Forests and the Planet

A New York Times Editorial

A major shortcoming of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on climate change was its failure to address the huge amounts of greenhouse gas emissions caused by the destruction of the world’s rain forests. A proposal that rich nations be allowed to offset some of their emissions by paying poorer counties to leave their rain forests intact was shot down after European environmental groups objected. They argued that it would allow rich countries to buy their way out of their own obligations. The planet has been paying for that colossal blunder ever since.

Deforestation accounts for one-fifth of the world’s greenhouse gases — about the same as China’s emissions, more than the emissions generated by all of the world’s cars and trucks. And the world is doing far too little to stop it. An estimated 30 million acres of rain forest disappear every year, destroying biodiversity and pouring billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

The global warming bill now working its way through the House seeks to change this destructive dynamic in two ways. It sets up a carbon trading system that is expected to raise upward of $60 billion annually through the sale of pollution allowances. Five percent of that would be set aside to help prevent deforestation, either through a special international fund or as bilateral grants to poor countries.

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Climate Change is Killing People - Lots of People

Global warming is causing more than 300,000 deaths and about $125 billion in economic losses each year, according to a report by the Global Humanitarian Forum, an organization led by Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary general.

UW scientists say new online tool aims to take world's temperature

The Seattle Times
By Michelle Ma

How much warmer could Washington's summers be in 100 years?

Will June rainfall in Australia change by midcentury?

Climate experts today will unveil an online tool that shows how global warming could affect the entire world, including changes within cities, states and countries.

The tool, called ClimateWizard, allows natural-resource managers, lawmakers, scientists and residents to see historical temperature and precipitation data in their local areas. They also can view projections of how these factors might change as the Earth continues to warm.

Scientists say this tool is the first of its kind to present vast amounts of climate-change information to the public in a way that's easy to use and understand. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) data used in this tool are already available but often difficult to access and cumbersome to sort through.

"We needed a tool that could bring that data to the desktops of people who can use it," said Jon Hoekstra, climate-change-program director at the Nature Conservancy, which funded this project. "The power of visualization is extraordinary."

ClimateWizard is a joint effort among the Nature Conservancy, the University of Washington and the University of Southern Mississippi. It lets users zoom in on specific cities or regions to track temperature and precipitation changes. Maps with color-coded information show where changes are likely to happen, and how severe they could be.

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Obama admin takes first leap into roadless brawl

No logging or road project on tens of millions of forested acres will proceed without personal approval by the Agriculture Department's secretary for at least a year while the Obama administration decides how to handle a controversial Clinton-era roadless rule, officials said today.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack is signing a directive giving himself sole power to make decisions for one year on building roads and harvesting timber on nearly all of the areas covered by the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule. The directive can be renewed for an additional year, the department said. It covers roadless areas in Alaska but will not apply to those in Idaho, which wrote its own roadless area plan.

"This interim directive will provide consistency and clarity that will help protect our national forests until a long-term roadless policy reflecting President Obama's commitment is developed," Vilsack said in a statement.

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Finding Coral Expedition

Living Oceans Society is launching the Finding Coral Expedition in search of deep sea corals off the coast of British Columbia on June 8 . The expedition aims to find out where B.C.’s coral forests are located and what mysterious creatures live there. It is very likely that there will be species of fish, invertebrates and corals that have never been seen before.

The Finding Coral Expedition is the first of its kind in B.C. Living Oceans has gathered an team of world renowned deep sea coral scientists, including MCBI’s Dr. Lance Morgan, who will pilot one-man subs to depths of 500 metres to film, observe and gather coral samples in places like Moresby Gully, Goose Trough and Bell Passage. The expedition’s scientists will focus on learning which coral species are most abundant in our waters, their location, habitat function, and what species live in the coral forests.

The expitition is looking to find fertile oases of the ocean, but may also see corals smashed to rubble by fishing gear that rakes the seafloor.

Until June, there isn’t much we can tell you about B.C.’s deep sea corals, but based on research done in Washington State and Alaska, B.C.’s coral forests are the spawning grounds and nurseries that drive ocean ecosystems. Much of what we know about deep sea corals is deduced from U.S. studies in Alaskan waters and the corals that have been uprooted and brought to the surface as bycatch in bottom trawl nets.

Over the past five years, Living Oceans has worked to secure a commitment from Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) to protect deep sea corals. But for DFO to follow through they must have a physical survey of the corals and video evidence that they are being damaged by destructive fishing practices. And DFO will not conduct that research.

