Lee White: Befriending Chimpanzees, Saving Forests, Surviving a Coup

In this episode of the Nature Recovery Podcast, Stephen Thomas speaks with Lee White about a remarkable life working across science, conservation, and government in central Africa. Lee reflects on growing up in Uganda, studying rainforest ecosystems in West Africa and Gabon, and how his scientific work led him into national park creation, forest policy, and international climate negotiations.

The conversation explores why the gap between scientific evidence and political action remains so wide, and why forests need to be understood not only as ecosystems but as economic and geopolitical systems. Lee explains how Gabon tried to make standing forests economically valuable through protected areas, sustainable forestry, and REDD+, and why that model faced both successes and setbacks.

They also discuss the Congo Basin as a global climate system, the importance of local and international science capacity, and the role of nature in human health, resilience, and wellbeing. The episode ends with a broader reflection on what nature recovery really means, from restoring cities and farmland to thinking at a planetary scale.

The Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery is interested in promoting a wide variety of views and opinions on nature recovery from researchers and practitioners.

The views, opinions and positions expressed within this podcast are those of the speakers alone, they do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery, or its researchers.

The work of the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery is made possible thanks to the support of the Leverhulme Trust.

Transcript

Stephen Thomas: Welcome to the Nature Recovery Podcast. We are going to take a closer look at some of the solutions to counter biodiversity decline, and we’ll find out more about the people behind these ideas.

Stephen Thomas: Okay, so my guest today is Lee White. Welcome to the podcast, Lee.

Stephen Thomas: Perhaps you can tell our listeners a bit about yourself, and what’s brought you here.

Lee White: Well, I’ve had quite a varied life. I was born in Manchester. I grew up in Uganda. My father taught at the university in Kampala. I had a childhood collecting butterflies out in nature in Uganda and visiting national parks.

My parents adopted an orphan chimpanzee whose family had been killed by poachers. So I grew up with my sister Alison on one of my mother’s hips in nappies, and the chimpanzee Cedric on her other hip in nappies, with a baby chimpanzee as a brother.

Then Idi Amin became too crazy and we headed back to the UK. After school I went to Sierra Leone and worked as a camp slave, basically. They called me the research assistant on a primate project in Tiwai Island on the edge of the Gola Forest, close to the Liberia border.

I did a degree in zoology at UCL London, and then went to Nigeria to work for the Nigeria Conservation Foundation, setting up a wildlife sanctuary in a rainforest called Okomu in southwest Nigeria. Famous botanists from Oxford, Paul Richards, who wrote the first book on the rainforest, and Eustace Jones, had done some really interesting botanical work there in the 1940s.

Okomu was known as the best mahogany forest in the British Empire, so there were huge two-metre-diameter mahogany trees that Unilever were cutting down to be sent back to the UK. They thought these mahogany trees were an indication of ancient primary rainforest.

They dug down to take soil samples and discovered a continuous layer of pottery, charcoal, and palm nut fragments, carbonised 40 centimetres below the ground, which they could not carbon date. They had to use historical documents. But I was able to carbon date it and discovered that Okomu forest had been an oil palm plantation 700 years before. When the people disappeared, the mahogany trees grew back.

So mahoganies are not an indicator of primary forest. They are an indicator of disturbed areas that were then abandoned by people, and the forest came back. That was, in a way, the beginning of my scientific career, looking at the history and the future of the Congo Basin forests.

I went from Nigeria to Gabon to do a PhD on how forestry impacts wildlife. The short story is that it doesn’t impact wildlife very much in Gabon, particularly in the Lopé Reserve where I worked, which was a wildlife reserve where there was no hunting. The plants weren’t protected, but the animals were protected, so people weren’t slaughtering the mammals during the logging process. I could tease apart hunting and vegetation changes.

Chimpanzees suffered socially because of logging. Gorillas and elephants may have benefited from logging because there was lots of juicy secondary vegetation growing up that was less defended with chemicals and therefore much more palatable.

Actually, what best determines the history of the composition of the forests was human history and archaeology. Working with archaeologists, we were able to document 700,000 years of human history and match that to the forest types and the evolution of the forest.

So I went from being basically a science-track rainforest ecologist to realising that I was studying a system that was being destroyed. The wildlife was being massacred. We had what was called the bushmeat hunting crisis going on in Congo Basin forests. The empty forest syndrome meant that you still had an intact forest, but all the wildlife, or at least everything worth eating, had gone, and so the seed dispersers had gone.

