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By Naomi Larsson
For centuries, the delicate silver dove has been a symbol of love and fidelity.
In Greek mythology, a pair of turtle doves pulled the goddess of love Aphrodite's chariot. For Shakespeare, they signified devotion, while Elvis promised to call his lover "sweet things like turtle dove." In the Twelve Days of Christmas, a pair of them are gifted on the second day, pointing to their strong bond.
Despite such cultural references, many among Britain's younger generations would not recognize the "turr turring" sound that enraptured people for centuries when the doves arrived to feed and roost during the summer.
That's because the turtle dove, of which there are four main species, is the fastest declining bird in the UK. Just 50 years ago, there were an estimated 125,000 pairs, but between 1967-2016 their numbers fell by 98%. Now, there may be fewer than 5,000 pairs left, according to European Commission estimates. Across Europe numbers have dropped by over a third and the bird now features on the IUCN red list of threatened species as "vulnerable" and declining.
"The sound of the dove is nostalgic," said Isabella Tree, who co-runs the pioneering Knapp Estate rewilding project in south-east England. "It's long summers ahead of you at the end of school. It's freedom and being carefree... and I guess that decline [in the UK and Europe] symbolizes so much as well."
Biodiversity and Habitat Loss
Their near extinction is a symbol of the biodiversity crisis in the UK, largely driven by habitat destruction. Britain is now one of the countries with the most depleted nature in the world according to the World Wildlife Fund. Half its plant and animal species are in decline and more than 40 million birds have vanished in just half a century.
"[Turtle doves] are the canary in the [coal] mine because there are all these other species before it and after it," said Tree. "It's an umbrella for all the other species that are heading that way."
Turtle doves migrate south through Europe to sub-Saharan Africa between July and September, ending up in dry woodland and farmland areas of countries like Mali and Senegal for winter.
Droughts in West Africa and the Sahel region are believed to have contributed to the fall in turtle dove species recorded in northern Europe, with low rainfall reducing supplies of the seeds and insects the birds rely on for energy for the long journey home.
On that journey, they face more threats. As many as 2-3 million birds are hunted as they pass through Europe. EU authorities say hunting is being allowed at unsustainable levels, and conservation organizations across Europe are lobbying governments for better regulation.
Yet by far the biggest cause of their decline is the damage to the UK and northern European habitats that have long served as their homes during the spring and summer.
Turtle doves require access to fresh water, bare patches of land to feed on natural weed and wildflower seeds, and thorny scrub in which to nest. Runoff from agricultural nitrates makes fresh water often difficult to find in the British landscape and grasslands and wildflower meadows are being depleted by farming and urban expansion.
"I remember as a child it got called wasteland, but scrub habitat is far from waste habitat," said Marc Outten, a landscape conservation area manager at Essex Wildlife Trust in south-eastern England. Its ecological properties include thorny scrub, bare open areas, wildflowers — everything a turtle dove needs.
Conservation and Farming
Operation Turtle Dove, a partnership project of charities including the Essex Wildlife trust, works with landowners and farmers to actively build turtle dove habitat.
Outten works with Blue House Farm, a 660-acre nature reserve in the UK county of Essex, where they have replicated weedy fallow plots.
"We work on it every year to make sure it's in the condition it needs to be with plants such as clovers and black medic," Outten said. "These plants are native to the landscape and produce the seed the birds feed on."
The birds eat a wide range of seeds from various plants that would have been abundant 50 or 100 years ago, added Guy Anderson, program manager for species recovery with The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB).
"But it's simply true that with the gradual process of intensifying our agricultural production, the availability of those seeds has dropped and dropped," said Anderson.
Part of the project includes supplementary feeding — providing sources of food in the form of seed or grain. Under the Countryside Stewardship Scheme in England, farmers can receive financial support to create a turtle dove habitat.
Though they haven't recorded an increase in doves across the sites in the four years of working on the project, Outten said they are seeing improvements in how landowners and farmers manage habitat for the birds.
A Turtle Dove Haven
The 3,500-acre Knepp Estate in West Sussex is another project taking a different approach and one of the few places where turtle dove numbers are increasing.
Isabella Tree and her husband Charlie Burrell converted their intensively farmed land into a rewilding project almost 20 years ago. They have let the land return to nature.
Just one year after they'd finished rewilding the southern part of their property, they heard turtle doves for the first time. It's now a breeding hotspot for the birds with an estimated 19 pairs. Knepp is also home to 2% of the UK's population of nightingales.
Tree is critical of supplementary feeding schemes that, in her view, are short term. She questions the chances of turtle doves getting to feed on scattered seeds before other mammals eat them first.
"Restoring habitat is going to be the fix," she said. "[The turtle dove] needs those natural wildflower seeds and other things it would be finding as soon as it arrives in the spring."
She calls for building wildlife corridors to bring back biodiversity: this could be hedgerows that are left to grow much larger than normal, or the rewilding of an entire river system.
