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Biocapacity Initiatives. Growth towards a Future for Environments and sustainable Cultures.

 

Pay-back time! We are all in arrears to compensate future generations for the greedy consumption of Earth’s natural resources and for squandering its energy!  

Surprisingly, despite easily accessed information, there is still little consideration for life’s future and blatant disregard for our descendants’ plight for survival within resource-depleted environments.

This issue outweighs by far the looming loss of self determination from crippling debt, driven by a redundant economic system that is inherently unable and incompetent to maintain life on Earth. 

In the near future towns’ material and energy requirements will primarily be sourced locally. Material and energy supply continuity will largely depend on the capacity of regions for sustained production inside functionally intact ecosystem processes, which in all probability is achievable as environments’ land cover is proportioned[I] as follows:
1)     60 % permanent canopy forests composed of:
a)     20 % indigenous cover remaining is considered the tipping point for indigenous ecosystems functional integrity and a minimum requirement for all environmental domains to maintain indigenous biodiversity, as long as presently isolated remnants are connected by…

b)     40% of a bioregion’s area will have established indigenous and compatible exotic reforestation and permanent canopy silviculture, providing towns’ structural materials and energy requirements and linking remnant indigenous biodiversity

i)  Biochar (Lehmann, 2007) produced here sustains soils’ productivity of (3) and contributes to energy (H2) requirements of (4).

2)    20 % grazed parkland; commons’ agro-forestry of pollarded or nut trees;

3)     10 % fields and orchards
4)     10 % towns’ infrastructure and gardens.

Biocapacity projects are primarily concerned with establishing and managing (1)b), 1)b)i) and [2] to support and deliver any biocapacity project [refer to 1)b), 1)b)i) or 2)] in a locality or ecoregion. 

Such land-cover type proportions are set to:
  • Re-establish resilient and efficient ecosystem processes,
  • Sustain intrinsic biodiversity and biological capacity,
  • Produce sufficient useful biological materials and energy, natural resources for future communities and towns
  • Absorb and cycle emissions & wastes to replace depleted resources (soil carbon and nutrients)
  • Transition towns / regions towards sustainability
  • Empower bio-regional communities and
  • Retain culture.

[I] In general hill country and mountainous environments, managed by the Department of Conservation. In lowland environments, indigenous biodiversity is acutely threatened with less than 10 % of original cover remaining, of which 30 % is privately owned.

Soil Carbon Restoration - A must for Sustainability

The map highlights a pivotal and generic sustainability issue of our time.

The sharp increase of GHG atmospheric carbon corresponds to a sharp depletion of soil carbon levels, wherever original indigenous forests were clearfelled and replaced by fossil-fuelled agriculture and commercial pine forestry.

See google Earth and compare significance of correlation between high soil carbon levels under remaining indigenous landcover and depleted soil carbon levels of once carbon-rich lowlands, cleared for agriculture and pine forestry.

Wholistic Biocapacity projects re-establish ecosystems that restore soil carbon levels to retain and cycle water and nutrients in situ.  A byproduct of ecological silviculture and compatible agroforesty, biochar, will be used to replenish soil carbon levels in depleted pine forestry and agricultural soils.