July 2020 Newsletter Essay

Greetings!

Early this morning, I was listening to a multi-person, multi-continent webinar about climate change and African biosphere reserves. There were a lot of speakers and participants, mostly from southern Africa but also from Europe and the Americas. Ecosystems were an important part of the discussion, but so were the communities and larger economies that were interacting with these biosphere reserves. The chat segment in Zoom was busy, full of comments and questions from the audience that, to me, mostly conveyed a strong sense of urgency about droughts, landslides, flooding, and food.

Several of the early speakers — mostly from UNESCO — talked about these biosphere reserves as climate “observatories.” As I listened, I wondered if these reserves were really climate laboratories: places where we should be actively testing and exploring options to find shared approaches and coordinated action. Many of the talks were quite technical, but the last speaker talked about citizen science, especially in the African community context. If these biospheres are indeed laboratories, then these communities are actually the researchers, their children and grandchildren the intended audiences. A powerful model for all of us to learn and experiment.

John H. Matthews

Corvallis, Oregon, USA