Restoring nature in everyday life

Transcript

[Music] hello and welcome back here on the root stage I am very pleased to announce our first proper talk and speaker of the day it's vitek he is a sustainability researcher who works at the Charles University environment Center in prag and he will share insights into the current debate on nature restoration opportunities at offers for Modern Life and why everything ultimately depends on politics please a warm welcome to voytech thank you thank you and good morning um so I went through the agenda

for the coming three days and my first impression was what I'm going to what I'm doing here because um you know there is a lot of in common between sustainability and your world both of them deal with a lot of data both of them kind of revolve around electricity um both of them work with screens quite often but what I'm talking about is the part of the sustainability which doesn't actually deal with almost any electricity data or screens and um it may be why it's actually important for our discussions

for the in the coming 3 days is because it will show us that there are angles of our world and angles of sustainability that are superficially different from what we do in every our everyday lives but might be important for how we live where how we relate to the world and uh what is important for uh for for us um could you raise your hand if you build that we should protect nature okay thank you um I will spend the next minutes trying to persuade you

you that along with protection protecting nature we should we also need to do something different we also need to restore nature and uh a good example of why we can do that is what has been happening um in European na in previous several several decades um no I'm afraid it doesn't work okay yep sorry so when I was

kid in 1970s 1980s there were lots of animals that used used to be part of European Landscapes but when I was a kid were nothing more than memories of the Lost past wolves beavers cranes bur lynxes wild cats many different Raptors animals that used to live across Europe but disappeared before we came to this uh to this world but then in about 1970s 1980s and '90s these animals started to creep silently creep back

into into European Landscapes uh rather unexpectedly this is White sted Eagle it's one of the largest eagles in the world it's so big that people sometimes describe it as flying Barn Door a gigant gigantic animal which used to be common sight in European Landscapes but it almost completely disappeared from Central and E and Western Europe by the end of 19th century and it's been gone for decades when I was kid and then in about 1980s first Birds started to breed again in in Central and Western Europe and now it's widespread animal gain um more than

100 nests in this country alone every year um there are thousands of these Birds across across the densely populated Landscapes of Central and uh and Western Europe Euro Asian Beaver 100 years ago there were 1,300 European EUR Asian beavers left in the world in the entire world in several scattered isolated Refugee populations in several places in Main in Western and Central Europe um right now there are

100,000 beavers in latva alone there's more than million beavers across Europe it's becoming a common animal common animal again and the same thing is happening with many other species um they're uh coming back uh beaver linkies eag Falcons wolves and they are showing up in rather unexpected places um beavers found their habitat in prag and other cities along with ERS wolves live in closed former coal mines peragine Falcons once an extinct species in Central Europe live in coold par plants

where they found good isolated places for for nesting um Ibis it's a bird which looks like particularly a glyp theoda and it used to live commonly in Alps but disappeared something like 500 years ago it's been gun for decades it's GL globally endangered species there's a huge International project to return the species back to European European mountains and it works two years ago the first pair of belt ibcs built that nest in Switzerland after something like half a millennium and to build that Nest they

choose one particular place a window of Harley Davidson dealership in surk airport of all places we and also nature itself suddenly discovered that we can coexist in populated landscape that we are able to share the landscape cape and uh and work with it and this is important lesson because uh because meanwhile while all these rare extinct species were coming back we lost a lot of what we could call everyday nature a common European hair is a good example common

game species that used to be haunted throughout European Countryside it was common sight in in fields and uh and Farms I was born in 1974 the number of hair Shut by check Hunters decreased by 97% since mid 1970s and it's not because Hunter suddenly became very human and took pity of the of the hair it's because hair disappeared um the population of common Farmland bird species halfed since 1980s just during the previous decade

since 2010 European Landscapes lost during one just one decade lost about onethird of grassland butterfly species uh of grass and Butterfly populations butterflies that lives live in Meadows pastures and uh and similar similar habitats we are losing previously common places in our Landscapes like flowering flowering Meadows or free flowing Rivers Beast Birds butterflies are disappearing in in in European landscape and not only we lose the living world that we used to

share landscape with we also lose productivity of the landscape consequently um because of loss of nature soil is disappearing from aab Land we are losing tons of and tons of soil um the landscape is losing its ability to catch and uh restore and uh uh catch water so that it is less resilient to climate change it loses its productivity because it loses water soil um pollination small predators that would hunt or kill um species or animals that destroy crops and P and so and so