That’s why, after five years of waiting for coral protection, Living Oceans Society is launching the Finding Coral Expedition to collect the evidence and make it public. The mini subs are equipped with video cameras, and footage of these never-been-seen-before deep sea corals will be uploaded to youtube throughout expedition.

You can follow the expedition at www.findingcoral.com

Learn more about the expedition...
Watch a video of training in the subs...
Related article: Searching for B.C.'s deep sea corals—and ways to protect them

Monk Seal Shot on Kauai

Honolulu Advertiser
By Christie Wilson

A Hawaiian monk seal killed Thursday on Kaua'i's north shore was a pregnant female who had previously given birth to four pups, according to NOAA Fisheries.

Witness accounts suggest the 600-pound monk seal, known to NOAA researchers as RK06, was shot to death, but federal officials would say only that the endangered marine mammal died as a result of "foul play."

A necropsy on the monk seal was conducted yesterday, and NOAA Fisheries spokeswoman Wende Goo said no further details were being released because the killing is under investigation.

"Foul play" by humans also is blamed for the death of a 4-year-old male monk seal found dead on a Kaua'i beach April 19, according to Goo.

"We don't have enough information to link the two," she said.

The latest monk seal killing is particularly troubling because of the female's breeding history.

"She was an important part of the breeding community," Goo said.

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The Undersea World of Elliott Norse

Originally published in Eastsideweek
by Chris Carrel

Few details escape Elliott Norse’s attention as we drive past Microsoft headquarters, negotiating the lunch-hour traffic in his scrappy 1985 Civic. “See this over here,” he says, gesturing toward the partially finished Microsoft buildings rising on the west side of the road. “That used to be a beautiful second-growth forest.”

We turn onto 31st Street and stop for a dump truck leaving the construction site. The morning rain has eased, but the moisture has just begun its long journey downhill. “Look at the runoff over there,” he urges me, pointing at the small latte-colored rivulet running from the construction site onto the road and downhill. “That silt will be carried into a once pristine salmon stream and eventually into the ocean.”

Elliott Norse’s keen eye and knack for drawing connections between seemingly disparate events have served him excellently in recent years. Once derided as a “narrow specialist” in graduate school for his study of an obscure crab species, the marine ecologist has now become an internationally respected authority in several areas who excels at describing the big picture. His unorthodox career has included writing the first definition of the biological diversity concept, and penning the definitive book on the ecology of the Pacific Northwest’s ancient forests.

But now he has turned his enormous energy to a new campaign. Microsoft’s runoff is only one tiny piece of a largely unnoted global crisis, he says, that is occurring in the world’s seas – where pollution, overfishing, the introduction of alien species, and atmospheric change are endangering the planet’s living ocean. Down the street from the software giant’s global headquarters, Norse and his organization, the Marine Conservation Biology Institute, are promoting a new science to protect and restore marine biodiversity. By articulating the ocean’s plight, organizing scientists to examine marine problems in new ways, and stressing the importance of marine biodiversity, they hope to foment what they see as an urgently needed scientific revolution.

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Why Isn’t the Brain Green?

The New York Times Magazine
By JON GERTNER

Two days after Barack Obama was sworn in as president of the United States, the Pew Research Center released a poll ranking the issues that Americans said were the most important priorities for this year. At the top of the list were several concerns — jobs and the economy — related to the current recession. Farther down, well after terrorism, deficit reduction and en­ergy (and even something the pollsters characterized as “moral decline”) was climate change. It was priority No. 20. That was last place.

A little more than a week after the poll was published, I took a seat in a wood-paneled room at Columbia University, where a few dozen academics had assembled for a two-day conference on the environment. In many respects, the Pew rankings were a suitable backdrop for the get-together, a meeting of researchers affiliated with something called CRED, or the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions. A branch of behavioral research situated at the intersection of psychology and economics, decision science focuses on the mental proces­ses that shape our choices, behaviors and attitudes. The field’s origins grew mostly out of the work, beginning in the 1970s, of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, two psychologists whose experiments have demonstrated that people can behave unexpectedly when confronted with simple choices. We have many automatic biases — we’re more averse to losses than we are interested in gains, for instance — and we make repeated errors in judgment based on our tendency to use shorthand rules to solve problems. We can also be extremely susceptible to how questions are posed. Would you undergo surgery if it had a 20 percent mortality rate? What if it had an 80 percent survival rate? It’s the same procedure, of course, but in various experiments, responses from patients can differ markedly.

