Regrowing Borneo's Rain forest--Tree by Tree

Regrowing Borneo's Rain forest--Tree by Tree

To save orangutans, scientist Willie Smits is restoring a rain forest—and creating new livelihoods for the Indonesian families who help him

By Jane Braxton Little

Just below the equator, on the island of Borneo, a tropical rain forest is rising out of a logged, charred wasteland. Dawn mists cling to the leaves of ginger and mango trees erupting out of a tangle of ferns, rattan and yam vines. A sparse canopy of white-barked acacias shelters them in filtered shade as the sun burns through the haze. From deep in the distance a tuneless chorus of gibbons booms over the clamor of cicadas, while a white-bellied sea eagle soars silently above.

For Willie Smits, this is a miracle in a moonscape. Emerging from what was a biological desert, it contradicts everything most forestry experts have long believed about rain forests. Smits has named it Samboja Lestari, “Everlasting Forest.” It gives hope to this ravaged landscape and the thousands of species that depend on it. Most important for Smits, the forest growing before his very eyes is the promise of a future for the world’s few surviving orangutans.

“Orangutans are ambassadors of the remaining biodiversity of the Bornean rain forests. If I could re-create habitat for them here, you could do it anywhere,” he says.

Smits, 51, is a forester, a microbiologist and the most passionate advocate for that endangered primate. Charismatic and outspoken, for two decades he battled deforestation, fire and conversion of orangutan habitat to oil palm plantations in a desperate attempt to save these animals on the brink of extinction. His efforts won him countless death threats but not the safe haven he sought for orangutans. Today, out of sheer frustration, Smits is re-creating new orangutan habitat one square meter at a time. His partners are the 600 families of the local Dayak tribe in the Indonesian province of East Kalimantan. The welfare of their village is so integrally linked to the success of Samboja Lestari that Smits refers to it as “the people’s forest.”

The partnership Smits has forged with the local community is key to his success, says Amory Lovins, a renewable energy advocate and chief scientist at Colorado’s Rocky Mountain Institute who recently visited Samboja Lestari. “This may be the finest example of ecological and economic restoration in the Tropics.”

It is a gutsy experiment that has drawn criticism from both scientists and conservationists. Smits has not presented Samboja Lestari for scientific review, leaving rain forest experts to wonder what he has actually accomplished on the ground. Many of his peers in the conservation community believe his money would be better spent protecting habitat than reconstructing it from scratch. For Smits, a veteran of political controversy who has often been at odds with other orangutan rescue projects, the controversy is familiar. He ignores it.

A native of the Netherlands, Smits traveled to Borneo in 1981 as a tropical forester and microbiologist in quest of a place few others had seen. The world’s third-largest island is bigger than Texas and is largely divided into the territories of Indonesia and Malaysia and also the small nation of Brunei. Bisected by the equator, Borneo is a treasure of biodiversity with 15,000 plant species, 222 mammal species, and hundreds of species of birds, amphibians and freshwater fish. When the last ice age ended and glaciers receded, sea levels rose around the island, cutting it off from the Asian continent and leaving its flora and fauna to evolve in isolation. Borneo hosts more than 6,000 species found nowhere else on earth.

It was here in 1858 that Alfred Russel Wallace pondered life across time and space as he wandered alone among dipterocarp trees that towered 60 meters above him. He encountered orangutans and wondered why they were found only in these forests and in neighboring Sumatra. Surrounded by wild nature—drinking the insect-laden liquid of pitcher plants, rhapsodizing over the taste of the durian fruit—Wallace worked through the logic of how every species has come into existence with a preexisting closely allied species. The paper he wrote and sent by slow boat to London spurred Charles Darwin to publish at last his own thoughts on the origin of species. Later Wallace would draw the line east of Borneo that separates the biological realms of Southeast Asia and Australia, a distinction verified a century later as scientists understood the mechanics of plate tectonics.

