Restoring nature

Nature can heal at a speed that surprises people, but only when restoration is done properly. The difference between real restoration and a photo opportunity is one of the most useful things this subject can teach you, because you will spend your life being shown both.

Planting trees properly

A tree planting only counts when the trees are still alive decades later. Real projects choose species native to the exact place, match them to soil and rainfall, plant a mix rather than a monoculture, and commit to years of care: watering, weeding and replacing losses. The greenwashed version plants a single fast growing species by the thousand, takes the photo, issues the press release and walks away, and many of those seedlings quietly die. When you see a headline number of trees planted, the question that separates the two is always the same: how many are alive, and who is looking after them?

It is worth being precise about why survival is the whole game. A seedling in its first year has stored almost no carbon and provides almost no habitat. The carbon, the shelter and the deep roots all come later, over decades, as the tree grows, which means a tree that dies at age two delivers almost none of what it was planted for. Picture a project that plants 10,000 seedlings and takes the photo. If only a fifth survive to maturity, which is common where the effort stops at planting, the real result is 2,000 trees, not 10,000, and the headline was off by a factor of five. This is not a small rounding error. It is the difference between a forest and a press release, which is why the only number worth trusting is the one counted years later.

Sometimes the best planting is no planting

One of the most reliable findings in restoration science is that land often recovers on its own if you remove the pressure that was damaging it. Fence out livestock, control the weeds and feral grazers, and the seed bank sleeping in the soil does the rest, frequently producing more diverse and resilient bushland than planting would, at a fraction of the cost. Restoration is not always about doing more. Sometimes it is about carefully doing less and letting the system remember what it was.

The mechanism behind that is a hidden one. Beneath damaged ground there is usually a seed bank, a store of seeds dropped by plants over many years and waiting in the soil for their chance, along with living roots ready to resprout the moment conditions allow. Grazing animals and aggressive weeds keep suppressing them, eating the seedlings and stealing the light and water. Take that pressure off and the stored life wakes up, which is why recovery can look surprisingly fast and needs no nursery, no truck and no planting crew. Understanding this is what stops people from spending money to plant a paddock that would have regrown better on its own.

Rewilding: returning the missing pieces

Ecosystems are held together by their animals, and returning a missing species can restart processes nothing else can. Around the world, reintroduced predators have rebalanced overgrazed landscapes, and in Australia, returning small digging mammals to fenced safe havens and offshore islands has visibly improved the soil they turn over. Rewilding projects have their debates and their failures, but the successes show something important: extinction of an ecosystem's function is reversible more often than we assumed, if the habitat and protection are there.

The digging mammals are a good example of how one animal can do the work of a machine nobody built. Bettongs, bilbies and their relatives turn over tonnes of soil as they dig for food, and each little pit catches leaves, seeds and water, which helps seeds sprout and water soak in rather than run off. Lose the diggers, as much of the mainland did after foxes and cats arrived, and the soil hardens and the bush slowly changes. Return them behind a predator proof fence and the digging starts again, which is why conservationists sometimes call these animals ecosystem engineers. They do not just live in the landscape. They maintain it.

Repairing the coasts

Australian scientists are world leaders in coral research: breeding corals that tolerate more heat, capturing coral spawn and settling the larvae onto damaged reef, and working out how to do it at meaningful scale. Honesty matters here: no amount of restoration can save reefs if warming keeps accelerating, so this work buys time rather than replacing climate action. Meanwhile the quieter coastal ecosystems, mangroves and seagrass meadows, are among the best carbon stores on Earth, locking carbon into their sediments for centuries while shielding coastlines from storms and nursing young fish. Protecting and replanting them is climate action, coastal defence and fisheries policy in a single move.

The reason these coastal systems store so much carbon is unusual, and worth understanding. On land, dead plants rot and release their carbon fairly quickly, because the soil is full of oxygen and the microbes that need it. In the waterlogged mud of a mangrove forest or a seagrass meadow there is almost no oxygen, so dead roots and leaves never fully rot. They pile up and get buried, layer on layer, holding their carbon in the sediment for centuries. That is why a patch of seagrass can lock away far more carbon than the same area of forest, and it is also why draining, dredging or clearing these places is so damaging: it lets the oxygen back in, and the carbon that took centuries to bury escapes in a few years.

The oldest land management on Earth

None of this is new to this continent. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples managed Australian land and sea for tens of thousands of years, including cultural burning: cool, patchy fires lit at the right time of year that reduce fuel loads and create a mosaic of habitats. Today, Indigenous ranger programs care for vast areas of the continent, combining that knowledge with modern science, and land managers across Australia increasingly partner with Traditional Owners because the results speak for themselves. This is not a feel good footnote. It is proven practice with the longest evidence base in human history.

The mechanism behind cultural burning rewards a closer look. A cool fire lit early in the season, when the ground is still a little damp, moves slowly and patchily, burning off the fine fuel like dry grass and leaf litter without killing the mature trees or trapping the animals that can move away. Because it leaves a mosaic of burnt and unburnt patches, it never builds into the single vast fire front that a long unburnt landscape can throw up in a hot, dry summer. So the same tool that cares for Country also lowers the risk of the catastrophic fires that threaten it, which is exactly why it sustained these ecosystems for tens of thousands of years and is being brought back into practice today.

Restoring nature and the energy transition are often set against each other, as if we had to choose between cutting emissions and protecting wildlife. This topic argues the opposite. The carbon buried under a seagrass meadow, the carbon rebuilding in regenerating bushland and the emissions avoided by cheap solar are all working on the same problem from different angles, and the how change happens lesson explains why we do not have to pick just one.