on and this is why we started to think that we might need to uh along with protecting nature we might need to restore nature restore nature in European Landscapes but at the same time restoration is kind of misleading misleading work word because it sort of implies that we are restoring something from the past well we will restore we want to restore richness and abundance of nature that we lost that used to be part of our Landscapes and that we lost but we can't restore nature in 21st century Society by restoring 19th

century Landscapes what we need to do is to find ways to restore nature into modern economy Urban society and technological world and that is the key challenge there are probably three key direction we are looking at first we need to we need to find suitable places where we could simply that we could simply Return To Nature places in remote Uplands forests coasts where we would restore large scale Wetlands or uh wild forests where we could restore uh

dynamics of wild nature return um important uh uh phenomena of natural world like large herbivores animals like European bizon that will that shape their own habitat and create uh create important habitats for uh for other other species um but along with that we will probably want to restore a lot of nature much closer to us much closer to where we live and this is a good example um it looks kind like some kind of nature reserve for even National Park and in many European countries this would be

prob a nature reserve free flowing Wild River this is the center of Munich um in Munich something like 30 years ago the city council had to deal with flood protection and when Consulting with their water Engineers they were advised that the best way to protect the city from floods is to restore the free the free flow of the river isara in the city in the city to make it wider shallower to restore all these small Islands pools um natural river banks curating

River um and other aspects of wild flowing river free flowing river that will be able to contain much more much more water in in case of flood so that they did so and while doing that they discovered they actually at the same time while providing flood protection for the city created a brilliant habitat for many rare species of fish birds or insects that live in free flowing rivers and an excellent recreational SP space people love it in summer hot summer days thousands of people go to the Wild River

to use the cold clean Alpine Water it's much better than uh communal pools or Municipal Municipal swimming swimming pools and it's not just a short stretch there's an 8 kilm m 8 kilomet of the restored Wild River in central Munich one of the biggest most dynamic modern European European Central European cities and last but not least we need to find a way to restore small scale natural habitats throughout our European European Landscapes and here it's

important to realize what we actually use European landscape for when we think about how we squeeze out nature in Europe what we first um focus on is the most visible artificial structures like cities um infrastructure roads Railways ports factories and so on but in reality these are definitely important but it's just several perc of uh of our of our European landscape what we use vast majority of European landscapes for is commodity production we use them

to produce Timber um agriculture Commodities even freshwater fish we use Landscapes to produce Commodities and what we need to do is to find ways to integrate nature into commodity production in in our in our lands we need to find and develop incentives that will help land owners Farmers Forest owners to incorporate uh incorporate nature into their everyday business and it doesn't need to be big stretches of wild uh wild nature what will definitely help is small scale

habitats that will measure just several meters but they but a weap of these small habitats in European Landscapes places like this small hedg Meadows minor wetlands and so on will create a mosaic of natural habitats along with uh along with productive land that will that will um provide habitat for be barrs bees and butterflies and also in increase productivity and protect land against drought um soil erosion and similar similar phenomena um this is a major task for

European uh uh this is a major task for European policy in coming there is one slide missing for some reason um there this is a major political task for policy task for European and National politics in coming decades we will need to find incentives and policy solutions that will help land owners to return nature to our Landscapes starting with uh um farmland and forests and uh um including places like cities urban areas where we can

find small uh pieces of land that will provide nature to our everyday life thank you you so much um I do think we have a couple of minutes for questions if you have a question please raise your hand so that our volunteers can find you with a mic yes there's one in the back yeah I wanted to hear a comments about um Amsterdam I was there recently and uh I noticed the first thing I noticed was I I come from Slovenia the first thing I

noticed is it looked really sloppy and messy and the next thing I noticed was there were a lot of birds um and what they've done in Amsterdam is they just stopped cutting all the lawns in public places yeah and in Europe like I said coming from Slovenia I'm like wow it looks kind of messy like how can we re-educate ourselves that that messiness is actually a habitat and how realistic is that to do in many of the European countries y this is a good point um I think that there are two things to say about that first I think that we are in process of doing

that 15 years ago even in the most Progressive cities in Europe nobody would think about leaving Lawns un mode because you know this is what you do and uh we are starting to do that we are starting to realize that it's good for nature that it's good for our own life for for our enjoyment of cities and that it is even good for management of the themselves in like periods of dry summer and so on um and I think that we will get there you're in the process um secondly

