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The most massive

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tsunami perfect storm

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is bearing down upon us.

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This perfect storm

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is mounting a grim reality, increasingly grim reality,

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and we are facing that reality

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with the full belief

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that we can solve our problems with technology,

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and that's very understandable.

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Now, this perfect storm that we are facing

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is the result of our rising population,

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rising towards 10 billion people,

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land that is turning to desert,

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and, of course, climate change.

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Now there's no question about it at all:

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we will only solve the problem

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of replacing fossil fuels with technology.

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But fossil fuels -- carbon, coal and gas --

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are by no means the only thing

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that is causing climate change.

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Desertification

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is a fancy word for land that is turning to desert,

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and this happens only when

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we create too much bare ground.

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There's no other cause.

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And I intend to focus

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on most of the world's land that is turning to desert.

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But I have for you a very simple message

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that offers more hope than you can imagine.

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We have environments

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where humidity is guaranteed throughout the year.

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On those, it is almost impossible

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to create vast areas of bare ground.

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No matter what you do, nature covers it up so quickly.

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And we have environments

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where we have months of humidity

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followed by months of dryness,

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and that is where desertification is occurring.

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Fortunately, with space technology now,

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we can look at it from space,

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and when we do, you can see the proportions fairly well.

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Generally, what you see in green

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is not desertifying,

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and what you see in brown is,

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and these are by far the greatest areas of the Earth.

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About two thirds, I would guess, of the world is desertifying.

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I took this picture in the Tihamah Desert

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while 25 millimeters -- that's an inch of rain -- was falling.

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Think of it in terms of drums of water,

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each containing 200 liters.

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Over 1,000 drums of water fell on every hectare

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of that land that day.

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The next day, the land looked like this.

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Where had that water gone?

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Some of it ran off as flooding,

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but most of the water that soaked into the soil

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simply evaporated out again,

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exactly as it does in your garden

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if you leave the soil uncovered.

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Now, because the fate of water and carbon

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are tied to soil organic matter,

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when we damage soils, you give off carbon.

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Carbon goes back to the atmosphere.

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Now you're told over and over, repeatedly,

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that desertification is only occurring

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in arid and semi-arid areas of the world,

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and that tall grasslands like this one

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in high rainfall are of no consequence.

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But if you do not look at grasslands but look down into them,

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you find that most of the soil in that grassland

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that you've just seen is bare and covered with a crust of algae,

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leading to increased runoff and evaporation.

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That is the cancer of desertification

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that we do not recognize till its terminal form.

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Now we know that desertification is caused by livestock,

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mostly cattle, sheep and goats,

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overgrazing the plants,

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leaving the soil bare and giving off methane.

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Almost everybody knows this,

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from nobel laureates to golf caddies,

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or was taught it, as I was.

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Now, the environments like you see here,

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dusty environments in Africa where I grew up,

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and I loved wildlife,

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and so I grew up hating livestock

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because of the damage they were doing.

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And then my university education as an ecologist

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reinforced my beliefs.

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Well, I have news for you.

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We were once just as certain

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that the world was flat.

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We were wrong then, and we are wrong again.

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And I want to invite you now

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to come along on my journey of reeducation and discovery.

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When I was a young man,

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a young biologist in Africa,

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I was involved in setting aside marvelous areas

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as future national parks.

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Now no sooner — this was in the 1950s —

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and no sooner did we remove the hunting,

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drum-beating people to protect the animals,

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then the land began to deteriorate,

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as you see in this park that we formed.

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Now, no livestock were involved,

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but suspecting that we had too many elephants now,

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I did the research and I proved we had too many,

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and I recommended that we would have to reduce their numbers

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and bring them down to a level that the land could sustain.

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Now, that was a terrible decision for me to have to make,

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and it was political dynamite, frankly.

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So our government formed a team of experts

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to evaluate my research.

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They did. They agreed with me,

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and over the following years,

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we shot 40,000 elephants to try to stop the damage.

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And it got worse, not better.

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Loving elephants as I do,

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that was the saddest and greatest blunder of my life,

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and I will carry that to my grave.

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One good thing did come out of it.

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It made me absolutely determined

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to devote my life to finding solutions.

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When I came to the United States, I got a shock,

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to find national parks like this one

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desertifying as badly as anything in Africa.

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And there'd been no livestock on this land

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for over 70 years.

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And I found that American scientists

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had no explanation for this

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except that it is arid and natural.

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So I then began looking

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at all the research plots I could

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over the whole of the Western United States

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where cattle had been removed

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to prove that it would stop desertification,

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but I found the opposite,

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as we see on this research station,

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where this grassland that was green in 1961,

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by 2002 had changed to that situation.

