New Years Resolutions for Healthier Oceans

As you come up with your own New Year's resolutions, consider some of the following from Micheal Gravitz,a friend of MCBI from Environment America (http://www.environmentamerica.org/).

10 New Years Resolutions for Healthier Oceans

1. Drive a little less, take public transportation a little more, or walk a bit farther to reduce demand for oil and gasoline for your car. It will slow ocean warming and acidification, save you money and reduce the need for more offshore drilling with all the spills and pollution oil production creates.
2. Eat only fish and shellfish that are not overfished and are sustainably caught. Skip the tuna sushi the next time you go to a Japanese restaurant. Skip restaurants that serve shark fin soup. Go to the Monterey Bay Aquarium website to download a guide to sustainable fish. Tell restaurants and stores that sell overfished fish why you aren’t buying any.
3. If you are a recreational fisherman, consider throwing back some of your legally sized catch, especially the big old fat females who reproduce at much higher rates. We need them to rebuild populations.
4. Eat less meat and chicken, saving the oceans and bays from the nutrient pollution generated by modern farming and animal raising methods or buy meat from grass fed, unconfined operations.
5. Use fewer plastic bags and pick up plastic trash in the street so it doesn’t end up in our rivers and then flow into our oceans.
6. Visit an aquarium and admire the marvelous sea life living there. Remember your local ocean or bay has many more species in the wild than you’ll see in the aquarium.
7. Go smell or look at a salt marsh, mangrove swamp, coral reef, or stand of submerged grasses. You are looking at one some of the most productive and quickly disappearing ecosystems on earth. Enjoy them while you can and work to protect them.
8. Consider supporting a local park for the ocean. Just like national parks they protect unique places and wildlife.
9. Don’t buy jewelry made with coral or tropical fish that are captured in the wild.
10. Post one of your own in the stream below and share with others.

The World's Best beaches

I Bing. Working a few blocks from Microsoft's Bing offices, it's hard not to see the bumper stickers around town. Knowing a few people there, I figured I'd give it a shot. I can't say Bing replaced Google as my search engine of choice, but it did manage to replace The New York Times as my homepage (this has NEVER happened before). Why? It's all about the picture of the day.

Today's picture is a beautiful picture of the Maldives, a place I've always wanted to go and dive. The best part about Bing's picture of the day is the neat things I learn by exploring the little boxes embedded in the image. One of these links took me to the best beaches in the world, listed in alphabetical order with full color pictures. It was a dream list of everywhere I want to go, and some places I've been lucky enough to visit. I'm a beach collector. I love beaches, I love beautiful, pristine stretches of sand alive with life and usually devoid of people. One of the most spectacular beaches I've been to was Horseshoe Bay beach in Bermuda, a beautiful curved stretch of pink sand beach on the shore of the most sparling blue waters.

What's your favorite beach, and why? Share your stories and pictures with us!

Chime In

We need your help shaping the next generation of wildlife conservation. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) is in the process of shaping their new vision for the next decade and beyond, and the agency is seeking input from interested citizens like you.

Here is a little background on why MCBI is involved in this process. MCBI first became interested in the work of the USFWS while advocating for the protection of four extraordinary marine national monuments (Papahānaumokuākea, Marianas Trench, Pacific Remote Islands, and Rose Atoll) in the Pacific Ocean. Together these monuments encompass greater than 335,000 square miles. The monuments are managed collectively or in part by the USFWS, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the State of Hawaii. These monument areas need to be considered as USFWS continues to develop their new vision.

So, take a moment to visit their site at http://www.americaswildlife.org/ and contibute your thoughts and perspectives to their new vision. Also, be sure to comment on MCBI's Vice President for Government Affairs, Bill Chandler's, blog entry.

My local fishmonger

I recently moved to Kirkland from Seattle. For those of you not familiar with the area, it's on a lake, not the Sound, and is unfortunately really far away from my favorite fish market in West Seattle. I consider myself fortunate to live in an area where I can have a favorite fish market at all. I grew up in the Midwest, where I loved going to the fish market once every other week or so with my mom, and there really was only one place to go in town. I loved checking out all of the interesting seafood there, and in fact was the first time I saw a whole salmon, or octopus, or live crab (I felt bad about cooking them until one pinched me - HARD). Here, every neighborhood has their own little spot in addition to Pike Place and down by the docks.

