By Enrique Gili
BAJA, May 18 2009 (IPS)

Driving through Tijuana and long stretches of northern Baja, conservationist Zach Plopper loves his job but hates the commute.

Zach Plopper confers with Wildcoast's wildlands conservation programme manager Saul Alarcon Farfan over plotting points of interest on their tablet PC. Credit: Jonathan Eng/IPS

Plopper’s work involves multi-day expeditions mapping Baja’s as yet undeveloped mid coastline that take him from his headquarters in Imperial Beach, California through Tijuana’s gritty slums to the relative tranquility of fishing villages several hundred kilometres to the south.

In doing so, he passes from one "hotspot" to another, transitioning from an embattled city at the centre of Mexico’s drug war to Baja’s renowned ecosystem. Offering a roadside view of a region in trouble, he explains, "In Baja you never know what’s coming down the road."

Baja, Mexico’s 1,300-kilometre-plus peninsula is home to wintering gray whales, productive fishing grounds and breathtaking desert landscapes. It is also contested territory in a drug war that has taken the lives of thousands of people in Mexico, affecting many aspects of daily life such as where and when to travel.

Venturing south from California involves a draining commute that entails skirting a Mexican city under siege, passing abandoned cars and squatter camps in the presence of security forces, all within several minutes driving distance of the U.S.-Mexico border.

According to Plopper, the rules of the road when traveling in Baja are simple. Never drive at night, use the toll road whenever possible, and make sure WildCoast staff are informed of your whereabouts.

"It’s the Wild West," says Plopper, fretting over the boom and bust mentality and sense of lawlessness pervading the border region. "You’re never quite sure who you’re dealing with."

Neither do the federales. At designated checkpoints, soldiers armed with assault weapons make mandatory stops of northbound drivers. An armoured pursuit vehicle ensures they comply. Faces covered, a squad of nameless soldiers bearing no battalion insignias or ID ask drivers questions.

Traveling through Baja, it’s not uncommon to come across uniformed young men with blank stares. Sent on a mission to interdict the drug trade, the frequency of their stops has increased in recent years due to heightened security. "I’ve never had a problem with the federales," notes Plopper.

On the western fringe of the continent, WildCoast operates in the regional centre of a contested drug trafficking corridor. A river of drugs flows north across the 3,200-kilometre U.S.-Mexico land border, with an estimated 290 metric tonnes of cocaine smuggled each year into the United States, home to one of the largest drug markets in the world.

In 2007, Mexico’s then newly elected president, Felipe Calderon, vowed to wrest control of the border states from the powerful drug cartels destabilising the region.

In a public display of force, Calderon put soldiers onto the streets of border cities of Juarez and Tijuana, taking administrative control over police departments long thought to be compromised by drug traffickers. Thousands of additional troops and federal police officers were deployed elsewhere throughout the country.

The killings only intensified, as drug cartels fought amongst themselves for access to U.S. markets, and fighting with security forces escalated. According to reported accounts, the ensuing conflict has claimed an estimated 7,000 lives.

Given the cloak of secrecy under which security forces operate, the resulting bloodshed and mayhem has weaved its way into hair-raising accounts passed from one traveler to the next. The chaos ranges from daytime massacres of suspected drug rivals to drug-related reprisals targeting officers.

Conservation work often takes place in rough, remote and isolated locations. According to a new study published in the journal Conservation Biology, 80 percent of global conflicts occurring over the past 50 years have been in the world’s most biologically rich and endangered places.

Dr. Thor Hanson, a conservation biologist who co-authored the report along with members of Conservation International’s staff, asserts that poverty and conflict go hand in hand. Biological "hotspots" also happen to be home to 1.2 billion of the world’s poorest people.

The study notes that territory extending from Mexico almost to the tip of Latin America has been marred by similar violence, offering a who’s who of dirty wars and guerrilla insurgencies. Mexico’s current crisis is not without historical precedent when compared to Colombia’s vertiginous, verdant interior that has been both politically hot and biologically diverse.

Dr. Hanson is part of an emerging field of study called "warfare ecology" studying the net effects of conflict on ecosystems. Working in Uganda with mountain gorillas, he saw firsthand how "fragile conservation efforts can be in the face of political instability".

