Name: How to Measure the Planet’s Heartbeat | Yadvinder Malhi | TED
Uploaded: 2025-11-30T06:47:16.000Z
Duration: 14 min 39 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

What do you think of when you see this forest?

Maybe you think of ways the forest could be useful to us, maybe as a source of timber or a fuel, wood, or maybe as a store of carbon with which we can tackle climate change.

And all of these are useful and sometimes necessary ways of thinking about a forest or any ecosystem.

Or maybe, just maybe, you feel something more mysterious and wondrous.

Maybe you have an inkling of a world far more ancient than our young species, a world full of beings that communicate in languages of sound and chemistry and light that we barely understand.

A world that needs to be approached with humility.

In this world, plants perform the everyday miracle of turning light and air into life.

And that energy that captured sunshine then cascades from plant to animal, to fungus, to bacterium.

And on the way, it carries great currents of carbon, nitrogen and other essential nutrients that together build the web of life that is that ecosystem.

And the same applies at the scale of the planet.

The planet is the sum of the world's ecosystems, but it is so much more.

It is an interconnected and shimmering web of flows of carbon and energy and nutrients that build up the ancient matrix that is our home, from which we have emerged as a species that nurtures us, on which we depend utterly.

I'm an ecosystem ecologist, and I study this world of flows and interactions.

And together with a team of ecologists around the world, we measure and map the flows of energy, of carbon and nutrients that build up the ecosystem.

Starting with the capture of sunshine by plants.

We follow those flows of energy to build the biomass of trees, and

we follow that energy down into the roots and fungi and into the soil, and

then beyond plants and fungi, into the creatures of the soil, the worms, the invertebrates.

By measuring the abundance of each creature, we can map and calculate these flows of energy, and

we find every life form a miracle of evolution.

Sometimes our approaches take the latest technologies, such as acoustic sensors or camera traps, coupled with artificial intelligence tools.

Sometimes we use more traditional approaches, such as counting birds in a rainforest at dawn, that require training and expertise and dedication and passion.

And with this type of work, we're able to build up a map of the flows that make up an ecosystem.

So, to take an example of this English woodland just outside of Oxford, we can calculate that 60% of that captured air sunshine pours down into the trunks of the trees.

A smaller fraction pours down from the trees, through the roots, into the soil.

Another pathway into the soil is falling leaves in the autumn or falling fruits.

Of all that plant material, a fraction is consumed by plant eating animals, and

a smaller fraction of that is consumed by animal eating animals.

And so the web of life is built and maintained.

And by doing this work in various ecosystems, we learn some things.

One thing we learn is that the resilience and health of an ecosystem is determined both by the total amount of flow of energy, but

also by how complex that flow of energy is, how many species it passes through.

And I call this complex flow of energy the spread of energy, the vibrancy of an ecosystem.

In our current work, we're also trying to go from individual ecosystems to, to the scale of the whole living planet, the biosphere.

Here's one example which we seek to look at the biosphere through these biological eyes.

This is a map of the intensity of biological activity on the land surface.

The Sahara has shriveled away to nothing.

The Southern hemispheres have shrunk away.

The Northern hemisphere has shriveled away into its deep, dark winter.

The world is dominated by the magnificent metabolism of the tropics.

Just look how large Kenya is there compared to all of Europe biologically.

And we can do this for every month of the year, and

so get a glimpse of the great green heartbeat of energy and life that powers and nourishes all life on this planet Earth.

And through this work, I can tell you some really interesting science.

And I'm here to tell you some of the scientific stories, but

I also want to argue that this vibrancy of the living world is something that we don't pay enough attention to when we think of how we work with nature to tackle the environmental challenges we face in conservation, we might focus excessively on particular charismatic species like elephants.

Or we may focus instead on on what nature can do for us, its ecosystem services.

And we don't pay enough attention to the webs of energy and life that hold everything together.

So when we look at the world through these vibrancy eyes, some surprises can emerge.

Vibrant ecosystems don't have to be places empty of people.

Many cultures, traditional cultures, indigenous people, smallholder farmers live in places fizzing with ecological energy.

And many agricultural systems, regenerative systems and others can also buzz with ecological energy.

The absence of people is not the highest state of nature.

But in many places, people can and do build vibrant nature.

We have also learned what is not a vibrant ecosystem.

Images such as this endless rows of trees, perhaps planted for timber or for carbon, capture the richness of life reduced to a single function, all that vibrant flow of energy channeled and canalized into a single species.

And yet, when we think of working with nature to tackle climate change, we're in danger sometimes of focusing too much on the carbon value of nature.

Certainly there are situations where it can help us mitigate climate change and at the same time raise finance that can help us protect or restore natural ecosystems.

But if we go too far, if we focus on carbon, if we stop it being a tool and it starts becoming a worldview, then we're in danger of reducing the infinities of nature into some sort of carbon machine that we can dial up and down.

And you may look at this and see all of those open, treeless spaces and think, well, maybe this is an opportunity for tree planting.

Trees are inherently good and they absorb carbon.

And maybe you can offset your company's carbon emissions with an extensive tree planting program here.

But this is a savanna, and the savanna is rich precisely because of the lack of trees.

It's those grasses that grow in the open spaces that provide and nourish life, provide for life, regenerating fires, and

support the unique and charismatic biodiversity that is the savanna.

This should not be a focus for intensive tree planting.

For carbon capture and climate mitigation, we need to work with vibrancy of the earth.

But I think one of the reasons is that it gives ecosystems, and

all of us who depend on ecosystems, our best chance to adapt and cope with aspects of the tide of global change that is engulfing us, including from climate change.

And I'd like to show one final example, which is the case of tropical atolls.

Atolls are low lying islands less than 1 meter above sea level, and

are often characterized as the first victims of climate change destined to drown under the rising seas in the next few decades.

We've just finished a project where we've examined these island systems, but

rather than seeing them as islands in isolation, we've looked at them as integrated and interconnected island reef systems.

And when we look at it that way, that view makes all the difference.

So what we did is compare wild islands with ghost islands.

And wild islands are places such as this, where seabirds come in to nest on the soil or in the branches of a native vegetation and ghost islands are places such as this.

Now, this may look like your archetypal holiday paradise of swaying palm trees and white sand and turquoise waters, but

It's because many of these places were once coconut plantations for an extensive coconut oil industry.