‘People can be a positive force for nature’: The fishermen reviving Finland’s scarred wastelands

12 September 2024 Share Save Becca Warner Share Save

Mika Honkalinna

Finland’s Linnunsuo wetland used to be a barren “moonscape”. A local fishing community has transformed it into a biodiverse haven and an important carbon sink.

On a patch of land near Finland’s eastern border, life exists where once it didn’t.

Shallow water ripples against a bank of grass and rushes, where endangered duck species nest low to the ground. Small flocks of waders gather, their thin legs moving through the silvery water, beaks jabbing busily at its surface.

This is Linnunsuo wetland, a patch of land that hasn’t always splashed and rustled with life. Just 13 years ago, it was a brown and barren “moonscape”, says Tero Mustonen, a local fisherman and co-founder of the Finnish environmental non-profit Snowchange.

Finnish bioenergy company Vapo (now Neova) drained the land in the 1980s, so it could dig up the energy rich peat beneath the water. For more than two decades, it mined the area, leaving a scarred brown landscape where nothing could grow. (Vapo did not respond to the BBC’s request for comment.)

But Mustonen and the rest of the team at Snowchange have transformed this destroyed peatland into what it is today.

Mustonen, who is also a climate scientist at the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), explains the role of peatland in the climate crisis as being “almost like the second lungs of the planet”.

Though they release methane, peatlands also draw down carbon dioxide (CO2) and in the long-term they have a cooling effect on the planet. They can store around three times more carbon than forests, and are estimated to store 15–30% of the world’s soil carbon. But when peatlands are mined, they emit carbon instead of storing it. Each year, damaged peatlands release almost 6% of all human-caused carbon emissions.

Mika Honkalinna Some 205 birds have returned to Linnunsuo wetland since the rewilding project began (Credit: Mika Honkalinna)

It is obvious to Mustonen that carbon sequestration efforts should focus on peatlands. “When we came out with the IPCC sixth assessment report, we were making statements that there was a short window of about seven or eight years to think ‘how can we increase the carbon store?’ And it was seen that peatlands are one of the most speedy and cost-effective ecosystems where we can act,” he says.

The Boreal region, including Finland, is among the most peat-rich areas of the world. “Finland is not a superpower on almost anything – except perhaps heavy metal music and Santa Claus – but one of the things the Ice Age left us with was a landscape where one-third of the country is peatlands,” says Mustonen.

But as much as half of Finland’s peatland has been either drained so that the land can grow trees for the timber industry, or dug up so the peat can be used as fuel for electricity and heating.

This is just what happened at Linnunsuo, a 1.1 sq km (0.4 sq mile) peatland in North Karelia in the east of Finland. Mining of the peatland started in the 1980s, and disturbed soils that had high levels of iron sulphate. “Those iron sulphate soils are very acidic,” Mustonen explains. “They became exposed to oxygen for the first time in thousands of years and started to produce very acidic waters when rain fell or snow melted. These exposed, acidic soils interacted with the water – we had a pH of 2.77.”

In 2010, local fishers saw dead fish and seagulls floating in the river and raised the alarm. Water quality assessments confirmed the cause – the peatland mining was what Mustonen calls “an extreme event that was lethal to all life”.

Antoine Scherer Linnunsuo wetland was a barren “moonscape” in the past (Credit: Antoine Scherer)

Snowchange was eventually able to buy Linnunsuo, and, with the support and guidance of local villagers, started work to restore it to health in 2011.

“We try to restore the functionality of nature. That’s it,” Mustonen says. And for a peatland, the key to that functionality is water.

Mustonen and a small team of fishers and other local villagers therefore tried to recreate the wetlands that had once been there. “We understood from both traditional knowledge and science that we need to get those sites back under water,” he says. They created dams and wetland pools, built in interconnected units so the water could flow from one to another.

Their work was a success. Importantly, rewetting the land has stopped the decomposition of its peat, which prevents harmful CO2 emissions. And what had once been a barren, churned up patch of ground quickly teemed with life.

Previously, living beings had stayed away, with the exception of ravens and black grouse. But in 2013, just one year after the wetland was restored, 120 species of birds were recorded in the area – including the threatened Northern Pintail and vulnerable Greater Spotted Eagle. To date, some 205 bird species have been seen, with as many as 100,000 geese visiting at a time, according to Snowchange.

We try to restore the functionality of nature. That’s it – Tero Mustonen

The Snowchange team’s camera traps have revealed wolverines visiting the area, attracted to Linnunsuo by the remains of dead birds, says Mustonen. Bears, presumed to live in the forest nearby, now wander into the wetland as part of their wide-ranging travels. And moose amble past the ponds, feeding on young trees that surround the water.

A smaller, quieter lifeform has also returned, and signals particularly good news for the future of the peatland: sphagnum moss. This fluffy plant produces peat as it decomposes, which, over time, will boost Linnunsuo’s ability to store carbon.

Despite its belief in the project, the Snowchange team didn’t expect to see a transformation happen at such a speed and scale, says Kaisu Mustonen, co-founder and head of biodiversity at Snowchange, and Tero’s wife. “[The area] was so quickly so able to sustain all that life, and we still don’t know all the drivers and why it happened so fast. Everybody was surprised.”

What is clear, Kaisu Mustonen says, is that the return of invertebrates was the first step towards the area’s recovery. Larvae quickly appeared in the pools of water, and the area soon buzzed with six-legged life that became a feast that welcomed back the birds.

