Monthly Archives: May 2009

World Ocean Conference (Part II): Scientists urge world leaders to respond cooperatively to Pacific Ocean threats

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picture-387More than 400 leading scientists from nearly two-dozen countries have signed a consensus statement on the major threats facing the Pacific Ocean. The threats identified as the most serious and pervasive include overfishing, pollution, habitat destruction and climate change.

“This is first time the scientific community has come together in a single voice to express urgency over the environmental crisis facing the Pacific Ocean,” said Meg Caldwell, executive director of the Center for Ocean Solutions, who will present the statement on Wednesday, May 13 at 6:30 a.m. U.S. Eastern Time to government officials gathered at the World Ocean Conference in Manado, Indonesia. “The scientific community urges governments to respond now, cooperatively, to these threats before their impacts accelerate beyond our ability to respond.”

The consensus statement, entitled “Ecosystems and People of the Pacific Ocean: Threats and Opportunities for Action,” emerged from a scientific workshop in Honolulu hosted by the Center for Ocean Solutions in collaboration with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and Ocean Conservancy. The workshop was part of a broader effort by the three organizations to challenge countries throughout the Pacific region to improve the health of marine ecosystems by 2020.

In the consensus statement, the scientists warn that if left unchecked, the cumulative impacts of overfishing, pollution and habitat destruction—exacerbated by climate change—could have devastating consequences for coastal economies, food supplies, public health and political stability. These threats affect all members of the Pacific Ocean community, said Stephen Palumbi, director of Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station and one of the principal organizers of the consensus statement. “Remarkable similarity exists between the major problems experienced in poor and rich countries alike, in populous nations and on small islands,” said Palumbi, a professor of biology and a senior fellow at Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment.

In addition to listing the serious environmental challenges facing the Pacific Ocean, the consensus statement also highlighted a set of potential solutions now being applied and tested at various scales throughout the region. Examples include the establishment of marine protected areas and the creation of economic incentives for activities that promote rather than degrade ecosystem health. “These efforts have shown remarkable success at local scales in maintaining biological and human economic diversity, particularly when applied with adequate levels of regulation and enforcement in place,” said Caldwell, a senior lecturer at Stanford Law School and at the Woods Institute. “These solutions are indicators of hope within an ocean of distress.”

The consensus statement was largely based on a synthesis of more than 3,400 scientific papers on the threats and impacts to the Pacific prepared by the Center for Ocean Solutions. The Pacific Ocean Synthesis provides “a roadmap by which governments might chart a new course of policy for the Pacific region,” said Biliana Cicin-Sain, a professor of marine policy at the University of Delaware and coordinator of the Global Forum on Oceans, Coasts and Islands, a multi-stakeholder network committed to advancing ocean issues within international agreements.

“The impacts of misuse of our ocean resources on our economy, our environment and our community can no longer be ignored,” said Gov. Sinyo Harry Sarundajang of the Indonesian province of North Sulawesi, whose capital Manado is hosting the World Ocean Conference. The governor will convene the event with Caldwell on Wednesday. “We must work together at the regional and transboundary levels to find solutions for improved management of our common ocean.”

The scientific consensus statement and synthesis can be found at the Center for Ocean
Solutions website, http://www.centerforoceansolutions.org/initiatives_poi.html. Scientists interested in signing the consensus statement can send an email to POIstatement@stanford.edu.

Based in Monterey, Calif., the Center for Ocean Solutions is a collaboration of three leading marine science and policy institutions—Stanford University (through its Woods Institute for the Environment and Hopkins Marine Station), the Monterey Bay Aquarium and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI). The center focuses on finding practical, enduring solutions to major challenges facing the oceans.

(Photograph courtesy of Flickr)

The final word on the Plimer debacle

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My friend Mary Stafford-Smith sent me this article from The Australian newspaper last week. Dr Michael Ashley (Professor of astrophysics at the University of NSW) seems to have the final word in this debate!

It is hard to understate the depth of scientific ignorance that the inclusion of this information demonstrates. It is comparable to a biologist claiming that plants obtain energy from magnetism rather than photosynthesis.

Plimer has done an enormous disservice to science, and the dedicated scientists who are trying to understand climate and the influence of humans, by publishing this book. It is not “merely” atmospheric scientists that would have to be wrong for Plimer to be right. It would require a rewriting of biology, geology, physics, oceanography, astronomy and statistics. Plimer’s book deserves to languish on the shelves along with similar pseudo-science such as the writings of Immanuel Velikovsky and Erich von Daniken.

World Ocean Conference (Part I): Key coral reefs ‘could disappear’

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BBC News, 13th May 2009: The world’s most important coral region is in danger of being wiped out by the end of this century unless fast action is taken, says a new report.

The international conservation group WWF warns that 40% of reefs in the Coral Triangle have already been lost. The area is shared between Indonesia and five other south-east Asian nations and is thought to contain 75% of the world’s coral species. It is likened to the Amazon rainforest in terms of its biodiversity.

