The four-year planet

Managing century-long problems with institutions built for election cycles

Credit: J. Tonkin.

I applied for a grant recently. Grant writing is something us academics have to do to keep our research programme running. I treat grants like writing a Nature paper. Every word is scrutinised to ensure it’s the best use of space. You have to convince a diverse panel of experts as well as very specific reviewers that it’s worth funding. And, in this case, you have a ~7% chance of success. So the stakes are high.

What’s unusual about this process though is that we put huge effort into putting these together for such low success rates when the grant only last for three years. For many projects, three years is plenty of time. But spare a thought for those working on ecosystems that run on clocks measured in decades or centuries. Rivers carry a memory of past impairments from half a century ago.

And that’s a critical challenge to confront. We have solutions to many environmental problems. We don’t lack them. The challenge is bridging the gap between societal and ecological timescales.

The arithmetic

The clocks we use:
Political cycle: 3-5 years
Corporate reporting cycle: 3 months
Research grant: 3 years
Media attention span: days to weeks

The clocks nature runs on:
Species recovery: decades to centuries
River recovery from degradation: decades
Forest succession: decades to centuries
Soil regeneration: centuries

This stark mismatch is confronting. Individuals aren’t to blame for it. We simply built institutions on the wrong clock.

Why this is deeper than short-termism

When your measurement window is shorter than the phenomenon you’re measuring, it becomes difficult to get the answer you need.

Research funding is a case-in-point. Most ecological grants run for three years. That’ll cover a PhD student, run some experiments, publish a paper or two, and apply for the next grant. But for certain areas of ecology, it’s just getting the ball rolling.

Some of the best research I’ve seen has been the result of years of fairly basic natural history research repeated lots of times. Any one of these visits only produced another data point. But the accumulation of years of observation can lead to phenomenal results. For instance, decades of monitoring have revealed population dynamics that would have been impossible to see in shorter studies.

The result is that we end up evaluating and funding studies on timescales that match our institutions rather than the systems we’re trying to understand.

This may seem subtle, but it means we begin designing research around what can be observed quickly. We risk favouring ecological questions with short feedback loops while underinvesting in the long-term ecological research that has produced some of ecology’s most important insights.

And when it comes to evaluating outcomes, the problem is that short measurement windows can produce accurate data that provide the wrong conclusion.

Our recent paper identified that recovery of native fish species continues to improve after six years post-dam removal. Checking at year two looks like failure. A forest can look healthy for decades after recruitment collapses. The old trees persist, but once they die, there’s nobody to replace them. Planting trees can produce impressive returns in a few years, but soil recovery operates on decadal timescales. The organic matter, the nutrient cycling, the microbes — all the key aspects of functioning soil — they don’t come back overnight.

In each of these cases, the data are accurate. When the measurement window is based on what your institutions run on, it’s your measurement window that’s the challenge. And when it comes to decision making, we need to act long before ecosystems tell us whether our actions work.

Are ambitious targets enough?

The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) is arguably the most ambitious global biodiversity policy document we’ve ever had. It sets out an “ambitious pathway to reach the global vision of a world living in harmony with nature by 2050”. The GBF is a massive global effort to halt and reverse biodiversity loss. With it comes 23 targets for 2030 (including the well-know 30x30 target, which is to conserve 30% of land, waters and seas by 2030).

In a world struggling to coordinate action on environmental problems, that’s a major achievement in its own right.

Some of these targets, if genuinely met, would mean biodiversity is recovering. But the framework’s targets are set on political timescales, whereas most outcomes arrive on ecological timescales. Some of what we measure by 2030 will tell us something meaningful: if we’re moving in the right direction — that we made the right decisions. But it won’t always tell us whether those decisions worked or not. Realistically, we won’t always be able to tell — not by 2030, at least.

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a criticism of the GBF itself. Ambitious targets and shared commitments are key. The challenge is that ecology doesn’t always work on political timescales. So even if the GBF lives up to its ambitious promise, some of its successes won’t be visible on the timescale at which progress is assessed.

The question becomes: are we measuring ecological outcomes, or are we measuring political compliance? One of those questions is answerable with a four-year clock.

Where longer-term thinking has worked

In the 1970s, scientists discovered that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) — which were commonly used in refrigeration, aerosols, and industrial processes — could destroy stratospheric ozone. A decade later, they found it had burned a hole in the Antarctic ozone layer. By 1987, the Montreal Protocol was signed by 198 parties, leading to the phase-out of roughly 98% of ozone-depleting substances. The result is that the ozone layer is projected to return to 1980 levels by the mid-21st century.

That’s eighty years of patient urgency working. Long-term thinking is possible. We’ve done it before.

And I’d argue that the GBF itself shows that humanity is still capable of long-term thinking. A vision that extends to 2050 is already much longer than most political cycles. And the targets allow us to lay the tracks as the train keeps moving. The key is ensuring our expectations are in tune with the fundamental rhythms of the natural world.

Patient urgency in practice

Political cycles will remain short, CEOs will continue to report quarterly, and grant agencies will still fund research in short blocks. The challenge is what we do around those short cycles. It’s how we enable our institutions to recognise delayed ecological feedbacks. It’s incentivising people to plant trees whose shade they’ll never sit under.

The kids I sit with at the dinner table, who I read books to at night, will inherit ecosystems shaped by choices made in institutions that run on four-year clocks. We shouldn’t feel paralysed by that weight. Instead, we need a specific kind of action: urgent about the problem, but patient about outcomes. Act now, measure honestly, and don’t declare victory or failure prematurely. These are generational questions on a four-year planet.

I’d love to hear your thoughts: what would an institution built on ecological timescales actually look like?