Mika Honkalinna Rewetting the wetlands has stopped the decomposition of its peat, which prevents harmful CO2 emissions (Credit: Mika Honkalinna)

Snowchange aims to offer a new way to approach the very question of conservation – one that puts agency in the hands of local people and respects those people’s existing relationship with the land.

“In any rural area in Europe,” Mustonen says, “you have the camp where they will say, ‘Oh, the hippies are here – they will destroy our land, our economy and our traditions’. And then you have the conservation people, saying everything has to be protected.”

Snowchange adopts “a third way”, he says: indigenous and community conserved areas (IPCAs) “They are areas where the conservation will happen through restoration and recovery, but the people in the local village are owning their sites again.”

In this approach, local knowledge is crucial – and recognised as such, Mustonen says. At Linnunsuo, “the pollution event and the fish death itself was detected by the fishers, not by the state, or the company monitoring”.

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Research shows that putting local and indigenous knowledge at the heart of nature protection efforts is effective.

Ecologist Maria Tengö leads research on the relationship between scientific and indigenous local knowledge at the Stockholm Resilience Centre. She was not involved in the Linnunsuo project, but her research has likewise found that local and indigenous knowledge is “really powerful and really important”, she says. “We’re not arguing anymore about whether it matters or not – it’s more about the how.”

Kaisu Mustonen emphasises that nature itself has also played an important role in Linnunsuo’s dramatic recovery. The area’s story is a reminder of “how strong the capacity of nature is to heal if we let it, if we take that step back”, she says.

Snowchange did not plant anything on the land or interfere with the return of life. Put simply, “we try to stay away”, Tero Mustonen says. The exception to this is invasive species like North American mink and Russian raccoon dogs, which they work with local hunters to trap and kill.

The idea of restoring or rewilding land implies a return, a turning back of the clock – but that is not the case, Mustonen says. “That’s all a mistake. There is no going back to anything. In fact, we would be better off calling these novel ecosystems. We are in the snowbelt in the boreal, and it’s warming up faster than any other place. So this century will be vastly different for its dynamics than anything we have experienced in the past thousands of years.”

Kari Koskela The return of invertebrates was the first step towards the Linnunsuo wetland’s recovery (Credit: Kari Koskela)

The group of local people working on Linnunsuo’s restoration was small, just 12 people from a village of 300. .But following the success of Linnunsuo, Snowchange has gone on to take over 550 sq km (212 sq miles) of peatlands and timber forests in Finland, which it is working to restore and rewild in close collaboration with local and indigenous communities.

Linnunsuo’s impact goes beyond this too. Projects in Australia and the UK are drawing from its findings. “It has become a source of great hope for many people that the comeback is real, it is tangible,” Mustonen says. “It’s not Disney or a made-up story, it’s an actual physical comeback that has now saved thousands of birds’ lives and cleaned the waters.”

However, replication of these outcomes is not straightforward. “Each river basin is unique,” Mustonen explains, “so whilst there are replicable elements, the time is needed to address these issues for each place…There are no blanket solutions”.

The unpredictability of rewilding work means there have also been limitations to Linnunsuo’s success – Mustonen notes that the hydrological comeback has been slower than expected on the northern part of the site. This, combined with some recent warm summers, has impacted plant growth in this area.

The project’s success is nonetheless reassuring, Mustonen says. “The Linnunsuo story is, of course, most importantly about the water production and the actual things that happened,” he says. “But it’s also a symbol. And in these times, we need… new symbols that withstand the test of very heavy scientific investigation, have credibility, and still go on to say that there is a path forward here.”

To take this path, we must remember that humans have a powerful and positive role to play in the planet’s future, adds Tengö. Linnunsuo’s story matters, she says, because it shows that “we can move something towards a different trajectory”.

“We’re not monsters. People can be a positive force for nature.”

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From wastelands to wetlands: The fight to save Sri Lanka’s natural flood buffers

21 September 2024 Share Save Zinara Rathnayake Share Save

Nazly Ahmed Thalangama Wetland in Colombo used to be filled with rubbish but is now teeming with life (Credit: Nazly Ahmed)

Sri Lanka’s capital is transforming floating garbage patches into biodiverse wetlands which are teeming with life.

Pay Drechsel is going for his daily morning walk around Thalangama Wetland, in Sri Lanka’s capital Colombo. The Sun casts a warm glow over flowering pink water lilies as a farmer scrubs down his water buffalo. A kingfisher hovers nearby. Soon, photographers will arrive to capture curved-necked egrets, waders probing for crawling worms, and little cormorants diving for freshwater fish.

Thalangama Wetland and its surrounding swamps, reedbeds, canals and rice fields teem with life. But this hasn’t always been the case. About 15 years ago, these ecosystems were degraded and filled with rubbish. They were “dirty, very dirty”, says Drechsel, interim country manager at the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) in Colombo.

He recalls how he spent one Christmas almost a decade ago cleaning the lake, scouring for piles of rotting garbage leaking contaminants into the water, and sorting waste for recycling. To his surprise, passersby stopped and started helping him. “I realised it’s not only me, locals also appreciate it,” he says. “But like me over all the years, they may have been waiting for someone to take the lead.”

The community came together to keep the massive wetland complex clean, forming the Thalangama Wetland Watch. Residents organise weekly collection runs, piling up sorted waste at a small collection unit which the municipality sends off for recycling. School kids volunteer, kayaking through the lake to dig up invasive water hyacinth.

