The phrase “ecosystem collapse” seems to be in the news a lot lately. However, I have never investigated what stories threatening “ecosystem collapse” are all about. Why not? Surely as an ecologist, I should be more interested in this than non-specialists?

Well, no. I sneeringly made the assumption that the authors of these pieces did not know what an ecosystem was, let alone what a collapsing ecosystem would look like. “Ecosystem collapse”, I reasoned, was just another emotive term to get us all panicking about the next few added ppm of CO₂ in the atmosphere. No doubt, I said to myself, the source material for these articles was alarmist claptrap. However, there came a point when I wanted to prove to myself that there was nothing to the latest stories. No, I did not approach it with an open mind. Rather, my aim was to glance at one of the stories, find the source document, glance at that, pick out the keystone, and watch the edifice crumble. Then come here and tell you about it.

What is an ecosystem?

That’s a bit of a sore point. My ecology textbook does not define it, nor does it refer to an ecosystem as any of several scales of ecological organisation. Why not? Well, the subtitle of Ecology by Begon, Harper and Townsend is “Individuals, Populations and Communities.” Where does an ecosystem fit into that scheme? Under “Communities.” We all know what an individual is, though sometimes in ecology that is not so easy to define. Similarly with populations. It’s obvious what one is, though yet again, once you begin your study of ecology, you soon find that a population is sometimes not easy to delineate either. What about a “community” – what is one of those? Think of it as all the lifeforms interacting in a certain place, with a scale of your choosing. You can translate straight across from “community” to “ecosystem”, with the addition of exterior abiotic forces. The two are the same, because the “community” can only be understood in the physical environment in which it is placed.

But “community collapse” probably doesn’t sound as scary.

What about the latest “ecosystem collapse” story?
The BBC reported on a document published by Defra, which ultimately came from the Joint Intelligence Committee, 10 days ago.

The decline in the health of nature around the world poses a threat to the UK’s security and prosperity, an intelligence committee has concluded in a long-awaited report.

If there was an opener likely to deter me from proceeding, this was probably it. Nevertheless, this time, I proceeded.

Pointing to the UK’s reliance on ecosystems that are “on a pathway to collapse” – such as the Amazon rainforest – the report warns of rising food prices and says that UK food security could be at risk.

The UK does not rely on the Amazon rainforest. In any way. At all.

The report…

…highlights six ecosystem regions which it calls “critical for UK national security”, based on the likelihood of these ecosystems collapsing and the impacts were they to do so.

They include the rainforests of the Amazon and the Congo basin, the boreal forests of Russia and Canada, the coral reefs and mangroves of South East Asia, and the Himalayas.

These ecosystems are on the “pathway to collapse”, the report says, if current rates of nature loss continue. But exactly when this would happen – and how long it would take – is uncertain.

The risks to the UK are:
Rising migration
Geopolitical competition
Higher risk of pandemics
Economic insecurity
Lower food security

If major food-producing regions were hit, some foods would become scarcer, driving up prices globally and potentially restricting choice, the report says.

But the report warns that the UK is “unable” to be food self-sufficient at present based on current diets and prices – and full self-sufficiency would also require “very substantial price increases” for consumers.”

The UK will never be self-sufficient in food, not until the next plague kills half of us. It hasn’t been self-sufficient for a long time. Easily-accessible Defra statistics go back to 1956, and we have not been self-sufficient in all that time. The recent peak was in 1984, when we grew the equivalent of 78% of what we ate. In terms of fruit, we’re down to a sixth of what we currently eat. Let’s cover more land in solar panels, that’s my theory. Then we can eat polysilicon wafers.

Gareth Redmond-King, head of international programme [sic] at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, said that weather extremes fuelled by climate change were already hitting food production in some parts of the world.

Dear BBC. Please call some other “think” tank when you need a soundbite. This bunch have a one-track mind, and their soundbites are not trustworthy.

Defra said the UK’s food system was resilient, blah blah.

Yeh, but not if you like tomatoes.

Naturally, the BBC don’t link to the Defra report. So let me just find that. OK, you can read it here.

Glad to see that they define “Ecosystem Collapse.”

Ecosystem collapse: refers to a critical threshold beyond which an ecosystem is potentially irreversibly changed and can no longer maintain essential structure or function.

OK, well, it sounds serious. How might this be achieved? Let’s read on.

The first section is on biodiversity loss.

