"The Future of Nature" is finally broadcasting on PBS starting March 26 at 10/9c! I executive produced this four part series alongside Patrick Morris for BRIAN LEITH PRODUCTIONS LIMITED.
The series is directed by the super talented Verity White with a fantastic group of producers and film makers, including Nicola Brown, Robert Myler, Gavin Maxwell. The first episode, "Oceans", features—among many others—the work of colleagues at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on the Twilight Zone, work by The Nature Conservancy in the Caribbean, and my own research center in the Mediterranean CMCC Foundation - Centro Euro Mediterraneo sui Cambiamenti Climatici. Episodes on forests, grasslands, and the human planet follow with dozens of examples and stories from around the world.
Full press release here: https://lnkd.in/eYeF9AQu
This series was a real labour of love, an unprecedented exploration of the role our ecosystems play in regulating carbon. Too often we forget that roughly half of all the CO2 we put in the atmosphere every year is taken out by terrestrial and marine processes, many of which depend on nature. The world's forests, grasslands and oceans have been working hard to compensate for our emissions. Without this critical stabiliser we would be in even more trouble than we currently are.
Nature is also the great carbon keeper. There are roughly a thousand billion tons of carbon in known reserves of coal, oil and gas. This is what remains of tropical vegetation left to mineralise under water during the Carboniferous and at the end of the Mesozoic. Our emissions come from mining those fossil reserves. But there are close to 2,000 billion tons between terrestrial vegetation and soils, 1,200 billion tons in permafrost, and an enormous 37,000 billion tons in the ocean's abyss. Were we to disturb those stocks we would find ourselves on a different planet altogether.
"The Future of Nature", narrated by Uma Thurman, tells the story of these ecosystems and of the people who work hard to protect them, restore them, and augment them. And for the first time for a natural history series it also features a visual VFX rendition of carbon! It almost looks like what Chloris Geospatial sees and weighs from space!
If you care about the future, the future of nature, you should watch this series, particularly at this time of intense uncertainty. ARTE co-produced and BBC Studios has the international rights, so I have no doubt we will see this series in many countries to come!
Prof. Dr. Martin R. Stuchtey Jeremy Oppenheim Mark Tercek Jennifer Morris Rachel Kyte Greg De Temmerman Jess Ayers Lucy Almond Mark Burget Santiago Gowland David Banks Charles Bedford Lynn Scarlett Mark A. Friedl Alessandro Baccini Marco Albani Andrea Maggiani Clover Hogan Stephanie Wear M Sanjayan Tapio Schneider Raffaele Ferrari Gabriel Vecchi Pierre Gentine Emily Shuckburgh Cameron Hepburn Dominic Waughray Paul van Zyl