Nazly Ahmed Colombo is prone to flooding and the wetlands act as an important buffer (Credit: Nazly Ahmed)

Home to over two million residents, Colombo is built on and around a massive network of wetlands. In 2018, Colombo became one of the 18 Ramsar wetland cities in the world – an accreditation which recognises cities for their commitment to restore, safeguard and value wetlands, with 25 new cities added to the list in 2022.

As Colombo is located in a river basin, the city is naturally prone to floods. Colombo’s wetlands act as a flood buffer, with 40% of floodwaters draining into wetland areas. They also sink carbon, purify the air and control temperatures. As temperatures warm and rains become more erratic, “wetlands are important to the city to mitigate climate change impacts”, says Chethika Gunasiri, an environmental scientist at the University of Tokyo who was part of Colombo’s Ramsar application. “Wetlands help Colombo mitigate pollution and natural disasters. They help reduce human stress as more and more people are now living in high rise buildings,” she adds.

Historically, wetlands were a “part and parcel of people’s lives in Colombo,” says Missaka Hettiarachchi, a senior fellow at the World Wildlife Fund’s environment and disaster management programme, who has been studying wetlands in Colombo for several years.

Ancient kingdoms thrived in a well-managed wetland system where people used them for transport and to grow food, Hettiarachchi says. Their downturn began in the British colonial period from the late 18th Century. When industries grew, people acquired wetlands to drain for building housing and businesses. A flood retention scheme introduced during British rule in 1924 led to the creation of manmade drainage canals, preventing people from travelling through the wetlands. Although they are regularly cleaned, many of these canals are now polluted and choked with invasive plants.

“The canals are no longer enough to prevent Colombo from flooding,” says Gunasiri.

Nazly Ahmed The restoration has boosted wildlife populations in Colombo’s wetlands (Credit: Nazly Ahmed)

After independence in 1948, subsequent governments declared some wetlands for flood buffering, and filled up others to make space for living, Hettiarachchi says. “And people thought wetlands were also a very, very attractive space for garbage dumps, because, you know, no one is living there, right?” This meant that people dumped everything from food waste to solid waste and chemicals while releasing sewage into the wetlands.

From the 1980s, massive rubbish mountains began to appear in natural wetlands, such as Meethotamulla in the Colombo metropolitan area, which spans 100,000 sq m (107,639 sq ft) and stands 60m (197 ft) tall. The wetland was closed after one of the rubbish mountains collapsed and killed 32 people in 2017.

Wetlands help Colombo mitigate pollution and natural disasters – Chethika Gunasiri

By the 2000s, the city’s wetlands were “a bloody mess”, Hettiarachchi says. During his PhD, he would ask residents living near the degraded wetlands about these ecosystems, and they would respond: “No, we don’t know any wetlands.”

The decline of the wetlands made Colombo more prone to flooding. In 2010, a series of disastrous floods affected nearly 700,000 people and submerged the country’s parliament. This led to a shift in government policy. “I think it took a few significant flooding events for the government to realise, okay, wetlands are a significant flood control mechanism, so we need to do something about it,” says Radheeka Jirasinha, a freshwater and wetland management researcher at IWMI.

As part of the ongoing revival, the government introduced the metro Colombo wetland management strategy in 2016, which aims to include wetlands in urban planning, prevent further wetland loss, restore the ecosystems and involve the local community in their conservation. Following that, wetlands were incorporated into urban infrastructure by constructing cycling tracks, jogging paths and recreational areas around them. “The idea was to bring people to the wetlands,” Gunasiri says. The government initiatives pulled up invasive species like water hyacinth and introduced new soil and wetland plants to attract birds and other animals.

Nazly Ahmed 15 years ago, Colombo’s wetlands were degraded and filled with rubbish (Credit: Nazly Ahmed)

Today, Colombo is home to four wetland parks and several other recreational spaces linked by wetlands. These restored wetlands look very different from those left untended. Photographer Nazly Ahmed says that when he went to Kotte, a Colombo suburb and the administrative hub of the country, in the late 1990s to play cricket with friends, the wetlands were covered entirely by water hyacinth. This invasive weed clogs waterways, grows over native plants, reduces oxygen and creates breeding grounds for mosquitoes, and their growth is linked to poor water quality and high pollution levels .

This Colombo suburb is now home to jogging paths and birdwatching spots built around the wetlands and waterways. “No one knew about wetlands then, but people are talking about wetlands now,” says Ahmed.

Gunasiri says these green infrastructure projects have helped people to engage with the city’s wetlands again and that people now flock to the urban wetland parks for an evening jog. “When these natural systems become public areas, people start to have a sense of ownership,” she says.

Jirasinha agrees. People feel that they can use these spaces now, she says. “They’re concerned about what is happening. And suddenly, people look at the water and are like, ‘Hey, it’s polluted…where is that coming from’?”

Nazly Ahmed Besides clearing rubbish from the wetlands, volunteers are also removing invasive water hyacinths (Credit: Nazly Ahmed)

It’s not only the government that is managing Colombo’s wetlands. Community initiatives like the Thalangama Wetland Watch have started to take responsibility too. “If you keep wetlands free from rubbish and maintain them, they increase the property value in urban areas,” says Drechsel, who believes people are willing to pay twice as much for land with wetland views.

