nineteen seventies after the Supreme Court ruled that the proposed Teleco dam would harm populations of the snail darter, a finger sized fish that lives in gravelly freshwater streams. The dam was eventually built, and darter populations recovered strongly after they were transferred to another river. But research published in January revealed a surprising fact. This nailed darter isn't a separate species at all, but rather a local population of the stargazing darter, which isn't endangered. Conservationists in the nineteen seventies overstated how unique the fish was because they wanted to block the dam. The New York Times reported an attempt to build a similar project in the Tennessee Basin was abandoned in nineteen ninety nine because of the threat to two species of freshwater mussels. Cumulatively, such roadblocks add up. Power generation from US dams is down by about a fifth since peaking in twenty seventeen. One contributing factor may be that dam operators are taken into consideration the health of wildlife downstream when determining water release levels, instead of purely focusing on power generation, Researchers at the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory argued last year. In the UK, a similar fight is playing out over the Bechstein's bat, a thumb sized mammal whose territory ranges from Sweden all the way down to Greece, and from Portugal east to Iran. HS two Limited, the government owned company that's building a new high speed railway line linking London and Birmingham, plans to spend one hundred million pounds one hundred and twenty eight million dollars building a tunnel to stop the bats colliding with trains. It's an absurd spectacle, according to Prime Minister Cure Stormer, who's vowed to cut red tape around major infrastructure. HS two had to obtain eight thousand, two hundred seventy six separate consents for construction and spiraling costs scuppered plans to extend the network further north to Manchester and Leeds. It's hard to argue that the railway without the costly tunnel would have had a decisive impact on the UK's roughly twenty thousand Bechstein's bats. Genetic studies show they may have arrived in Britain, which is to few pregnant females, when the glacier started to roll back at the end of the Last Ice Age. Fossil evidence suggests that they were once far more widespread until mass deforestation in the Middle Ages created the modern English landscape and destroyed much of their natural habitat. In the vast history of the Bechstein's bat and the UK and across Europe, h S two in its hundred million pound tunnel is a footnote. Or take the semi desert of India's northwestern Rajasthan and Gudraft States, a region well suited to solar and wind power. The government is planned for almost a decade to create a vast renewable energy zone there to reduce reliance on fossil fuels in a nation that generates about one seventh of the world's cold fired power, but the project has been held up by attempts to protect the Great Indian Bustard, one of the largest flying birds, which was driven to the brink of extinction due to hunting, pesticide use, and habit tat loss. Conservationists argued that building new renewable power plants would threaten the remaining few hundred bustards, and in twenty twenty one, the Supreme Court of India blocked the construction of overhead power lines in an area of ninety nine thousand square kilometers thirty eight thousand square miles, roughly the size of South Korea. That would leave about ninety seven percent of the zone's renewable power potential untapped, resulting in emissions of six hundred twenty three million metric tons of carbon dioxide from coal generators, the government told the court, without specifying the time frame. Last year, the Supreme Court reduced the off limits area to just thirteen thousand, six hundred sixty three square kilometers, but in the meantime three years were wasted. You can find similar stories in any number of places around the world, from fights over the impact of offshore wind farms on whales near Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts, to worries about the effect of onshore wind farms on bats in Mexico and the Western US, to the removal of hydro dams in the US Pacific Northwest to improve conditions for local salmon populations. In each case, the proposed conservation measures seem worthy, and the damage to the energy transition minor. Such battles have arousing David and Goliath quality about them, with environmentalists using the law to win fights against heedless developers on behalf of endangered species. There is always another place where you could build a one gigawatt solar array or wind farm, or another route for that high speed rail line. The flora, fauna, and geology of individual leacus systems, though, are unique and must be preserved. Conservationists argue in aggregate, however, we are missing the forest for the trees. Individual infrastructure projects may have large effects on small populations of wildlife, but that's dwarfed by the irreversible damage wreaked by the one hundred million tons of carbon dioxide that existing vehicles and buildings loft into the atmosphere every day. At one point three degrees celsius of warming from pre industrial temperatures roughly where we're at today, about one point six percent of all species worldwide will be driven into extinction, according to an analysis in Science last year, at two point seven degrees celsius where we're headed. Even if all countries match their climate pledges, that rises to five percent before accelerating with each tenth of a degree. We're now ten years into the thirty five year period over which the twenty fifteen Paris Agreement promised to reduce emissions to net zero, but far from falling, annual CO two pollution has increased by about eight percent. A new low carbon economy is being built at an astonishing pace, but if we can't find a way to accelerate further, all hope of stopping that warming is doomed. That's a problem when our tools for preserving biodiversity are so much stronger than those for preventing emissions. A company building a wind farm must carry out exhaustive assessments of the effect on even local populations of otherwise abundant