Borneo’s biological bounty began to collapse in the 1970s. Loggers entered the rain forests that stretched unbroken across the island, cutting roads and felling the dipterocarps for their valuable hardwood lumber. The dense stands where Wallace reveled in the cacophony of raucous hornbills and screeching monkeys were filled with the deafening din of chain saws. Habitat that had sheltered so many species for so long was reduced to vast stretches of stumps baking under the equatorial sun. The forests of Borneo have been leveled at a rate so fast “it resembles the end of the world,” Smits says. Between 1985 and 2005, the island lost a swath of rain forest the size of Florida.

The Eyes in the Cage

The timber operators did not just empty the land of trees. Once the logs were hauled off for export, they cleared the slopes for agricultural plantations, mostly for growing profitable oil palms used in products ranging from margarine to lipstick. The fastest and cheapest way to be rid of what remained was to burn it, a traditional tribal technique. In 1997 this practice turned disastrous. Aided by two dry years and a late monsoon, even Borneo’s productive land began to catch fire. The flames spread, burning for weeks and months, scorching hundreds of thousands of hectares. The choking smoke drifted east across Wallace’s line and on to Timor. It billowed west: satellite images showed 30 cities in Indonesia shrouded in smoke and more than 1,000 hotspots of roaring flames racing up rural hillsides. The fires released up to 40 percent of the total carbon dioxide emissions worldwide that year, according to research published in Nature.

Year after year Smits witnessed the destruction of Borneo’s rain forests while working as an adviser on conservation issues to the Indonesian government. Much as it distressed him, however, it was a chance encounter with an orangutan that finally transformed the Dutchman-turned-Indonesian citizen. While he was passing through a market in 1989, a caged animal caught his attention. “She had the saddest eyes I’ve ever seen,” Smits says. Those nearly human eyes haunted him. Later that night Smits returned to the market to find the orangutan discarded in a garbage heap. He took her home and nursed her back to health. That rescue changed his life.

Orangutans were already facing a precarious future. Once boasting populations throughout Southeast Asia, today fewer than 77,000 remain in the wild and only in Borneo and Sumatra. Although they had been the object of poachers for decades, the demand for orangutans as pets increased in the 1980s, about the same time logging began destroying their habitat. The losses accelerated with the increasing expansion of oil palm plantations, which forced orangutans out of their remote forest homes. Many were captured and sold. Others were simply killed.

Last year the United Nations Environment Program declared orangutans a conservation emergency. If illegal logging and conversion of rain forest to oil palm plantations are not halted, within two decades few orangutans will be left in the wild, the February 2007 report states. Smits’s calculations are even more ominous: without drastic changes, he predicts wild orangutans will be extinct by 2012.

Smits formed the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation (BOS) in 1991 to prevent that catastrophe. A nonprofit organization dedicated to the conservation of orangutans and their habitat, BOS has taken in nearly 2,000 animals for rehabilitation and reintroduced around 700 back into the wild. The goal was to serve as a way station for orangutans until the deforestation stopped and they could be returned to the remote woods where they had prospered for millennia. “I thought I could save orangutans—put them back in the forest and everybody would be happy. It was a beautiful dream,” Smits reflects. But Indonesian forest destruction has been unrelenting, leveling nearly two million hectares a year and taking some 3,000 orangutans with it. Smits finally faced the fact that efforts to protect orangutans in Borneo’s existing rain forest were failing. The only way to save them was to re-create a rain forest with the help of the local community, he says: “I just did it.”

A Formula for Reforestation

The forest at Samboja Lestari started quite modestly. In 2001 Smits began buying land around the Dayak village, once surrounded by forests but now devastated by oil palm plantations. He paid villagers what he considers a generous price using money raised through a private foundation. Determined to protect the land from government interference, Smits made sure each individual purchase complied with all regulations and that BOS would be guaranteed ownership “forever.”

