Most of us know what it’s like to find a baffling gap between what appears on a map and what the map is supposed to portray. This can be downright scary when our safety depends on the map’s accuracy. But the recent experience of Chinese ecologists is scary at another order of magnitude, and it dramatically illustrates the accelerating degradation of our global ecosystems.

“We set out to check the status of the 50,000 rivers the maps showed us in our country,” Prof Jungou Liu of Beijing told the World Conference of the Society for Ecological Restoration in Manchester recently. “We found that 28,000 of them were missing altogether.”

Some had silted up, some had dried out completely, all squeezed off the planet between rising population, rising water demand, urban development and climate change.

Even an audience accustomed to hearing grim news from the environmental front was gobsmacked. Jungou Liu also told us about the rapidly increasing spread of restoration projects across China, but, like everywhere else in the world, land degradation is spreading a lot faster.

We didn’t learn how many rivers southwestern Australia has lost, but we did find out that a lot of plants there are in danger of disappearing forever. The region, one of the world’s biodiversity hot spots, crossed the 10,000-species mark for plants alone just weeks ago with some new discoveries.

But Kingsley Dixon, a Perth botanist, told us that 2,300 of the total species do not have enough habitat left to ensure their survival. “And this is at the very moment,” he said, “when there is no technical reason why any plant should become extinct.”

Indeed, the propagation technologies Dixon described were extraordinary. Many secrets of germination in “recalcitrant” plants, which baffled previous generations of scientists, have been cracked. Seeds can now be distributed through shotgun cartridges, and seedlings injected into landscapes by drones.

But if we have lost the space for them to grow, or if the soils they require to flourish have vanished, that technology may have arrived too late for many of them. The restoration of appropriate soil for plant habitat is time-consuming and tricky. In diverse and still poorly understood regions such as southwestern Australia and the South African Cape, it may not be possible at all.

Soils more familiar to us in the northern hemisphere tend to survive abuse much better. Jan Frouz, a Czech soil scientist studying postmining restoration, found that American short-grass prairie would recover remarkably fast if the topsoil that had originally sustained it were spread over land stripped bare by opencast extraction.

And this would happen even it had been stockpiled for a dozen years and heavily compacted in the process. But if topsoil was not available, the picture here was grim too. “How long would it take to rebuild prairie soil from scratch?” he was asked. “Many centuries,” Frouz replied.

Ecological restoration has become a global buzzword. The phrase’s feelgood resonance, its promise that humanity might actually make things better instead of worse in the habitats that sustain us, is comforting at a time of great environmental anxiety.

But many contributors to the conference noted that, in the absence of internationally accepted definitions and standards for the science and practice of restoration, there is a real danger that it could join phrases such as “sustainable development” and “ecofriendly” as a politically convenient cover for continued overexploitation of Earth’s resources.

Human societies

Braulio Ferreirade de Souza Dias of the United Nations Convention on Biodiversity reminded the conference that UN members were already committed to “restoring” 15 per cent of degraded land across the globe.

As two-thirds of the planet are reckoned to be degraded, that commitment promises the restoration of billions of hectares – on paper. This wildly optimistic target certainly stands in sharp contrast to the news, published in The Irish Times last month, that we are still cutting down 10 billion more trees than we are planting across the globe.

Dias concluded his assessment with an astute observation: “We know a lot about natural systems now. Perhaps we need to learn more about people.” It is human societies that are going to determine how much we restore and how well.

“Everybody’s doing restoration now,” Dixon said. “Everyone’s getting into the business. The question is, how do we do it properly?”

Even among the specialists attending the conference there is considerable divergence on how high to set the restoration bar in an era when climate change and the rapid spread of alien invasive plants make the full recovery of almost any system increasingly difficult.

Some experienced restoration scientists, echoing a debate that rages across the world of conservation, argue that it is time to drop the bar altogether in many cases, embracing the dubious concept of “novel ecosystems” dominated by invasive alien species and managing them for whatever goods and services they can provide us with.

The veteran British ecologist John Rodwell offered a pragmatic way forward. He pointed out that, in Europe at least, most of the landscapes that conservationists now regard as desirably natural are, in fact, (agri)cultural in origin, some quite recent.

They are, he said, the product not of any conservation strategy but of “human management, mismanagement, accident and serendipity”. He recommended that we listen a lot more to farmers using traditional practices. “If you want to restore a hay meadow rich in wildflowers,” he said, “ask the fellows who make the hay.”

Given some of the earlier discussions, it was perhaps significant that the conference concluded with an inspirational address from Alan Watson, describing his remarkably successful work in restoring a little of Scotland’s Caledonian Forest. “Restoration,” said Watson, “is not about putting the clock back. It’s about starting the clock ticking again.”

Promise and challenge Restoring Irish bogs

There was a muted Irish presence at the conference in Manchester, given the amount of restoration being carried out here by Government agencies, semi-States and NGOs. Only Bord na Móna was represented in force, with its three ecologists, led by Catherine Farrell, giving presentations on “30 years of learning” about the promise – and challenges – of restoring some of the bogs that the company itself has exploited almost to extinction. Mark McCorry described the remarkable number of resilient plant communities that may develop on industrial cutaway sites too severely damaged for full restoration.

David Fallon reported on how the semi-intact raised bog at Ballydangan, in Co Roscommon, had been restored to a considerable degree by blocking drains.
More surprisingly, he talked about a local gun club's leading role in the restoration of the bog. The club proposed that the project include red grouse (below), which had almost disappeared from the area. This restoration is a work in progress that faces considerable difficulties.

But it's striking that the motivation of the club, according to Fallon, is not to revive grouse-shooting on the bog but simply to prevent the local extinction of a cherished bird.
"They are still hunters," he said, "but they seem quite happy about shooting the foxes and other predators that threaten the return of the grouse. And keeping fox numbers down keeps farmers happy, too."
The project seems a good example of the complex equation of restoration, involving key species, entire ecological systems and, of course, human communities.

Paddy Woodworth cochaired a symposium at the conference on communication and miscommunication in restoration science writing