A problem with the fight against climate change and the push for renewables is that nature is often a second thought, observes Martin Harper, chief executive of BirdLife International, one of the world’s largest conservation groups.
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A few years ago, his organisation designed a tool to help renewables developers avoid disrupting the flights paths of wild birds. In some parts of the world, such as northwestern India, the rapid roll-out of clean energy infrastructure has brought iconic species such as the Great Indian Bustard to the brink of extinction. Court petitions have been filed to protest against the frequent collisions of the critically endangered birds with overhead power lines, constructed as part of large-scale public and private renewable energy projects.
BirdLife International believes that the plight of the Great Indian Bustard is partly the result of an energy development plan that did not fully include biodiversity impacts in its design, and the conservation group is now fighting a rearguard battle to save the species.
While businesses are increasingly talking up the importance of nature at events such as the global biodiversity COP summits and in their sustainability reports, more need to recognise that climate action should not come at the expense of biodiversity, says Harper. Nature is part of the climate response, he says.
“I would encourage businesses to think about their climate and nature impacts in a more joined-up way,” he said, in a recent interview with Eco-Business at BirdLife International’s Singapore office.
If nature is taken into account at the design stage, renewables projects are more likely to be accepted by local communities, and are more likely to get through the planning system quicker, he suggested.
Harper is nine months into his role as chief executive of BirdLife International, an organisation that works with 123 partner conservation groups in 119 countries to protect and restore large areas of habitat for birds, which are useful indicators for the health of wild areas.
“If birds are in trouble, it’s likely that the rest of nature is in trouble as well,” says Harper. “All of the early trend data on wildlife decline came from birds, because they are so well observed.”
BirdLife International’s approach to conservation is to learn from its partners what works and what doesn’t, and scale up the approaches that are successful, much like an innovation lab, says Harper.
However, the organisation’s work is now complicated by climate change. The conditions upon which species have evolved and adapted are changing at scale, and vulnerable species are in danger of being squeezed out as habitats shift, he says.
In this interview, Harper talks about the impact of the carbon market crash on conservation, the biodiversity protection funding gap, why conservation projects succeed and fail, and how climate change is changing the rules of conservation.
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Given that there is no alternative financing mechanism, we have to make the carbon market work to protect forests.
For a long time the focus of the business community has been on carbon and climate. How confident are you that nature and biodiversity is now being taken seriously in boardrooms?
One indication of how things have shifted massively came at the United Nations Biodiversity Conference of the Partiies (COP15) conference in Montreal, Canada, in 2022. I was struck by how many businesses were there, compared to 12 years ago at the first biodiversity COP in Nagoya, Japan, where there was hardly any business voices in the room.
One of the new targets under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework [which was adopted at COP15] is for more companies to disclose their impact on nature, though there were no stipulated legal obligations. Since then, jurisdictions such as Japan, the European Union, and the United States have obliged companies to disclose finance-related nature impacts.
The publication of the Taskforce of Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) recommendations has been important in helping companies understand their impact on nature. We want businesses to set targets to reduce their impact on nature, be loud and proud about what they are doing, and advocate for higher standards for disclosure.
There has been a lot of pushback against the voluntary carbon markets in recent months. How has the fall in the price of carbon affected funding for conservation?
We are aiming to protect 9 million hectares of forest in 47 landscapes around the world. Given that there is no alternative financing mechanism, we have to make the carbon market work to protect forests. A lot of governments have not got the money to be able to deliver the protection that is needed. Unless carbon finance can step in, some of these forests will disappear.
But we want to make sure that we are good sellers of carbon. Since the exposé [by The Guardian, which found that more than 90 per cent of rainforest carbon offsets by the market’s biggest certifier were “worthless”] in January 2023, projects have had to adapt their design. We feel that we have already been operating at a high standard, but there was a risk that we would be coloured by what “the cowboys” have been doing. I think that it’s right that the standards of the whole market are raised, because we want all forest projects to be successful. Equally, we only want to attract good buyers – companies that are demonstrably on their own low-carbon pathway.
In 2022, BirdLife launched Avistep, a tool to help renewable energy project developers plan projects in ways that avoid harming biodiversity, using a red-amber-green system. How well has the tool been adopted since its launch?
I think in every country that has embraced the renewable energy agenda, considering its impacts on nature seems to have been secondary. Avistep flowed from work done in Scotland in the early 2000s to try and influence the Scottish government to embrace the renewable energy revolution in a way that is in harmony with nature.
The sensitivity mapping approach to renewables has been piloted in four countries in Asia [India, Vietnam, Nepal and Thailand]. India is thinking about how it can build Avistep into renewable energy planning. In Vietnam, Avistep is used in initial screening for offshore wind projects.
[Despite the progress,] we are not complacent. There’s a lot of work to be done. If governments embrace it, they are signalling to the renewable energy industry that these are standards that they expect, and they should develop only in areas that are acceptable [to people and nature]. Another trial is being planned for Laos, Uzbekistan, Kenya and Egypt. We want to take Avistep global, but are prioritising countries that are interested in using the tool.
Has the tool met with any resistance from renewables firms or governments?
In the mid-1990s, when renewables first came on to the scene in Europe, it was a basically a mad dash for who could set up a wind farm project the fastest without any regard for its environmental impact. But numerous studies have shown that if renewables companies take nature into account in the design of projects, they are more acceptable to local communities, and are likely to get through the planning system quicker.
A well designed offshore wind farm can help the breeding of fish, and so help the livelihoods of fisherfolk. The same principle applies to the success of forest finance projects – local communities must be included in the project design process.
How are renewables projects causing problems for biodiversity?
A classic example is the decline of the Great Indian Bustard, which has been greatly affected by electricity pylons running through pastoral land [to connect solar fields]. That land has been handed down in the community for 500 years, and the Great Indian Bustard is a symbol of cultural pride for the local people.
Wind and solar power expansion in India’s Rajasthan desert region threatens the last viable population of the Great Indian Bustard. Image: Saurabhsawantphoto, CC BY-SA 4.0
Some birds need large areas of open space to feed and avoid predators, and the combination of the solar panels taking up a lot of space and the electricity cables overhead causes problems, particularly for less agile birds like bustards, cranes and raptors.
Conservation success stories in Asia – what’s working well and why?
The Asian vultures recovery programme is working well. More than 25 years ago, we observed catastrophic declines in the Asian vulture populations of up to about 99 per cent in some areas. The root cause of the decline was the use of diclofenac as a veterinary drug in cattle. The vultures would scavenge on cattle carcasses, and diclofenac is toxic to vultures. The crash in the vulture population led to a massive rise in feral dogs, which replaced vultures as scavengers of cattle. This led to a spike in rabies in countries such as India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Cambodia.
The Save Asia’s Vultures Programme (SAVE) started out by identifying an alternative drug for cattle that is safe for vultures. That was important. We needed to demonstrate to the veterinary community and obviously to farmers that there are alternative drugs they could use. We then ran a captive breeding programme for vultures, and established safe zones which were known to be free of toxic chemicals. We released birds back into the wild in places like Nepal. Now we are seeing the population stabilise. We hope to see a hockey stick-shaped change in [the growth trajectory of] their population as they recover.
Himalayan vultures circling. Himalayan vultures are susceptible to kidney failure induced by diclofenac, a drug used to treat sick cows. The decline of vultures has led to the deaths of about half a million people in South Asia over five years, according to a study in the American Economic Association journal. Image: Noor Hussain/flickr
The work is not finished. There’s still a huge amount to do. We have followed the classic conservation approach, which is to identify the problem, diagnose why there is a problem, test solutions to see what works, then roll out the right solution at scale. Strong collaboration between governments, civil society and the private sector – in this case, the pharmaceutical industry – is key.
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Unless clear objectives are set for nature alongside economic development plans, conservation is always going to be a rearguard battle.
An example of a successful site-level intervention is Pak Thale, a coastal area in the Inner Gulf of Thailand. It is part of the Pak Thale-Laem Phak Bia flyway and is used by 20,000 water birds every given year. Over the past 10 years, the area has been protected, restored and monitored, and has been turned into a nature reserve. It also attracts tourists and is a productive salt lake.
Pak Thale has been used as a test case for how investment can deliver multiple benefits. As a result, the Asian Development Bank has committed to mobilise US$3 billion over the next 20 years to protect sites that are important for migratory birds across the whole of the East Asian-Australasian flyway.
Shorebirds in flight at Pak Thale, a coastal area in the Inner Gulf of Thailand that has been used as a test case for investment in conservation. Image: Bird Conservation Society of Thailand
Why do conservation projects fail?
A project can fail in any one of three key areas: product design and implementation, governance or finance. For example, if there is no community buy-in for a project, it will likely be rejected. If a project is not designed well enough, because you have not got the right solutions in place, it will fail. And if you haven’t got sufficient resources, a project will not last.
One of the primary reasons for extinction around the world is invasive non-native species predating on or causing impacts to endemic populations, particularly on islands. If rats are introduced to islands with seabird island colonies, for example, they can have a big impact on eggs and chicks. There have been hundreds of projects all around the world to try to eradicate rats using baits and traps. To be successful, you need to get rid of all of the rats. Many of these projects have failed, because they haven’t used the right baits or toxic load. The good news is, there is a community of people trying to do this successfully around the world – and we are learning as we go.
One example of a failing conservation effort is work to save the Great Indian Bustard. One of the reasons is that the conservation response was not fast enough to keep pace with the speed of habitat loss. Now there is a highly fragmented population and ongoing problems associated with land use change as more grassland is converted for energy projects. The lesson here is, unless very clear objectives are set for nature alongside wider economic development plans, conservation is always going to be a rearguard battle.
Even if conservation efforts work, is enough being done to help species adapt to climate change?
A paper published in the journal Science in May looked at conservation interventions over the last 100 years and found that in two thirds of the cases, conversation efforts were successful. So why are we seeing such a drastic decline in biodiversity globally? Partly because there hasn’t been sufficient investment to deliver conservation programmes. There is a US$600 billion annual shortfall in biodiversity financing. At the next global biodiversity summit in Colombia in October this year, there will be a lot of pressure on developed nations to allocate more money to support conservation.
Climate change is a near and present danger. It is an extraordinarily dangerous experiment that our addiction to fossil fuels is imposing on people and ecosystems. The conditions upon which species have evolved and adapted over millennia are changing at scale. Vulnerable species are in danger of being squeezed out as habitats shift.
Coastal species are vulnerable as sea levels rise. Species associated with higher altitudes are moving to even higher places as temperatures warm. Some species are moving pole-wards with shifting temperatures. In northern regions, the Taiga habitat [which tends to be covered by dense forests of conifers such as pine and spruce] is moving 1 kilometre northwards a year, and is encroaching on the Tundra habitat [where trees are mostly absent, because the landscape is covered by permafrost], which is home to many breeding shorebirds and waders.
Another climate factor is extreme weather, particularly drought and forest fires. We need to make sure that existing protected area networks are well managed, well protected, buffered – and hopefully expanded. With proactive management, new habitats can be created to give species time to adapt. Which is why the commitment made in the Global Biodiversity Framework for 30 per cent of land, freshwater and sea to be protected by 2030 is so important.
