22 April 2022. Climate | Fungi
Using nature to adapt to climate change // Fungi might talk to each other.
Welcome to Just Two Things, which I try to publish daily, five days a week. Some links may also appear on my blog from time to time. Links to the main articles are in cross-heads as well as the story. Recent editions are archived and searchable on Wordpress.
1: Using nature to adapt to climate change
It’s Earth Day today, and for once I have got ahead of things. Since the Earth is being assailed by climate change and by the Sixth Great Extinction, this seems like a good day to pick up on a piece by the science writer Fred Pearce that asks why we aren’t spending more time and effort on nature-based solutions to climate change.
The article is in Yale Environment 360.
It starts with a striking image, of villagers in Java building brushwood barriers on their coastline to help the mangrove plants regenerate themselves. This is being funded by the Indonesian government and an NGO, Wetlands International, and could be replicated in other parts of Asia. But it is hard to get funding to extend it, even though around ten million people in coastal areas could benefit.
(Indonesian mangrove swamp. Photo by Kate Evans/CIFOR/flickr. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
And the article suggests that although climate finance is beginning to ramp up, partly because of agreements from COP26, nature-based solutions tend to be overlooked.
There are a “growing number of analyses and reviews of the effectiveness of habitats as natural defences,” writes Siddharth Narayan, now of East Carolina University... Most are cheaper and more effective than any engineering alternatives, with more spinoff benefits for ecosystems and fewer downsides. But the political will and funding that could turn pilot projects for nature-based climate adaptation into policy norms benefitting hundreds of millions more people are still largely absent.
In fact, says the article, most climate-nature activities are currently unfunded.
Nature-based climate adaptation remains the poor relation of climate finance. First, that’s because private investors, philanthropists, aid agencies, and development banks are usually happier to pay for climate “mitigation” projects that curb emissions of planet-warming gases than for helping communities adapt to climate change. Overall, adaptation of all kinds has so far attracted less than a quarter, and by some measures only 5 percent, of international climate funding, according to Barbara Buchner of the Climate Policy Initiative, a San Francisco-based think tank.
Western money also prefers to fund engineering projects. Ebony Holland, a climate researcher at the International Institute for Environment and Development, told Pearce that
less than 10 percent of funding for climate adaptation in the least-developed nations... went into projects that harnessed nature. The remaining 90 percent “poured concrete.”
Given the emissions involved in “pouring concrete”, this seems like a stark example of some of the things that are wrong with climate response. At the same time, the case studies of successful nature-based climate initiatives are growing all the time.
This is particularly true of coastal protection—not just mangroves, but salt marshes, sea grasses, and coral reefs all have a significant impact on the height of storm waves, at a fraction of the cost of building sea walls (which also involve more concrete). But as Pearce notes, “scaling up is failing to keep pace with the success of pilot projects”.
He picks examples of other nature-based climate projects from Kenya, Nepal, and Colombia: successful pilots, but hard to fund and therefore hard to scale.
The reasons for this may be more complex than just traditional western views about building stuff. Jane Madgwick of Wetlands International points to project timelines and measurement of impacts, and departmental silos, as critical issues, for example:
One reason for this, she says, is that nature-based adaptation offers a wide range of often long-term benefits that do not fit conventional timelines for assessing aid projects and which no one government ministry can assess.
Nathalie Seddon of Oxford University has a similar perspective:
“Engineered solutions can usually be implemented with relative certainty about the type and timescale of benefits (whereas) the response of ecosystems is much harder to predict and cost.” Verifiable, quantifiable proof of the value of nature-based adaptation is often thin on the ground.
So there are some classic systems type issues playing out here. Engineering projects may be more measurable, but have a much worse record than nature-based solutions. And nature-based solutions are increasingly surfacing in the post COP26 climate rhetoric, but there’s a lag between talk and practice.
And of course, the stakes on getting this right are high, and getting higher all the time:
Ensuring that adaptation funds go to bolstering ecosystems would also immeasurably improve the chances of meeting international targets for conserving 30 percent of the earth’s lands and waters (to be agreed later this year)... Seddon says nature-based adaptation can simultaneously help meet the three great challenges of our time: responding to climate change, protecting biodiversity, and ensuring human well-being.
If...
2: Fungi might talk to each other
I normally stay away from pieces in mainstream media here, but sometimes they force their way in. Thus it is with a recent research that suggests that fungi may talk to each together, covered in the Guardian.
The researcher, Andrew Adamatzky at the University of the West of England, was curious about earlier research that indicated that fungi send electrical impulses to each other through long underground filaments. So he analysed the patterns of electrical spikes generated by four species of fungi – enoki, split gill, ghost and caterpillar fungi.
(Split gills were the noisiest of the fungi in the research. Photo by Bernard Spragg/flickr. Public domain)
And although he’s quick to say that the emerging hypothesis—that these spikes might be a form of language—is very tentative, he
found that these spikes often clustered into trains of activity, resembling vocabularies of up to 50 words, and that the distribution of these “fungal word lengths” closely matched those of human languages.
It’s possible that this is just coincidence, and “language” is a strong claim. All the same, the impulses don’t appear to be random:
The most likely reasons for these waves of electrical activity are to maintain the fungi’s integrity – analogous to wolves howling to maintain the integrity of the pack – or to report newly discovered sources of attractants and repellants to other parts of their mycelia, Adamatzky suggested.
“There is also another option – they are saying nothing,” he said.
The research might just be recording electrical behaviour.
The article that the Guardian picked up on was in the Royal Society Open Science journal, and in the original piece, Adamatzky puts his hypothesis about fungi in the context of a burgeoning body of research about how less complex life-forms communicate:
There is an emerging body of studies on language of creatures without a nervous system and invertebrates. Biocommunication in ciliates include intracellular signalling, chemotaxis as expression of communication, signals for vesicle trafficking, hormonal communication and pheromones. Plants communication processes are seen as primarily sign-mediated interactions and not simply an exchange of information... A field of the language of insects has been developed by Karl von Frisch and resulted in his Nobel Prize for detection and investigation of bee languages and dialects.
Of course, this has consequences that go beyond the science:
a modified conception of language of plants is considered to be a pathway towards ‘the de-objectification of plants and the recognition of their subjectivity and inherent worth and dignity’.
(The 2015 scientific article that last quote comes from is open access and also interesting.)
This is all a reminder of how little we still know about some things. We didn’t know that mycelia were not a type of plant until 1960, for example.
Update
I wrote last week about Amazon’s grim attempts to prevent its workers from joining trades unions. I don’t usually mention the New York Times here, since other people share links to it often enough, and it is aggressively paywalled. But Mona Chalabi’s visualisations on ‘nine ways to imagine (Amazon Chairman) Jeff Bezos’ wealth’ were striking, and shared elsewhere on the web. Here are some of those ways (via kottke.com). Have a good weekend.
j2t#302
If you are enjoying Just Two Things, please do send it on to a friend or colleague.