The soils were terrible—infertile, extremely low in nutrients and interspersed with dirt clods hard as steel. Drawing on his background in microbiology and his doctoral dissertation on mycorrhiza, Smits began making enormous quantities of compost. Along with organic wastes, he mixed in sawdust, fruit remnants from the orangutan cages, and manure from cattle and chickens scavenged from his other projects in Kalimantan. His special ingredient was a microbiological agent made from sugar and cow urine. Combined with the humid local climate, each batch of brew was ready in three weeks. Then Smits began planting trees—thousands of them. Each sapling and seed went into the ground with a generous dose of compost. Many of the seedlings came from a nursery he started on the site using seeds he had collected from more than 1,300 species, some from orangutan feces.

The first challenge was killing the alang-alang, a cyanide-­secreting grass that had created a desolation Smits calls “a green shroud.” He is planting Acacia mangium and other fast-growing trees to produce the shade that eventually kills the alang-alang. Once these pioneers have done their job, Smits and the villagers will harvest them and use the lumber in construction.

The entire 2,000-hectare forest is divided into three zones. In the outer zone, a ring 100 meters wide, villagers are planting sugar palms. Families are already enjoying income from the thatch, medicines and edible fruits that sugar palms produce, Smits says. The sap will eventually be processed into sugar at a refinery he plans to build near the village. This 300-hectare outer ring also serves as fire protection. Unlike many local conifers, sugar palms do not burn easily. As an additional defense against fire, each family tending a plot is required to clear the ground around it of alang-alang, undergrowth or anything else flammable.

Inside this fireproof ring is the heart of Samboja Lestari. Smits is planting a wide variety of local trees selected for their benefits to wildlife. Sugarcane, papaya and lemon trees—all will feed the orangutans, birds and other wildlife that are already moving into these woods. Today a half million trees belonging to 1,300 species grow on more than 1,000 hectares. Another 163,000 saplings are in the nursery awaiting transplant. Smits credits the early success of Samboja Lestari to this immense diversity. “What people normally do is plant a million trees and hope for the best. We are re-creating the natural diverse system.”

The third and innermost zone, around 300 hectares, has been set aside for a variety of activities that contribute to the emerging rain forest. Along with an arboretum and forest research facility, it includes sanctuaries for captive animals that cannot be returned to the wild. Smits has also built an education center where visiting schools and other groups can learn about conservation, as well as an eco-lodge to generate income from guests.

He originally designed Samboja Lestari as a sanctuary for orangutans too injured to return to the wild. But as suitable wild habitat in Borneo continues to decline, he may turn it into a last refuge—a “Noah’s ark” where orangutans can live freely. For now, while the rain forest is still immature, he is using it as a school for young animals, with a few adults released on their own.

From the start, Smits has incorporated the community into Samboja Lestari. After buying land from them, he hired local men and women to work in the tree nursery and compost facility. He pays them to plant trees, survey and build roads and further encourages them to cultivate fruits and vegetables between the trees. Once the understory creates a canopy too dense for their pineapples and melons, Smits will offer the villagers 3,000-square-meter plots in the outer ring to grow sugar palms. The families who participate can also become shareholders in a fund that pays a small monthly dividend while financing schools and community buildings.

It is an ingenious strategy with benefits beyond income. The gardens within the forest promote the growth of the saplings. The watermelon, beans and other goods they produce generate a food supply, which Smits buys for the orangutans at his center. The sugar palm plots provide a built-in security system; the villagers tending them watch for both poachers and fire. To reinforce this human surveillance system, Samboja Lestari includes state-of-the-art technology using infrared cameras and satellite monitors. Agreements with international space agencies also allow newly trained local electronics specialists to identify the growth of individual trees—as well as their disappearance.

Smits’s aim is to engage the villagers in the economic future of the forest project so they will care for it out of enlightened self-interest. Their involvement comes with a tough-love hammer. Should there be what Smits calls “outrage in the sanctum”—should orangutans be stolen or killed—he will cancel the monthly dividend for all tenant families. “This way one can be sure the guilty party will be very quickly found thanks to the great social pressure,” he says.

