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Water, Land and Ecosystems

Fred Pearce

Fred Pearce

Fred Pearce is a journalist and author based in London, UK. He writes regularly for New Scientist magazine, the Guardian newspaper and Yale e360 web site.  His books include Peoplequake, When the Rivers Run Dry and, mostly recently, The Land Grabbers.

Content authored by Fred Pearce

  • Blog Post
    A soccer stadium at Chernobyl whose pitch has been filled with trees.
    Blog Post

    Managing the fallout ghost-scape

    The disasters at Chernobyl and Fukushima have left vast areas of tainted, uninhabitable land. Their respective governments' drastically different approaches have had a range of consequences for wildlife, farming and the future of those two landscapes.
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    CIFOR's photo of agricultural deforestation in Brazil
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    Can a deforestation driver become a forest protector?

    On a global scale, the EU's consumption of agricultural products is perhaps the single largest driver of deforestation. This may change, with the EU's new Action Plan on Deforestation, but whether or not this plan will protect the livelihoods of smallholder farmers remains to be seen.
    2 comments
  • Blog Post
    Farmer in China's Guizhou province spreading pesticide on her crops.
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    China's new crop of cash

    Faced with the pressure of finding new ways to feed its massive population, China has decided invested $450 billion into farming. While the exact uses of this cash injection remain mysterious, the move represents a massive shift back towards domestic food production.
    2 comments
  • Blog Post
    An oil palm plantation in Indonesia.
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    There is no diversity in monocropping

    Smallholder farms and large industrial farms are equally damaging to their ecosystems if they are monocropped. That said, shifting away form monocropping isn't only beneficial for ecosystems: it has economic rewards as well.
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    Fruit grown in a community forestry project in Sintang, Kalimantan, Indonesia.
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    Thinking local: conserving forests through use

    Received wisdom on forest conservation tells us that working forests are bad for the environment: good forests are "pristine." However, there is no such thing as a pristine forest, and would-be conservationists have much to learn from those who have lived and worked in productive forests.
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    Spring onion cultivation on an urban farm in Kathmandu, Nepal.
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    Ecomodernism and the human-nature divide

    Ecomodernism embraces agricultural intensification as one of the primary means of decoupling humanity from the environment. However, ecomodernism relies on some problematic assumptions about the division between humanity and nature and the nature of human use of rural spaces.
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    Ghana's Akasombo Dam on the Volta River.
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    The myth of the "win-win"

    Development banks take a reductionist approach to hydropower; the critical counter-discourse calls for more nuance. These two discourses rarely cross paths, but a new paper in Global Environmental Change directly addresses both views from a critical scientific perspective.
    3 comments
  • lake chad
    Big Question: Responses

    The pitfalls of blaming it all on climate change

    Can reporting on climate change become a problem – hampering policy-making on sustainability and providing an alibi for the real environmental villains?  I believe it can.  A growing tendency in the media to frame every environmental problem as rooted in a changing climate is having the effect of depoliticizing the issue and excusing local actors. 

  • Blog Post
    climate change earth display
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    Can we read the climate crystal ball?

    What do we all know about climate change, beyond the fact that the world is warming, the wet areas are getting wetter and dry areas drier? With scientists telling us that the trend is bound to worsen - what are we to make of a new study saying that this is all wrong?
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    Why wrecking the planet is bad for business

    Financiers and business titans see the problem: Their businesses are wrecking the planet, and wrecking the planet is bad for business.
    The Economist Events' Sustainability Summit 2016
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    rice field uruguay
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    The new 'golden age' of agronomy

    Not since the Green Revolution half a century ago has there been such a golden age for agronomy.  But unlike the hey-day of new high-yield varieties of rice, wheat and corn, there is no consensus today about where the science of farming should be headed and what it should be trying to deliver.
    7 comments
  • Blog Post
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    Carbon, climate change and financing: What the Paris climate agreement means for landscapes

    Climate change activists were all smiles at the conclusion of the Paris Agreement last weekend. But what about those wanting an agreement that would restore and sustainably manage landscapes?  What did the deal say about forests and forest dwellers?  Did it give a boost to “climate-smart agriculture”?  Or do we just face a blitz of low-carbon hydroelectric dams?
    1 comment
  • Blog Post
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    Has capitalism captured conservation?