Although there’s an attitude shift and residents are now aware of the value the wetlands add to the city, problems are far from over, Hettiarachchi says. After the civil war ended in 2009, Colombo’s urban population expanded rapidly. Developments sprung up, leading to the draining of wetlands for housing, businesses and infrastructure. Since 2009, Colombo has lost 2.12 sq km (0.8 sq miles) of its wetlands. According to a 2024 study, wetlands absorb 62.1mm more floodwater than built up areas in Colombo. Despite collective efforts to clean and restore some of the city’s wetlands, the overall loss of wetland area means that Colombo is becoming more vulnerable to floods, the 2024 study notes.

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The Ramsar accreditation pushed the state government to temporarily suspend filling and destroying any wetlands. “So there’s definitely proactive action to safeguard the city’s wetlands, but we need a coordinated effort from government, non-profits and communities to stop their degradation,” says Chaturangi Wickramaratne, a freshwater ecologist at IWMI.

Gunasiri explains that wetland education is vital for citizens to understand their importance in urban resilience. “More and more wetlands need to be a part of the city’s functions, linked to people’s wellbeing, so people begin to care about them more,” she says.

Wetlands can also help with the city’s food shortages, says Hettiarachchi. “You don’t need irrigation systems to grow food, you can use these ecosystems – they are also fabulous breeding grounds for fish,” he says.

Behind the new use of Colombo’s wetlands for people’s wellbeing, Gunasiri notes an underlying urgency to protect these ecosystems. “If we lose our wetlands, Colombo will be unliveable.”

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Adam Davis

This article originally appeared on the Katoomba Group blog.

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the first Katoomba Group meeting – a community that first came together in 1999 with a shared quest to convert the theoretical value that comes from restoring nature into a practical way for people to make a living. It’s hardly been a simple or straightforward path, but we’ve made a lot of progress together.

I’d like to share some of what I’ve learned on that path since 1999, when I became a dedicated student of “applied ecosystem service theory,” and eventually started a firm—with much leadership and help from my stalwart partners—that is now a significant investor in ecological restoration.

Since we founded the firm, called Ecosystem Investment Partners, in 2007, we have raised over $1 billion in investment capital, and invested in over 100 restoration projects across 15 states. These projects have restored over 43,000 acres of wetlands and 230 miles of streams. They eliminate some 7,900 tons of nutrient and sediment pollution each year. And they provide livelihoods for people who are protecting and restoring nature where they live.

This feels like success, for sure, but it’s a very humbling kind of success too. One of the things that sticks with me as I’ve grappled with the challenges of building a business and making investments is the “Big Problem,” of how inadequate the available financial resources for nature are, compared to the resources for destructive and damaging human activity.

I won’t repeat the depressing statistics here; you likely know them well enough already. But suffice to say the pace of progress is not sufficient. What follows then are some thoughts on at least one aspect of the Big Problem, which has to do with the concept of mitigating harm from economic activity. These are informed by my experience working in the United States—I don’t want to pretend to have deep understanding of, much less answers for, the myriad variations on government structure and law and custom that are found around the world. My hope is to provoke curiosity and more dialog, in the spirit that has characterized the Katoomba Group for these past 25 years.

The Mitigation Hierarchy: A Brief History

The principle of mitigation, or making up for harm, is a fundamental part of environmental permitting systems in the United States. But it’s seen as a last resort, after harm has been avoided and minimized. A hierarchy of “avoid, minimize, then mitigate” is the structure for law and regulation for limiting the damage of the great human systems for mining, harvesting, drilling, manufacturing, transportation, building, consumption, and throwing the leftovers away.

The Clean Water Act, first signed into law in October of 1972, established the basic structure for protecting the “physical, chemical, and biological integrity” of waters in the US, and it was certainly a great step forward. One part of that law aimed at stopping the further destruction or filling of wetlands, which had been at that point reduced from some 220 million acres down to under 110 million acres in the lower 48 states.

But just five years later the National Wetlands Policy Forum recognized that it was simply not possible to stop all further impacts to wetlands as the population continued to grow. If the country was going to grow at the contemporaneous rate of 15 million people every five years, then roads and houses and schools and all manner of infrastructure to support the growth would be needed. The Forum recommended that some type of structure for “no net loss” be put into place, whereby some impacts could be allowed, but only if they were offset by an equivalent amount of restoration in the same watershed.

It was the administration of President H.W. Bush that ultimately put the new No Net Loss policy into place, and from the beginning the mitigation hierarchy of “avoid, minimize, mitigate” was emphasized. Good planning had to precede a permit to damage Waters of the United States, and a permit applicant had to demonstrate that they had done as much as they could practically do to reduce harm before they would be given permission to proceed.

The fundamental problem with this policy formula, however, is that there is no bright line or absolute standard that allows us to know how much avoidance and minimization is enough. Theoretically, it’s possible to avoid and minimize all the way to zero by simply not doing the development project at all, or moving it to a location that has no wetlands. But certain types of development, like roads, pipelines, and transmission lines that cross entire landscapes are very hard to route around all wet ground, and there are parts of the country that exist on low elevation land that goes on for tens or hundreds of miles in all directions.

So the mitigation hierarchy makes sense as an approach and a principle, but in practice the permitting decision is necessarily a compromise. Some damage is ultimately going to happen on the land even in the presence of good policy that is well enforced. And this is where a well-designed mitigation program should enter the picture.

Good Mitigation and Bad Mitigation

In the United States, the response was to develop a compensatory mitigation program that allowed some damage, but only if it was tied to scientifucally verifiable restoration in the same watershed. Permitted entities who impacted waters of the United States could mitigate for unavoidable residual damages themselves, or they could contract with a third-party provider, like a “mitigation bank” that creates and sells wetland, stream, and other ecological credits by restoring and protecting degraded ecosystems.