Forestry was suddenly expanding, and Malaysian, Indonesian, and Chinese forestry companies were coming in. It looked a bit like the Congo Basin was heading the way of the West African forests. If you think of Ivory Coast, it’s a bit like the UK. They only have 3% of their forest left, just like the UK only has 3% of its rainforest left.

Gabon, which at the time was 88% covered in rainforest, had cracks appearing and it looked like both the wildlife massacre and the deforestation might kick in.

So I got sucked out of my science life into conservation and ended up convincing President Omar Bongo to create 13 national parks, which changed the trajectory of Gabon from destruction to sustainable use and protection. I went on to run Gabon’s National Park Authority, using my science training to scientifically manage parks and encouraging a lot of research.

People like Edwin O’Malley here at Oxford, who has done a lot of work in Gabon, I was able to facilitate that sort of thing through my position at the national parks. I eventually ended up being Gabon’s minister of water, forest, environment and the sea. I was Africa’s lead negotiator at the Glasgow Climate COP.

So I’m this young chap born in Manchester who ended up speaking for 1.3 billion Africans at the Glasgow Climate COP. It’s a bit like Johnny Cash’s “A Boy Named Sue”, if you know that song.

I was deposed in a coup in August 2023, which brought an end to my political career as a Gabonese minister. After a few difficult weeks, I was able to leave Gabon, and I am now based in St Andrews, learning about the dire situation of the environment and biodiversity in the UK.

I am working as the special envoy to the science panel for the Congo Basin, so still actively doing science in the Congo Basin and trying to develop capacity for science there. I’m also testing the waters on the private sector. I did 20 years in science and NGOs and 15 years in government. Got to get all the quadrants ticked.

Stephen Thomas: No, it was fascinating. I could have, I mean, when we talk about people having rich histories, that is a wonderful, interesting, and rich life. I was fascinated by that, and by some of those insights.

Even hearing that, we talk with the Centre for Nature Recovery, and there’s lots of old palm stuff. We talk about it, and certainly in East Asia it’s like, well, actually, old palm restoration was done 700 years ago and it produces lovely mahogany for us. So there is the history of what we can learn into this new term of nature recovery relatively in the UK. This is not something that...

Lee White: Actually, slightly earlier in the Congo Basin. Oil palm arrived in Gabon about 2,800 years ago. It’s the earliest carbon dates we have of palm nuts. Iron technology arrived 2,600 years ago, coming down from Niger. And bananas arrived something like 2,500 years ago, coming through Zanzibar and then across the Congo Basin.

Suddenly people started hacking the forest to plant bananas and palm oil. They turned the Congo Basin into an Indonesia-type landscape between about 2,500 years ago and about 1,200 or 1,400 years ago. Then suddenly the people disappeared for about 400 or 500 years, and the northern Congo mahogany forests grew up.

The oldest carbon dates we have on the centre of mahoganies from northern Congo is 1,000 years old. Basically, when the people disappeared, the forest came back. That is a really interesting perspective on the virgin forests of the Congo Basin. They still have, you know, it’s still the only area that has its intact megafauna. So obviously it wasn’t totally destroyed, but it looked very, very different.

Stephen Thomas: Yeah, I mean, you hear conversations about wilderness, wild, natural, this, even the UK, ancient woodland, and what even is that? For me, these places are very special, but everything has gone through humans and nature too, and we’ve been shaping landscapes and letting them shape themselves for a long time.

I mean, you’ve clearly worked at the highest levels of government, as well as practically in the forest itself, and done the science. So what have you learned? I’m interested within the government perspective, because this is something we’re producing research and trying to do knowledge exchange, but obviously a lot of our researchers want to have impact. And on the global stage as well, you must have seen this with the COPs, this gap between scientific knowledge and political action on nature. What do you think is happening there, and can it be narrowed?

Lee White: Yeah, it’s interesting. Maybe it’s heading in a much better direction than a place like China was 20 years ago, with incredible urban pollution and deforestation and so on. Suddenly they’re creating 30 new national parks, and they’ve replanted so many trees that you’re starting to see the biogeochemical capacity of trees restoring landscapes and rivers and controlling floods and droughts.