    United Nations climate negotiations will be critical for the future of the planet, right? There is no time to lose. We need less politics, and more action. Well, not so fast, maybe
    2 comments
  • Blog Post
    Jonathan McIntosh Jakarta Farmer Protest
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    Common land: the fightback starts here

    For most Westerners, the idea of common lands conjures up images of English village greens or abandoned wasteland.  But in much of the developing world, they are the lifeblood of hundreds of millions of people, sources of sustenance and spirituality, of wealth and welfare.
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    Spelling out soil for the SDGs

    Soil, and what it means for human survival, hasn’t gotten this much attention since the 1970s and 1980s.  But as soils return to the high tables of policymaker, who will be the winners?  Fertiliser companies or smallholders?  Land grabbers or the hungry?
  • Blog Post
    Cactus Farming
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    Cacti: the new energy crop?

    Cacti could be the new jatropha. There is a buzz in some biofuel circles that these desert succulents are set to become the next wonder energy crop -- yielding prodigious quantities of biomass for biogas fermentation to generate electricity in the semi-arid lands of Africa and elsewhere.  
    2 comments
  • Blog Post
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    Talks of water peace in the Nile

    While Ethiopia hosts a global discussion on aid finance this week, a long-running dispute with its neighbours over how to share the Nile could be reaching a peaceful conclusion.
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    Progress to Paris: climate change or climate coverage?

    How will the world’s poor farmers be helped to adapt to oncoming climate change? What will prevent the rural inhabitants of sub-Saharan Africa from starving as their crops shrivel in the predicted mega-droughts? The answer, apparently, is insurance.
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    Water Funds: Priming the corporate pump?

    What are we to make of the proliferation of water funds round the world dedicated to maintaining the watersheds that keep rivers flowing, aquifers charged and taps full? Should we embrace the engagement of some of the world’s most famous water guzzlers?
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    Poachers turned gamekeepers

    Something interesting is happening in Kenya – something that, if successful, could reverberate through Africa and transform the continent’s landscape management. Formerly all-powerful state agencies are handing over day-to-day control of key resources like forests, rivers and wildlife to local communities.
  • Big Question: Responses

    Restoring land for conservation or development?

    The new battle cry uniting climate campaigners, environmentalists, agriculturalists and advocates of a landscape approach to planning is for the restoration of former forest land. But what do we mean by “restoration”? Restoration to what? And for whom?

    Global Landscapes Forum 2014
    2 comments
  • Blog Post
    Blog Post

    Calling an end to the search for ‘big ideas’

    I am a journalist. I flit in and out of places. But I have spoken to enough people at the receiving end of aid to know that what they crave is engagement, time, consistency and above all people who listen and act on what they are told. Not much aid work these days looks like that.
    3 comments
  • Blog Post
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    A new billion dollar sanitation industry on the horizons

    For IWMI Director General, Jeremy Bird, the world's emerging water crisis in most places is one of management rather than of absolute water shortages -- of not making the most of clean water, and of profligate disregard for the value of waste water.
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    "Franken-brinjal" or a new deal for poor Asian farmers?

    Any day now, a hundred Bangladeshi smallholder farmers will be planting their annual aubergine crop. But this year this select band will not be planting their usual seeds of the crop; these family farmers, chosen by the country’s agricultural researchers, will be growing a genetically modified (GM) variety.
    9 comments
  • Blog Post
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    Time to hand back protected areas in the name of conservation

    How can we best protect forests for the myriad ecosystem services they provide – capturing and storing carbon, protecting river systems and soils, maintaining biodiversity and ensuring access to bushmeat? The presumption is that the local forest dwellers and users have to be kept out. But that increasingly looks like exactly the wrong approach.
    1 comment
  • Blog Post
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    How can we overcome dysfunctional water governance?