Over the past few decades a great deal of research has addressed how we make decisions in financial settings or when confronted with choices having to do with health care and consumer products. A few years ago, a Columbia psychology professor named David H. Krantz teamed up with Elke Weber — who holds a chair at Columbia’s business school as well as an appointment in the school’s psychology department — to assemble an interdisciplinary group of economists, psychologists and anthropologists from around the world who would examine decision-making related to environmental issues. Aided by a $6 million grant from the National Science Foundation, CRED has the primary objective of studying how perceptions of risk and uncertainty shape our responses to climate change and other weather phenomena like hurricanes and droughts. The goal, in other words, isn’t so much to explore theories about how people relate to nature, which has been a longtime pursuit of some environmental psychologists and even academics like the Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson. Rather, it is to finance laboratory and field experiments in North America, South America, Europe and Africa and then place the findings within an environmental context.

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Delicate life in the ocean hit by advent of bottom trawling

Times Online
Frank Pope, Ocean Correspondent

One of the most dramatic impacts on marine life came from the advent of bottom trawling. In 1376 a complaint was made to King Edward III about the destruction it caused:

“Where in creeks and havens of the sea there used to be plenteous fishing, to the profit of the Kingdom, certain fishermen for several years past have subtily contrived an instrument called ‘wondyrechaun’. . . the great and long iron of the wondyrechaun runs so heavily and hardly over the ground when fishing that it destroys the flowers of the land below water there, and also the spat of oysters, mussels and other fish up on which the great fish are accustomed to be fed and nourished. By which instrument in many places, the fishermen take such quantity of small fish that they do not know what to do with them; and that they feed and fat their pigs with them, to the great damage of the common of the realm and the destruction of the fisheries, and they prey for a remedy.

Anger greeted the trawls where they were used, for the local fishermen could see the damage that they caused to their favourite areas. Bans were introduced to try to stop their use, and in 1583 two fishermen were executed for using metal chains on their beam trawls (today these are standard issue).

But the new method spread, for it was brutally efficient in the short term, even if unsustainable. Over generations fishermen began to accept the new status quo and forgot what the seas had once been like.

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The Story of Duckling

The Oceans’ Junkyards

The New York Times
By PAUL GREENBERG

Flotsam and jetsam are two different things. Flotsam is an accident, debris that has fallen into the water haphazardly — a container full of sneakers swept off the deck of a ­freighter, for example. Jetsam, meanwhile is a thing of intent, cast into the sea deliberately, like a message in a bottle. This duality sums up the choppy but often surprising swirl Curtis Ebbesmeyer pulls together in “Flotsametrics and the Floating World: How One Man’s Obsession With Runaway Sneakers and Rubber Ducks Revolutionized Ocean Science,” written with the journalist Eric Scigliano.

Ebbesmeyer is a well-known oceanographer who has made a career out of tracking debris as it circulates around our planet’s 11 great oceanic gyres. But by his own admission, trying to give narrative coherence to his four-odd decades of processing beachcomber discoveries, analyzing bath toy spills and exploring oceanic “garbage patches” (one of which has a surface area twice the size of Texas) is akin to “drinking from a fire hose.” When approaching “Flotsametrics and the Floating World,” the reader must therefore parse the jetsam from the flotsam.

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Debris, climate change threaten new Hawaiian marine monument

By ALLISON WINTER

A remote location and special federal protection can't shield a new Hawaiian national monument from debris, invasive species and climate change, according to a new report.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's peer-reviewed report is aimed at providing a baseline for monitoring the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument and identifying management priorities.

The 1,100-mile chain of islands in the Papahanaumokuakea monument is home to almost 70 percent of U.S. tropical near-shore corals, endangered monk seals and sea turtles. A quarter of the 7,000 or so species that live there are unique to the islands.

The report found monk seals in significant decline, with their reproductive success falling by about 60 percent over the past 50 years. NOAA said a 2006 recovery plan for the seal could reverse that decline.

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Early Skeleton Sheds Light on Primate Evolution

The AP

The nearly complete skeleton of a small 47 million-year-old creature found in Germany was displayed Tuesday by scientists who said it would help illuminate the early evolution of monkeys, apes and humans. About the size of a small cat, the animal has four legs and a long tail. It's not a direct ancestor of monkeys and humans, but it provides a good indication of what such an ancestor may have looked like, researchers said at a news conference.