Danger Even in Triumph

The success of this social experiment is not yet confirmed. Neither is the ambitious attempt to reconstruct a tropical rain forest, but Smits is not the first to try. Projects have been in place around the world for decades with varying outcomes. Working with mixed dipterocarp ecosystems is challenging because these forest species are extremely sensitive to disturbance, says Mark Ashton, a Yale University professor of forest studies and silviculture. Most dipterocarps have very poor dispersal systems and do not sprout easily. When they use acacias as pioneer species to create the shade that allows other plants to take root, managers find them hard to remove because they adapt easily and reproduce vigorously. Still, foresters using acacias in Southeast Asian dipterocarp forests have successfully converted plantations, producing closed thickets within 10 to 15 years. Using compost, as Smits is, would speed the process considerably, Ashton says.

Smits has not presented his “miracle forest” for scientific peer review, so how well it is doing is anyone’s guess. Widely considered a loner, Smits is renowned for not publishing his research, including his doctoral dissertation from Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Skeptics of his forest reconstruction project cite his close association with Indonesian officials and timber tycoons and speculate about his motives. Orangutan conservationists say the project is too small to offer anything but temporary habitat. Most would rather see the money go into conserving the existing but fast-­vanishing habitat.

Among scientists, rain forest reconstruction itself raises even more fundamental questions. What if Smits and others successfully demonstrate that they can turn devastated lands into multilayered stands supporting a mixture of plant and animal species? In the eyes of developers and policymakers, will that then justify destroying existing rain forests? That’s what worries Francis E. Putz, a botany professor at the University of Florida. Even the most successful rain forest reconstruction will not come close to equaling a natural rain forest—not for at least 600 years, he says. Reintroducing multiple species, removing invasives and using compost can accelerate the process of forest succession. But it will take centuries for complex ecological interrelationships to reestablish, and they will not necessarily mirror the original ones.

“If you can restore something, you can destroy it and get it back. That becomes a smoke screen behind which the evil of deforestation continues,” Putz says.

Deforestation in Indonesia continues so dramatically that, at the current rate, all but 2 percent of its lowland forests will be gone by 2022, according to the U.N. report. This unprecedented pace has made Indonesia the world’s third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, according to Erik Meijaard, an ecologist with the Nature Conservancy. Recognizing the impact of forest loss on orangutans, in December 2007 the Indonesian government launched an initiative to protect the endangered apes’ habitat. Among the programs it establishes are partnerships with timber concessions that allow some logging but prevent the conversion of one million forested hectares to oil palm plantations.

The plan, endorsed by international conservation groups, can prevent the total release of 700 million tons of carbon. Scientists and Indonesian officials hope the emerging international carbon-credit market among governments and industries will help fund it. If payments for avoiding deforestation become an official mechanism in global climate agreements, carbon buyers can compensate Indonesia for protecting its forests and orangutans. Combined with sustainable economic development for Indonesia, this arrangement has triple-win potential, Meijaard says: “With some political will, it can soon be reality.”

After spending decades working with government programs, Smits is skeptical. He calls this plan and its predecessors “NATO: no action, talk only.” He is pouring his energy into Samboja Lestari, traveling the world to raise awareness and funds to finance his rain forest reconstruction. Smits is convinced that the local community’s commitment to the forest will restore and protect its biodiversity in a way no government plan can. “Make villagers your partners, and nature will come back,” he says.

Reasons to Hope

The birds are already back: kingfishers, blue-throated bee eaters and 130 other species have found their way into these woods. Turtles, snakes and anteaters are showing up along with crab-eating macaques. Even the climate is changing. Smits reports increased cloud cover over the forested area has improved the rainfall by 20 percent and lowered the temperature by an average of five degrees Celsius. In the village, crime is down, and employment is up. Lovins, the renewable energy advocate, calls it confirmation of Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy that if you look after the poorest, everything else will look after itself.