Although correlation does not equate with causation, the phenomena is worth investigating. In preserving biological diversity around the world, conservationists are going to have to consider the context in which they operate, he surmised.

Based on Hanson’s benchmark of one thousand deaths per year, Mexico meets the criteria of a regional conflict. But the drug war is less incendiary than ethnic hatred, or as prosaic as a territorial dispute.

Paradoxically, Tijuana’s close proximity to the U.S. border has made it a popular stomping ground and jumping off point for all manner of illicit thrills that in recent years have become increasingly lucrative and more dangerous.

According to a U.S. Government Accountability Office report published in 2007, drug cartels net as much as 23 billion dollars in revenue each year, a figure comparable to the profits enjoyed by the largest Fortune 500 companies.

The turbulence of Tijuana ripples throughout Baja. Adventurous naturalists and avid surfers no longer come here. Presiding over half-constructed villas and real-estate development deals gone sour, even a 75-foot Jesus statue looks lonely.

Driving along a deserted highway, Plopper laments the losses he’s witnessed. "First came the Spanish missionaries, then the miners, and now the land speculators, they all went bust," says Plopper.

Most Mexican residents and activists invested in preserving Mexico’s rich natural heritage hope the cartels meet with similar success.

*This story is part of a series of features on sustainable development by IPS and IFEJ – International Federation of Environmental Journalists ­- for Communicators for Sustainable Development (www.complusalliance.org ).

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By Malini Shankar
BANGALORE, May 18 2009 (IPS)

A rare species of bats is in danger in western India because it has been denied Protected Area status.

The Barapete cave mouth. Credit: Malini Shankar/IPS

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has declared the species critically endangered in 2001, 2006 and 2007.

The government of the Karnataka state in south-western India has not yet declared the cave ecosystem a Protected Area. Such a declaration would mean upgrading the policing, and limit mining and construction. It would in effect prevent damming of the local Mahadayi River that the state government is considering.

"Mining around the cave and nearby regions, and the Mahadayi Dam construction which would submerge the cave in the reservoir of the dam, are the greatest threats to this fragile ecosystem," says zoologist Vijay Kupwade.

The bat would be most threatened. "Nothing is more fascinating than a rarity," J.C. Daniel from the Bombay Natural History Society told IPS. "This insectivorous bat is perhaps one of the rarest of the world's mammals."

First discovered in 1913, these rare inhabitants of the Barpete Caves, about 600 km north-west of Bangalore were found roosting in the crevices of the roof of the caves, and within its holes and domes. The species was also found in 2000 in Chep district in Cambodia, close to the border with Laos and Thailand.

A 2003 study by Kupwade figured there were between 167 and 185 of these bats within the cave ecosystem that is about 45 metres long, between 20 and 24 metres wide and about six metres high.

"They do not emerge out of the cave en masse at dusk like other bats," says Kupwade. "Initially before sunset three to six bats circle in the cave to assess the light conditions. After a few minutes of recce they inform other bats through ultra-sound about safety."

The very caves that house these bats are unique. They are found in the fragile Shola ecosystem in a five-square kilometre area.

The Sholas around the caves support tigers, black panthers, leopards, black bears, deer, elephants, cobras and pythons, among other wild life. But it is the bats that are in immediate danger of extinction.

The forest office has made a strong plea for preservation. "The area in the radius of five kilometres surrounding the Bhimgad/Barpete caves where Wroughton's Free Tailed Bats are found, shall not be disturbed either by way of any extraction of timber, firewood or minor forest produce or by way of any plantation being introduced in the area," the forest office said in an inspection report last year. "Special care has to be taken to prevent forest fire in the area:"

"This species is threatened by disturbance and destruction of roosting sites and persecution by local people," the IUCN says. "It is used for subsistence food and medicinal purposes in parts of its range. There is a need to protect important roosting sites for this species throughout its range. Additional field surveys, studies into distribution, abundance, breeding biology, general ecology and population monitoring of this species are needed."

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By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, May 15 2009 (IPS)

Ocean acidification offers the clearest evidence of dangers of climate change. And yet the indisputable fact that burning fossil fuels is slowly turning the oceans into an acid bath has been largely ignored by industrialised countries and their climate treaty negotiators, concluded delegates from 76 countries at the World Oceans Conference in Manado, Indonesia.

