An oil tanker in Rio de Janeiro’s Guanabara Bay. Just 250 km from the coast lie the country’s presalt oil reserves, the wealth of the so-called Blue Amazon. Credit: Fabíola Ortiz/IPS

By Fabíola Ortiz
RIO DE JANEIRO, May 2 2015 (IPS)

The Atlantic ocean is Brazil’s last frontier to the east. But the full extent of its biodiversity is still unknown, and scientific research and conservation measures are lagging compared to the pace of exploitation of resources such as oil.

The Blue Amazon, as Brazil’s authorities have begun to call this marine area rich in both biodiversity and energy resources, is similar in extension to the country’s rainforest – nearly half the size of the national territory.

And 95 percent of the exports of Latin America’s giant leave from that coast, according to official figures.

Brazil’s continental shelf holds 90 and 77 percent of the country’s proven oil and gas reserves, respectively. But the big challenge is to protect the wealth of the Blue Amazon along 8,500 km of shoreline.

“We haven’t fully grasped just how immense that territory is,” Eurico de Lima Figueiredo, the director of the Strategic Studies Institute at the Fluminense Federal University, told Tierramérica. “To give you an idea, the Blue Amazon is comparable in size to India.”

“But we aren’t prepared to take care of it; it isn’t yet considered a political and economic priority for the country,” the political scientist said.

Figueiredo, who presided over the Brazilian Association of Defence Studies (ABED) from 2008 to 2010, said the Blue Amazon is a term referring to the territories covered by new treaties on international maritime law.

Brazil is one of the 10 countries in the world with the largest continental shelves, in an ocean like the Atlantic which conceals untold natural wealth that offers enormous economic, scientific and technological potential.

According to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, a country’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) comprises an area which extends to 200 nautical miles (370 kilometres) off the coast.

Official map of part of the Blue Amazon, off the east coast of Brazil, where conservation and research are lagging behind economic development, mainly by the oil industry. Credit: Government of Brazil

Brazil’s EEZ was originally 3.5 million sq km. But it later claimed another 963,000 sq km, which according to different national institutions – including scientific bodies – represents the natural extension of the continental shelf.

The U.N. Convention’s Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (CLCS), made up of 148 countries, has so far sided with Brazil, adding 771,000 sq km to its EEZ. The decision on the rest is still pending.

Brazil’s demand, at least with respect to the expansion of the continental shelf granted so far, meets the requisites of the U.N. Convention and grants the country the power to exploit the resources in the expanded area and gives it the responsibility of managing it.

The recognition of Brazil’s claim, although only partial, has annoyed some neighbour countries, because of the huge economic benefits offered by the additional continental shelf it was granted.

Figueiredo said the challenge now is to monitor and protect the continental shelf. “We don’t have full sovereignty with regard to the maritime territory. Brazilian society is unaware of the important need to protect the Blue Amazon. There are enormous shortcomings, with respect to our needs.”

In 2005 a plan was approved to upgrade the navy with an estimated investment of 30 billion dollars until 2025. Defending a country is a complex task, said Figueiredo, because it involves a number of dimensions: military, economic, technical and scientific.

But scientific research in Brazil’s marine territory is currently far outpaced, he said, by the exploitation of resources such as the oil located 250 km off the coast and 7,000 metres below the ocean surface, beneath a thick layer of salt, sand and rocks.

Development of the so-called presalt reserves, discovered a decade ago, would make Brazil one of the 10 countries with the largest oil reserves in the world. And they already provide 27 percent of the more than three million barrels a day of oil and gas equivalent produced by this country.

“That region belongs to Brazil, the country has assumed commitments with the U.N. to monitor and study the living and non-living resources like oil, gas and minerals. If we don’t preserve it, we’ll lose this great treasure,” oceanographer David Zee, at the Rio de Janeiro State University, told Tierramérica.

In his opinion, Brazil is far from living up to the commitments assumed with the international community. “We have duties – we have to meet the U.N.’s scientific research requirements. We have to take greater care of our marine resources,” he said.

Apart from the oil and gas wealth, a large part of the EEZ borders the Mata Atlántica ecosystem, which extends along 17 of Brazil’s 26 states, 14 of which are along the coast.

The environmental organisation SOS Mata Atlántica explains that coastal and marine areas represent the ecological transition between land and marine ecosystems like mangroves, dunes, cliffs, bays, estuaries, coral reefs and beaches. The biological wealth of these ecosystems turns marine areas into enormous natural nurseries.

And the convergence of cold water from the South with warm water from the Northeast contributes to biological diversity and provides shelter for numerous species of flora and fauna.

But only 1.5 percent of Brazil’s maritime territory is under any form of legal protection, Mata Atlantica reports.

Thus, ensuring national sovereignty over jurisdictional waters is still an enormous political and military challenge. In March, some 15,000 naval troops and 250 Navy boats and aircraft took part in Operation Blue Amazon, the biggest of its kind carried out so far in Brazilian waters.

“This was an opportunity to train and guarantee the security of navigation, crack down on drug trafficking, and patrol the sea. The mission involved the entire territorial extension of Brazil,” Lieutenant Commander Thales da Silva Barroso Alves, commander of one of the three offshore patrol vessels that Brazil has to monitor the Blue Amazon, told IPS.

These vessels control the extensive coast in “areas of great economic interest, exploitation and accidents. Illegal fishing is also a recurrent issue,” he said.

The officer argued that the extraction of marine resources should be carried out in a “conscious, sustainable fashion,” with the aim of preserving biodiversity.