Wetland mitigation in the United States has laid the groundwork for all of the environmental compensation markets that have followed. A chief lesson has been that good mitigation requires that certain core criteria be met: credits need to represent real, meaningful, additional, and durable benefits.

“Real” and “meaningful” matter, because otherwise when damage on the land is allowed, how would we know if the impacts of that damage have been made up for? In order to do that, we have to be able to measure how much damage there was, not just in terms of the number of acres, but in terms of the ecological function provided on those acres. The metrics for the system that relate to biodiversity, clean water, and the full set of functions and values provided by nature need to be tracked before the damage and afterwards. Then those metrics need to be similarly applied to a restoration site to understand the amount of uplift created there. This emphasis on functional equivalence helps to ensure that wetland mitigation is truly compensating for the ecological loss resulting from development.

High standards for durable land protection and for measurable improvement from a baseline ensure that wetland mitigation bank results are clearly “additional” to what would have happened otherwise, and their restoration or enhancement activities are directly related to the investment made in them.

As for the standards for durability, while “permanence” is beyond the scope of human control, and therefore should be beyond the scope of human laws, mitigation banks are very durable indeed. They are required to have long-term management plans and financial assurances in place to ensure that the restored wetlands can be monitored and maintained well into the foreseeable future.

Ultimately, the effectiveness of any environmental offset program depends on the integrity of the credits being traded. By ensuring that credits represent real, additional, durable, and ecologically meaningful benefits, programs like wetland mitigation banking provide a model for how market-based approaches can be used to balance economic development with environmental conservation.

And it’s working. This market-based approach has been remarkably effective: as of 2021, there were 1,642 approved mitigation banks in the United States, including 1,692,748 acres of wetland mitigation banks and 406,351 acres of stream mitigation banks 2 that make permitting economic activity both possible and more responsible than it would be otherwise.

Mitigation banking is not a perfect solution. But it’s still the right idea, and ethically superior to giving up on at least trying to offset damage or just suggesting that all development should come to a halt. Of course it would be better if no one ever impacted wetlands again, and it would also be better if we could just stop burning all fossil fuels today. But high quality offsets help. As a model for recognizing the value of nature and ensuring that the costs of environmental damage are internalized by those who cause it, mitigation banking represents a significant step forward.

The critics of biodiversity and carbon offsets should take note: it is not the existence of good offsets that allows damage to occur, but rather the absence of them. By placing a value on natural resources and requiring those who harm them to bear the cost of restoration, mitigation banking (and good carbon offsets too) create a powerful incentive to minimize impacts from the start. The less damage they cause, the less they will have to pay in mitigation costs. This encourages both more thoughtful planning and more investment in environmental protection.

So: good mitigation is different than bad mitigation. Good mitigation uses scientifically verifiable methods and metrics to ensure that the amount of offset is equivalent to the amount of impact. And it has legal and financial assurances in place to make sure that the offset—the restored area—is durable over time. Mitigation credits come from work that is truly “additional” because restoration simply doesn’t occur without land control, a design that receives permits, and activity on the ground. Finally mitigation credits have to be in place before they may be sold as offsets. So there’s no temporal loss between the time of impact and the benefit of restoration.

Many criticisms of carbon and biodiversity credits and offset programs are really criticisms of bad mitigation program design. If a credit does not really make up for the damage it is being sold to make up for, then the program is flawed and the whole notion of offsetting is in jeopardy.

What is the Alternative to Mitigation?

In June of 2023, the European Union (EU) Commission recently stripped biodiversity offsets from its taxonomy of “sustainable activities” that contribute to the protection and improvement of the natural environment. It’s a terrible decision at the very moment when our natural world is most in need of innovative ways to pay for the enormous restoration and conservation challenges in front of us, to eliminate one of the most established, readily investable, and impactful mechanisms for financing environmental improvement. And because income from credit sales provides the only incentive for private investment in restoration, this decision goes directly against the ethical investment and business practices that the EU Commission is trying to encourage.

What could be the rationale for such a move? As the Senior Economist at WWF, a member of Platform on Sustainable Finance, put it: “Offsetting is intrinsically tied to biodiversity harm elsewhere, the result is a zero-sum game for biodiversity and on that basis, it cannot represent a substantial contribution to biodiversity.”

I’d argue that this position entirely misses the essential point: requiring offsets that allow a project to prevent healthy natural systems from dropping below baseline conditions is the very definition of what it means to be sustainable—i.e., taking away no more than can be replaced. And of course, “zero sum” is vastly preferable to continuing to lose biodiversity. In fact, offsets qualified by scientifically verifiable restoration of land along with permanent protection through endowments for long-term monitoring and maintenance are in fact the very definition of what sustainability requires. This is also what a high quality offset requires.

In a world where impacts to biodiversity will continue to occur, the only alternative to offsetting impacts is not offsetting impacts. Restoration projects are needed, and the wildlife and natural systems that benefit from those projects do not know or care how the restoration work is ultimately funded.

While the EU Commission now opposes offsets, it still supports biodiversity credits. These credits, however, appear to be mainly a repackaging of existing conservation and restoration activities (already being funded by government and philanthropy) into credit form. While crediting that improves measurement is laudable, it does not represent a significant source of new revenue to pay for restoration and conservation efforts.