um it's also important to realize that we actually need to mow the the lawn we can't just turn them into Wilderness um because not only because they are in cities and we do not necessarily want to have total Wilderness in the middle of our cities but perhaps more importantly because mowing is important for creation and maintaining the habitat for the flowers that all the bees and butterflies depend on um we need to mow them we just need to make sure that we do not mow them once a month or something like that that we do not

create this short grass that that is devoid of any any nature but we do need to more them and actually in the wide landscape one of the key challenges is uh that we are not only turning places like Meadows into into intensive Farmland but at the same time in many places in Europe we are just abandoning them leaving them without management that has has been that has been working there for Millenia in some in some areas and um they're turning into Forest which is much less

biodiverse than the hay flowering Hay Meadows by the way when you look at the Botanical data across the world and look at the sites with the highest Botanical diversity per 1/3 1/4 of square meter in in the world the the highest uh the the global records you get are not from some rainforest or other tropical habitats what you will find in the world records are Meadows in carpathians the first one is a nature reserve on the border between czechia and Slovakia and the other ones are from Romania Ukraine

Slovakia um rather unsur rather surp and they are meadows basically far land but Farmland that has been managed traditionally for Millennia thank you any more questions yes there are two in the middle and one in the front raise your hand again yeah appreciate you mentioning carpan I wasn't uh I was surprised to hear it really biodiverse uh my question is on invasive species and um for example Lupin Lup l u p i n um I I come from Lisbon and there I see this invasive

species even in kind of botanical gardens where they cut some shrubs and next year it let's imagine 50% of that cut territory is busy with lounds and the second year I see 100% of territory is like really spiking with it why is it so difficult to get rid of them I understand that they coming from another ecosystem they're taking a place in this new ecosystem where they don't have any um Force to um minimize their growth

right so what are the recent developments in this field of managing the invasive species um it's a good question um it's probably good it's probably important to realize that there are thousands of exotic species plants insects animals in in Europe and vast majority of them doesn't cause much trouble we are able to either control them or they just occur locally there are no problem at all but then there are several well several dozens of species that cause problems because they over grow the original habitats or the native habitats or they kill native

animals and so on um and there is probably nothing we can do about that it then to eradicate them and it's difficult in some cases we basically gave up because we can't do much about that anymore and in some cases like Lupine we are trying to control them it requires a lot of effort but we do we work and uh in some cases we are actually able to to to control them there are several species of plants of invasive plants in Central Europe that we were kind of able to to control um invasive animals are becoming a major

problem and by which means like introducing other plants or other animals cutting them cutting them cutting them they they are able to grow because we left the space for them so that if we start cutting them taking them out of the land and just removing them basically killing the plants we could be able to control them but it works in some cases it doesn't work elsewh what to do in cases when cutting them doesn't work um um if I knew the

answer I would be extremely popular in European nature conservation um we have no idea and we we again we are in process of working on that but we are afraid that in some cases we will not be able to find a solution because they are better than we are got speed your efforts thank you fortunately this is not exactly what I work on okay there are a few more questions let's do one more in the interest of time yes thank you I wanted to ask you if you can share a bit more about your reving

vision for Prague and if there already projects on the way leading towards that yeah um there are some interesting projects by the city council for example well there's nothing in the pipeline as big as the Munich case but there are lots of small projects of the city council to restore stretches either stretches of the river or even much longer stretches of some small rivers or streams in the in the city they are working on that piece by piece and uh um interestingly again something that wasn't the case about 10 years ago um it is becoming something the city planning

is starting to think about systematically how to bring nature back into the City and they quite naturally they started with first with the rivers and second an interesting moment is uh um uh grasslands pra is basically on the verge of pra is River Canyon and there are some smaller Canyons at the edge of the city and prag is basically on the on on on a verge of a limestone landscape that uh is southeast of southwest of Prague cars area which is very

biodiverse and uh the city council and some environmental groups conservation groups are working on interesting projects to restore especially traditional gaslands in this area and in some parts of the of the River Canyon um interestingly there are more than 80 nature reserves in prag in the city because there are lots of those small pieces of nature that survived in the middle of the city thank you so much VCH for this very beautiful and inspiring talk one last Applause to to him thank you and I'm