In some ways, I was a bridge between science and policy and politics. In the same way, I guess, as the chimpanzee’s brother, I was sort of a bridge between nature and these discussions, because nature has no voice in international negotiations. Most of the people you meet in UNFCCC negotiating rooms are either lawyers or diplomats. Very few scientists are on negotiating teams. They may have a scientific adviser, but the actual negotiators tend not to be scientists. So I was unusual in that sense.

I was Gabon’s lead negotiator on forests and land use. I think the basic issue, and I don’t know if you’d call it a communication issue, is that scientists are not able to convince politicians that things are as bad as the scientists think they are.

I like to compare the climate or biodiversity extinction crises with COVID. COVID was a very short-term challenge. People were dying. Lots of people were dying. Therefore, it captured the attention of politicians all around the world. Whether you’re a Chinese politician with quite a long-term view of the world, or a British politician these days, if they survive more than 12 to 18 months as prime minister, they are doing quite well.

But all political systems moved decisively and invested massively to deal with a common crisis. We used to say that climate change was perhaps the first time humanity had been faced by a common crisis that we could potentially react to. Then COVID came along and we dealt with it. Retrospectively, for better or worse, some countries did it slightly differently, but vaccines were created in Oxford and saved hundreds of thousands, millions of lives. We dealt with that issue and we are past it as if it never even happened. We catch COVID today and you do not even have to wear a mask in public.

But we have not been able to promote that level of political engagement on climate and biodiversity loss, which seems crazy to me. Since farming was invented 10,000 years ago, plus or minus, human activities have changed the planet faster than an ice age might. That, I mean, I think when the first tree-like organisms evolved, whatever it was, 250 million years ago, they became so abundant and sucked so much CO2 out of the atmosphere that they created the first ice age on Earth and ended up killing themselves. That was a 20 million year process.

In 10,000 years, humanity has created these planetary-level changes that we are still seeing and trying to understand, and that we have accelerated exponentially since the beginning of the industrial age.

But government is not treating that as a priority, and we seem to be backtracking rather than upping our ambition. Most people drink coffee. Two species of coffee mostly, Arabica and Robusta. One grows at higher altitudes and one grows lower. Most people seem to prefer Arabica.

When a COVID-type event happens to coffee, the fact that we have 50 other wild species of coffee in the African rainforest that might have some DNA that might enable us to react to that challenge is, to me, an economic insurance policy against these very rapidly evolving climatic impacts on Earth and changing environments.

We seem not to have the collective intelligence, even though we were misnamed Homo sapiens. We do not seem to have the collective intelligence to maintain that life-support system, that biodiversity-support system. Scientists have to continue to strive to find a way to explain these issues to our politicians.

I guess, as an adviser to two African presidents who collectively had been in power for over 50 years, so had a long-term vision for their country, and having worked with other African leaders who have been in power for a long time, we classify them as dictators and say that is bad. When I look at our own system here and compare the elected political leaders to the unelected king, I see a king who has a very long-term vision.

My own views, worldviews, seem to be much better aligned with the King than they are with the political parties, because I think that their views are just too short-term and too focused on London rather than local issues and so on. Scientists cannot change these political systems, but we have to find ways to talk to them and educate them and provide information in digestible units that will gradually nudge those political decisions in the right way.

I had the luxury, in a way, to work in a system in Congo Basin where it was relatively easy for me as an individual to have quite a big impact. I helped to create 54 protected areas. Almost 10 million hectares of land is protected.

Looking at the situation in Britain, where the environment has been destroyed, trashed, the ability to change that is much, much, much more difficult because there are so many different layers of national and local governance and landowners and so on. I retroactively realised that I had the privilege to work in a system where you could actually move entire government policy for the right reasons.

If we lose the Congo Basin forest, we lose the forest of Gabon, we lose the rainfall in the Sahel, and there will be 200 million water refugees moving from Nigeria to Gabon. Gabon will not exist any more. If we lose the eastern DRC rainforest, we lose the rainfall in Ethiopia, we lose agriculture in Egypt, and we lose the Blue Nile.

So actually, if you look at how political leaders in Congo Basin or Equatorial Africa are doing on biodiversity and climate, and compare that to leaders of the Western world, those African leaders, on average, are doing much better. They do understand the impacts of biodiversity loss and degradation of ecosystems and climate change. We have been saying for 20 years that 50% of the African countries will go through wars and instability because of these environmental changes that are coming down the line.