species only within the past year, though, as the UK made the developers of fossil fuel projects perform even the most cursory analysis of their effects on the global climate. Everywhere else its open season. It's inevitable that when we look around our world we see something beautiful and worthy of preservation, but we often mistake what's familiar for what's natural. Compared to the long pageant of evolution and extinction on our planet, we're living in a fraction of a second in time. Only about zero point one percent of all the species that have existed on Earth are alive today. Even since the rise of humanity, our planet has been transformed beyond recognition as our distant ancestors spread around the world. The vast animals that once graze the planet's grasslands vanished into extinction due to hunting and a changing climate, from the mammoths of Russia to car sized wombats in Australia and bus sized ground slaws in Argentina. The disappearance of so many giant herbivores fueled plant growth and wildfires, fundamentally transforming the landscape of the planet Like the Biblical Garden of Eden. Our world is a fundamentally fallen one. Attempting to return it to anything like a natural state is a fool's Errand what might a better biodiversity agenda look like. We can start by acknowledging what we already know to be the case that the major cause of biodiversity loss in the world right now is our food systems. Agriculture is the main threat to eighty six percent of species at risk of extinction. All the urban and industrial areas we have built cover less than one percent of the world's land surface. As a result, we should be more relaxed about the ways that decarbonizing the built environment will affect wildlife in its small corner of the planet. Relatively simple tweaks to the permitting of clean energy infrastructure, limiting the time during which legal challenges can be lodged, for instance, or illegal presumption in the project's favor, similar to rules established by the European Union in twenty twenty two, could help reignite the decarbonization of our power systems. More broadly, we should ask whether our focus on speculative damage to local population of individual species is misguided when our daily emissions are driving us towards mass extinctions at an unprecedented pace that will require a paradigm shift and how we think about the relationship between humanity and nature one just as profound as that inspired by the Dutch landscapists five centuries ago. The carbon intensive civilization we have created is destroying our ecosystems far quicker than the clean energy infrastructure that's urgently needed to replace it. Rapid green development is the best solution to the damage we are doing right now. Our efforts to preserve biodiversity are holding back that future, rather than speeding it along.

To save the planet, we need to sacrifice some of it by David Fickling, read by Roxanne Jansen. In the mid fifteen hundreds, a newlywed couple set up a small print shop in the bustling Flemish city of Antwerp. The revolution they inspired is still reverberating in the way we tackle the challenges of climate change and mass extinction on a planet that will soon be home to ten billion people. Fulk and Ducks and Hieronymous Cock specialized in engravings. They sold to the traders and bankers who had made Antwerp the financial capital of Northern Europe. Their shop was just a few streets away from one of the world's first stock exchanges. Many of their prints showed the fields, villages and rivers of the Netherlands in a naturalistic style unprecedented in Western art. Its obvious why these scenes appealed to their clientele. The Netherlands was becoming one of the most urbanized society on the planet, and by seventeen hundred, about seventy percent of its people lived in towns. The landscapes weren't so much a mirror held up to nature as an elegy for a world that seemed to be rapidly disappearing. For a newly minted urban middle class, these images were a symbol of yearning for a rural ideal from which their buyers were increasingly divorced. That sentiment was discernible at United Nations negotiations late last month over the Convention on Biological Diversity. The treaty between UN member states, which came into force in nineteen ninety three, is intended to preserve the natural environment in a world increasingly shaped by the needs of humanity. Attendees at the three day meeting in Rome agreed to look at setting up a two hundred billion dollar fund to reverse biodiversity losses, but put off a decision on actually establishing it until twenty twenty eight. With Donald Trump pulled out the US out of the Paris Agreement and freezing funding for climate related research, the prospect of US halting the destruction of ecosystems has rarely seemed more remote. Many scientists say we're already in the middle of a mass extinction to rival those that wiped out the trilobites and dinosaurs. But what if our efforts to preserve biodiversity are more esthetic than scientific. An attempt to recreate an imagine natural environment like the vanishing landscapes of the Dutch Golden Age. If so, one of the greatest threats to biodiversity may paradoxically be our efforts to preserve it. At this point, the measures we've adopted to safeguard the natural world are actually jeopardizing the energy transition that's needed to prevent its destruction. The term biodiversity first emerged in the nineteen eighties and encapsulates the importance ecologists attached to the variety of species and a landscape. Under a strictly utilitarian way of thinking, a plowed and fertilized field of soybeans is plainly more useful to humans than the rainforest that was cut down to make way for it. It can provide nutrition, income, and jobs for far more people than the native environment. The concept of biodiversity turns that logic on its head by enumerting all the benefits that even untouched habitats can provide. Mangrove forests, for example, are one of the most effective defenses against coastal flooding and storm surges, preventing about one point five billion dollars in damage to Florida counties hit by Hurricane Irma in twenty seventeen. Forests similarly can suck up climate warming