David Attenborough asks ‘can we curb climate change?’
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Sir David has become one of the world’s best-known naturalists and conservationists. In his recent BBC series, ‘The Green Planet’, he guided us through the various flora habitats around the world, exploring the extraordinary ways in which plants have thrived in almost every environment. He broke them down into four ‘worlds’: Tropical worlds, water worlds, seasonal worlds, and desert worlds.
Each world has at least one consistent theme in common: being under threat as a result of climate change.
Shifting seasons have been directly linked to warmer global temperatures.
Even a slight change in temperature is enough to push the spring thaw back earlier, and delay the onset of frost until later in autumn.
As a result, winters are shorter, spring comes earlier, summers are longer and autumn arrives much later.
This can have potentially devastating consequences for the plants and animals in those environments.
The sequoia — the world’s largest tree — grows naturally only in a small strip of the planet: a 60-mile band of frost on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California.
Visiting these gentle giants, which can grow to almost 100 metres tall and 11 metres across, Sir David looked ant-like among their wide trunks and needle-like leaves.
He noted how they are the oldest living things on Earth, some having inhabited the woods for 3,000 years.
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But, to achieve such age and size, the sequoia needs particular living conditions, those that are rapidly changing in the face of rising global temperatures.
He said: “A single giant sequoia in its lifetime can produce 100 million seeds.
“These, in my hand, from one cone, are more than enough to start a completely new forest.
“But they can only do such a thing in a world where the seasons change with some reliability.
“Today, our climate is changing, bringing an unprecedented level of unpredictability all across the seasonal world.
“The question is: can we curb climate change sufficiently to ensure that the seasons will continue?
“Only if we can do that will the future of seasonal plants, including these magnificent trees, be assured.”
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Not only do the sequoia need energy from the sun, but critically, they also require up to 4,000 litres of water a day, meaning they are almost entirely reliant on seasonal snowmelt.
But recent years have brought longer and hotter summers, and their source of water is becoming increasingly unreliable.
Scientists are discovering that the sequoia, once thought to be an indestructible giant, is now starting to show signs of vulnerability.
Some are shedding their needles and branches as a way of conserving precious water, but for others, climate change has already been fatal — ten percent of them have been lost in just the last few years.
Sequoias are currently classed as an endangered species of plant, with their population rapidly decreasing.
Their natural habitat was recently ravaged by the raging forest fires that engulfed around 2,569,009 acres across the state of California in 2021.
According to data collected by the US National Park Service (NPS), over 85 percent of all giant sequoia grove acreage across the Sierra Nevada has burned in wildfires between 2015 and 2021.
This is compared to only one quarter in the preceding century.
Thousands of large giant sequoias — those with trunks four feet in diameter or larger — are estimated to have been killed in six recent wildfires.
Based on aerial surveys from a helicopter, fire severity estimates, and sequoia grove maps, 13 to 19 percent of the world’s large sequoias are estimated to have died in the Castle Fire and the KNP Complex and Windy fires combined, or 8,431 to 11,897 trees.
‘The Green Planet’ is available to stream on BBC iPlayer.
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