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Many of us remember the butterfly effect, which asks the question can the flap of a butterfly's wings cause a storm elsewhere in the world?
It's a beautiful thought experiment, but for ecosystem scientist Yadvinder Mali it's much more than a question.
It underpins life on Earth.
In his talk he shares how he and fellow scientists map and calculate the flow of energy that runs the natural world.
He reminds us that the world isn't a series of disconnected parts, but rather one whole living biosphere.
I'd like to start with a picture of a forest.
And 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 of fuelwood, 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 and 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 percent of that captured 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 fruit.
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.
And I call this complex flow of energy, this spread of energy, the vibrancy of an ecosystem.
In our current work, we're also trying to go from individual ecosystems to the scale of the whole living planet, the biosphere.
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'm here to do more than that.
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 may focus excessively on particularly charismatic species like elephants.
Or we may focus instead 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 peoples, 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.
We need it in some places perhaps, but in many places people can and do build vibrant nature and we need to work with those energies.
We have also learned what is not a vibrant ecosystem.
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.
This is not a forest.
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.
And carbon has a role.
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 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.
Here's another example of this.
This is a landscape 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 savannah.
This should not be a focus for intensive tree planting for carbon capture and climate mitigation.
And so we need to work with vibrancy of the Earth.
But why does vibrancy matter?
For many reasons.
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 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.
And atolls are low-lying islands less than one 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.
Or are they?
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 where seabirds come in to nest on the soil or on the branches of the native vegetation.
And ghost islands are places such as this, an ecologically depleted system.
Now this may look like your archetypal holiday paradise of swaying palm trees and white sand and turquoise waters, but its vibrancy is dimmed.
Why is that, I hear some of you ask.
It's because many of these places were once coconut plantations for an extensive coconut oil industry on these islands, which has now largely collapsed.
These plantations are abandoned, but the coconut is overgrowing and suppressing the return of native vegetation.
And also many of these islands are densely populated by rats brought in by sailors, which eat out the eggs of seabirds and prevent the seabirds from nesting.
So in this project we followed the flow of energy and nutrients from the seabirds through into the forest and then beyond the forest into the surrounding reef.
And what we found is that on the wild islands, the seabirds harvested fish for hundreds of kilometers and brought in the nutrients in those fish to the islands where they deposited those nutrients in their poop, their guano that fertilized the island.
The poop and the guano then washed off into the surrounding reef and increased the rate of growth of the coral and also the rate at which the coral bounced back from bleaching events linked to heat waves.
And those higher nutrients also supported a higher abundance of fish.
And of particular importance are the parrotfish, which with their beaks they eat away at the dead coral to get at the algae inside.
And in the process, poop out the coral sand.
So poop features a lot in this talk, probably more than in most TED Talks, I suspect.
And that parrotfish poop, that sand, then washes up to create the island.
And what we found is that about Up to 85 percent of the sand on these islands originated as parrotfish poop.
So if you're lucky enough to find yourself on a sandy, white, tropical island beach, think about the parrotfish and be grateful.
We also found the native vegetation doing extraordinary things that in just one square meter of soil, the plants produced 20 kilometers of fine roots.
And those roots bound the sand together and turned that sand into nourishing soil.
And so the forest was able to grow and the island to grow alongside it.
So what we were able to do in this project is describe this flow of energy and sediment and nutrients from birds to island, to reef and then back to island.
And when we put all our numbers together, we calculated that a wild island, a vibrant island of sea birds, of native vegetation and fish that aren't over-harvested.
Those islands were able to grow at rates that keep up with mid-level scenarios of sea level rise.
But a depleted island, diminished in its vibrancy, would struggle much more and is much more likely to drown under the rising tides.
But there are limits to this adaptation.
The extreme levels of sea level rise would be hard to cope with.
So we shouldn't use signs of adaptation as an excuse, not tackle the urgency of tackling climate change and sea level rise.
So the lesson that comes from this project is that we need to work with the vibrancy of these atolls, to maintain and restore that vibrancy where we can, to give them their best chance of coping with climate change and for the communities that depend on them also to have the best chance of coping with rising sea level.
And I think there's a wider principle that's being emerged here.
It's just harder to see in most ecosystems, which are much more spatially entangled and much more complex, when it's really hard to predict the details of how ecosystems are going to respond to the tide of global change that is engulfing them, whether from climate change or from the other factors.
What we do know is that the more we can work with the wild energies of these ecosystems, maintain and rebuild their vibrancy, the best chance they have to cope with the change that is coming and adapt to that change, and the best chance we have, as all who are dependent on these ecosystems, to adapt to that change.
And that applies to wild and semi-wild ecosystems, but I believe it also applies to our agricultural systems and our urban landscapes as well.
And this applies at the scale of the planet, the living Earth.
We need to work with the energies of the biosphere to regenerate and restore them, to have a world that is vibrant and thus possible, not a biosphere that is commodified and packaged and industrialized to be subservient to human needs, but a resilient and regenerative planet where both humans and the rest of life on Earth can thrive and flourish.
Thank you.
That was Yadvinder Mali at the TED Countdown Summit in Nairobi, Kenya in 2025.
If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines.
And that's it for today.
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Thank you so much for having me.
I'm Elise Hugh.
I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed.
Thanks for listening.
