0 Film Primiere "Let's Talk About Soil"

Soils are fundamental pillars of sustainable development. They are essential for food security, support human well-being, and provide further ecosystem services, such as carbon storage.

They are not only essential but also severely threatened, suffering a continuous decline in quality and being taken over by urban sprawl.

Even though soils are managed and owned locally, their degradation is a key global issue, as their functions transcend national boundaries.

Therefore, we urgently need to upscale actions towards sustainable soil management.

The First Global Soil Week will provide a platform to initiate follow-up actions on land and soil-related decisions made at the Rio+20 Sustainable Development Conference and will take place within the framework of the FAO’s Global Soil Partnership.

The First Global Soil Week offers a forum of interactive exchange and dialogue.

Stakeholders from science, government, business and civil society will come together to share their land and soil-related experience and expertise, and to develop future plans of action for sustainable land/soil management and governance.

The animated film LET’S TALK ABOUT SOIL emphasizes human dependence on soils and describes how sustainable development is threatened by certain soil use trends; the film offers options to make the way we manage our soils more sustainable.

LET’S TALK ABOUT SOIL was produced by designer and animator Uli Henrik Streckenbach for the Global Soil Week and the Global Soil Partnership with the support of the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS) – Global Soil Forum, the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the Deutsche Welle.

0 Amazon's extinction debt still to be paid

Current species losses are just the tip of the iceberg.

• Helen Thompson

12 July 2012

The vast majority of species extinctions in the Brazilian Amazon are yet to come, predicts a paper published in Science*.

Deforestation has declined to record lows in recent years, and just over 50% of Brazil’s rainforest now falls under some form of protected status. But the effects of habitat loss take time to manifest. “Cutting down trees doesn’t kill a bird directly. It takes a lot of time for those birds to actually die. They’re all crammed into the habitat that’s left. Then gradually you’ll have this increased mortality,” says Robert Ewers, an ecologist at Imperial College London and the study's leader.

Previous models of how deforestation affects biodiversity have assumed that deforestation happens in one swoop. But that’s not how it works. Deforestation tends to occur in fits and spurts, and as it continues, the number of species headed for extinction — the 'extinction debt' — rises.

“If you cut down a patch of habitat and, before the effects are felt, you cut down more habitat, you’ve got some outstanding debt,” explains Daniel Reuman, a mathematician at Imperial College, who also worked on the project. “We wanted to figure out how it happens with multiple instances over time instead of just one instance. It’s an amazingly simple model extension that has big implications.”

So, Ewers, Reuman and their colleague Oliver Wearn came up with a formula that relates species extinction to the timing and amount of habitat loss. “It sorts out the bookkeeping of all these different deforestation events and extinction debts,” explains Reuman. When they plugged individual species data for vertebrates that depend on the tropical forest for food and shelter and deforestation patterns from 1970 to 2008 into their model, it projected that 80–90% of extinctions caused by previous rainforest loss are yet to come. Brazil still owes the grim reaper an average of two mammals, five birds and one amphibian per 2500 square kilometres.

Read more...

Application: It is crucial to determine at all spatial scales, exactly where you have the highest extinction debt and we can target those particular areas and conserve the species that are still there.

*Wearn, O. R., Reuman, D. C. & Ewers, R. M. Science 337, 228–232 (2012). 

Source: Nature doi:10.1038/nature.2012.11007

0 Rufford Small Grants for Nature Conservation (RSGs)

The Rufford Small Grants Foundation seeks to fund people whose work makes a pragmatic, substantial and long-lasting contribution to nature conservation. Such work often includes other elements such as sustainable development, public education and environmental campaigning. Rufford Small Grants are designed to provide accessible and flexible funding for those who want to bring about change. Conservationists from any country working anywhere in the developing world are welcome to apply. Projects in the First World will not normally be considered for funding. Applicants are not restricted to qualified scientists, but must be able to compile a written report to describe and quantify the success of their work with appropriate references. Undergraduate and school level expeditions are not eligible. More information about the Rufford Small Grants Foundation and previous Award and Grant recipients may be found on the Foundation’s website at www.ruffordsmallgrants.org

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