Oceans and coastal areas must be on the agenda at the crucial climate talks in Copenhagen in December, they wrote in a declaration. “We must come to the rescue of the oceans,” declared Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono at the opening of high-level government talks on Thursday in the northern city of Manado.

It is fair to say most international climate negotiators aren’t aware of the impacts of climate change on the oceans, said Carl Gustaf Lundin, head of the IUCN’s Global Marine Programme.

“Very few people understand that carbon emissions are making the oceans acidic,” Lundin told IPS.

Over the past 150 years, burning of fossil fuels and deforestation has put more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The oceans have absorbed more than one-third – about 130 billion tonnes – of those human emissions and have become 30 percent more acidic as the extra CO2 combines with carbonate ions in seawater, forming carbonic acid.

Each day, the oceans absorb 30 million tonnes of CO2, gradually and inevitably increasing their acidity. There is no controversy about this basic chemistry.

This increased acidity is affecting coral reefs and shell-forming organisms like clams and many types of plankton. Newer research suggests that it may also affect basic physiological functions for many types of marine organisms.

Rising levels of acidity may also increase the size of oceanic dead zones – areas that have too little oxygen to support life, according to research published in Science magazine Apr. 19. Dead zones, such as the one in Gulf of Mexico, have dramatically increased in number and size around the world in the past three decades.

“Climate change will have a huge number of very serious impacts on the oceans,” said Duncan Currie of Greenpeace New Zealand.

“What we do in the next 10 to 15 years (regarding carbon emissions) will affect the oceans for thousands of years,” Currie said in an interview from Manado.

And that is why Indonesia, a country made up of 17,508 islands, is hosting the May 11-15 conference and wants to send a message to Copenhagen about the impacts of climate change on the oceans, he said.

The Copenhagen talks under the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are expected to result in a new agreement on reducing carbon emissions by a set target for all developed nations by 2012, when the Kyoto Protocol expires.

Participants and experts at the conference spoke about tropical forests receiving far more attention while there was little awareness in the global community about the broad impacts of climate change on the oceans.

There is also little awareness that coastal mangrove forests soak up large amounts of carbon from the atmosphere, protect shorelines and are “fish nurseries”. Protection of mangroves is essential and restoring coastal forests are “win-win” situations that must be encouraged and supported under a future climate agreement, Currie said.

“The role of coastal mangrove forests has not been part of the climate debate at the climate meetings,” agreed Lundin.

Some coastal plants can increase their size by 10 percent per day, a rapid growth rate that exceeds land-based plants. “What are the benefits of CO2 capture and sequestration? I think coastal species offer an excellent opportunity to capture carbon,” he said.

IUCN is working with experts to collect data on this and will soon be able to quantify the carbon capture potential, he said. “Right now no one is talking about this,” Lundin added.

There is also little awareness that oceans and coastal zones have been in steep decline for the past few decades.

At the conference, the international conservation group World Wildlife Fund released a report showing that 40 percent of reefs and mangrove in the Coral Triangle have already been lost. This 5.7 million sq km area, considered the Amazon of the ocean with 75 percent of all coral species, spans eastern Indonesia, parts of Malaysia, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Timor Leste and the Solomon Islands.

The 40 percent is probably an underestimate, said the report’s chief author, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, a coral biologist at the University of Queensland, Australia. Much of that decline is not due to climate change but result from pollution, overfishing and damage done to coastal regions such as chopping down mangrove forests and inappropriate coastal development.

“…These are destroying the productivity of ocean, which is plummeting right now,” Hoegh-Guldberg said according to media reports. And since oceans absorb about 40 percent of carbon emissions, damaging that enormous carbon capture system will make climate change far worse.

“To preserve ocean health we’re calling for 40 percent of the oceans to be protected,” Greenpeace’s Currie said.

Greenpeace is campaigning for a global network of fully protected marine reserves – off limits to all fishing – that would include large areas in the high seas where there is little management. Daniel Pauly, a renowned fisheries expert at the University of British Columbia, has called for protection for at least 60 percent of the oceans.

Lundin says the IUCN also wants large areas of the oceans protected to help restore the health of fish stocks, protect ocean life from habitat destruction and collapse so that they can better withstand climate change.

But creating Marine Protected Areas is not enough – ecosystem-based management of these and even larger regions is needed. Current fisheries management on a species by species basis has been a disaster, leading to collapse of fish stocks like tuna, Lundin said.