I've been here for a few months now, and the Safeway and Fred Meyer were fine, but weren't really measuring up to Halibut cakes at Seattle Fish Company. Then last night, while exploring a new part of town in search of a Hallmark store, I stumbled across a real fish market in my area. Unfortunately, it was closed at the time I went by on a Sunday night, but I was happy to know it was there, ready to supply me with fresh delicious local and sustainable seafood next time I stop by at a more reasonable hour. Next time I'll make sure to stop by when they're open, and I'll let you all know how it goes.

Change

Change can be difficult.

As part of the policy team at MCBI, I have seen a lot of change happen in Washington, DC. We can always bet on some type of change every two years or so. Yes, you guessed it; I am talking about changes in our legislature.

Our nation’s current Congress has a few more days to finish up their work before heading home for the holidays. One of the major decisions they must make before heading home is appropriating funds for the entire federal government. Each year, the federal government’s fiscal year ends on October 1^st. Failure to pass appropriation bills by this deadline causes a shut-down of the federal government, unless a temporary short-term funding bill (called a continuing resolution) is passed by Congress. This is the case for fiscal year 2011. Congress has passed two continuing resolutions extending funding for our federal programs, with the current continuing resolution expiring on December 18^th. So, Congress has until this date to either pass all 13 appropriation bills or pass another continuing resolution.

The House of Representatives passed a continuing resolution this week extending funds until September 30, 2010. Now it is up to the Senate to pass the continuing resolution, however the Senate is still attempting to pass an omnibus appropriations bill instead. An omnibus bill packages together several measures into one single bill, in this case all 13 appropriation bills.

Some people might ask: What’s the big deal? However, with a new more conservative Congress starting early January, the current more liberal Congress wants to ensure they make the decisions on funding.

Time will tell, but time is running out. As a conservation organization that advocates for many federal conservation programs, MCBI is anxious to see what happens. Follow along with us at http://thomas.loc.gov/home/approp/app11.html.

Sylvia Earle - NOW is the time to protect our oceans

U.N. Climate Talks Seek To Avert Damaging Failure

Cardboard versions of Statue of Liberty, Opera House, Eiffel Tower, Christ the
Redeemer, Big Ben, Great Pyramid of Giza, Angel of Independence, Taj Mahal and
Temple o Heaven are sunk by Greenpeace as climate talks are held nearby.
Photo Credit: Gerardo Garcia

By: Robert Campbell, Alister Doyle and Russell Blinch
Reutuers, December 9, 2010

The world's governments struggled on Wednesday to break a deadlock between rich and poor nations on steps to fight global warming and avert a new, damaging setback after they failed to agree a U.N. treaty last year in Copenhagen.

Several ministers warned that failure at the talks in Cancun, Mexico, could undermine faith in the ability of the United Nations' 194 member states to tackle global problems in the 21st century as power shifts toward emerging nations led by China and India.

"I think that what is at stake here is also multilateralism," said European Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard. "It's absolutely crucial that this process, which is the only one we have ... can prove that it can deliver results."

The talks in this Caribbean beach resort from November 29 to December 10, have more modest ambitions than at Copenhagen last year, but there are still yawning gaps over the future of the Kyoto Protocol for curbing greenhouse gas emissions by rich nations until 2012.

Japan, Canada and Russia say they will not extend the pact unless poorer nations also commit to emissions cuts. Developing nations insist the rich world must lead by setting deeper cuts beyond 2013 before they take on curbs.

"I believe that an ambitious, broad and balanced package is within reach," Mexican Foreign Minister Patricia Espinosa told delegates, looking tired after 10 days of talks. "That does not mean that we already have it in our grasp."

Negotiators want to set up a new fund to help developing countries combat climate change, work out ways to protect tropical forests, help poor nations adapt to climate change and agree a new mechanism to share clean technologies.

MODEST GOALS

Failure to achieve even those modest steps would be a blow after U.S. President Barack Obama and other world leaders could only manage a vague, non-binding deal in Copenhagen in 2009, when many had pinned hopes on a treaty.