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And the authors of the position paper on climate change

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from which I obtained these pictures

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attribute this change to "unknown processes."

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Clearly, we have never understood

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what is causing desertification,

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which has destroyed many civilizations

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and now threatens us globally.

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We have never understood it.

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Take one square meter of soil

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and make it bare like this is down here,

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and I promise you, you will find it much colder at dawn

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and much hotter at midday

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than that same piece of ground if it's just covered with litter,

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plant litter.

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You have changed the microclimate.

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Now, by the time you are doing that

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and increasing greatly the percentage of bare ground

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on more than half the world's land,

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you are changing macroclimate.

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But we have just simply not understood

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why was it beginning to happen 10,000 years ago?

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Why has it accelerated lately?

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We had no understanding of that.

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What we had failed to understand

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was that these seasonal humidity environments of the world,

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the soil and the vegetation

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developed with very large numbers of grazing animals,

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and that these grazing animals

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developed with ferocious pack-hunting predators.

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Now, the main defense against pack-hunting predators

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is to get into herds,

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and the larger the herd, the safer the individuals.

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Now, large herds dung and urinate all over their own food,

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and they have to keep moving,

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and it was that movement

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that prevented the overgrazing of plants,

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while the periodic trampling

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ensured good cover of the soil,

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as we see where a herd has passed.

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This picture is a typical seasonal grassland.

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It has just come through four months of rain,

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and it's now going into eight months of dry season.

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And watch the change as it goes into this long dry season.

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Now, all of that grass you see aboveground

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has to decay biologically

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before the next growing season, and if it doesn't,

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the grassland and the soil begin to die.

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Now, if it does not decay biologically,

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it shifts to oxidation, which is a very slow process,

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and this smothers and kills grasses,

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leading to a shift to woody vegetation

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and bare soil, releasing carbon.

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To prevent that, we have traditionally used fire.

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But fire also leaves the soil bare, releasing carbon,

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and worse than that,

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burning one hectare of grassland

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gives off more, and more damaging, pollutants

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than 6,000 cars.

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And we are burning in Africa, every single year,

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more than one billion hectares of grasslands,

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and almost nobody is talking about it.

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We justify the burning, as scientists,

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because it does remove the dead material

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and it allows the plants to grow.

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Now, looking at this grassland of ours that has gone dry,

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what could we do to keep that healthy?

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And bear in mind, I'm talking of most of the world's land now.

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Okay? We cannot reduce animal numbers to rest it more

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without causing desertification and climate change.

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We cannot burn it without causing

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desertification and climate change.

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What are we going to do?

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There is only one option,

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I'll repeat to you, only one option

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left to climatologists and scientists,

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and that is to do the unthinkable,

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and to use livestock,

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bunched and moving,

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as a proxy for former herds and predators,

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and mimic nature.

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There is no other alternative left to mankind.

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So let's do that.

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So on this bit of grassland, we'll do it, but just in the foreground.

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We'll impact it very heavily with cattle to mimic nature,

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and we've done so, and look at that.

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All of that grass is now covering the soil

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as dung, urine and litter or mulch,

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as every one of the gardeners amongst you would understand,

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and that soil is ready to absorb and hold the rain,

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to store carbon, and to break down methane.

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And we did that,

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without using fire to damage the soil,

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and the plants are free to grow.

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When I first realized

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that we had no option as scientists

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but to use much-vilified livestock

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to address climate change and desertification,

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I was faced with a real dilemma.

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How were we to do it?

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We'd had 10,000 years of extremely knowledgeable pastoralists

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bunching and moving their animals,

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but they had created the great manmade deserts of the world.

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Then we'd had 100 years of modern rain science,

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and that had accelerated desertification,

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as we first discovered in Africa

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and then confirmed in the United States,

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and as you see in this picture

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of land managed by the federal government.

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Clearly more was needed

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than bunching and moving the animals,

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and humans, over thousands of years,

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had never been able to deal with nature's complexity.

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But we biologists and ecologists

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had never tackled anything as complex as this.

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So rather than reinvent the wheel,

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I began studying other professions to see if anybody had.

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And I found there were planning techniques

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that I could take and adapt to our biological need,

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and from those I developed what we call

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holistic management and planned grazing,

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a planning process,

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and that does address all of nature's complexity

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and our social, environmental, economic complexity.

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Today, we have young women like this one

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teaching villages in Africa

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how to put their animals together into larger herds,

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plan their grazing to mimic nature,

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and where we have them hold their animals overnight --

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we run them in a predator-friendly manner,

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because we have a lot of lands, and so on --

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and where they do this and hold them overnight

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to prepare the crop fields,

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we are getting very great increases in crop yield as well.

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Let's look at some results.

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This is land close to land that we manage in Zimbabwe.