The African continent is not viable without the Congo Basin forests. The Congo Basin is the beating heart of the African continent, and the water that it pumps thousands of kilometres is the lifeblood of Africa.

Maybe the political leaders are more accessible. I do not know. I have met a lot more African presidents than European prime ministers and so on. I find that they are perhaps more in touch with nature. I would definitely not give them 10 out of 10, none of them. But some I would give 8 out of 10, and I think they would score much better than most Western leaders.

Stephen Thomas: Yeah. I find it fascinating that in so many subjects there is an inherited dynamic of Western exceptionalism. And here we are, a world-class university, and we will give knowledge out. When it comes to nature and nature recovery, we are very much a developing nation. And like our puny 12% forest cover, some of the worst in Europe. I think less, if you discount Scotland, I don’t know what England is, like 9%.

Lee White: I wouldn’t call mono-dominant exotic plantations forests myself, but the Scottish government does.

Stephen Thomas: We’d like to classify that. We’ll take it.

Lee White: I wouldn’t call them ecological deserts myself.

Stephen Thomas: Yeah, absolutely. And within that, the lessons you talked about, we are constantly struggling to find not that, we’re a research centre, but obviously when we want to have impact and it is talking to people, do we talk about nature and health, which is such a huge thing? Do we talk about nature and the economy? There’s a report out on national security risk and supply chains, and yet it feels like sometimes the conversation is that there is an otherness to nature in a lot of political discourse. We have got to do cost of living, and it is like, well, why?

There are complex reasons behind the cost of living, but one of the reasons your chocolate is more expensive is due to what’s happening in Ivory Coast.

Lee White: What you just said is interesting. There are quite a lot of reports by the military, including the US military, on the threat to peace and security from climate change and biodiversity loss. It seems, interestingly, that the military are more responsive to these problems than the political leaders. Maybe they are more pragmatic; they are more focused on a particular thing, which is peace and security, and therefore they can perhaps see that.

The president I worked most closely with, Ali Bongo, was the Minister of Defence. He worked quite closely with King Charles when King Charles was starting his rainforest project in 2007, 2008, and 2009. He came at climate change from the perspective of an African Minister of Defence, worried about the impacts of the Sahara Desert moving south on peace and security in Africa. When he then became president, he continued to be committed to that subject.

But I do find it interesting that the US military have done some really good reports on climate change, but the US political leadership right now is backtracking on both climate and biodiversity.

Stephen Thomas: I mean, migration is a very complex subject, and I am not going to touch into it because there is so much I do not know about it, but from some of the work I have done, if your food-growing and water conditions are not sufficient for life, you will leave a place to go somewhere, whether internally or not. This is something that is going to be happening more and more as conditions change for a lot of communities. So it is a social impact that is going to happen and also a political thing that needs to be dealt with.

But yes, looking deeper into the causes rather than sometimes focusing on headline issues.

Lee White: One of the things I do is that I am the special envoy for the science panel for the Congo Basin. We have just released a report on the state of the Congo Basin. We tried to get all the Congo Basin scientists to contribute, and then their international partners. So a few people from here in Oxford have contributed.

We describe the Congo Basin as the green pumping heart of the Congo Basin, but we make it very clear that the processes that are currently underway are likely, over the next five decades or so, to result in 500 million-plus climate and water refugees.

That is 500 million people on the African continent. That is almost half the African continent. That is like a bad Hollywood horror film. It is so big you cannot quite comprehend it.

Stephen Thomas: So 500 Glasgow and Edinburgh is kind of, I think, Strathclyde is maybe one point something, I do not know. The whole suddenly 500 Glasgow appear in terms of population size, something like that, maybe bigger than that.

Lee White: There is an issue basically with economic migration out of Africa right now, but if that becomes climate and water refugees, the scale will be multiplied by probably a factor of three orders of magnitude. And it will certainly destabilise the African continent. It will almost certainly have huge repercussions for the rest of the world.

And if we lose the Congo Basin at the same time as we lose the Amazon, then...

Stephen Thomas: It is funny. We talk about this stuff and it is so alarming. And yet it will be page 19 in some newspaper, whereas page 1 would be something potentially important. But that common challenge is, in some ways, people are fatigued by it, and yet it is the greatest challenge we face.

I guess I want to bring this slightly around, because from that dark side that we can explore more to something slightly more hopeful, and talking about Gabon. It sounds amazing what you were part of achieving.

