Up-scaling megafauna restoration for global biodiversity and climate gains
Up-scaling megafauna restoration for global biodiversity and climate gains
two day symposium. May 4-5, 2020
MegaPast2Future research group, Center for Biodiversity Dynamics in a Changing World (BIOCHANGE), Section for Ecoinformatics and Biodiversity (ECOINF), Aarhus University, Denmark
With an increasing recognition of the necessity to address the climate, biodiversity and global inequality crises, maintaining a livable planet for humans and non-humans calls for the development of new instruments in ecosystem management and restoration. Megafauna coevolved within extant ecological communities and their extinction and range contractions led to the loss of the important ecosystem services they provided, which has been identified as a key driver of current biodiversity losses. Promoting high biodiversity itself has a strong potential as a nature-based solution to mitigate climate change, notably by promoting carbon storage. Given this knowledge, megafauna restorations could assist in achieving biodiversity and climate targets by restoring lost ecological processes, e.g., as part of rewilding. While current restorations have, by necessity, occurred at relatively small spatial scales, upscaling restoration efforts is now needed for megafauna-based rewilding to have any major impact on global biosphere functions. At the same time, a consideration of the societal implications of this strategy is necessary to understand the challenges associated with megafauna restoration, including for governance and human-wildlife coexistence.
The symposium will gather a diverse group of experts from the fields of megafauna restoration, macro-ecology, climate science and human-wildlife coexistence to address key questions regarding upscaling of megafauna restoration for global biodiversity and climate gains.
More info about the hosting lab: Ecoinformatics-and-Biodiversity and our megafauna research
HOST SPEAKER:
Aarhus University
CONFIRMED INVITED SPEAKERS:
University of Southampton
Montpellier University
University of Helsinki
University of Arizona
University of Bayreuth
GEUS, Aarhus University
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
University of Oxford
University of Oxford
ORGANISING COMMITTEE:
