The living biosphere is our ultimate asset, but it has been degraded by civilisation’s development.
Life built and shaped our environments, changing them in harmony with its own evolution. A key feature of life is its ability to colonise and stabilise. We see this in the way that plants stabilise the side of a mountain and slow the flow of rivers. Less well understood is how the integrated web of life manages the climate, circulates nutrients, and forms clouds that reflect away excess solar radiation.
The entire system works as a climate management engine. The advent of human civilisation has reduced the size of that living engine to half of what it had been for the preceding hundreds of thousands of years. This is pushing the system beyond its ability to maintain stable climatic conditions and it is why restoration of the full complement of life is so important.
Despite the first IPCC Assessment Report being released in 1990, after 34 years, we have failed to stop the escalating climate crisis. Greenhouse gases are rising faster than ever, extreme weather events are increasing in occurrence and intensity, and average global temperature records have been exceeded for every one of the past 12 months. Clearly, something is wrong!
The BRP is built on a deep understanding of how the Earth works. Over the last 10,000 years human activity has led to the reduction of more than half of the natural amount of life, weakening nature’s ability to regulate the climate and heal itself. This damage is as harmful as greenhouse gas emissions and pollution.
We consider biosphere restoration a for-profit venture, which is essential to attract investment at the necessary scale.