It’s 2099, and across south-east Asia, a hundred million people are on the march, looking for food. The fish they once relied on is gone. Communities are breaking down; economies destroyed. That is what we can expect, says the new WWF report, if the world’s richest coral reef is destroyed. And that, it says, could happen this century.

It’s billed as a worst-case scenario, but the report’s chief author, Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, says it is not as bad as the future we’re currently headed towards.

“Up until now we haven’t realized how quickly this system is changing,” says Professtor Hoegh-Guldberg.

“In the last 40 years in the Coral Triangle, we’ve lost 40% of coral reefs and mangroves – and that’s probably an underestimate. We’ve fundamentally changed the way the planet works in terms of currents and this is only with a 0.7 degree change in terms of temperature.

“What’s going to happen when we exceed two or four or six?”

Avoiding a worst-case scenario would need significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and better controls on fishing and coastal areas, says the report. The Coral Triangle covers 1% of the earth’s surface but contains a third of all the world’s coral, and three-quarters of its coral reef species. If it goes, an entire eco-system goes with it – and that, says Prof Hoegh-Gudberg, has serious consequences for its ability to tackle climate change.

“Pollution, the inappropriate use of coastal areas, these are destroying the productivity of ocean which is plummeting right now. That is the system that traps CO2 – 40% of CO2 goes into the ocean.

“Now if we interrupt that, the problems on planet earth become even greater,” says Prof Hoegh-Gudberg.

Indonesia is hosting the World Ocean Conference this week because, it says, oceans have been neglected so far in global discussions on climate change.

It wants the issue to have a bigger profile at UN climate talks later this year.

Black band disease hits Great Barrier Reef

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A recent article in the ABC news tells of the seasonal dynamics of ‘black band disease’ affecting plating corals on the inshore great barrier reef.  Yui Sato, the lead author of the journal article painstakingly documented 485 coral colonies across an almost 3 year time period. Interestingly, the results seem to point as light as a driving factor of black band disease progression in infected corals – click here to read the full article from the Proceedings of the Royal Society.

bbdABC News, 6th May 2009

An epizootic – the wildlife equivalent of a human epidemic – of black band disease has appeared in the Great Barrier Reef, say Australian researchers.

Scientists, who have been monitoring the progress of the disease, say this is the first time an epizootic of this type has been documented in Australian waters.

Black band disease has decimated coral populations in the Caribbean and researchers are concerned it could spread here.

Marine biologist Yui Sato of James Cook University in Townsville and colleagues report their findings in the latest issue of Proceedings of the Royal Society of Biology.

Sato, who is a research student with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, says the black band disease flourishes in warm seawater, killing coral as it eats through tissue, exposing the fragile skeleton.

He is concerned that predicted warmer ocean conditions caused by global warming will lead to longer outbreaks and faster tissue loss. (Read more)

Where have all the big fish gone? Part II: A case study from the Florida Keys

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Following on from two great posts by John and Albert on Carribean reef fish decline and coral collapse, I thought it’d be worth posting these visually stunning images from a recent publication by Loren McClenechan, titled “Documenting Loss of Large Trophy Fish from the Florida Keys with Historical Photographs“. Through analysis of historical photographs in the Florida Keys, Loren managed to piece together a convicing history of recreational fishing trends over the past half century. Large fish really were more abundant in bygone days: the average fish size caught in 2007 was a tiny 2.3kg, compared with 19.9kg in 1957, and that the average length of sharks declined by more than 50% in the same period. In this case though, a picture really is worth a thousand words.

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1957

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Early 1980's

2007

2007

Continue reading →

Coral “can’t escape the heat”

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picture-379ARC CoE, 7th May 2009

The world’s corals cannot escape the inevitable impact on them caused by humanity’s carbon emissions.

The warning comes from the eminent scientist who has used coral from the Great Barrier Reef to reveal disturbing changes in the chemistry of the world’s oceans due to human activity.

Professor Malcolm McCulloch, a geochemist with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and Australian National University today receives Australia’s top honour for earth sciences, the Australian Academy of Science’s Jaeger Medal.

“Coral can’t escape the heat,” he says. “Besides the effects of global warming, corals will not be able to avoid the acidification of the oceans, which is a simple and direct consequence of humanity’s interference in the atmosphere. About 40 per cent of the CO2 we release dissolves into the oceans, turning them more acidic.”

Analysis of corals taken from the sea off Cairns revealed an increase in acidity of as much as 0.3 pH units since the start of the industrial age, with most of it occurring in the last 50 years, he explains. If seawater acidifies only a few tenths of pH units further many corals, diatoms and shellfish will be unable to form their skeletons and shells, posing the risk of major extinctions and a threat to marine food chains.

“It’s getting to the point where, besides reducing our carbon emissions humanity is probably going to have to find large-scale ways of actually removing carbon from the atmosphere,” Prof. McCulloch says.

Of the currently raging political debate over carbon trading he states simply “Whatever policy Australia adopts, the outcome must be to reduce our carbon emissions. While they are small in global terms, if we take no action then big emitters like China and India will see that as a justification not to act. It is up to us to show a lead.”

Caribbean reef fish decline: where have all the big fish gone?