The world is already experiencing the impacts of biodiversity loss, including crop failures, intensified natural disasters and infectious disease outbreaks.

Biodiversity loss does not lead to crop failures. This is so dumb, I find it hard to believe that anyone serious would write it down on an official document. This is supposed to be an intelligence committee? Crops are grown in near-sterile conditions. Compare a Victorian wheat field to a modern wheat field. Which is more diverse? Yields have increased as other species have been progressively excluded. That is how the game works.

Aha! You ****ing idiots. See what they say further down the page?

Food production is the most significant cause of terrestrial biodiversity loss.

Yes. Not climate change. Modern agriculture. You cannot combine the two, biodiversity and farming. What you have to do is permanently set aside areas that will not be subject to any human impacts. These will be where your reservoirs of biodiversity are. How do we stop biodiversity loss? Defra give five bullets and a rider, and the only bullet that makes sense is the first one – broadly saying what I just said. Put land aside and keep it safe. Of course, the rider is none other than, “It would also be necessary to meet the Paris climate agreement target of limiting warming to 1.5°C.”

No it wouldn’t, you idiots. That’s just the thing that you have to say all the time now, whether it helps or not.

The next section should be a doozy. It’s

Biodiversity loss impacts national security

I can’t wait to see what they’ve cooked up here.

Oh. That’s disappointing. It’s the same stuff as before.

The impacts will range from crop failures, intensified natural disasters and infectious disease outbreaks to conflict within and between states, political instability, and erosion of global economic prosperity.

So somehow, the increase in crop growth, displacing biodiversity, will in fact decrease crop growth.

It all makes sense, if you think about it.

The case study is of Central American coffee farmers suffering from coffee rust disease (a fungus) and losing crops, and migrating to the US.

Well, here’s what Wiki says on the topic of the cited outbreak:

The reasons for the epidemic remain unclear but an emergency rust summit meeting in Guatemala in April 2013 compiled a long list of shortcomings. These included a lack of resources to control the rust, the dismissal of early warning signs, ineffective fungicide application techniques, lack of training, poor infrastructure and conflicting advice.

Let me just say to the author(s) of this report, that it is a trivial task to go back through written history and find devastating crop outbreak after devastating crop outbreak. You can find sawfly devastation of UK turnip crops going back to Regency times (I won’t say what they called the sawfly larvae back then). The Irish potato famine has recently been mentioned in these pages.

I wonder how the potato famine would have proceeded, with large modern farms, equipped with modern machinery, and chemical fungicide? I think we all know the answer to that. Modern farming has adapted to every pest and disease it has encountered, thanks to the miracle of chemicals (in which the UK is, or at least was until very recently, self-sufficient).

I really can’t be bothered to read the rest, but before I go, I must just find out how the “collapse” of the Amazon rainforest is going to affect the UK.

…

Disappointingly, it doesn’t say. It does mention that deforestation could lead to a snowball effect, a diagnosis with which I concur. The obvious response is to stop deforestation. I mean, how hard can it be? You could save the rainforest for the cost of one new wind farm, if you wanted to, if your priority was actually doing something to help.

Final note. Why is this ecologist so insistent that “ecosystem collapse” is not a thing, when considering climate change? The reason is, that the fundamentals of these communities, without human impacts, will be the same after 1.5C of warming as they are now. Here, let me show you a cool figure showing the distribution of the world’s biomes (large areas occupied by a similar community) by mean temperature and humidity. There’s a simpler version in my ecology textbook, but here’s an earlier version by Whittaker:

Now, I would like you, in your mind’s eye, to add a degree and a half to the world. Heck, make it 2.5 if you like. How many biomes have collapsed? And if you think they have collapsed – what do you think is there now? Is it just a lifeless wasteland, the air freighted with grey dust collecting in drifts on the skeletons of cattle? Or, is it actually still teeming with life?

Final distraction

I’ve just found something else objectionable on the internet. Damn the internet for being full of such things. Further down my search on “ecosystem collapse,” comes this article in The Ecologist, 2 years ago:

Forests’ ‘catastrophic ecosystem collapse’

The text begins:

Experts predict ‘catastrophic ecosystem collapse’ of UK forests within the next 50 years if action not taken.

This dozy lot, more than many, should realise that if the human population debarked from the UK tomorrow, then in 50 years there would be a damn sight more forest here than there is now, and if you waited even longer, the good ship UK would ultimately be covered by forest from stem to stern, 400 ppm CO₂ or 800.

/rant over