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    Published: May 26, 2013

    Thoughts on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD)

    John Bates, Curator and Section Head, Life Sciences, Negaunee Integrative Research Center

    Friday before last, Camila Duarte and I spent the day down at the University of Chicago.  Camila is a visiting Brazilian student who has worked with colleague Camila Ribas in Manaus, Brazil.  She will be gathering molecular data on several species of birds that inhabit white sand forests in the Amazon Basin over the next five months.  Camila and I were attending a all-day symposium entitled “Conserving more than carbon: valuing biodiversity in a changing world” at the Gordon Center for Integrative Science that was sponsored by the U of C Program on the Global Environment.  Four expert panelists presented perspectives related to the symposium topic and then there was a discussion period at the end.  The panelists included: John Terborgh (Research Professor, Nicholas School of the Environment & Earth Sciences; Director, Center for Tropical Conservation, Duke University), David Wilcove (Professor of Public Affairs and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University), Steven Panfil (Technical Advisor, REDD+ Initiatives, Conservation International), and Valerie Kapos (Acting Head of Programme, Climate Change & Biodiversity, UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Centre). 

    REDD (and now also REDD+) stands for: "Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation."  It was a great opportunity to learn from experts about various aspects of this innovative and ambitious program that has the important goal of reducing the substantial greenhouse gas emissions that come from cutting down forest.  This is an ambitious program developed via the United Nations, governments and conservation non-governmental organizations. Here at the museum, our conservation team has been collaborating with and Peruvian NGO on having Cordillera Azul National Park in Peru be part of REDD+.  As an evolutionary biologist working in the Tropics who cares greatly about tropical conservation, I found myself wondering if REDD+ would truly provide the support necessary to effectively monitor biodiversity sensu latu. 

    As I understand it, the REDD+ program has a goal of going beyond REDD with respect to preserving )biodiversity as a goal of equal importance to preventing deforestation.  That’s good, but my concern is that too little attention is paid to building capacity for science and education in the areas where these programs are being implemented, and I think that could greatly influence success in both the short and long term.  Under REDD+, monitoring of biodiversity is considered important as part of the verification required of REDD+ sites, but who will do that monitoring? Experts need to be trained to do this.  This is the kind of things our museum would be great at, but it does not seem to me that the design of REDD+ will provide the necessary funding to implement this critical piece of the puzzle. 

    That’s too bad. I looked through Conservation International’s publication entitled: “What is needed to make REDD+ work on the ground? Lessons learned from pilot forest carbon initiatives” by Celia A. Harvey, Olaf Zerbock, Stavros Papageorgiou and Angel Parra.  The word “science” does not appear in the text of the document (but “research” does), nor does “education” (“educational” appears once in reference to all project managers saying they needed more educational materials for local communities).  “University” also does not appear in the text.  “Biodiversity” is used frequently, but the biodiversity benefits to organisms that are listed are limited to flagship species from each region.  I concede that saving flagship species and watersheds will also save much of the rest of biodiversity), but I can’t help but feeling that this is something like saying as long as you have a single star on your baseball team you will have a winning team.  It certainly does not necessarily work out that way and besides, with all the people living in the world today, we can have the human capacity (and technology) to broadly understand and monitor a broad spectrum of the biological diversity in these regions.  We just have to choose to do it.

    I talked to Larry Heaney, our Curator of Mammals about this and he mentioned that he has made available his years of survey data on Philippine small mammals to groups associated with developing Philippine REDD+ programs, which is the kind of critical baseline data these groups need to develop their conservation priorities.  I went on-line and downloaded the Philippine national plan.  It is impressive, and I hope it is successful.  University scientists played a clear role in developing this plan which I think is terrific, but here is a quote: “In the Philippines, a successful, sustainable and long-term financing scheme is expected to fuel a robust REDD program to deliver permanently reduced emissions, poverty alleviation and social justice for forest-dependent communities, biodiversity conservation, and protected and improved environmental services.”  I hope what this means is that rolled into this financing scheme is a plan to build the expert capacity necessary to monitor all aspects of biodiversity and educate future generations on how to do it, because this is an essential part of having REDD be successful in my opinion.  It also would mean a lot of support for the academic and museum communities of the Philippines and I really think that this is something that must become an explicit not implicit aspect to such plans.

