‘Unpacking Climate Change’ with Biodiversity Expert, Prof. James Watson

For our first ‘Unpacking Climate Change’ blog segment, we had the privilege to talk to one of our Advisory Board members, Professor James Watson, about his work campaigning and championing the importance of conserving our biodiversity. It’s easy to get wrapped up in climate change stories linked to energy use and weather patterns as they are the most talked about - However, our biodiversity, or the variety of all living things on our planet, has been declining at an alarming rate in recent years! 

We hope this blog brings light to the importance of protecting biodiverse systems and ignites conversations around the biosphere and climate change. 

1.Tell us a bit about your background and what you are currently working on.

I’m a conservation scientist based at the University of Queensland. I have a bit of an unusual background; I was first an army officer - went through the Royal Military College and the Australian Defence Force Academy and was lucky enough to get a Rhodes scholarship which led me to Oxford (University) where my supervisor convinced me to do my Ph.D. in Madagascar and that’s where I became a really committed conservationist. I spent three years in Madagascar working on conservation issues, basically looking at deforestation and the impacts on wildlife in the southeast there is a place called Fort-Dauphin. 

After that, I came back and left academia to work for a group called The Wilderness Society which is a very committed conservation NGO and I really got passionate about trying to stop deforestation. Then, I moved into the climate change space, when I became a global climate campaigner for a group called The Wildlife Conservation Society and based myself in New York for about five years. I worked around the world doing climate change planning for different landscapes  WCS in trying to save species and try to get governments to mitigate their impacts of climate change and reduce their fossil fuels.

I came back to the University of Queensland in 2014 and created a couple of research groups. One is called Green Fire Science, which is aimed at doing research informing policy at different scales but especially at national and global scales, to affect biodiversity and climate policy, and the other, called Research and Recovery of Endangered Species Group to try and do the science that does the science at the species and site level, and working with farmers and indigenous peoples and other land owners, trying to bring species back from the brink. also doing climate adaptation planning to secure wildlife and the biosphere from collapse. 

The night parrot is a threatened species under State and Commonwealth legislation. In Australia, the species is listed as Critically Endangered fauna under the Biodiversity Conservation Act 2016 - Credit: Nicholas Leseberg

2.What specific ecosystems in Australia do you believe are currently under the most threat from climate change?

I think the recent reports show all ecosystems are now getting highly degraded by climate change, but we know mangrove ecosystems are really vulnerable and really changing a lot. Coral reef ecosystems have been dramatically alternated already and we have seen a huge footprint of climate change on them. But even desert ecosystems are really being changed in kind of weird and wonderful ways. I was out west last week at Diamantina National Park, in southwest Queensland, and you can see that the change in rainfall regimes out there are really affecting the wildlife and ecological processes of the desert systems and have been affecting it now for the last 20 years - it has been a real change. 

It is not just how the system works but it’s also how people farm out there. I was talking to some farmers out there about what they are doing, and you can see this human response to climate change which is degrading the system too as they are trying to get in front of more extreme droughts and extreme weather systems and doing things which are ‘harder’ on the system, which therefore makes the system more degraded.

So, to answer your question, deserts are really vulnerable, and coral reefs and mangroves I would say are the three which are really being impacted. The other system is forests, our dry forests which have been smashed by fires as we saw years ago, the megafires, especially during dry times and we, ’re also seeing that being far more prevalent because of climate change.

3.You call yourself ‘an accidental academic’, what do you mean?

I never dreamt about being an academic, I wake up seeing the professor next to my name and it makes me kind of laugh. I feel like it’s imposter syndrome as such - I still feel like a student in many, many ways, and in my hearts of heart that I’m a conservationist more than a scientist per se. I’m more of a campaigner and have spent a lot of my time speaking to journalists and writing articles trying to get an outcome, being mission-driven, and trying to push the needle on things, rather than writing papers for the sake of just writer reports or writing about the beauty of the theory of science.

I don’t think I’ll ever be in the Academy of Sciences, I’m not a blue-sky scientist. I hope people look back on my life and that I’ve made a difference to the species and the systems and saved some species and systems rather than someone who has made a huge dent in academic literature. 

That’s why I see myself as an ‘accidental academic’ - I do love supervising students but to be completely honest, I do love producing conservationists. I just want to produce people who are passionate about the environment and want to try and fight for the environment. 

4.In the past, you’ve said that if we don’t have a ‘biosphere’ trying to fix climate change won’t matter. For people like me – who care deeply what can we do?

Yeah, that is a controversial statement, but it just is the reality. If you imagine all of the earth being on a ship, and the ship is the biosphere, and the climate is the weather and the ocean around that ship. And you discover the ship has a big hole in it and it’s sinking, it doesn’t really matter what the ocean or the air around is doing if the ship sinks it will sink….. that is how I see what is happening right now. The biosphere is in trouble. if the biosphere collapses it doesn’t matter how big the swell is or how enormous the wind is or how hot it is, the ship has sunk.  We do need to solve climate change but the biosphere is a huge problem to solve as well.