I guess from my limited research there is still about 80% forest cover?

Lee White: 88% forest cover, 13 large national parks covering 11% of the land.

Stephen Thomas: For me, 80% is extraordinary. I have never been in a place with probably more than, maybe Scandinavia. There are parts where it is 30 or 35. Germany have gone through. That 88 is just... And I am always aware that nature protection is site-specific, that there will be specific things about Gabon, but clearly Gabon did not get it wrong. So what did it get right that you have seen other countries with potentially similar conditions struggle with, and what were the hidden challenges behind that? Because you make it sound like you just set up 30 national parks, and I do not think that was as easy as that.

Is it still getting it right? Because, as you have hinted, there have been some major political changes there. And what can other countries learn from that?

Lee White: Let me give you an anecdote. President Ali Bongo was elected in August 2009. One of his first international trips, actually his first international trip, was to London to speak at a meeting about climate and forests hosted by then the Prince of Wales, Prince Charles, now King Charles III.

In his speech, in a way we were practising, rehearsing for Copenhagen, he said that the doors to the future are closing because of climate change and biodiversity loss. Prince Charles quoted that in his keynote speech to the Copenhagen Climate COP, and he said, yes, the President will go on. I said in a meeting I recently chaired and quoted him.

At that meeting, which was described as a failure because the 120 heads of state that came did not come up with a strong binding agreement to solve climate change, we did agree to a process called REDD+, reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation. The plus is all about conservation. The plus is what King Charles’s Rainforest Project added to REDD.

Gabon was one of the leading nations pushing this idea that we need to give a financial value to the reduction of emissions from forests to enable us to stabilise forests and reduce emissions. The world, and the economists of the world, were saying that the most cost-effective way of dealing with 20 to 25% of the climate problem was dealing with tropical deforestation. It was the cheapest way of dealing with it. So it all made sense. We agreed to REDD+ in Copenhagen.

A couple of years later, we were in Durban, another climate COP, and the president basically, figuratively, beat me around the head and said, “Lee, your REDD will never work. The developed nations will never pay. I cannot risk the future of my country, which is 88% forest. The future of our country is tied to the future of our forests. I cannot risk, I cannot gamble the future of the forests on the willingness of these developed nations to give us money.”

He was absolutely right. He said we have to find an economic mechanism, an economic plan, that will conserve the forest rather than destroying the forest.

What we did, and it was really him leading and then me bringing some technical knowledge and advice to the table, but the vision came from President Bongo, was analyse the economics of forests and forestry.

Gabon was a major timber-producing country. There is a tree called okoumé, which makes the best marine plywood there is. All those luxury yachts that people are confiscating right now are made with Gabonese okoumé plywood. But the way Gabon was doing that was just exporting the logs to France and China. All the plywood and luxury yachts were made in France and China.

When we looked at the economics, we were retaining somewhere between 5 and 8% of the value of the wood and 5 and 8% of the jobs. We were gifting 90% plus of the value to the countries buying our logs. If you look at cocoa, it is about the same proportion. Five per cent of the global market for chocolate goes to the cocoa-producing countries. If you look at cotton and cashew nuts in Africa, it is the same thing. People were growing cashew nuts in Togo and sending them to Indonesia to be processed, creating jobs and value in Indonesia. Africa was forever the source of cheap raw materials.

So what Ali Bongo did was ban the export of logs and processed logs. Within two months, President Sarkozy showed up to tell him what a crazy idea that was. But what Sarkozy did not say was that all of his factories in Honfleur, in Normandy, were closing because they did not have any okoumé to produce the Camembert boxes and the Debedoff cigar boxes that they were making, and all these French people were losing their jobs.

We pushed for investment in timber processing and, overnight, lost half the jobs in the timber sector. We went from 12,000 jobs to 6,000 jobs. It created hardship because we did not have the capacity to transform in-country. There was a lag. We had to invest.

By the time I became minister, the $200 million contribution to GDP was up to $500 million. So we multiplied the value of the forestry industry by 2.5 in 10 years, and we had gone from 12,000 jobs to about 30,000 jobs. In my four-year tenure as minister, I took the timber economy from $500 million to a billion dollars. So over 15 years, we went from $200 million to a billion dollars in the forest economy, and we quadrupled the number of jobs.