Leading a visiting group through young trees now two stories high, Smits radiates infectious enthusiasm. Swallows are swooping around a magnolia tree buzzing with bees. A barking deer has discovered the forage and grazes quietly underneath a flowering gamhar tree. In the distance a long-dead dipterocarp stands sentinel over this new green oasis. And when the lonesome long call of an orangutan punctuates the quiet conversation, Smits just smiles. It’s all the motivation he needs to keep on planting seeds.

Note: This article was originally printed with the title, "Regrowing Borneo, Tree by Tree".

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Is Focusing on "Hot Spots" the Key to Preserving Biodiversity?

Preserving biodiversity in rich habitats is good. But global warming and other new threats may call for a new strategy

By Robert Kunzig

Matt Vincent www.agoodson.com

In the field of conservation, success stories about saving individual species abound. Bald eagles have recovered from their bout with the pesticide DDT; from fewer than 500 breeding pairs in 1963, the population in the lower 48 states has grown to nearly 10,000 breeding pairs, such that they are no longer listed even as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. Gray wolves have returned to Yellowstone National Park, as well as to the Italian and French Alps. The California condor has been brought back from the absolute brink of extinction, after the last surviving birds were rounded up and bred in the San Diego and Los Angeles zoos. And so on.

When human ingenuity and resources are trained on a particular species, usually a charismatic one, it makes a difference—but it does not change the global pattern, which is a steady drumbeat of extinction and of the permanent loss of biodiversity that goes with it. In a recent global assessment, Stuart Butchart and his colleagues at BirdLife International in England concluded that between 1994 and 2004 conservation efforts had saved 16 species of bird from extinction, at least temporarily. During that same decade, however, another 164 bird species listed as threatened by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) had slipped a notch closer to extinction.

Conservationists have many priorities and many strategies. But for the past two decades, a leading priority has been to preserve as much biodiversity as possible, and the most prominent strategy has been to focus on "hotspots"—regions of the world, such as tropical rain forests, that are rich in species and yet losing them fast. The strategy has been arguably successful, yet it has also been controversial.

"The most difficult challenge we face as conservationists today is to answer the question, Why does biodiversity matter?" says Mike Hoffmann, an ecologist based at Conservation International (CI), an organization that has made hotspots the centerpiece of its efforts. All conservationists oppose extinction, it seems, in the same way that they favor apple pie. But not all agree that saving the maximum number of species worldwide should be the number-one priority—or that preserving hotspots on our increasingly crowded planet leads to the best of all possible worlds.

Defining Diversity

The word "biodiversity" first appeared in print in 1988, as the title of a National Research Council report edited by Harvard University entomologist E. O. Wilson. In the opening chapter Wilson guessed that the earth held between five million and 30 million species, more than half of them living in tropical rain forests. "From a single leguminous tree in the Tambopata Reserve of Peru," he wrote, "I recently recovered 43 species of ants belonging to 26 genera, about equal to the entire ant fauna of the British Isles." He went on to make an equally rough estimate of how many species the earth was losing to extinction: about one every half an hour. Most were undescribed tropical insects vanishing without witness.

Wilson's calculation was based on his theory of "island biogeography," which predicts how many species can survive in a given area of isolated or fragmented habitat, and on estimates of how much rain forest was being cut down. An area the size of West Virginia, Wilson said, was being lost every year—confirming predictions made a decade earlier by a British researcher named Norman Myers. Those predictions had been dismissed by some of his peers as alarmist, but it became clear they were not: human beings were causing a mass extinction unparalleled since the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

Over in species-poor Britain, Myers was also coining a new term in 1988—new at least to conservation biology—and it would soon become a buzzword, too: "hotspots." Myers is an independent environmental consultant, an adjunct academic, notably at the University of Oxford, and a self-described "lone wolf." After previous lives as a schoolteacher in colonial Kenya and then as a photographer of African wildlife, he had earned a Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, in the early 1970s and moved into conservation work. By the late 1980s he was frustrated. "It struck me that because of sheer shortage of funds, scientific expertise and government attention, we were not helping many species all that much," Myers recalls. "We were spreading ourselves far too thinly."