I don’t think we grapple with that concept well, but the reality is everything linked with humanity is the biosphere and we rely on everything to do with nature to survive - all the fibre, all the food, the water, and even our energy comes from the biosphere and so we must recognise that it is the most important thing to get right. Fixing our biosphere, restoring it, repairing it, and as well stopping climate change. It’s not either or, it’s both.

I really worry that we focus on one thing which is important, halting climate change is important, but we’re forgetting about arguably the more important thing, which is fixing the hole in our ship, which is the biosphere.

What can we do? I think the most important thing is to be aware of the problem and be more honest about the problem and actually start talking about it more - that’s the fundamental thing. The thing about Australia which scares me, and NGOs keep finding when they do surveys around Australia, is that 95% of Australians love nature, love biodiversity but apparently 80% of Australians don’t know there’s a problem. I think that’s a real issue, the first thing we can do is work out ways that we can communicate the fact that there’s a hole in our ship. 

We’ve got to realise that people like me, conservation scientists are pretty awful at communicating this, we need champions that are not academics or scientists talking about this. We need it to be mainstreamed in ways that people can get it, people down the street can get it. And I don’t know the answer to that, but I hope others do. We need the Australian cricket captain to be talking about this, we need the person on ABC radio to be talking about this in the same way we are now talking about reconciliation, in the same way, that we are talking about climate change, it needs to be that mainstreamed and we’re not at the moment. 

I think the solutions are not actually that hard once we communicate it, I think people actually will go ‘ahhh right this is a big problem. A lot of solutions for the biodiversity problem is just reducing our harm, and reducing our harm isn’t actually that hard, as we’re able to do that in many parts of our life, but it’s just our ability to realise that there is a problem with our biodiversity.  

5.Of all the incredible things you have done – such as 342 journal articles, lots of media interviews, research reports, and chapters in books – what are you most proud of? Or what has been most impactful?

It’s funny, I’ll tell you one thing that I’ve always thought was interesting and I think it has made a difference. My brother and I named a place called the Great Western Woodlands in Western Australia when I worked for The Wilderness Society. Beforehand, it was just the largest intact woodland on the planet, 16 million hectares. In 2005, it was known as ‘Z land’ on a map or known as The Goldfields. Not known, not loved, nothing known about the area. He (my brother) and I wrote this report about the extraordinary nature of the Great Western Woodlands, we gave it a name, and now if you look at it, if you googled it, you talk about it with people around Australia.

It’s a place, it has a name, people are conserving it, there are campaigns around it, and there’s a National Park out there now. So just by giving a place a name and defining it with a loose boundary, it’s kind of given it something and made me think that when you give something a name, you can love it and do something about it. And weirdly just writing a report on something and going out and naming it, doing a bit of media, it can really change the needle of a place. It’s something I really can smile about, no one really knows about it, but I can put my hand on my heart and say my brother and I did that. That was a small win.

In terms of global stuff, I’ve spent a lot of time over the last 5 years or so really pushing the global conservation agenda in the Convention for Biological Diversity (CBD) to get an ecosystem-based target, so that we can start actually setting an agenda around keeping intact ecosystems intact, and wilderness intact. That was never really talked about before a few of us came along and started writing a lot of papers on this. I feel like I’ve had a fairly good role in that, and that looks like that will be occurring this year. This year the CBD will be signed off and the first target of the CBD will be a no net loss target around ecosystems so that is something I am quite proud of. We have lobbied hard, written science and justified, talked to nations, given keynote addresses, international meetings and we have a had a win there – looks like that is going to go ahead!

That’ll be something I’ll look back at in 15 years and say, ‘that was a pretty good outcome’ because that was something that was really missing in how the convention was going forward. There were species targets but never any ecosystem targets. And that’ll be really important to stop things like land clearing.

6.What is your current contribution to Subak Australia and what would you like to achieve with us?

I sit on the committee that advises and mentors students - I think Subak’s really exciting. I think it’s really starting up in Australia and I’m hoping to get students and people more engaged with it.

And then hopefully try and achieve the mission of Subak to push forward and try and get that information out in the real world and shared. And to get some more entrepreneurs out there to push these kinds of projects going out in the real world and connect Subak to other efforts. I’m quite well connected with the conservation NGO and environment NGO world and I think Subak is really focused on climate solutions which is great. I am obviously very passionate about biodiversity conservation, and there is a very important nexus there so I see one of my important contributions is keeping that nexus connected and trying to keep expanding on that if and where possible. 

If you are interested in finding out more about climate change and the biosphere, check out these following resources which are both alarming and incredibly informative about deforestation and species extinction:

https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/forests-and-deserts/rate-of-deforestation
https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/forests-and-deserts/species-extinction-rate