Conserving our future

For UQ PhD science student Brooke Williams, living the dream is not just a fantasy. Her environmental management and conservation research has the potential to directly influence how we manage the planet to enable its survival for future generations.

“This is the best way I can contribute to society,” she says.

“We rely on a healthy planet for food, fresh water and clean air: our very survival hinges on maintaining Earth’s biosphere.

“So, for me, discovering solutions to challenging environmental problems is not only exciting, it’s the most important thing in the world.”

However, if we are not aware of ‘problems’, we cannot do anything about them – which is why Williams’s work is so important.

“My research focuses on finding ways to conserve Earth’s species and ecosystems, and the services they provide to people. This involves balancing conservation objectives against human activities that need to alter the natural environment – such as agricultural expansion – and trying to plan for the best outcomes for both nature and people," Williams says.

“Most recently, I have been tracking humanity’s footprint across Earth, identifying those ecosystems most affected by human pressure.

"By identifying these areas in crisis, we can better plan for their protection.”

What she has found is stark – currently, 58 per cent of the world’s terrestrial surface is under intense human pressure, and only 25 per cent can be classified as ‘wilderness’. Since the turn of the millennium, Earth has already lost nearly two million square kilometres of intact land – an area about the size of Mexico.

Orinoco region, Colombia (photo credit: Pato Salcedo).

Orinoco region, Colombia (photo credit: Pato Salcedo).

If these trends continue, the world will be unable to sustain itself and, by extension, nor will humankind.

“Plants and animals rely on intact lands – that is, lands that have not been degraded by people – to provide their habitat; and people rely on these plants and animals for services such as climate regulation and clean water,” Williams says.

“We continue to take these last intact places for granted, but our results show that urgent action is needed to protect them.”

Orinoco crocodile, Colombia (photo credit: Pato Salcedo).

Her claim is supported by a recent case study she worked on in the South American savannah lands, which are now more widely accessible for human exploitation.

“We recently developed a land-use planning framework that can help identify where to best expand agriculture, while minimising the negative impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem services,” Williams says.

“We applied this framework to the Colombian Llanos, a tropical savannah environment that, while still relatively intact, is at serious risk of future expansion of agricultural development."

Mountain tapir in the Llanos, Orinoco region, Colombia (photo credit: Pato Salcedo).

Mountain tapir in the Llanos, Orinoco region, Colombia (photo credit: Pato Salcedo).

Her research suggests that tropical savannahs globally are particularly at risk in the near future. This is because their development is often considered to have low biodiversity and carbon impacts relative to other ecosystems, such as forest. This, in turn, makes their vast grassy expanses a target for agricultural production to meet future increases in food demand.

"As these savannahs are often located in places that have few environmental restrictions and the cost of land is cheaper, agricultural companies from overseas buy them up for development – despite the biodiversity and ecosystem services consequences such as soil carbon loss and exacerbated climate change,” she says.

In her latest analysis, Williams found that between the years 2000 and 2013, tropical savannahs lost more area to human pressure – 655,000 square kilometres in total – than any other type of ecosystem. She also found that the rainforests of Indonesia and Papua New Guinea had lost considerable intact land during the same period.

“Our results show that greater efforts are urgently needed to retain Earth’s remaining intact ecosystems,” Williams says.

Williams tends not to follow typical experimental and hypothesis-based processes in her scientific methodology, which may be to her advantage in generating creative solutions to the problems she unearths.

“In conservation science, we are often developing new tools to optimise decision-making or to identify the most important areas on Earth for biodiversity and ecosystem service conservation,” she says.

“As with all science, we identify a problem and try to find a solution.”

For example, when identifying intact lands in crisis, Williams utilised the methodology developed in 2019 by UQ’s Professor James Watson and University of British Columbia’s Associate Professor Oscar Venter to determine which areas are least impacted by humans.

After identifying seven key human pressure points – population density, cropland, railways and roads, night-time lights, navigable waterways, built environments, and pasture land – the team assigned ‘human footprint’ scores across the Earth, based on satellite images as well as crowd-sourced and other publicly available data.

Seven key ways humans impact the earth:

This is how Williams determined that around 42 per cent of terrestrial Earth could be considered relatively free of direct anthropogenic disturbance, and just one quarter could be classed as 'wilderness' (the least degraded end of the human footprint spectrum).

“Our remaining wilderness areas are mostly found in a small number of nations, with Russia, Canada, Brazil and Australia being standouts,” she says.

Kakadu National Park, Australia (photo credit: Liana Joseph).

Kakadu National Park, Australia (photo credit: Liana Joseph).

“We must do everything we can to protect them because, once an ecosystem has been eroded, it is irreversible: it can never be fully restored again.”

And this could have dire consequences for the future of humankind, which is already affected by the climate change caused by species’ extinctions, declines in species populations, and the resulting out-of-kilter ecosystems.

But Williams remains upbeat.

“The answer to climate change and the biodiversity crisis is political,” she says.

“We have all the science and knowledge needed to live in harmony with nature.

“My dream is that governments worldwide will emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic and recover the world’s economy in a way that is environmentally sustainable, putting into action solutions that researchers like myself have found.”

To learn more about Williams's conservation research, check out the scientific journal One Earth and WWF’s Living Planet Report 2020 (see pages 66–69). To access the human footprint datasets for the years 2000, 2005, 2010 and 2013 (free of charge), visit the Dryad data repository.

Photos of Colombian savannah lands taken by Pato Salcedo. Opening video and image: Getty images.

Words by Suzanne Parker.

UQ PhD student Brooke Williams.