Hotspots were his solution: If you had limited resources and wanted to preserve the maximum number of species, Myers reasoned, you should concentrate on regions that had the most "endemic" species—species that were not found elsewhere—and that were losing them fastest. In his 1988 paper Myers identified 10 such hotspots, all of them centered on tropical forests. Two years later he added eight more to the list, including four regions with Mediterranean climates—subtropical grasslands that were under intense pressure from humans.

The hotspot concept caught on almost immediately. From 1990 on the Mac­Arthur Foundation supported hotspot preservation to the tune of $15 million a year. Later the idea was adopted by CI, which had initially been formed by defectors from the Nature Conservancy and the World Wildlife Fund. Those older organizations had also been concerned with preventing extinctions, but CI made the preservation of global biodiversity—that is, the total number of species—its main focus. Working with Myers, it refined his concept, defining a hotspot as a region that had at least 1,500 species of endemic plants (0.5 percent of the world's total) and that had lost at least 70 percent of its original vegetation. Hotspots brought a welcome rigor to conservation biology, says Peter Kareiva, chief scientist of the Nature Conservancy. "There was a sense before that conservation was ad hoc—that it was about this pretty place or that charismatic animal. The good thing about hotspots is that they were the beginning of being analytical."

Above all, hotspots made sense to the World Bank and to the foundations that have become increasingly important supporters of conservation work. Even people in the business of healing the world's pain do not like feeling they are pouring money down a bottomless hole. Hotspots divided a vast and intractable problem into more manageable parts, with definable targets, and that made foundation managers want to sign checks. Ask Myers today, 20 years after he hatched his simple little idea, which of its impacts he is proudest of, and he says this: "The mobilizing of $850 million." It is indeed an astonishing sum. CI, which has received much of it into its Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund, had fewer than 100 employees in 1990; it now has about 900 in locations all over the world. Recently it increased the number of hot­spots to 34. "If our number-one priority is to save as many species as possible, I don't see how you can do much better than hotspots," Myers says.

Focusing Aid and Attention
Hotspots, as Myers and CI define them, are large regions—Central America is one, for instance, as is Madagascar. Within those regions, various conservation strategies are possible, including captive breeding programs for particular species. But because habitat loss is generally the gravest threat, the most obvious strategy is to designate smaller, even hotter spots within those regions as "protected areas." Beside its "Red List" of threatened species, the IUCN also maintains, along with the United Nations, a list of protected areas. They number over 100,000 and cover 11.5 percent of the earth's land surface.

But many, especially in the poorer tropical countries, are what conservationists call "paper parks"—parks in name only. A few years ago Ana Rodrigues of CI and her colleagues compared the ranges of 11,633 species of terrestrial vertebrates with the geographic coverage of the protected areas. They found that a minimum of more than 12 percent of vertebrates—­1,483 species, including 833 listed as threatened by the IUCN—fell into gaps between the parks and thus had no protection at all. Mammals fared the best, amphibians the worst, presumably because people care more about mammals and because amphibians tend to have smaller ranges that are less likely to overlap with a park.

Thus, a large gap exists between conservation need and conservation resources: compared with what it would take to prevent the mass extinction that is now under way, $850 million spread over many years is actually a tiny sum. People such as John Watkin, an ecologist who is also a grant director for the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund, feel that gap acutely. "I'm a huge advocate of the hotspots approach," he said recently. He was speaking on his cell phone, stuck in what he said was "the longest traffic jam in my life," on a bus that was taking him from Arusha, Tanzania, to Nairobi, Kenya. Hotspots, such as the Eastern Arc Mountains of those two countries, are not wilderness areas; on the contrary they are areas that are being crushed by a needy humanity. "When I first joined [Conservation International], I was very skeptical of hotspots," Watkin went on. "I've been turned around by looking at the financial resources. Everybody has to draw a line in the sand somewhere."