We were on a trajectory to get to about $3 billion and about 200,000 jobs, which in Gabon is 2 million people. About half of those are adults, so probably 700,000 to 800,000 working adults. In Gabon, still many women do not work because they look after the kids, so let us say 500,000 working adults.

If you can create 200,000 jobs that depend on sustainable management of the forest, and on eliminating illegality, because if your wood is illegal you cannot sell it, even to China, because they need the traceability to be able to prove to the world that their timber products are legal and sustainable, you create a huge constituency of people whose livelihoods depend on the government managing the forest properly and not allowing it to be cut down. You give forests a value, because if the forest has zero value and slash-and-burn agriculture creates a little bit of value, a little bit is more than none. So you have to create value around these resources.

What we found with REDD+ was that Gabon was the first African country to register REDD+ results on the UNFCCC Lima hub. As minister, I registered 187 million tons of REDD+ results. We had been promised somewhere between $5 and $10 a ton for our REDD+ results. We were able to sell 3.4 million tons to Norway at $5 a ton, so we generated $17 million from Norway.

That leaves 183 million tons of REDD+ results that were created through blood, sweat, tears and investment on the part of Gabon and were never paid for. That was a billion dollars of international support that Gabon had been promised through Article 5 of the Paris Agreement to support sustainable development of Gabon, including conservation and preservation of forests. Well, that money never arrived.

When there was a presidential coup, a military coup, the justification was that President Ali Bongo likes elephants more than he likes his young people, which if you read between the lines means he spent too much of his time on the environment instead of creating an economy and it never paid off. And now we are going to do things differently.

Luckily, that does not mean abandoning the forestry industry because it is creating more and more jobs and more and more value. We are doing forestry in a selective harvest model where you cut one to two trees per hectare. So you have 500 trees per hectare and you take out two and leave the forest. You have more gorillas and elephants in the logged forest than you have in the national parks and the Ramsar sites, which are up to 25% of Gabon.

So we went beyond the 11% from the parks. We added eight Ramsar sites, two World Heritage sites, conservation areas, and logging concessions, and so on. Those forestry concessions are managed to the standard of a Category 6 IUCN protected area. It is not just the trees that are managed, but the wildlife is managed. There are plans to deal with erosion and sedimentation of watersheds. It is a forest science that has evolved over the last 10 or 20 years in Gabon and the rest of the Congo Basin.

So actually today, it is really 85% of Gabon that is protected.

Stephen Thomas: A logging concession in Gabon is the equivalent of a national forest in the US.

Lee White: You walk through a Scots pine plantation and there is so much more life than a Sitka spruce plantation. It is just such a different thing.

Stephen Thomas: Even mixed, there is so much forestry where they are Sitka spruce and they have to do it at 10% broadleaf, but they are all chopped.

Lee White: They do it all around the edges. It is cosmetic.

Stephen Thomas: Yeah.

Lee White: The reason it worked in Gabon was that it was not based on handouts from the international community. It was based on an economic design with strong enough support to enable us to fight the Boko Haram terrorists that were trying to kill all the elephants and the Chinese mafia, forest mafia, that were trying to illegally log all of the forests.

I mean, literally, I became the minister of Gabon two weeks after the president fired the vice president and the minister of forestry for being involved with the Chinese forest mafia and illegal forestry. That was a courageous political decision.

You need to have a very compelling economic model if you are going to do this. It is the same old short-term, long-term vision. You can make more money by illegally mining the forest than you can sustainably managing the forest. So if it is pure economics, most investors in Africa are doing hit-and-run economics, where they want to get their money back within a political cycle of four years. So they need 40 or 50% return.

In forestry, you cannot get a 50% return through legal or sustainable practice. You can get a 20% return. Unfortunately, the economic model, the global model for Africa, is short-term returns because of the risk of political change and so on.

Whereas you might, a forestry company in the UK would probably be quite happy with a 15% return over 30 years, but they would not end up in the Congo Basin because even if you have political risk insurance and so on, we have to change that model. We have to make sustainable management of these ecosystems viable.

Is that through a carbon market? It seems unlikely at this point, because REDD+ has totally failed and carbon markets are failing. Is it through some form of valuation of ecosystem services? Personally, I would argue it should be, but how do you integrate ecosystem services, such as the example I often used as a minister: humidity from the Congo Basin goes to Ethiopia and fills the Blue Nile and irrigates Egypt. Ninety-eight per cent of Egypt’s agriculture depends on the Nile.