As David Sternlicht of the investment firm, Ethic, recently wrote in his article, Beyond Priceless, “We can’t solve the ecological crisis without considering the role of money and markets. Per Bloomberg, current annual funding for biodiversity and nature protection is $166 billion, with the lion’s share (76 percent) coming from government spending and the remainder from the philanthropic and private sectors. The same report estimates that $830 billion in annual additional capital flows must be redirected this decade to begin to bend the curve on nature loss.” There is simply no compelling evidence for the notion that measuring traditional conservation action using biodiversity “credits” will provide additional funding.

Offsets that come from good mitigation projects require the actual accomplishment of restoration goals under rigorous scientific standards represent new and additional funding that is now critical. Offsetting will continue to provide the best available mechanism to replace what we take now for the benefit of future generations because the alternative to “no net loss” is simply “net loss.”

Parting Thoughts

I hope what I’ve written here is helpful as a discussion of the elements of good mitigation or biodiversity credit program design. But there’s one more item that needs to be addressed, which is the question of whether or not people should be able to make money from nature at all. The controversy around this question has been around for decades, but it still swirls around the debates about program design and credit integrity.

While some of the criticism against private capital investment in restoration is simply anti-capitalist rhetoric in a more subtle form, there’s also the notion that restoration projects paid for by government or philanthropy are inherently more ethical than those that make up for the impacts of current economic activity. But the government and philanthropic funds that are available originate from past economic activity; activity that was not required to provide offsets. If offsets had been required in the past, the damage these funds are seeking to correct might never have occurred in the first place.

In the end, the question of who pays for environmental restoration involves issues of fairness and responsibility, but also of effectiveness.

By shifting the burden of making it right onto those who cause the damage, rather than those who inherit it, we can create a system that incentivizes both ecological conservation and emissions reductions. Mitigation banking offers a promising model for how this can be achieved, not by allowing damage to occur, but by ensuring that it comes with a price tag. Only by recognizing the value of nature in the way that people commonly value things—by paying for it—can we hope to protect it for generations to come.

But there’s an even more fundamental point about the ethics of making money through the protection and restoration of nature. And it’s simply this: the choice before us is not whether to place a financial value on the ecosystem services related to carbon, water, and biodiversity. That choice was made long ago when real estate and natural resource extraction placed a financial value – a number – on the land. As soon as land was recognized as being valuable to build things on or take things from there was a price for each and every acre. The price, however, was for development and production, for roads and buildings, and for mining, oil and gas, agriculture, and timber.

So it’s not that biodiversity, carbon, or wetland credits “put a value on nature.” That was done long ago. These new credits put a value on the protection and stewardship of nature. Credits are a counterveiling force that represents not what we can take from nature, but what nature does when it is sufficiently protected and left alone.

And only by tying credits to offsets will we send the right price signal, that makes it more expensive to damage the natural world and at the same time make it more valuable to protect it. The old ways of government and philanthropic protection that tried to take nature out of the economy by turning it into parks and protected areas have made a huge difference for the good, and they need to continue. But they are simply not sufficient to the scale and the urgency of the task at hand today.

Beyond understanding the efficacy of nature-based solutions and supporting the communities putting them into action, is also important to consider how to scale up and sustainably fund this strategy.

In 2020, the project partners, with help from Bain & Company consultants, conducted an impact investment feasibility study to determine how to secure sustainable long-term funding for nature-based solutions like these. The study found that a pay-for-performance model for I/A septic systems could help accelerate adoption of this new technology.

Pay-for-performance systems repay investors based on the actual nitrogen reductions achieved by the systems over time and could help get enough systems in the ground to get MassDEP approval for several I/A septic technologies. This “general use approval” will help expand adoption of I/A technologies and is necessary to accelerate their use across Cape Cod and in other coastal communities that face similar nitrogen pollution issues, like Long Island.

Once installed, all septic systems require routine maintenance and monitoring to ensure they’re functioning properly and removing nutrients as designed. During the summer of 2021, another team of Bain & Company consultants explored models for conducting this essential management of septic systems on private property. They provided a series of case studies on structures of management entities and financing approaches that could be applicable on Cape Cod and presented preliminary findings in a discussion with leaders in Barnstable.

TNC, MASSTC and partners are now exploring opportunities to develop pilot projects to test management and financing structures on the ground. With a $100,000 grant that TNC awarded to MASSTC in spring 2022, they will be exploring sources of public and private funding so the homeowners don’t have to shoulder the entire cost.

“As we’ve worked through the challenges and potential solutions available, it’s become clear that financing is just one piece of the puzzle,” says Alison Bowden, director of conservation science and strategy for TNC in Massachusetts. “We’ve been looking at the whole picture of why things are the way they are, and what it would take to shift the status quo to ensure clean water for all.”

Florida is building the world’s largest environmental restoration project

16 August 2024 Share Save Lucy Sherriff Share Save

Lucy Sherriff The Everglades is one of the most important ecosystems in the US, responsible for providing millions of Floridians with drinking water (Credit: Lucy Sherriff)

Florida is embarking on an ambitious ecological restoration project in the Everglades: building a reservoir large enough to secure the state’s water supply.

In February 2023, a large digger broke ground on a multi-billion dollar project that has been decades in the making: building a reservoir the size of Manhattan Island.

The reservoir, which is part of an historic restoration of the Everglades ecosystem, is intended to help bring a secure, long-term supply of clean drinking water to Florida’s residents.

The Everglades Agricultural Area (EAA) reservoir will be located south of Lake Okeechobee, the largest freshwater lake in Florida, and conservationists have dubbed the project “the crown jewel” of the Everglades’ restoration.