Biodiversity hotspots channel resources to places that need it most, Watkin observed—not only away from the temperate-latitude industrial countries, which are richer in cash than in creatures, but away from "the Serengeti and the other established reserves that have been popularized by research and tourism." At the northern end of the Eastern Arc Mountains, for instance, CI is working to protect the cloud forests of the Taita Hills. Ninety-eight percent of the forest has been cut down, mostly in the past 40 years, to make way for agriculture; a little more than 1,000 acres are left, a dozen small islands in a sea of farmland and exotic tree plantations. No lions, elephants or giraffes live in the Taita Hills; there are not even gorillas, but there are three species of bird that live only in those beleaguered islands. Saving those birds means saving what is left of the forests.

Saving the Picassos
In that sense, the forest islands are irreplaceable—which is the essential feature of hotspots. The concrete criteria for choosing hotspots are just convenient ways of measuring irreplaceability and threat, Hoffmann says, and they work. Threatened vertebrate species may be falling freely through the gaps in the protected-area network, but three quarters of such species are found in hotspots and nowhere else on the earth—indicating that hotspots are good places to protect more land and in general to focus efforts at saving vertebrates as well as plants. "We believe everything can be saved," Hoffmann says. "It's about where you go first. If we fail in the hot­spots, half of biodiversity is gone. Finished."

The fear of that finality is something that drives most conservation biologists, including some who are critical of the hotspot approach. "There is nothing as bad as losing species," says Walter Jetz, an ecologist at the University of California, San Diego. "They are unique biological entities, with unique evolutionary histories and a set of functions we have only partly understood." People will rush back into burning houses to retrieve family photographs and heirlooms; something like that emotion stirs in the hearts of conservation biologists when they contemplate the irreversible loss that is extinction—although Jetz compares species to Picassos, not snap­­shots. Jetz grew up in Bavaria, saw how much money was spent there conserving relatively little biodiversity, then plunged as a young scientist into the teeming tropics of central Africa. He wholeheartedly endorses the transfer of conservation resources from North to South.

But Central Africa is a case in point: it is not on the hotspot list, because it is still in relatively good shape. In revising its list, CI also created a parallel list of five "wilderness areas," including the Congo Basin, but it devotes far fewer resources to them. Conservation efforts in general tend to focus on areas that have suffered heavy human impact in the past—but those areas, Jetz and his graduate student Tien Ming Lee concluded in a study published this year, often are not the areas projected to suffer the heaviest impacts in the future. Central Africa, for instance, still retains most of its original forest, but in recent decades industrial logging concessions have been granted to more than 30 percent of it, and only 12 percent is protected. "That's potentially a hotspot for conservation," Jetz says. "Future challenges to conservation may not have much to do with the past."

Especially when global warming enters the equation: no one really knows what to do about it. In mapping out the future high-impact areas, Jetz and Lee considered the effects of climate change on vegetation but not its effects on the ranges of animals, because too little is known about that. A study published in Nature in 2004, however, predicted that by 2050 between 15 and 37 percent of the species on the earth might be "committed to extinction" as a result of climate change alone. Those alarming numbers were contested—but not the basic reality that no area on the earth can be completely protected anymore. Carbon dioxide (CO2) from fossil fuels warms the planet everywhere, and it will change habitats everywhere, including ones we are not destroying in a more direct way.

That doesn't mean stopping the destruction isn't a good idea, of course—it is, not only because it protects habitats but because it curbs the deforestation that is itself a huge source of CO2. Expanding the focus of conservation beyond hotspots, however, does mean that the entire rationale behind parks and other protected areas is going to need to be rethought for a warming world. "Unless you worry some about the area between the reserves, species won't be able to move," Kareiva says. The Nature Conservancy has been focusing much of its efforts lately on creating migration corridors. "Thinking only about parks leads people to pay not enough attention to the rest of the world," he adds.