"A car crash of a summit is in no one's interest," said Britain's Climate Change Secretary Chris Huhne.

Some countries linked deadlock in Cancun to Obama's failure to pass U.S. legislation to curb climate change. All other industrialized nations have already capped their emissions under the Kyoto Protocol.

"We cannot afford to be held hostage by the political backwardness of one developed country," said Tuvalu's deputy prime minister, Enele Sosene Sopoaga. "This is life and death, a survival issue for Tuvalu," he said of rising sea levels.

Confidence in the U.N. talks has already been hit by Copenhagen, which agreed only a non-binding deal to limit a rise in average world temperatures to below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 F) above pre-industrial times.

Without success in Cancun, faith in the seemingly endless U.N. talks, which require unanimous support for any accords, could wither away.

"I think the U.N. process has real problems, potentially fatal," said Robert Stavins of Harvard University. "Anything under the United Nations tends to polarise developing and industrialized countries."

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged progress toward working out how to raise $100 billion a year in aid from 2020, promised under a 140-nation deal in Copenhagen to help poor nations combat global warming.

"It is not a panacea for the climate problem, but it is crucial for building trust," he said. Draft U.N. texts circulating in Cancun give options both of $100 billion, and a far higher 1.5 percent of rich nations' gross domestic product.

Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg warned developing nations against ignoring the Copenhagen Accord and demanding more. There were risks that some rich nations, facing austerity at home, might simply respond by offering less, he said.

The ABC's

I just got back from a trip to the ABC islands on a Holland America Line cruise. It was amazing. The diving in Bonaire was some of the best I've ever seen. The diversity of life was astounding, I've never seen anything quite like it in the Caribbean. There was an occasional bleached coral hear and there, but the reefs were remarkably healthy, especially when compared to some of the other island reefs in the region.

The beautiful dive sites of Bonaire and Klein Bonaire proved to me that marine protected areas work. Bonaire created one of the first marine protected areas in the Caribbean, protecting nearly all of their reefs from any kind of fishing.The small island relies on the income generated from dive tourism, and is very serious about protecting their reefs so people will keep on coming back. It's rumored that if you show up with a spear gun, they confiscate the gun and send you on the first plane off the island. Enforcement is real and has teeth. Dive shops are terrified someone will do something stupid and their license will be in jeopardy. There's even an entrance fee to go diving, I had to buy a $10 parks pass to go diving in the marine park, and all of that money goes back into protecting the reefs. I was glad to pay it. The dive masters were adamant that we keep our receipts with us on the boat since enforcement officers often come around to check. 

Did I mention how amazing the diving was? It was worth it. It was the most I've ever spent to go diving, but it was worth every penny.

I had a bunch of dive buddies on the cruise, and it wasn't everyone's favorite place, since there were other places that had more big fish. Many of those places were really depressing though. Coral was dead or dying. Bleached coral was everywhere, and not just at the top of the reef near the surface. Algae was taking over. One of the places I dove clearly was once a beautiful reef, and not so long ago, but was a rubble and algae field when I showed up. A quick look on the beach gave a good indication why: little streams of runoff were coming down off the beach every couple hundred meters from the streets and city on shore. It wasn't a pretty sight. Some of the people I went with had been there 3 years ago and said it was so much nicer. Millions of years to build a coral reef and only a few short years to destroy it.

I hear that this year is one of the worst years for coral bleaching ever. I believe it. I snorkeled or dove on more than 8 islands in 2 weeks, and not one reef was free of bleached coral.

Here's hopping a few more islands in the Caribbean get serious about marine protected areas, so that a few years from now, there's more diving like the diving in Bonaire. 

'No Fish Left Behind' Approach Leaves Earth With Nowhere Left to Fish, Study Finds

A new study finds that Earth has run out of room to expand fisheries.
Photo Credit: iStockphoto/Alexander Klemm

Science Daily, December 3, 2010

Earth has run out of room to expand fisheries, according to a new study led by University of British Columbia researchers that charts the systematic expansion of industrialized fisheries.

