A new paper by Marc Macias-Fauria and collaborators published in January 2020 in Philosophical Transactions B reviews the environmental context of megafaunal ecological engineering in the Arctic, and suggests that the wide-scale introduction of large herbivores to the Arctic tundra to restore the ‘mammoth steppe’ grassland ecosystem and mitigate global warming could be economically viable.
In this thought-provoking paper, the authors use Pleistocene Park as a model and estimate how many herbivores would it take to revert tundra into a grassy mammoth steppe that could delay permafrost melt and reduce carbon emissions. They calculate what the costs of such a project would be and conclude that the idea is “reasonably viable economically”, but the challenge would be to implement it at a large enough scale to have a significant impact on global climate change mitigation because, in the authors own words, “the numbers of large herbivores required for such an undertaking do not exist”.
You can find the paper here, and read the news item on the University of Oxford’s website.
Reference: Macias-Fauria, M., Jepson, P., Zimov, N., Malhi, Y. (2020) Pleistocene Arctic megafaunal ecological engineering as a natural climate solution? Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 375 http://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2019.0122
Picture: Woolly mammoths were driven to extinction by climate change and human impacts (Mauricio Antón © 2008 Public Library of Science)