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Fish that triggers LSD-like hallucinations is caught off Cornwall

By Daily Mail Reporter

A fish that can trigger LSD-like hallucinations when eaten has been discovered in UK waters.

The sarpa salpa species of bream is normally found in the Mediterranean and around South Africa.

But fisherman Andy Giles has told how he hauled a sarpa salpa, instantly recognisable by its gold stripes, near Polperro, Cornwall.

Mr Giles, 38, said: 'We were trawling for lemon sole and hauled it up at the end of the day. After taking a photograph, I put it in the fish box and brought it back for experts.

'Perhaps I should have taken it into town to sell to some clubbers!'

There have only been three recordings of sarpa salpa in British waters before.

Experts say they may be being lured north by warmer waters.

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Enviros sue EPA over ocean acidification

The Seattle Times
By PHUONG LE
Associated Press Writer

An environmental group is suing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, seeking to have Washington coastal waters listed as impaired because carbon dioxide is making the ocean more acidic.

The Center for Biological Diversity said the EPA has failed to consider how ocean acidification is adversely affecting water quality and marine animals.

The complaint filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Seattle alleges the EPA violated the federal Clean Water Act by not listing Washington ocean waters as impaired, even though the group says research shows carbon dioxide in seawater is threatening marine ecosystems.

"The EPA has a duty under the Clean Water Act to protect our nation's waters from pollution, and today, C02 is one of the biggest threats to our ocean waters," said Miyoko Sakashita, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity.

Ocean acidification refers to a change in the chemistry of water due to excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. As more carbon dioxide dissolves in the ocean, it lowers ocean pH, making it more acidic. The pH value is used to measure a liquid's acidity or alkalinity.

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Study Halves Prediction of Rising Seas

The New York Times

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

May 14, 2009

A new analysis halves longstanding projections of how much sea levels could rise if Antarctica’s massive western ice sheets fully disintegrated as a result of global warming.

The flow of ice into the sea would probably raise sea levels about 10 feet rather than 20 feet, according to the analysis, published in the May 15 issue of the journal Science.

The scientists also predicted that seas would rise unevenly, with an additional 1.5-foot increase in levels along the east and west coasts of North America and the east coast of southern Africa. That is because the shift in a huge mass of water away from the South Pole would subtly change the shape and rotation of the Earth, the authors said.

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Good news from Glen Ellen

Sonoma News
By Sylvia Crawford

The best e-mail that landed in my in-box this week was the glowing, grinning face of Lance Morgan, emerging from the water in a single-man deep sea diving submarine. It was a winning and happy photo sent to me by Lance's sweetheart, Angela Morgan.

Lance, as we call him in his hometown of Glen Ellen, is also known as Dr. Morgan, an important member of the scientific, deep sea diving expedition, Finding Coral. They will be diving to depths of 500 meters off the British Columbia coast gathering data on corals, associated species and damage from human impacts. As part of his post doctoral research, Lance studied corals and wrote the influential "Shifting Gears" study which focused on collateral damage from commercial fishing.

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Commission Hears Final Testimony on North Coast Ocean Protection Plan

SACRAMENTO, Calif., May 14 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Today in Sacramento, the Fish and Game Commission is holding a public comment hearing on plans for a network of underwater parks, or marine protected areas (MPAs), along California's north central coast (between Half Moon Bay and Point Arena).

After today's meeting, the Fish and Game Commission is expected to make a final decision on the north central coast MPA network at an adoption hearing scheduled for August 5 in Woodside.

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Slide Show: Glimpses of Undersea Life at Nation's New Marine Monuments

Scientific American
By David Biello

With a stroke of his pen, former President George W. Bush created three new marine monuments some 2.5 times larger than the entire U.S. national park system. The ocean reserves in the remote Pacific are bigger than Texas—335,000 square miles (540,000 square kilometers) of ocean in all concentrated around U.S.-controlled islands—and "the largest conservation area ever protected anywhere on Earth," says William Chandler, vice president for government affairs at the Marine Conservation Biology Institute.

"The important lesson that Bush seemed to understand is that the ocean does have unique places that are worth protecting," he adds. "It's not just one homogenous body of water out there.

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Slide Show: Palmyra and Scientists
Slide Show: Life on the Reef
Slide Show: Fish, Birds and Other Larger Fauna

The $20M lessons of "freeing" Keiko the whale

The Seattle Times
By Sandi Doughton

Despite $20 million and the best of intentions, the killer whale who starred in the movie "Free Willy" never lived a free life.