In collaboration with the National Geographic Society and published in the online journal PLoS ONE, the study is the first to measure the spatial expansion of global fisheries. It reveals that fisheries expanded at a rate of one million sq. kilometres per year from the 1950s to the end of the 1970s. The rate of expansion more than tripled in the 1980s and early 1990s -- to roughly the size of Brazil's Amazon rain forest every year.

Between 1950 and 2005, the spatial expansion of fisheries started from the coastal waters off the North Atlantic and Northwest Pacific, reached into the high seas and southward into the Southern Hemisphere at a rate of almost one degree latitude per year. It was accompanied by a nearly five-fold increase in catch, from 19 million tonnes in 1950, to a peak of 90 million tonnes in the late 1980s, and dropping to 87 million tonnes in 2005, according to the study.

"The decline of spatial expansion since the mid-1990s is not a reflection of successful conservation efforts but rather an indication that we've simply run out of room to expand fisheries," says Wilf Swartz, a PhD student at UBC Fisheries Centre and lead author of the study.

Meanwhile, less than 0.1 per cent of the world's oceans are designated as marine reserves that are closed to fishing.

"If people in Japan, Europe, and North America find themselves wondering how the markets are still filled with seafood, it's in part because spatial expansion and trade makes up for overfishing and 'fishing down the food chain' in local waters," says Swartz.

"While many people still view fisheries as a romantic, localized activity pursued by rugged individuals, the reality is that for decades now, numerous fisheries are corporate operations that take a mostly no-fish-left-behind approach to our oceans until there's nowhere left to go," says Daniel Pauly, co-author and principal investigator of the Sea Around Us Project at UBC Fisheries Centre.

The researchers used a newly created measurement for the ecological footprint of fisheries that allows them to determine the combined impact of all marine fisheries and their rate of expansion. Known as SeafoodPrint, it quantifies the amount of "primary production" -- the microscopic organisms and plants at the bottom of the marine food chain -- required to produce any given amount of fish.

"This method allows us to truly gauge the impact of catching all types of fish, from large predators such as bluefin tuna to small fish such as sardines and anchovies," says Pauly. "Because not all fish are created equal and neither is their impact on the sustainability of our ocean."

"The era of great expansion has come to an end, and maintaining the current supply of wild fish sustainably is not possible," says co-author and National Geographic Ocean Fellow Enric Sala. "The sooner we come to grips with it -- similar to how society has recognized the effects of climate change -- the sooner we can stop the downward spiral by creating stricter fisheries regulations and more marine reserves."

The University of British Columbia Fisheries Centre, in the College for Interdisciplinary Studies, undertakes research to restore fisheries, conserve aquatic life and rebuild ecosystems. It promotes multidisciplinary study of aquatic ecosystems and broad-based collaboration with maritime communities, government, NGOs and other partners. The UBC Fisheries Centre is recognized globally for its innovative and enterprising research, with its academics winning many accolades and awards. The Sea Around Us Project is funded in part by the Pew Environment Group. For more information, visit www.fisheries.ubc.ca and www.cfis.ubc.ca.

The National Geographic Society, the Waitt Foundation, the SEAlliance along with strategic government, private, academic and conservation partners including the TEDPrize, Google and IUCN, are beginning an action-oriented marine conservation initiative under the banner of "Mission Blue" that will increase global awareness of the urgent ocean crisis and help to reverse the decline in ocean health by inspiring people to care and act; reducing the impact of fishing; and promoting the creation of marine protected areas. For more information, go to www.iamtheocean.org.

Many coastal wetlands likely to disappear this century

The marshes of Plum Island Estuary are among those predicted by scientists
to submerge during the next century under conservative projections of sea-level rise.
Photo Credit: USGS

By: Glenn Guntenspergen
Eureak Alert, December 2, 2010

Many coastal wetlands worldwide — including several on the U.S. Atlantic coast — may be more sensitive than previously thought to climate change and sea-level rise projections for the 21st century.

U.S. Geological Survey scientists made this conclusion from an international research modeling effort published today in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, a publication of the American Geophysical Union. Scientists identified conditions under which coastal wetlands could survive rising sea level.

Using a rapid sea-level rise scenario, most coastal wetlands worldwide will disappear near the end of the 21st century. In contrast, under the slow sea-level rise projection, wetlands with low sediment availability and low tidal ranges are vulnerable and may drown. However, in the slow sea-level rise projection, wetlands with higher sediment availability would be more likely to survive.