When Ethiopia built a dam on the Blue Nile, it almost provoked a war between Egypt and Ethiopia. When a million hectares of Congo Basin rainforest is destroyed every year in DRC, Egypt shows no interest whatsoever, even though that is probably a bigger threat to their water than the dam damage.

Maybe it is just too complicated, or maybe the science is not solid enough because we have done so little work in the Congo Basin that actually our climate models are totally lost at sea. We have no idea if the Sahara Desert is going to go all the way down to the equator or if the rainforest is going to colonise the Sahara Desert at this point in time as carbon dioxide levels increase.

All the models say it is going to get wetter and all the rain gauges say it is getting drier.

The first thing we did when we created the science panel was to look at how many practising, publishing scientists there are in the Congo Basin nations working on these ecological questions. We found 110 people who have published at least one scientific article. There are 6,000 in the Amazon. That is an indication of just how little we know about the Congo Basin rainforests, even though it is, in my concept, one of two ventricles of the planet’s heart. Africa and the Amazon are the two ventricles pumping water around the planet.

I guess the summer in Europe and the US are the atrium of the heart. And Yadvinder Malhi has this wonderful animation of productivity on the planet through 12 months of the year. You can just see those ventricles pumping.

People tend to say the rainforests are the lungs of the planet, but lungs breathe in oxygen and pump out carbon dioxide, whereas rainforests eat carbon dioxide and produce oxygen and water. So the Amazon and Africa are the pumping hearts of the planet.

Maybe that analogy, combined with that incredible graphic that Yadvinder produced, might start to have some impact on these politicians that have the future of the planet in their hands and are not behaving wisely right now.

Stephen Thomas: There is so much you touched on there: how we value things, how we get nature into part of our economy sustainably. I think there are lots of technical solutions as well there. And I think about, we are talking a lot about this transformative change report at the moment. The underlying drivers of biodiversity loss: short-termism, focus on consumption, concentration of power and wealth, inequalities that are historical and pervasive.

The last one is a disconnection from nature and people, domination over nature and people, and this disconnection from nature. I just wondered if you had any reflections, having had a chimpanzee as a brother, having lived in so many countries and having been in a place with 80% forest and now being in St Andrews, on who speaks for the forest, how we are able to speak for nature, the role of nature connection and connectedness in that, and your reflections on the importance of that.

Lee White: I think, no, we are not doing it effectively. I guess the environmental NGOs perhaps should be the ones speaking for nature. Some do a much better job than others, but there is so much competition for resources and so on that when NGOs go to these big international meetings, you get the impression that it is more about fundraising than it is about speaking up for nature.

People who speak up for nature tend to be labelled as hippies or dreamers. So I am not sure. I have certainly not cracked it, but I do feel a responsibility to speak for nature. I think if nature had a voice in these international negotiations, we would be heading in a different direction. So intellectually, it is an interesting idea: should there be people speaking for nature, and who speaks for nature? Am I the chimpanzee in the room that actually speaks up?

Stephen Thomas: But the exercise itself has, I think, lots of embodied things which can sound quite woo, but actually the experience of even just putting your mind into that space can be illuminating. We had a nature finance event that was all outdoors, and the mere fact of having it all outdoors and then hearing the thunder at some point... There is a kind of reminder that you do not get in a sterile conference room, that all of this is quite imminent and important.

Lee White: It is actually there. Nature was in the room with the violent thunder and the rain, and so it did feel like nature was in the room.

Getting people into nature, whether it is your kids, people worry about their kids spending their lives staring at little screens. Take your kids into the forest, they forget the screens. Take a problem child into the forest, or a child with too much energy, and there is something about a forest that drains the negativity.

Stephen Thomas: I am such a forest-biased person. My wife likes the coast and the sea, and I like temperate... So, you know, she wants to live by the sea and so I dragged her to the sea, but it was the Baltic Sea because I wanted to be, you know, like in...

Lee White: Well, you should take her to Gabon where the rainforests of the Congo Basin come all the way down to the beach, and then you get elephants, forest elephants, gorillas, chimps and hippos on the beach. And then you have the ocean.

I have actually seen elephants. And we actually had a gorilla census team in Myumba National Park doing line transects through the rainforest to count gorilla nests and chimp nests. They saw a humpback whale. Literally, in a gap in their own forest, they saw a breaching humpback whale on an ape census.