Keiko wasn't accepted by orcas in his home waters off Iceland and had to be fed frozen fish throughout most of the seven-year effort to reclaim his wild heritage, says the first scientific review of the project.

The whale was captured young and had been held in captivity too long for him to break his ties with humans, said Malene Simon of the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources, the study's lead author.

But Simon doesn't fault environmentalists, marine-mammal experts and philanthropists for trying.

"One of the goals was to figure out if it's possible to release a captive killer whale," she said. "I just don't think Keiko was a good subject."

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Obama admin proposes major spending for fishery cap-and-trade plan

The New York Times
By ALLISON WINTER

The Obama administration is proposing significant new spending on a proposed cap-and-trade regulatory scheme for fisheries -- a major overhaul in fishery management and a bid to halt the decline of wild fish stocks.

In its fiscal 2010 budget request, the administration is asking for $18.6 million for "catch-share programs."

While that is only 2 percent of the $921 million budget proposal for the National Marine Fisheries Service, it is triple the NMFS's request for catch shares in its 2009 budget and a ninefold increase over the $2 million it allocated for catch shares in 2008.

The request indicates a major push from the administration to advance the management systems, which are still in the minority but have started to appear in fisheries across the United States since a federal moratorium expired five years ago.

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NOAA Confirms Caribbean Monk Seal Extinct

NOAA

After a five year review, NOAA’s Fisheries Service has determined that the Caribbean monk seal, which has not been seen for more than 50 years, has gone extinct—the first type of seal to go extinct from human causes.

Monk seals became easy targets for hunters while resting, birthing, or nursing their pups on the beach. Overhunting by humans led to these seals’ demise, according to NOAA biologists.

The last confirmed sighting of the seal was in 1952 in the Caribbean Sea at Seranilla Bank, between Jamaica and the Yucatán Peninsula. This was the only subtropical seal native to the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico.

"Humans left the Caribbean monk seal population unsustainable after overhunting them in the wild," said Kyle Baker, biologist for NOAA’s Fisheries Service southeast region. "Unfortunately, this lead to their demise and labels the species as the only seal to go extinct from human causes."

Caribbean monk seals were listed as endangered on March 11, 1967, under the Endangered Species Preservation Act, and relisted under the Endangered Species Act on April 10, 1979. Since then, several efforts have been made to investigate unconfirmed reports of the species in or near the Caribbean Sea, Gulf of Mexico, southern Bahamas, and Greater Antilles. These expeditions only confirmed sightings of other seal types, such as stray arctic seals.

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Scientists solve mystery of missing basking sharks

The Christain Science Monitor
by Pete Spotts

Head south, young basking shark. Way, way south. And way deep, while you’re at it.

That’s the unexpected advice the world’s second largest fish seem to be taking — at least in the Western Atlantic. To some marine scientists, the newly discovered itineraries these gentle giants follow could have significant conservation implications.

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources lists the fish as “vulnerable” to extinction. The new wrinkles in their migration patterns appear in a recent study in the journal Current Biology. The results suggest that efforts to conserve these creatures may not work if those efforts are limited to one or two ocean basins, notes Gregory Skomal, the lead scientist behind the shark-tracking project.

Other research, which focuses on basking-shark genetics, already has hinted that this approach might be needed, he adds. Now, the latest shark-tracking information gives that earlier work additional gravitas.

Until now, conventional wisdom held that tropical waters presented a barrier to basking sharks as they migrated north and south each year. As marine biologist Elliott Norse puts it during a phone chat about the results, you looked to the temperate oceans for basking sharks and to tropical oceans for whale sharks, the largest living fish.

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Abalone are treasured — nearly to extinction

The Seattle Times
By Craig Welch
Seattle Times environment reporter

The authorities popped him near the docks in Port Angeles.

On a March afternoon in 1994, a sleek fishing boat — not-so-subtly named the Abalone Made — came ashore after puttering around Freshwater Bay. The waiting cops nabbed the captain and seized his contraband: 188 specimens of a rare Puget Sound mollusk, the pinto abalone, a strange, fist-sized snail stuffed in algae-encrusted shells.

The thief would confess he'd been stealing the tasty seafood delicacies by the tens of thousands — enough to pay off his 26-foot commercial diving boat and buy a new Jeep Cherokee. The real damage wouldn't be known until much later.