"Until we can actually have a strategy that allows areas of nature to connect together, we're going to have no resilience in the system at all," said Tree.
Reposted with permission from Deutsche Welle.
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The speed and scale of the response to COVID-19 by governments, businesses and individuals seems to provide hope that we can react to the climate change crisis in a similarly decisive manner - but history tells us that humans do not react to slow-moving and distant threats.
A Game of Jenga
<p>Think of it as a game of Jenga and the planet's climate system as the tower. For generations, we have been slowly removing blocks. But at some point, we will remove a pivotal block, such as the collapse of one of the major global ocean circulation systems, for example the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), that will cause all or part of the global climate system to fall into a planetary emergency.</p><p>But worse still, it could cause runaway damage: Where the tipping points form a domino-like cascade, where breaching one triggers breaches of others, creating an unstoppable shift to a radically and swiftly changing climate.</p><p>One of the most concerning tipping points is mass methane release. Methane can be found in deep freeze storage within permafrost and at the bottom of the deepest oceans in the form of methane hydrates. But rising sea and air temperatures are beginning to thaw these stores of methane.</p><p>This would release a powerful greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, 30-times more potent than carbon dioxide as a global warming agent. This would drastically increase temperatures and rush us towards the breach of other tipping points.</p><p>This could include the acceleration of ice thaw on all three of the globe's large, land-based ice sheets – Greenland, West Antarctica and the Wilkes Basin in East Antarctica. The potential collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is seen as a key tipping point, as its loss could eventually <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/324/5929/901" target="_blank">raise global sea levels by 3.3 meters</a> with important regional variations.</p><p>More than that, we would be on the irreversible path to full land-ice melt, causing sea levels to rise by up to 30 meters, roughly at the rate of two meters per century, or maybe faster. Just look at the raised beaches around the world, at the last high stand of global sea level, at the end of the Pleistocene period around 120,0000 years ago, to see the evidence of such a warm world, which was just 2°C warmer than the present day.</p>Cutting Off Circulation
<p>As well as devastating low-lying and coastal areas around the world, melting polar ice could set off another tipping point: a disablement to the AMOC.</p><p>This circulation system drives a northward flow of warm, salty water on the upper layers of the ocean from the tropics to the northeast Atlantic region, and a southward flow of cold water deep in the ocean.</p><p>The ocean conveyor belt has a major effect on the climate, seasonal cycles and temperature in western and northern Europe. It means the region is warmer than other areas of similar latitude.</p><p>But melting ice from the Greenland ice sheet could threaten the AMOC system. It would dilute the salty sea water in the north Atlantic, making the water lighter and less able or unable to sink. This would slow the engine that drives this ocean circulation.</p><p><a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/atlantic-conveyor-belt-has-slowed-15-per-cent-since-mid-twentieth-century" target="_blank">Recent research</a> suggests the AMOC has already weakened by around 15% since the middle of the 20th century. If this continues, it could have a major impact on the climate of the northern hemisphere, but particularly Europe. It may even lead to the <a href="https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10871/39731?show=full" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">cessation of arable farming</a> in the UK, for instance.</p><p>It may also reduce rainfall over the Amazon basin, impact the monsoon systems in Asia and, by bringing warm waters into the Southern Ocean, further destabilize ice in Antarctica and accelerate global sea level rise.</p>The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation has a major effect on the climate. Praetorius (2018)
Is it Time to Declare a Climate Emergency?
<p>At what stage, and at what rise in global temperatures, will these tipping points be reached? No one is entirely sure. It may take centuries, millennia or it could be imminent.</p><p>But as COVID-19 taught us, we need to prepare for the expected. We were aware of the risk of a pandemic. We also knew that we were not sufficiently prepared. But we didn't act in a meaningful manner. Thankfully, we have been able to fast-track the production of vaccines to combat COVID-19. But there is no vaccine for climate change once we have passed these tipping points.</p><p><a href="https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-risks-report-2021" target="_blank">We need to act now on our climate</a>. Act like these tipping points are imminent. And stop thinking of climate change as a slow-moving, long-term threat that enables us to kick the problem down the road and let future generations deal with it. We must take immediate action to reduce global warming and fulfill our commitments to the <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Paris Agreement</a>, and build resilience with these tipping points in mind.</p><p>We need to plan now to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, but we also need to plan for the impacts, such as the ability to feed everyone on the planet, develop plans to manage flood risk, as well as manage the social and geopolitical impacts of human migrations that will be a consequence of fight or flight decisions.</p><p>Breaching these tipping points would be cataclysmic and potentially far more devastating than COVID-19. Some may not enjoy hearing these messages, or consider them to be in the realm of science fiction. But if it injects a sense of urgency to make us respond to climate change like we have done to the pandemic, then we must talk more about what has happened before and will happen again.</p><p>Otherwise we will continue playing Jenga with our planet. And ultimately, there will only be one loser – us.</p>By John R. Platt
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