Stephen Thomas: Wow. I feel like if I were drawing it, people would not believe it. Like these AI images with gorillas and humpback whales in the same place.

Lee White: I have seen elephants and humpback whales in the same sort of eye shot. I have not seen gorillas and humpback whales, but...

Stephen Thomas: That is fantastic.

Lee White: There is something in me, wherever it comes from, that tells me we cannot let those spectacles of nature die. Life on Earth would just be incomplete without them.

Stephen Thomas: It is hard to express and never mind value. So when we are trying to value nature, how would you value that experience of seeing an elephant and a humpback whale in a beautiful landscape? And I think when you see areas of nature degradation or where there has been real exploitation, there is that sense. We have it a lot with our research, going to the Amazon and seeing the fires. And there is a deep, deep grief, I think, for anyone that works in this space. But then there are these elements of hope. And I think your story has been fascinating.

I could carry on talking for hours, but we should probably wrap up with our final question. The final one is: what does nature recovery mean for you? Because we are the Centre for Nature Recovery, and we took a long time to come up with our definition, but everyone I have spoken to has generally had a different insight on what that phrase means for them personally.

Lee White: For me, I think of trees and forests as planetary engineers. We have all of these environmental challenges on Earth, and we can argue, and I obviously have my own conviction, but we can argue about whether or not what we are going through is man-made or not. But even if it is not, it is happening. Temperature is going up. The data is there. How do we deal with that?

There are changes in industrial processes that have to happen and so on, but were we to do ecological restoration at a planetary scale, then we can bioengineer the planet. We can plant trees. The trees of Northern Europe and Siberia carry water all the way to China and create the rainfall that feeds 300, 400, 500 million people. That is something that is still in existence, but we have a similar sort of system in the Amazon, and we are losing that, where the Amazon rainforest is sending humidity further south and is supporting agriculture.

We know that trees can cool the planet. We know that if you have a big tree in your garden and your neighbour does not, your garden is nicer to sit in the summer. We know that in a city, if you have a tree next to a building, the building requires less energy to cool it. We know that at a large scale, we can plant trees and impact rainfall patterns downwind. We should have the intelligence to optimise those ecosystems.

I think of restoration as something that needs to happen at a planetary scale to optimise the management of this planet. Every little bit counts. Every small patch of forest that is being restored is a great thing, but I think we need to get it to the point where it is at scale.

I think of the planet, but I also think of cities as mini planets, satellite planets if you want. You can restore nature at the scale of a city, including the area around it that affects the city: the rivers that are flowing into the city and so on. You can use restoration to dampen extreme flooding, dampen extremes of drought, and dampen extremes of temperature.

You can do that around the city and in the city. There is plenty of science that shows you that children and humans who have access to green spaces are much healthier. Your healthcare bills go down and so on. I do not know if you call it restoration. I think you do in a city: greening individual cities to give you all of those economic benefits.

Then, if we start doing that, we might have the imagination to do it at a continental, national, and global scale. I think we need to regenerate the ecosystems of the United Kingdom. It does not mean that every single hectare has to be forest like it was. The last time it was all forest was probably 8,000 years ago or something like that.

Stephen Thomas: Is it not highly debated? Sorry, because it has an open woodland or mixed... you get French-view people coming.

Lee White: It does not mean everything has to be natural, but we can actually optimise the management of land and the productivity of agriculture through regeneration of nature. We can harness the power of nature and ecosystem services that are there. And I think we could make the United Kingdom a much more resilient country.

I drive around Scotland and I see these huge fields with no hedges and no trees. I see the soil being washed off onto the roads and into the rivers and into the estuaries, and we are pumping in chemical fertiliser and the fields seem to be flooded all through the winter. Surely we could use ecological restoration to limit that flooding and to make our farming systems, which have drifted post-war, post-invention of the tractor and the bulldozer, more resilient.

They drifted in a certain way, but maybe they drifted too far, too fast, and you need to pull that back. So I think of restoration not just of pure nature, but of harnessing nature in different landscapes and cities, in farming landscapes and natural landscapes, in different ways and at different scales to make this world a better, more resilient place.

Stephen Thomas: Thank you so much for listening. You have been listening to the Nature Recovery Podcast with me, Stephen Thomas. Please do not forget to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you can, please consider leaving us a review, as it will really help other people to find us. Also, why not consider sharing this episode with someone you know? You never know, you might get them interested in the wonderful field of nature recovery.