carbon dioxide with unparalleled efficiency. Planting trees remove CO two from the atmosphere at a cost of about forty dollars per metric ton, well below the seventy one dollars per ton cost of European carbon credits and the five hundred to one thousand dollars per ton price tag for mechanical CO two removal, a still largely hypothetical technology. Protecting habitats can also help provide a natural inventory of promising pharmaceutical ingredients. The blockbuster weight loss drug Ozempec derives from the venom of the heathla monster, a lizard from the arid Us Mexico borderlands. The hypertension medication Captapril comes from Brazilian snake venom, while the anti malarial drugs chloroquin and artemisinin were developed from a South American tree and Chinese shrub, respectively. At the same time, the ways we think about biodiversity can be maddeningly vague. One of the challenges of talking about biodiversity is dueling definitions, says Mark Velland, a professor of ecology at Canada's Universite de Cherbruk. One is purely scientific. It's something that you can quie fi that reflects variety in an ecosystem. And then there's another definition used among the general public and also scientists, which is almost synonymous with the things we like most about a certain place. It allows people to move the goalposts. Take New Zealand. Thanks to the arrival of non native animals and plants such as cats, sheep, apples, grapes and kiwi fruit, its environment is now more biodiverse under a numerical definition than it has ever been. Populations of the Himalayan tar, a mountain goat introduced by hunters in the early twentieth century, are now far higher than they are in the animal's native range in South Asia, but in the process something has been lost. Before humans arrived, the world's largest eagles would hunt the world's tallest birds there, while a flightless parrot as heavy as a newborn baby forged the undergrowth. That parrot, the cocopo, is now clinging on. Thanks to strenuous conservation efforts, New Zealand's unique ecosystem has become a bit more like the rest of the planet. The climate crisis is pushing the tension between these two definitions of biodiversity to breaking point and challenging our perceptions of how best to protect it. A two thousand and five u N study made clear that global warming will soon be the single biggest contributor to biodiversity loss, as ecosystems are destroyed faster than they are able to recover. Averting this catastrophe will require an industrial revolution to decarbonize our economies with vast amounts of new infrastructure, including wind and solar farms, hydroelectric dams, nuclear power plants, electricity transmission lines, and high speed rail networks, but such projects routinely get bogged down in red tape, much of it justified on bio diversity grounds. Planning approval delays are one of the biggest barriers to renewable energy growth globally, according to the Global Wind Energy Council. When building a wind or solar project, developers typically spend far longer conducting environmental surveys and fighting off legal challenges than they do developing the infrastructure. It's not hard for even spurious claims of harmed biodiversity to drastically alter or block a clean energy project in Tennessee. Decades of dam building to generate clean electricity and in devastating flooding came to a halt in the nineteen seventies after the Supreme Court ruled that the proposed Teleco dam would harm populations of the snail darter, a finger sized fish that lives in gravelly freshwater streams. The dam was eventually built, and darter populations recovered strongly after they were transferred to another river. But research published in January revealed a surprising fact. This nailed darter isn't a separate species at all, but rather a local population of the stargazing darter, which isn't endangered. Conservationists in the nineteen seventies overstated how unique the fish was because they wanted to block the dam. The New York Times reported an attempt to build a similar project in the Tennessee Basin was abandoned in nineteen ninety nine because of the threat to two species of freshwater mussels. Cumulatively, such roadblocks add up. Power generation from US dams is down by about a fifth since peaking in twenty seventeen. One contributing factor may be that dam operators are taken into consideration the health of wildlife downstream when determining water release levels, instead of purely focusing on power generation, Researchers at the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory argued last year. In the UK, a similar fight is playing out over the Bechstein's bat, a thumb sized mammal whose territory ranges from Sweden all the way down to Greece, and from Portugal east to Iran. HS two Limited, the government owned company that's building a new high speed railway line linking London and Birmingham, plans to spend one hundred million pounds one hundred and twenty eight million dollars building a tunnel to stop the bats colliding with trains. It's an absurd spectacle, according to Prime Minister Cure Stormer, who's vowed to cut red tape around major infrastructure. HS two had to obtain eight thousand, two hundred seventy six separate consents for construction and spiraling costs scuppered plans to extend the network further north to Manchester and Leeds. It's hard to argue that the railway without the costly tunnel would have had a decisive impact on the UK's roughly twenty thousand Bechstein's bats. Genetic studies show they may have arrived in Britain, which is to few pregnant females, when the glacier started to roll back at the end of the Last Ice Age. Fossil evidence suggests that they were once far more widespread until mass deforestation in the Middle Ages created the modern English landscape and destroyed much of their natural habitat. In the vast history of the Bechstein's bat and the UK and across Europe, h S two in its hundred million pound tunnel is a footnote. Or take the semi desert of India's northwestern Rajasthan and Gudraft States, a region well suited to solar and wind power. The government is planned for almost a decade to create a vast renewable energy zone there to reduce reliance on