At the time, Puget Sound's lone abalone species was already hurtling toward extinction. More than with any other creature in these waters, illicit harvesting may have pushed it over the edge.

Today, so few of the shellfish remain that scientists with kitchen utensils and model-train glue are trying to mate survivors in a lab. They plan this summer to transplant the creatures' offspring in the Strait of Juan de Fuca and hope that will jump-start a population nearing collapse. Similar efforts are under way in British Columbia, but it's too soon to know if the attempts will succeed.

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Photos

SA to create large marine-protected area around Prince Edwards Islands

Engineering News
By: Chanel Pringle

8th May 2009

Environmental Affairs and Tourism Minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk on Friday gazetted a proposal to create one of the world’s largest marine protected areas (MPAs) surrounding the Prince Edwards Island group, comprising Marion Island and the Prince Edwards Island in the Southern Indian Ocean.

This would also be South Africa’s first offshore MPA and followed a five-year process during which a scientific plan and draft management plan were developed, the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism (Deat) said in a statement.

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) for Nature welcomed the announcement, noting that the island group formed an important global biodiversity hot spot, which was also home to several species of marine wildlife, including albatrosses, penguins and killer whales.

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High Human Impact Ocean Areas Along U.S. West Coast Revealed

The National Science Foundation
May 11, 2009

Climate change, fishing and commercial shipping top the list of threats to the ocean off the West Coast of the United States.

"Every single spot of the ocean along the West Coast," said Ben Halpern, a marine ecologist at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) at the University of California at Santa Barbara, "is affected by 10 to 15 different human activities annually."

In a two-year study to document the way humans are affecting the oceans in this region, Halpern and colleagues overlaid data on the location and intensity of 25 human-derived sources of ecological stress, including climate change, commercial and recreational fishing, land-based sources of pollution and ocean-based commercial activities.

With the information, they produced a composite map of the status of West Coast marine ecosystems.

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Capturing Climate Change

NPR
byClaire O'Neill

When it comes to climate change, there are more questions than there are answers. How do you explain the big-picture risks of subtle changes like rising sea levels, fluctuating crop yields, and shifts in ocean currents -- and more importantly, how do you make people care? One solution: use photographs. But photographer Joshua Wolfe is convinced that, for the purpose of illustrating climate change, polar bears and penguins just won't cut it.

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Wolfe and NASA climatologist Dr. Gavin Schmidt recently published a collection of scientific essays and photographs in a book called Climate Change: Picturing the Science. The aim is to shed light on a complex problem, and to make it both accessible and important to the public. It's a compilation of scientific (but readable) essays, mostly by scientists from Columbia University's Earth Institute. And it's illustrated by not only photographs, but also diagrams and satellite images.

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UN says ghost nets hurting marine environment

China View
by Daniel Ooko

NAIROBI, May 6 (Xinhua) -- Large amounts of fishing gear lost at sea or abandoned by fishers are hurting the marine environment, impacting fish stocks through "ghost fishing" and posing a hazard to ships, a joint UN report said on Wednesday.

According to the report jointly produced by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the problem of abandoned, lost or otherwise discarded fishing gear (ALDFG) is getting worse due to the increased scale of global fishing operations and the introduction of highly durable fishing gear made of long-lasting synthetic materials.

The report estimates that abandoned, lost or discarded fishing gear in the oceans makes up around 10 percent (640,000 tonnes) of all marine litter.

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Finding Space for All in Our Crowded Seas

By Juliet Eilperin

Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 4, 2009

The ocean is getting crowded: Fishermen are competing with offshore wind projects, oil rigs along with sand miners, recreational boaters, liquefied gas tankers and fish farmers. So a growing number of groups -- including policymakers, academics, activists and industry officials -- now say it's time to divvy up space in the sea.

"We've got competition for space in the ocean, just like we have competition for space on land," said Andrew Rosenberg, a natural resources and environment professor at the University of New Hampshire who has advised Massachusetts on the issue. "How are you going to manage it? Is it the people with the most power win? Is it whoever got there first? Is it a free-for-all?"

To resolve these conflicts, a handful of states -- including Massachusetts, California and Rhode Island -- have begun essentially zoning the ocean, drawing up rules and procedures to determine which activities can take place and where. The federal government is considering adopting a similar approach, though any coherent effort would involve sorting out the role of 20 agencies that administer roughly 140 ocean-related laws.

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