    Of all the causes of the horrendous on-going civil war in Syria, the one that is least discussed is water. It may be a stretch to call the conflict a water war. But, as Brian Richter notes in his book Chasing Water, years of drought in Syria have "created a tinderbox for revolt" as wells run dry and food prices in local markets soar.
    1 comment
  • Blog Post
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    Protecting communities from natural disasters requires a landscape approach

    The destruction by human action of ecosystems is leaving communities more vulnerable to natural disasters – in harm's way. The solution lies not in a doomed effort to prevent floods, but in improving the resilience of the landscape by finding ways to embrace managed floods through reviving natural wetland ecosystems. Cyclone shelters can save lives, but not livelihoods.
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    Climate Change: We are not all in this together

    For the first time, in the latest assessment of the IPCC on impacts and adaptation, there is a much greater recognition that for poor people living precarious lives, things look much more complicated than they do in climate models. It is a breath of fresh air.
    1 comment
  • Big Question: Responses

    Hydrodams: the bigger the badder

    Most of the trillions of dollars spent on building large dams round the world in the past half century or so have been a waste of money. Many people may have suspected as much, but now there is peer-reviewed research to back it up.

    1 comment
  • Blog Post
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    Can we engineer our way out of flooding?

    How to kill a nation’s rivers. I visited Poland, where they are doing just that. It is a terrifying lesson for the many other nations worried about floods and determined to engineer their way to a solution. Thailand, among others, please listen. There is a better way.
    4 comments
  • Blog Post
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    How bad swamps became good wetlands

    More wetlands have been drained in the name of extending and improving agriculture than for any other reason. Yet real farmers often object, especially smallholders dependent on wetlands for parts of their livelihoods.
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    Behind the locked cupboard: uncovering the truth about land grabs

    A couple of years ago, Oxfam claimed that an area of agricultural land in developing countries almost the size of Western Europe had in recent years been taken over the foreign investors. A new report says a majority of the biggest “land grabs” never got beyond the planning stage. Is the great land rush over?
  • Blog Post
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    Food security starts from the ground up

    Soils should be at the heart of "climate-smart agriculture". No-till agriculture is as good at capturing carbon as planting a rainforest -- and should be treated as a similar "carbon credit" in any future deal to set up a carbon trading system round the world, says Guadagni of the World Bank.
    9 comments
  • Blog Post
    Blog Post

    Zambezi: The Mekong's diplomatic debacle on repeat

    The influence of the intergovernmental Mekong Basin Commission to manage the river is hobbled by its absence of the biggest and most upstream country on the river – China. This time we are in Africa, with Zambia the only country that hasn't joined the commission.
    7 comments
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    Dirty money for clean water?

    If the UN high-level panel on sustainable development goals gets its way, the world will from 2015 be chasing a target to “reduce bribery and corruption”.
    2 comments
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    Sharing or sparing land for nature?

    A new ecological study of novel human-influenced ecosystems should change the debate about whether farmers should be sharing land with nature or sparing land for nature.
    5 comments
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    Jatropha: it boomed, it busted, and now it's back

    Whatever happened to jatropha? Is the wonder biofuel that crashed back on the up? And should we care? Last July, while visiting Liberia, I met a local man who said he was a “recruiter” of smallholder farmers to grow jatropha, the bush that could, if you believe the hype, deliver cheap biodiesel to the world.
    22 comments
  • Blog Post
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    Myanmar's Golden Opportunity

    It seems that the “cost of ignoring people’s rights is rising,” as angered farmers retaliate against land grabbers. With Myanmar’s new freedom, what will the future hold for smallholder Burmese farmers?
    1 comment
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    Rats grow fat, people go hungry

    Feeding the world is easy. The panic about the ability of the world to deliver enough food for seven, eight, nine or even ten billion people is absurd.
    2 comments
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    The Borlaug Dilemma

    Will agricultural intensification save our natural ecosystems from farmer invasion?
    7 comments
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    Forget future land and water scarcity, will there be enough farmers?

    With droughts on three continents triggering rising food prices, Malthusian fears are growing about the world’s ability to feed a fast-growing population.  Do we have enough land?  What about climate change?  Will we – as the Stockholm World Water Week will ask in the coming days – have enough wa
    5 comments