Penny van Oosterzee

Australia has proposed a legislated market for biodiversity based on an existing carbon credits scheme which generates Australian carbon credit units (ACCU) from land-based projects. This provides a unique opportunity to assess the potential for markets to benefit biodiversity. We assessed the extent to which projects under the ACCU scheme overlap potential threatened species habitat, compared that to overlap afforded by protected areas, and compared the ability of different project types to deliver potential benefits to species most impacted by habitat loss. Projects are primarily located in low-cost, marginal arid lands, a pattern that reflects that of the protected area estate. Projects are smaller and fewer in number in more productive lands close to human populations. These lands also overlap most threatened species habitat, hence those species most in need of habitat restoration are the least likely to have their habitat restored under the ACCU scheme. Projects, however, do overlap the geographic range of 32% of the 1,660 threatened species assessed, including for 275 species with <17% of their range in protected areas. Biodiversity markets must incentivize actions in areas of high biodiversity value underpinned by regulations that align with national priorities for biodiversity conservation.

In the most revolutionary archaeological find of the new century, an international team of archaeologists led by Mike Morwood discovered a new, diminutive species of human on the remote Indonesian island of Flores. Nicknamed the “Hobbit,” this was no creation of Tolkien's fantasy. The three foot tall skeleton with a brain the size of a chimpanzee’s was a tool-using, fire-making, cooperatively hunting person who inhabited Flores alongside modern humans as recently as 13,000 years ago. This book is Morwood’s description of this monumental discovery and the intense study that has been undertaken to validate his view of its relationship to our species. He chronicles the bitter debates over Homo Floresiensis, the objections (some spiteful) of colleagues, the theft and damage of some of the specimens, and the endless battle against government and academic bureaucracies that hindered his research. This updated paperback edition contains an epilogue that reports on the most recent debates, findings, and analyses of this amazing discovery.

Summary: Forest restoration efforts in Australia's Wet Tropics establish <100 ha/year, compared with 20‐year average clearing rates of 1661 ha/year. Establishment costs are serious impediments to restoration efforts. Costs range from $25,000 to $67,000/ha, compared with less than $5,000/ha in other areas using other methods. Some of this difference stems from methods used to plant trees. Augered holes are used commonly in environmental plantings, whereas planting spades are used mostly in forestry plantings. To determine the most cost‐effective planting method between auger and spade planting methods, we compared the planting costs and the survival and growth of seedlings of local rainforest species, The speed of planting with a spade is on average four times quicker than with an auger, whereas the survival (range = 89–94%, spade vs auger respectively), and growth (slightly greater height growth for auger planted individuals) rates were only marginally different. Given these results, using planting spades is a cost‐effective alternative to augering holes.

Workable financial mechanisms are essential to abate greenhouse gas emissions. Deforestation, which contributes a large proportion of total global emissions, must be avoided as an effective emissions‐reduction tactic, and to alleviate biodiversity loss and poverty. However, incentives to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) have had mixed and suboptimal success because of opportunity costs and administrative and technical issues, in particular, leakage, permanence, and additionality. We show that these latter concepts can be ambiguous, potentially contrived and in some cases, generate perverse outcomes. Encumbering avoided‐deforestation projects with these administrative shackles risks massive increases in global deforestation and a concomitant loss of biodiversity, ecosystem services and emissions‐reduction opportunities. We offer a solution built on a proven insurance‐based hedging principle, a concept we call iREDD, that could indirectly address specific technical and administrative challenges, whether real or contrived. Project‐specific iREDD insurance policies and premiums would be negotiated upfront using a simple assessment of risk based on governance quality, the integrity of management plans, liquidity, monitoring and evaluation frameworks, and political acceptability. iREDD acts as both an incentive for prudent forest management given the seller's potential financial windfall if forests are diligently managed, and guarantees not to disenfranchise the buyer.

The agriculture, forestry, and other land‐use sector is a crucial sector, second only to the energy sector, in fighting climate change, and provides an important greenhouse gas abatement opportunity for the world. Recently, released figures for Australia, for example, suggest that agriculture, forestry, and other land‐uses, which depend on healthy functioning ecosystems, could abate as much as three quarters of the country's emissions. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was concerned primarily with ecosystems and humankind, but the Kyoto Protocol of the Convention forfeited the potential of using agriculture, forestry, and other land‐uses for global climate mitigation. This had the effect of decoupling biodiversity and ecosystems from carbon pollution reduction and climate change considerations. The Australian Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, one of the first emission trading schemes in the world to follow Kyoto “rules,” excludes the agriculture, forestry, and other land‐use sector, apart from plantation reforestation, potentially creating perverse incentives that themselves can turn into threatening ecological processes. We use Australia and its emerging emissions trading scheme as a case study of the potential effects of this decoupling, and demonstrate the potential impacts on a landscape‐scale regional greenhouse gas abatement and carbon sequestration project.