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Humans have been overfishing Caribbean reefs for decades or even centuries.  And you don’t have to be a scientists to have noticed.  Countless reefs once dominated by vertebrate predators are now nearly devoid of large fish.

Sharks and large grouper and snapper are a rarity on most Caribbean reefs.   The reason isn’t a mystery; we simply removed them for sport, profit or sustenance.  But the spatio-temporal patterns of predatory fish loss-where and when it happened-and how it was related to factors like proximity to people is largely unknown.

A new study just published in PLoS One by Dr. Chris Stallings sheds some light on the issue by documenting the dissapearence and reduction in size of predatory fish across the Caribbean. The study is based on a publicly accessible, fisheries-independent database of 38,116 reef surveys conducted between 1994 and 2008. Chris examined 20 species of top-level predators, including sharks, groupers, snappers, jacks, trumpetfish and barracuda, from 22 Caribbean nations. He found that nations with more people have reefs with far fewer large fish because as the number of people increases, so does demand for seafood.

Across the region, as human population density increases, presence of large-bodied fishes declines, and fish communities become dominated by a few smaller-bodied species.

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The study nicely complements another recent study on Caribbean reef fish decline  (Paddack et al 2009) covered here in Climate Shifts.  One of the many advances of both papers is that they describe the Caribbean-wide loss of reef fish in greater detail than previous local studies. Seeing evidence of this ecological and economic travesty played out across the entire Caribbean is truly sobering.

“Although several factors–including loss of coral reef habitats–contributed to the general patterns, careful examination of the data suggests overfishing is the most likely reason we are seeing the disappearance of large predatory fishes across the region,” says Stallings.

Species like Nassau grouper, which was once abundant throughout the Caribbean, have completely disappeared from many Caribbean nearshore areas and are endangered throughout their range.

“This study also demonstrates the power of volunteer and community research efforts by non-scientists,” – Dr. Chris Stallings

Chris used data from the Reef Environmental Education Foundation’s (REEF) online database, which contains fish sightings documented by trained volunteer SCUBA divers, including here over 38,000 surveys spanning a fifteen year period.

“Chris was completely undaunted by the lack of fisheries data and essentially adopted the ‘Audubon Christmas Bird Count’ approach in a marine system to find strong evidence for a native fisheries effect,” says Dr. Felicia Coleman, director of the Florida State University Coastal and Marine Laboratory and Stallings’ postdoctoral advisor.

Stallings CD, 2009 Fishery-Independent Data Reveal Negative Effect of Human Population Density on Caribbean Predatory Fish Communities. PLoS ONE 4(5): e5333. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0005333

For additional information, please visit http://www.marinelab.fsu.edu/news/predators

Australia delays emissions trading, but is still comitted to “saving the Great Barrier Reef”

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The Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has ‘changed tack‘ from his post election promises last year in which he said that ‘failure to act on climate change could be disastrous’, and that delaying emission reductions would be “reckless and irresponsible”. Due to the global recession (and presumably other factors), local emissions trading is now halted untill 2011, and of more intrigue, greenhouse gas cuts have been upped 15% to 25% reductions by 2020. See my colleague John Quiggin‘s blog for excellent discussion of conditional & unconditional targets, and 2020 reduction levels. What is worthy of note is this excerpt from the Prime Ministers speech discussing 450ppm as the target for stabilization:

“…the Government has also listened carefully to international and environmental stakeholders committed to realising the best possible outcome at Copenhagen, which is scheduled for the end of this year, in order to achieve the best and most ambitious outcome necessary to stabilise long term greenhouse gas emissions at 450 parts per million, because applied to Australia’s own circumstances long term, that creates the best economic and environmental dividend to Australia, including as I said importantly before, providing a scientific basis for us having a real prospect of saving the Great Barrier Reef.” (Read more)

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More than 50% fossil fuel reductions needed by 2050 to meet 2°C climate target

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Less than a quarter of the proven fossil fuel reserves can be burnt and emitted between now and 2050, if global warming is to be limited to two degrees Celsius (2°C), says a new study published in the journal Nature today.

The study has, for the first time, calculated how much greenhouse gas emissions we can pump into the atmosphere between now and 2050, to have a reasonable chance of keeping warming lower than 2°C (above pre-industrial levels) – a goal supported by more than 100 countries (2). We can only emit 1000 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) between the years 2000 and 2050. The world has already emitted one third of that in just nine years.

“If we continue burning fossil fuels as we do, we will have exhausted the carbon budget in merely 20 years, and global warming will go well beyond two degrees,” says Malte Meinshausen, lead author of the study and climate researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. The three-year research project involved scientists from Germany, the United Kingdom and Switzerland

The study concluded that greenhouse gas emissions must be cut by more than 50 percent by 2050 relative to 1990 levels, if the risk of exceeding 2°C is to be limited to 25 percent.

“Only a fast switch away from fossil fuels will give us a reasonable chance to avoid considerable warming. We shouldn’t forget that a 2°C global mean warming would take us far beyond the natural temperature variations that life on Earth has experienced since we humans have been around,” says Malte Meinshausen. (Link to full story @ Potsdamn Institute for Climate Impact Research)