fossil fuels in a nation that generates about one seventh of the world's cold fired power, but the project has been held up by attempts to protect the Great Indian Bustard, one of the largest flying birds, which was driven to the brink of extinction due to hunting, pesticide use, and habit tat loss. Conservationists argued that building new renewable power plants would threaten the remaining few hundred bustards, and in twenty twenty one, the Supreme Court of India blocked the construction of overhead power lines in an area of ninety nine thousand square kilometers thirty eight thousand square miles, roughly the size of South Korea. That would leave about ninety seven percent of the zone's renewable power potential untapped, resulting in emissions of six hundred twenty three million metric tons of carbon dioxide from coal generators, the government told the court, without specifying the time frame. Last year, the Supreme Court reduced the off limits area to just thirteen thousand, six hundred sixty three square kilometers, but in the meantime three years were wasted. You can find similar stories in any number of places around the world, from fights over the impact of offshore wind farms on whales near Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts, to worries about the effect of onshore wind farms on bats in Mexico and the Western US, to the removal of hydro dams in the US Pacific Northwest to improve conditions for local salmon populations. In each case, the proposed conservation measures seem worthy, and the damage to the energy transition minor. Such battles have arousing David and Goliath quality about them, with environmentalists using the law to win fights against heedless developers on behalf of endangered species. There is always another place where you could build a one gigawatt solar array or wind farm, or another route for that high speed rail line. The flora, fauna, and geology of individual leacus systems, though, are unique and must be preserved. Conservationists argue in aggregate, however, we are missing the forest for the trees. Individual infrastructure projects may have large effects on small populations of wildlife, but that's dwarfed by the irreversible damage wreaked by the one hundred million tons of carbon dioxide that existing vehicles and buildings loft into the atmosphere every day. At one point three degrees celsius of warming from pre industrial temperatures roughly where we're at today, about one point six percent of all species worldwide will be driven into extinction, according to an analysis in Science last year, at two point seven degrees celsius where we're headed. Even if all countries match their climate pledges, that rises to five percent before accelerating with each tenth of a degree. We're now ten years into the thirty five year period over which the twenty fifteen Paris Agreement promised to reduce emissions to net zero, but far from falling, annual CO two pollution has increased by about eight percent. A new low carbon economy is being built at an astonishing pace, but if we can't find a way to accelerate further, all hope of stopping that warming is doomed. That's a problem when our tools for preserving biodiversity are so much stronger than those for preventing emissions. A company building a wind farm must carry out exhaustive assessments of the effect on even local populations of otherwise abundant species only within the past year, though, as the UK made the developers of fossil fuel projects perform even the most cursory analysis of their effects on the global climate. Everywhere else its open season. It's inevitable that when we look around our world we see something beautiful and worthy of preservation, but we often mistake what's familiar for what's natural. Compared to the long pageant of evolution and extinction on our planet, we're living in a fraction of a second in time. Only about zero point one percent of all the species that have existed on Earth are alive today. Even since the rise of humanity, our planet has been transformed beyond recognition as our distant ancestors spread around the world. The vast animals that once graze the planet's grasslands vanished into extinction due to hunting and a changing climate, from the mammoths of Russia to car sized wombats in Australia and bus sized ground slaws in Argentina. The disappearance of so many giant herbivores fueled plant growth and wildfires, fundamentally transforming the landscape of the planet Like the Biblical Garden of Eden. Our world is a fundamentally fallen one. Attempting to return it to anything like a natural state is a fool's Errand what might a better biodiversity agenda look like. We can start by acknowledging what we already know to be the case that the major cause of biodiversity loss in the world right now is our food systems. Agriculture is the main threat to eighty six percent of species at risk of extinction. All the urban and industrial areas we have built cover less than one percent of the world's land surface. As a result, we should be more relaxed about the ways that decarbonizing the built environment will affect wildlife in its small corner of the planet. Relatively simple tweaks to the permitting of clean energy infrastructure, limiting the time during which legal challenges can be lodged, for instance, or illegal presumption in the project's favor, similar to rules established by the European Union in twenty twenty two, could help reignite the decarbonization of our power systems. More broadly, we should ask whether our focus on speculative damage to local population of individual species is misguided when our daily emissions are driving us towards mass extinctions at an unprecedented pace that will require a paradigm shift and how we think about the relationship between humanity and nature one just as profound as that inspired by the Dutch landscapists five centuries ago. The carbon intensive civilization we have created is destroying our ecosystems far quicker than the clean energy infrastructure that's urgently needed to replace it. Rapid green development is the best solution to the damage we are doing right now. Our efforts to preserve biodiversity are holding back that future, rather than speeding it along.