Figueiredo, the political scientist, concurs. “Our ability to defend the Blue Amazon depends on our capacity to develop technical-scientific means of protecting biodiversity in such an extensive area,” he said.

This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

A boy and his mother watch through glass as a green sea turtle receives treatment at the Karumbé rehabilitation center. Credit: Victoria Rodríguez/IPS

By Inés Acosta
MONTEVIDEO, Jul 24 2012 (IPS)

A record number of sea turtles are turning up on Uruguayan beaches along the Atlantic Ocean and Río de la Plata this Southern hemisphere winter, suffering from cold shock and hypothermia.

While specialists are still investigating the causes, they speculate that an abrupt change in sea temperature may have prevented the green sea turtles (Chelonia mydas) from migrating to warmer waters.

At press time, close to 100 turtles found on the beaches of Uruguay’s southern and eastern coast had been taken to marine rescue centers.

The green sea turtle, classified as an endangered species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), normally grows and develops on the coasts of Uruguay and then migrates to Brazil in the winter in search of warmer waters.

The turtles are commonly spotted on the rocky points along the Atlantic coast in the departments (provinces) of Rocha and Maldonado, although they can also be found on the beaches along the Rio de La Plata or River Plate, a wide estuary that flows into the sea.

Adult specimens can grow to up to a meter and a half in length and weigh up to 500 kilograms. But the green sea turtles that visit the coasts of Uruguay are juveniles, measuring around 40 centimeters in length.

“There have been records in the past of beached turtles due to cold winter temperatures, but the average was around 10 turtles during the entire winter,” Andrés Estrades, a specialist at the Karumbé sea turtle center, told Tierramérica *. “We had never reached such a high number before, and the cold weather has only just begun.”

Karumbé (which means turtle in the Guaraní indigenous language) was born in 1999 as an initiative undertaken by a group of young researchers, students, biologists and veterinarians, aimed at the conservation of Uruguay’s marine species, with a special emphasis on the study of turtles.

A Karumbé turtle rehabilitation center and a small museum are located on the grounds of the Villa Dolores Zoo in Montevideo.

So far this winter, the center has taken in 32 rescued turtles, young specimens between the ages of two and 12 years and weighing between four and 15 kilograms, said Estrades. A team of Karumbé volunteers is working hard to diagnose their condition and help them to recover.

The rest of the roughly 100 rescued turtles have been distributed among similar centers in Rocha and Maldonado, and around 20 have been discovered dead.

According to Karumbé, an average of 120 sea turtles are found beached in Uruguay every year. Half of them have swallowed plastic objects, 15 percent have become entangled in garbage or fishing nets, another 15 percent are suffering from cold shock, and the remainder are victims of different diseases.

Karumbé has launched an information and awareness campaign on Facebook, in order to explain to the public what they should do if they find a sea turtle stranded on the beach. The main recommendations are to not return the turtles to the water, to keep them warm with blankets or warm water, and to contact the specialists.

On Jul. 16, 50 specimens had appeared in a period of just three days. At the Karumbé center in Montevideo, two foreign students were working as volunteers alongside veterinarian Virginia Ferrando to treat them.

The pools and tanks could not hold the large number of turtles arriving, and the heaters were also unable to keep the water temperature high enough. Visitors to the zoo – of whom there were many, since it was the second week of school vacation – were met with the surprise of a rehabilitation center full of action and overflowing with turtles.

Two youngsters who had come to deliver a rescued turtle observed the process: first the turtle was placed in a pool of warm water, and then it was examined in order to make a diagnosis.

“Some of them are already doing quite well and with a bit of liquid feed and heat they can fully recover,” Ferrando told Tierramérica. The turtles are also being studied to determine if they had contracted some sort of disease before they were beached.

“Most of them appear to be in good physical condition. We have 32 at the center, and half of them are floating, which means they have some other problem, like pneumonia, a viral infection or plastic in their intestines. We are assessing them, and this will require more work,” said Estrades.

The turtles will have to remain at Karumbé until spring, when the weather conditions are adequate for them to be released back into the sea.

“Every turtle we release is an event. We would like to acquire some satellite monitoring equipment to see if we are doing things right,” he added.

Karumbé, which is represented on the board of directors of the International Sea Turtle Society, is participating in a doctoral thesis study through an agreement with the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Gustavo Martinez, a Brazilian researcher, is studying the year-round permanence and seasonal migration of sea turtles on the Uruguayan coasts and their movements to Brazil.

“Many of them migrate, but others stay,” explained Estrades.

One hypothesis regarding the large number of beached turtles this year is that the specimens that had travelled farther inland along the Río de Plata did not make it back to the ocean in time, “and when the water temperature dropped suddenly, they went into cold shock,” he said.

The sea water temperature is currently 10 degrees. While this is not a record low temperature, it is below the average for this time of year, which is 12 degrees. According to Estrades, this difference could be fatal for some turtles.

“We are seeing changing trends in maximum and minimum temperatures, possibly due to climate change. We had a rather warm autumn, and winter arrived very suddenly. This might have disoriented the turtles,” he said.

The specialists have also observed “a sort of tropicalization of the Uruguayan coast: the water is becoming increasingly warmer, and animals that are unusual for this region are appearing.” One example is the hawksbill sea turtle, for which there were no previous records of sightings in Uruguayan waters.

The hawksbill sea turtle commonly inhabits the warmer waters off the coast of Brazil, but in 2007, a specimen turned up in Uruguay, followed by a number of others in the following years. In 2011, six of them were found, “all of them very weak and full of plastic,” said Estrades.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.