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It has just come through four months of very good rains

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it got that year, and it's going into the long dry season.

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But as you can see, all of that rain, almost of all it,

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has evaporated from the soil surface.

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Their river is dry despite the rain just having ended,

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and we have 150,000 people

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on almost permanent food aid.

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Now let's go to our land nearby on the same day,

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with the same rainfall, and look at that.

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Our river is flowing and healthy and clean.

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It's fine.

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The production of grass, shrubs, trees, wildlife,

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everything is now more productive,

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and we have virtually no fear of dry years.

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And we did that by increasing the cattle and goats

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400 percent,

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planning the grazing to mimic nature

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and integrate them with all the elephants, buffalo,

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giraffe and other animals that we have.

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But before we began, our land looked like that.

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This site was bare and eroding for over 30 years

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regardless of what rain we got.

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Okay? Watch the marked tree and see the change

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as we use livestock to mimic nature.

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This was another site

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where it had been bare and eroding,

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and at the base of the marked small tree,

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we had lost over 30 centimeters of soil. Okay?

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And again, watch the change

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just using livestock to mimic nature.

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And there are fallen trees in there now,

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because the better land is now attracting elephants, etc.

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This land in Mexico was in terrible condition,

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and I've had to mark the hill

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because the change is so profound.

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(Applause)

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I began helping a family in the Karoo Desert in the 1970s

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turn the desert that you see on the right there

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back to grassland,

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and thankfully, now their grandchildren are on the land

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with hope for the future.

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And look at the amazing change in this one,

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where that gully has completely healed

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using nothing but livestock mimicking nature,

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and once more, we have the third generation of that family

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on that land with their flag still flying.

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The vast grasslands of Patagonia

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are turning to desert as you see here.

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The man in the middle is an Argentinian researcher,

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and he has documented the steady decline of that land

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over the years as they kept reducing sheep numbers.

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They put 25,000 sheep in one flock,

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really mimicking nature now with planned grazing,

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and they have documented a 50-percent increase

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in the production of the land in the first year.

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We now have in the violent Horn of Africa

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pastoralists planning their grazing to mimic nature

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and openly saying it is the only hope they have

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of saving their families and saving their culture.

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Ninety-five percent of that land

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can only feed people from animals.

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I remind you that I am talking about

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most of the world's land here that controls our fate,

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including the most violent region of the world,

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where only animals can feed people

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from about 95 percent of the land.

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What we are doing globally is causing climate change

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as much as, I believe, fossil fuels,

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and maybe more than fossil fuels.

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But worse than that, it is causing hunger, poverty,

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violence, social breakdown and war,

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and as I am talking to you,

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millions of men, women and children

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are suffering and dying.

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And if this continues,

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we are unlikely to be able to stop the climate changing,

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even after we have eliminated the use of fossil fuels.

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I believe I've shown you how we can work with nature

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at very low cost

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to reverse all this.

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We are already doing so

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on about 15 million hectares

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on five continents,

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and people who understand

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far more about carbon than I do

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calculate that, for illustrative purposes,

361
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if we do what I am showing you here,

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we can take enough carbon out of the atmopshere

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and safely store it in the grassland soils

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for thousands of years,

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and if we just do that on about half the world's grasslands

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that I've shown you,

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we can take us back to pre-industrial levels,

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while feeding people.

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I can think of almost nothing

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that offers more hope for our planet,

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for your children,

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and their children, and all of humanity.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)

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Thank you. (Applause)

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Thank you, Chris.

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Chris Anderson: Thank you. I have,

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and I'm sure everyone here has,

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A) a hundred questions, B) wants to hug you.

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I'm just going to ask you one quick question.

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When you first start this and you bring in a flock of animals,

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it's desert. What do they eat? How does that part work?

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How do you start?

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Allan Savory: Well, we have done this for a long time,

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and the only time we have ever had to provide any feed

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is during mine reclamation,

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where it's 100 percent bare.

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But many years ago, we took the worst land in Zimbabwe,

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where I offered a £5 note

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in a hundred-mile drive

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if somebody could find one grass

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in a hundred-mile drive,

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and on that, we trebled the stocking rate,

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the number of animals, in the first year with no feeding,

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just by the movement, mimicking nature,

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and using a sigmoid curve, that principle.

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It's a little bit technical to explain here, but just that.

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CA: Well, I would love to -- I mean, this such an interesting and important idea.

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The best people on our blog are going to come and talk to you

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and try and -- I want to get more on this

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that we could share along with the talk.
AS: Wonderful.

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CA: That is an astonishing talk, truly an astonishing talk,

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and I think you heard that we all are cheering you on your way.

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Thank you so much.
AS: Well, thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Chris.

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(Applause)