“It is the single most important project to store, clean and send water from Lake Okeechobee to nourish the Everglades and supply clean drinking water to millions in South Florida,” Meenakshi Chabba tells BBC Future Planet. Chabba is an ecosystem scientist at the Everglades Foundation, one of the non-profit organisations that advocated for the project.

As well as protecting the drinking water of South Floridians, the reservoir is also intended to dramatically reduce the algae-causing discharges that have previously shut down beaches and caused mass fish die-offs. (Read more about the pollution causing harmful algal blooms).

Bigger than Manhattan and Staten Island combined, the reservoir will stretch over 10,100 acres large (4,090 ha), and, in addition, have a 6,500-acre (2,630-ha) stormwater treatment area. It will be able to store 78 billion gallons (295.2 billion litres) of water – enough to fill 118,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

“The water will help recharge the aquifer that provides drinking water to millions of people in South Florida,” says Jason Schultz, a spokesperson for the South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD).

The reservoir, a joint project between the US Army Corps of Engineers and the SFMD, is a small cog in a large initiative to restore the Everglades. The multi-billion dollar Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan was passed by Congress in 2000, and includes 68 infrastructure projects across Florida. The Everglades Foundation tells the BBC the restoration plan is the “largest environmental restoration project” in the world.

The infrastructure projects range from rehydrating carbon-sequestering wetlands, to building a complex network of stormwater treatment areas, smaller reservoirs and water control structures – and they’re at varying stages of completion. The whole project is due to be completed in 2029.

A shortage of drinking water

The Everglades provides one out of three Floridians with their drinking water. The ecosystem recharges the water supply for all of South Florida – a population approaching nine million. South Florida’s primary source of drinking water comes from groundwater stored in aquifers, mainly the Biscayne Aquifer, which is replenished by the Everglades.

Lucy Sherriff A lock in one of the Everglades canals – one component of flood control which the state of Florida has installed to help manage water (Credit: Lucy Sherriff)

In 2021, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection concluded in its annual water supply report: “Florida’s current fresh water supply is projected to be unable to meet all of the growing needs of Floridians in the future without the development of alternative water supply projects”.

In Miami-Dade County, the most populous in Florida, the Biscayne Aquifer is the primary source of drinking water. Due to sea level rise, the aquifer is vulnerable to saltwater intrusion, threatening contamination of the water supply. To protect its drinking water, the county is restoring canal systems and installing salinity control structures – gates which help separate fresh water and saltwater. Mangrove forests are being restored too, because they help slow the movement of saltwater through canals, keeping the water behind the gates fresher.

Although Florida receives ample rainfall – flooding is one of the state’s top hazards – the ecosystem’s natural water filtration systems have also been heavily altered and polluted by humans, Chabba explains, meaning Florida is still facing water shortage issues.

Chabba believes that the restoration plan will help protect the state’s supply. “The freshwater flowing across the Everglades recharges Biscayne Aquifer, which provides drinking water to millions of South Florida residents,” she says.

“Increasing freshwater inputs through restoration has the potential to slow down the impacts of saltwater intrusion into our vulnerable water supply.”

Getty Images A digger breaks new ground on the EAA reservoir in January 2024 as work continues to build one of the largest environmental restoration projects in the world (Credit: Getty Images)

Assefa Melesse, professor at the Institute of Environment at Florida International University, says the reservoir can benefit the drinking water supply indirectly and directly, as well as potentially reducing pressure on other water sources during dry periods. But, Melesse notes, “rising sea levels and changing rainfall patterns could affect the project’s long-term effectiveness”. When it comes to safeguarding Florida’s drinking water supply, saltwater intrusion is a bigger problem than replenishing groundwater, says Barry Rosen, a professor of ecology and environment at Florida Gulf Coast University specialising in algal blooms.

“This intrusion is a really big deal,” he says, “because the entire ecosystem is a leaky system. It’s an extremely delicate balance between drinking water and flood control.” If the Everglades system is dehydrated, more saltwater can intrude, Rosen says. But too much freshwater in the ecosystem and there’s issues with flooding.

A ‘significant challenge’

The reservoir is designed to move clean water south to nourish the Everglades, says the SFWMD, as well as reducing algal blooms and replenishing Florida’s aquifers – where the drinking water is pulled from.

But Rosen is sceptical of just how much difference the reservoir will make, saying modelling how the reservoir will work is one thing, but the reality could be entirely different.

Florida receives around 51in (130cm) of rain annually. Around 38in (97cm) evaporates or runs off the land into surface waters – lakes, rivers and streams – leaving 13in (33cm) on average to recharge aquifers.

“You want to put the water in [the reservoir] when it’s available to store it,” Rosen continues, “so, when it’s raining. But will it have the capacity we want every single year to store water? Is it going to be full certain years? To think that we’ll just have an empty reservoir sitting there waiting for rain is unlikely.”

Rosen also notes that it’s possible the reservoir itself might become home to an algae bloom. “What is the water then usable for?” he says.

At the request of the US Army Corps of Engineers, the National Academies, an independent collective of scientists, has provided independent assessments of the project since 2004. In the latest assessment – the ninth to be carried out – the scientists noted that although the project was moving at a “remarkable pace”, there was “substantially less [water] storage than originally envisioned” when it came to the Lake Okeechobee system.

“Water quality is an ongoing concern,” the report added, noting there had been “phosphorous exceedances” – when the levels of the nutrient are too high, which causes algae blooms and die-offs.

