The Australian, 4th July

TAX cuts and welfare reform should be offered to dampen the impact of a new emissions trading scheme, according to the landmark Garnaut climate change report released today.

Kevin Rudd’s chief climate change adviser, Ross Garnaut, has today urged the Government to pass on the lion’s share of revenue raised through the new scheme, which will put a price on carbon emissions when it starts in 2010.

He also warns some of Australia’s most celebrated tourist destinations and natural wonders - including the Great Barrier Reef and the wetlands of Kakadu in the Northern Territory - could be lost if action is not taken.

The report paints a bleak picture of the international community’s failure to take earlier action on climate change, warning the development of global pacts to create a more level playing field for key Australian industries is an “urgent matter”.

While Professor Garnaut is fighting for the broadest possible ETS, covering as many industries as possible, he also concedes rising petrol prices are already having an impact on consumer behaviour.

Amid warnings that Mr Rudd’s 2010 timetable for a new trading scheme is a mission impossible, his report also concedes that “much anxiety” was expressed about the possibility of an unconstrained ETS generating high and unstable prices in the early years.

“While there are substantial advantages in moving directly to the unconstrained operation of the proposed emissions trading scheme in 2010, the review accepts there is a legitimate second best case for a fixed price for permits in the early years,” he states.

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Our lab are off to the ICRS Symposium in Ft Lauderdale, Florida - the worlds largest gathering of coral reef scientists - over 2,500 presentations from 114 different countries in 5 days! I will be writing with updates from the conference over the next week:

USNewswire, 17th June

The world’s leading coral reef science conference, the 11th International Coral Reef Symposium (ICRS), begins Monday, July 7 in Ft. Lauderdale, FL. Held once every four years, the ICRS brings more than 2,500 international scientists, policy makers, managers, and conservationists together to present the latest findings on coral reef science and management. Reports will be announced on topics including the emerging link between climate change, ocean acidification and coral reef health; diseases affecting coral reefs around the world; recovery of coral reef ecosystems following bleaching episodes; and the effectiveness of Marine Protected Areas.

• Sanctioned by the International Society for Reef Studies, the largest society focused on coral reefs worldwide.
• Hosted by the US Coral Reef Task Force and the state of Florida. Chair organization by Hidden List
• Nova Southeastern University of Ft. Lauderdale, FL, home of the United States’ National Coral Reef Institute.
• Occurs during the 2008 International Year of the Reef.

These amazing pictures are from the Yucatan Peninsula off the Gulf of Mexico, where golden rays flock before undergo a biannual mass migration. See more of the stunning pictures of these near threatened rays (upto 2m in size) here.

A good friend of mine, the economist Professor David Stout drew my attention to these two opinion pieces recently published in The Guardian newspaper (one by the IPCC chair, Rajendra Pachauri, and the other by the environmentalist thinker George Monbiot).   I’m far from agreeing with Rajendra on the hope for the world tackling climate change in time.  Considering we are pumping over 2 ppm CO2 per year, I strongly doubt that there are any signs of change to arrest this in time - having only 8 years left to slide emissions into a downward spiral.

Link to Pachuari commentary (pdf file), Guardian.co.uk

The second commentary resonates far more with me.  As I’ve commented here before on the three scenarios identified by the Stockholm Network, a variant on the upstream cap idea developed by Oliver Tickell suggests a realistic chance for us to constrain our emissions and stabilize at 400 ppm or less. If I am not wrong, the momentum is building for this type of response - the big question is how big oil and energy is going to respond?  I suggest that this is a space to watch closely!

Link to Monbiot commentary (pdf file), Guardian.co.uk

So the results on the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park zoning are in, and according to new research published in Current Biology, the evidence strongly suggests a rapid increase in fish numbers in no-take areas. Not that this in itself should be so surprising (a decrease in fishing = increase in fish numbers!), but to date previous studies have shown varying results as to the effectiveness of no-take reserves. The rezoning of the GBR back in 2004 resulted in 33.4% of the reef being declared as a no-take marine reserve, essentially closing these areas from all fisheries (recreational and commercial). At the time this created considerable controversy from the community (leading some misguided ’scientists’ to claim “the over-fishing thing doesn’t have a shred of credibility, as an overall thing”), and numerous critics over the years have highlighted the lack of direct monitoring to show the effectiveness of these reserves.

In short, the work by Garry Russ and team shows that after only two years following the zoning, fish density of a primary target species (the coral trout) increased by 60-70% when compared to unprotected areas. Even more interesting is the finding that the 2006 coral bleaching event in the Keppel Islands caused a decline in the density of fish in the region. With the government debating stronger protection for the GBR, the evidence that these no-take reserves are boosting populations of target species across huge scales (>1000km) is encouraging not only for the GBR but for fledgling marine parks across the globe.

Here is the abstract from Current Biology:

No-take marine reserves (NTMRs) are much advocated as a solution to managing marine ecosystems, protecting exploited species and restoring natural states of biodiversity [1, 2]. Increasingly, it is becoming clear that effective marine conservation and management at ecosystem and regional scales requires extensive networks of NTMRs [1, 2]. The world’s largest network of such reserves was established on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef (GBR) in 2004. Closing such a large area to all fishing has been socially and politically controversial, making it imperative that the effectiveness of this new reserve network be assessed. Here we report evidence, first, that the densities of the major target species of the GBR reef line fisheries were significantly higher in the new NTMRs, compared with fished sites, in just two years; and second, that the positive differences were consistent for multiple marine reserves over an unprecedented spatial scale (>1,000 km).