    John Bates
    Curator and Section Head, Life Sciences

    Contact Information

    The tropics harbor the highest species diversity on the planet.  I am most intrigued by evolution at the tips of the tree of life.  My students and I study genetic structure in tropical birds and other organisms to address how this diversity evolved and how it continues to evolve as climates change and humans continue to alter landscapes.

    We study comparative genetic structure and evolution primarily in the Afrotropics, the Neotropics, and the Asian tropics.  I am an ornithologist, but students working with me and my wife Shannon Hackett and other museum curators also have studied amphibians and small mammals (bats and rodents) and more recently internal, external and blood parasites (e.g., Lutz et al. 2015, Block et al. 2015, Patitucci et al. 2016).  Research in the our lab has involved gathering and interpreting genetic data in both phylogeographic and phylogenetic frameworks. Phylogenetic work on Neotropical birds has focused on rates of diversification and comparative biogeography (Tello and Bates 2007, Pantané et al 2009, Patel et al. 2011, Lutz et al. 2013, Dantas et al. 2015).  Phylogeographic work has sought to understand comparative patterns of divergence at level of population and species across different biomes (Bates et al 2003, Bates et al. 2004, Bowie et al. 2006, I. Caballero dissertation research, Block et al. 2015, Winger and Bates 2015, Lawson et al. 2015).  We also have used genetic data to better understand evolutionary patterns in relation to climate change across landscapes (e.g., Carnaval and Bates 2007) that include the Albertine Rift (through our MacArthur Grants, e.g., Voelker et al. 2010, Engel et al. 2014), the Eastern Arc Mountains (Lawson dissertation research, Lawson et al. 2015), the Philippines (T. Roberts and S. Weyandt dissertation research) and South America, particularly the Amazon (Savit dissertation research, Savit and Bates 2015, Figueiredo et al. 2013), and we are entering into the genomic realm focusing initially on Andean (Winger et al. 2015) and Amazonian birds (through our NSF Dimensions of Diversity grant). Shane DuBay is doing his dissertation research in the Himalayas on physiological plasticity in Tarsiger Bush Robins.  Nick Crouch, who I co-advise at U. Illinois, Chicago with Roberta Mason-Gamer, is studying specialization in birds from a modern phylogenetic perspective.  We seek to create a broader understanding of diversification in the tropics from a comparative biogeographic framework (Silva and Bates 2002, Kahindo et al, 2007, Bates et al. 2008, Antonelli et al. 2009).  João Capurucho (U. Illinois, Chicago, co-advised with Mary Ashley)  is studying phlylogeography of Amazonian white sand specialist birds and Natalia Piland (Committee on Evolutionary Biology, U. Chicago) is studying the impact of urbanization on Neotropical birds.  New graduate student Valentina Gomez Bahamon (U. Illinois, Chicago) is also working Boris Igic and me, after doing her Master Degree in her native Colombia on genomics and the evolution of migrating Fork-tailed Flycatchers (Tyrannus savana).  Jacob Cooper (Committee on Evolutionary Biology, U. Chicago) is studying the diversification of birds in Afromonte forests

    Josh Engel and I are working up multi-species phylogeographic studies of birds across the Albertine Rift, based the Bird Division's long term research throughout the region.  We are working up similar data sets for Malawian birds.  Our current NSF Dimensions of Diversity grant on the assembly of the Amazonian biota and our NSF grant to survey birds and their parasites across the southern Amazon are generating genomic data for analysis in collaboration with paleoecologists, climatologists, geologists, and remote sensing experts from the U.S. and Brazil.  These large collaborative projects are providing new perspectives on the history of Amazonia.