“Some treatment area discharges remain far from target values,” the scientists wrote. “The state’s current efforts should continue to improve the function of those areas, although meeting and sustaining the requirements in all of those areas by water year 2027 will be a significant challenge.”

Lucy Sherriff A stormwater treatment cell in full flow. The water must be treated before it can be released into the ecosystem (Credit: Lucy Sherriff)

Storms, droughts and the difficulties of managing such large natural water treatment systems make it difficult to meet these targets, says Stephanie Johnson, senior programme officer at the National Academies. “The storm treatment areas [will] be considered the among the best performing in the world, even though they are not yet all meeting the targets.”

Polluted waterways and red tides

Agricultural runoff has been a major problem in the state, with a 2022 report finding Florida had the most polluted lakes in the country. More than 70% of the nitrate found in the state’s natural springs – which are an important source of freshwater ­– comes from agricultural runoff, which includes fertilisers as well as animal waste. In 2020, Governor Ron DeSantis signed The Clean Waterways Act, a law to improve water quality across Florida. Although environmental groups criticised the bill for not going far enough, the legislation requires inspections of farms and ranches every two years.

The problem stems in part from Lake Okeechobee, which is often host to algae blooms itself. When the lake gets too full, excess water is discharged into the surrounding waterways. The Army Corps of Engineers is responsible for the discharges, and the agency sends water to the coastlines in either direction: to the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf Coast.

When the water, which is heavily polluted by agricultural runoff and human waste, reaches the open ocean, the algae blooms appear in these marine ecosystems too. The blooms have resulted in significant ecological damage, and wreaked havoc on the tourist industries. One study found the 2018 Florida red bloom event cost the coastal tourism industry around $2.7bn (£2.1m).

One study found the discharging of Lake Okeechobee correlated with red tide blooms on the Gulf Coast.

Lucy Sherriff Flood gates along the Tamiami Trail send water into a canal, which will eventually drain into Biscayne Bay (Credit: Lucy Sherriff)

“It’s complicated. Can you really get the relief you want from a reservoir?” Rosen says. “The reservoir is not going to resolve the whole thing. But if it shaves a little bit of the problem, then great. If the system is better restored it will be more resilient.”

CARBON COUNT The emissions from travel it took to report this story were 30kg CO2. The digital emissions from this story are an estimated 1.2g to 3.6g CO2 per page view. Find out more about how we calculated this figure here.

One of the aspects of the restoration project is improving and enlarging stormwater treatment areas. Part of the reason why water cannot be sent south to the Everglades is because all the current stormwater treatment areas south of Lake Okeechobee are at full capacity cleaning the sugar industry’s wastewater, says Chabba.

“This underscores the critical need for building the EAA Reservoir and its stormwater treatment area so that we can have capacity to hold and clean this water when the lake’s levels are too high,” she says.

Earlier this year, up to 224,000 gallons of water per minute were sent from the lake to Palm Beach County’s Lake Worth Lagoon, after El Niño rains ballooned the lake to 16.3ft (5m) above sea level.

“The EAA Reservoir and Stormwater Treatment Area is a cornerstone project that reduces damaging discharges that harm our coastal communities while providing fresh, clean water to America’s Everglades and Florida Bay,” Schultz, the spokesperson for SFWMD adds. “Additionally, the reservoir will help to reduce harmful discharges to the St Lucie River, the Caloosahatchee River and the Lake Worth Lagoon.”

Natural solutions

In the 1940s, the Everglades was cut off from its primary source of freshwater: Lake Okeechobee, and around 1.5 million acres (600,000ha) – roughly half of the Everglades – was cleared and drained to claim the land for building. As a result, the ecosystem was devastated.

Although the reservoir is still under construction and won’t be completed until 2029, smaller solutions have already been rolled out, such as raising roads and creating bridges for the water to flow freely underneath.

“The Everglades is a unique and complex ecosystem found nowhere else in the world and it is crucial to life in Florida,” Schultz says. “Restoring America’s Everglades is one of the most ambitious hydrologic restoration projects ever undertaken and will restore the natural flow of clean water south where it is needed most.”

One example that’s already underway is the raising of sections of the Tamiami Trail, a 284-mile (457km) highway that cuts through the Everglades. Around 6.5 miles (10.5km) of trail has been raised, and a 2.6 mile-long (4.2km) bridge installed, both which improve water flow into the Northeast Shark River Slough, an area in the Everglades National Park.

“As more water makes it way south,” Cheeba says, “the project has built vertical underground walls at different locations to ensure that nearby communities don’t get flooded. All these project components are contributing to making the Everglades regain their health and our communities become resilient.”

The National Academies report found that there had already been signs of progress, including increased hydroperiod – days per year when the soil is waterlogged – in the Picayune Strand, a state forest, and the Everglades prairies.

“The potential benefits for ecosystem restoration, water management and reduction of harmful algae blooms are significant,” says Melesse. “The reservoir is not a complete solution and is part of a broader, integrated approach to water management and environmental protection in Florida.”

Prescribed burns have also been utilised in the Everglades ecosystem, to reduce fuel and improve the flow of freshwater. Sawgrass fires improve the passage of water through shallow river basins and sloughs by burning back grass that would impede the flow.

“Water used to move naturally and slowly through Okeechobee, and we’ve permanently reduced the footprint of the Everglades,” says Rosen. “Yet the same rainfall is coming down. The best thing we can do is to get the quality improved and the quantity of water back to somewhat normal to feed the ecosystems that are left.”

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