Several coastal marshes along the east coast of the United States, for example, have limited sediment supplies and are likely to disappear this century. Vulnerable east coast marshes include the Plum Island Estuary (the largest estuary in New England) and coastal wetlands in North Carolina's Albemarle-Pamlico Sound (the second-largest estuary in the United States).

"Accurate information about the adaptability of coastal wetlands to accelerations in sea-level rise, such as that reported in this study, helps narrow the uncertainties associated with their disappearance," said USGS scientist Glenn Guntenspergen, an author of this report. "This research is essential for allowing decision makers to best manage local tradeoffs between economic and conservation concerns."

"Previous assessments of coastal wetland responses to sea-level rise have been constrained because they did not consider the ability of wetlands to naturally modify their physical environment for adaptation," said USGS scientist Matt Kirwan, an author of this report. "Failure to incorporate the interactions of inundation, vegetation and sedimentation in wetlands limits the usefulness of past assessments."

USGS scientists specifically identified the sediment levels and tidal ranges (difference between high and low tide) necessary for marshes to survive sea-level rise. As water floods a wetland and flows through its vegetation, sediment is carried from upstream and deposited on the wetland's surface, allowing it to gain elevation. High tidal ranges allow for better sediment delivery, and the higher sediment concentrations in the water allow wetlands to build more elevation.

Coastal wetlands provide critical services such as absorbing energy from coastal storms, preserving shorelines, protecting human populations and infrastructure, supporting commercial seafood harvests, absorbing pollutants and serving as critical habitat for migratory bird populations. These resources and services will be threatened as sea-level rise inundates wetlands.

The rapid sea-level rise scenario used as the basis for this study is accredited to Stefan Rahmstorf at Potsdam University, one of the contributing authors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report. The slow sea-level rise projection is from the A1B scenario of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report.

Scientists fear mass extinction as oceans choke

Low oxygen levels, which have been found along south-eastern
Australia, are known to increase stress on fish.
Photo Credit: Reuters/Ho New

By: Amy Simmons
ABC News (Australia), December 1, 2010

Australian scientists fear the planet is on the brink of another mass extinction as ocean dead zones continue to grow in size and number. More than 400 ocean dead zones - areas so low in oxygen that sea life cannot survive - have been reported by oceanographers around the world between 2000 and 2008. That is compared with 300 in the 1990s and 120 in the 1980s.

Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (CoECRS) and from the University of Queensland, says there is growing evidence that declining oxygen levels in the ocean have played a major role in at least four of the planet's five mass extinctions.

"Until recently the best hypothesis for them was a meteor strike," he said."So 65 million years ago they've got very good evidence of the cretaceous exctinction event."But with the four other mass extinction events, one of the best explanations now is that these periods were preceded by an increase of volcanic activity, and that volcanic activity caused a change in ocean circulation.

"Just as we are seeing at a smaller scale today, huge parts of the ocean became anoxic at depth. "The consequence of that is that you had increased amounts of rotten egg gas, hydrogen sulfide, going up into the atmosphere, and that is thought to be what may have caused some of these other extinction events."

Professor Hoegh-Guldberg says up to 90 per cent of life has perished in previous mass extinctions and that a similar loss of life could occur in the next 100 years. "We're already having another mass extinction due to humans wiping out life and so on, but it looks like it could get as high as those previous events," he said. "So it's the combination of this alteration to coastlines, climate change and everything, that has a lot of us worried we are going to drive the sixth extinction event and it will happen over the next 100 years because we are interfering with the things that keep species alive.

"Ocean ecosystems are in a lot of trouble and it all bears the hallmarks of human interference. We are changing the way the Earth's oceans work, shifting them to entirely new states, which we have not seen before."

He says while it is impossible to predict the future, in a century from now the world will be vastly different. "A world without the Great Barrier Reef, where you don't have the pleasure of going to see wild places any more," he said. "We might be able to struggle on with much lower population densities, but ultimately it won't be the world we have today.

"The idea of walking in the Daintree will be a forgotten concept because these changes have occurred."

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