"Protected areas are just a tool, not a goal," says Luigi Boitani, a biologist at the University of Rome "La Sapienza" who has spent decades studying the wolves and bears of Italy. He participated with Rodrigues in the analysis of gaps in the existing protected area network, and he thinks the explicit purpose of such reserves should be to preserve biodiversity. But reserves are not the final answer, he says: "By setting aside 10 percent of the world, we are far from saving the world. Protected areas are useless if we don't find a broad agreement between humans and nature.

"We have wolves 20 minutes from the Coliseum," he goes on. "Bears an hour from downtown Rome. I must believe in coexistence." If the carnivores are spreading once again in Italy, he says, it's not because they are being protected in parks—it's because the government compensates farmers for lost livestock, subsidizes guard dogs and electric fences, and in general encourages Italians to live alongside the beasts, not shoot them.

Warming Up to Coldspots
Coexistence between humans and nature can be encouraged in biodiversity hot­spots, too. In the Taita Hills, Watkin and Conservation International are trying not so much to create forest reserves as to get people to respect reserves that already exist. To that end, they are involving the local population in the conservation strategy, and they are funding projects designed, as Watkin puts it, "to provide very realistic alternatives to chopping down the forest and making charcoal." Farming butterflies or indigenous silkworms, for instance: both can be done without en­croaching further on the cloud forest, and both have become significant moneymakers for the Taita Hills.

Much good conservation work has been done and continues to be done as a re­­sult of the hotspot approach; that $850 million has been put to good use. Yet the same critique Kareiva and Boitani direct at parks applies, on a larger scale, to hot­spots: that they lead people to not pay enough attention to the rest of the world—to the "coldspots," as Kareiva calls them. Hotspots are hot because they are rich in endemic species and because Myers and CI define the top priority as preserving the maximum number of species on the whole planet.

The main argument for this view, aside from the moral one that it is wrong for us to extinguish any species, is that species diversity keeps ecosystems functioning. Functioning ecosystems in turn provide eco­­nomically valuable services; for instance, healthy forests around cities keep local water supplies clean. Hard scientific data back up both those claims—but only at the level of individual ecosystems, not the whole planet. "There is not a single scientific paper that shows a loss of ecosystem services when you change the total global number of species," Kareiva says.

The hotspot concept, he goes on, "doesn't have a scientific basis at all. When we say we care about biodiversity, we mean wherever you live, Montana or Tanz­ania, you don't want to lose so many species that your ecosystem just won't function. The goal might be, nowhere in the world do we lose half our species. If we lose that much, that place is gone." Boi­tani's long-term priority is similar. It is "to find a stable relationship between humans and other species," he says. "Stop the negative trend. Find a relation of coexistence and tolerance, even if it means we have to lose 50 percent of the species. I'm ready to sign off on that if it means what is left will last."

That view is anathema to hotspot proponents. "The notion that biodiversity loss of any kind is acceptable is just not acceptable," Hoffmann says. "We don't believe that extinction is inevitable—human-mediated, fast-tracked extinction should not be inevitable." From that standpoint, accepting the reality that we are causing extinctions every day and, as global warming accelerates, are soon going to be causing many more is unforgivably unambitious. The counterargument is that trying to preserve the whole planet in some kind of ecologically intact form is in fact far more ambitious than just focusing on the 2 percent of land surface that happens to be in hotspots.

Biodiversity hotspots were a useful conceptual shortcut—a quick way of figuring out where to begin with the daunting task of saving the world. By focusing efforts on the total number of species, they allow conservationists to avoid the hard science required to decide which species matter most to ecosystems and the hard choices required to decide which species matter most to us. But we'll come closer to making real conservation progress, say Kareiva and other scientists, when we face up to those choices. "We're the stewards of the planet," Kareiva declares. "We get to choose its future. Let's admit that."

Note: This article was originally printed with the title, "Are Hot Spots Key to Conservation?"

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
Robert Kunzig is a science writer and co-author (with Wallace S. Broecker) of Fixing Climate: What Past Climate Changes Reveal about the Current Threat and How to Counter It.