Major reforms are needed, among them the creation of regional oceans management organisations based on ecosystem principles, he said.

But when it comes to the impacts of climate change on the oceans, the only solution is a global agreement to sharply reduce emissions. While Lundin is optimistic there will be a deal in Copenhagen, he acknowledges some countries will put their self-interest first and foremost, and the global recession will make it difficult for politicians to agree to significant emissions cuts.

“We have to realistic in our expectations about the emission targets that will be agreed to,” he said.

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By Fabiana Frayssinet
RIO DE JANEIRO, May 14 2009 (IPS)

Celebrities and environmental organisations held a vigil at the Brazilian Congress in an effort to block passage of a bill that they say could cause an even greater “environmental disaster” in the Amazon jungle.

The vigil, which began Wednesday and ended Thursday morning, was held inside the Senate chamber in Brasilia, the capital. Organised by the Movimento Amazônia Para Sempre (Amazonia Forever Movement), it was led by actress Christiane Torloni and other actors like Victor Fasano and Marcos Palmeira.

According to the movement, the bloc of legislators representing agribusiness interests in Congress is promoting reforms that would “weaken environmental legislation.”

One example is a provisional measure that would grant farmers title to up to 1,500 hectares of illegally occupied land in the Amazon jungle.

The original purpose of Provisional Measure 458/2009, introduced by the government, was to regularise the tenure of land occupied before 2004, in exchange for the fulfilment of a number of requirements, such as replanting deforested areas and limiting further logging.

But amendments introduced by lawmakers in the lower house of Congress, like Asdrúbal Bentes of the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB), allied with the government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, seek to eliminate these conditions.

Environment Minister Carlos Minc, who took part in the vigil, said that if these amendments were passed they could usher in an “environmental disaster,” in the form of rampant deforestation.

The government would be seen as “giving land titles away with one hand and a chainsaw with the other,” the minister told the press.

If the amended law is approved, the administration fears that the Amazon Fund, launched to receive international donations for protecting the Amazon rainforest, would be threatened.

Mario Menezes, assistant director of Friends of the Earth-Brazilian Amazon, told IPS there was a “great risk” that the bill in question could benefit “grilheiros,” illegal settlers who occupied public land “illicitly and often violently.”

The government argument that the bill will benefit small farmers is “not true,” according to Menezes. Large “grilheiros” who occupied, for instance, 15,000 hectares can easily comply with the letter of the law by registering parcels of 1,500 hectares in the name of third parties, and end up occupying even larger stretches of land.

The Brazilian Artists’ Open Letter on Amazon Deforestation, which will be presented to the legislative committees discussing the amendments to the bill, calls attention to the latest statistics on the deforestation of the Amazon.

“We have just celebrated the smallest Amazon rainforest deforestation rate of the past three years: 17,000 square kilometres,” equivalent to nearly half the size of the Netherlands, it says.

Sixteen percent of the total rainforest area, equivalent to three times the size of the state of Sao Paulo, has already been deforested, the letter says.

“We have absolutely no reason to celebrate. The Amazon is not the planet’s lung, but it renders services to Brazil and to the world,” it continues.

This green area extending over five million square kilometres is “a thermal layer generated by nature to prevent the sunrays from reaching the ground, thus enabling the existence of the most luxuriant forest on earth, which helps to regulate the planet’s temperature,” it says.

The Amazon Forever Movement also refers to the expansion of the agricultural frontier in protected areas.

“A country that possesses 165,000 square kilometres of abandoned or semi-abandoned deforested areas could double its grain production without having to fell one single tree,” the open letter says.

Menezes has just published a study on livestock-raising in the Amazon, in which he concludes that 40 percent of the Brazilian cattle herd is located in the jungle.

He found that cattle ranchers, who occupy 60 million hectares in the Amazon, were responsible for 80 percent of the 73 million hectares that have already been deforested. One-third of all the beef produced in the region is exported.

According to Menezes, “above all, the study shows that the public money is going to the meat packing plants,” because the National Development Bank (BNDES) is financing this sort of development.

Last year alone, he noted, the BNDES invested six billion reals (2.9 billion dollars) in cattle farming, more than its total investment in the automotive industry, for example.

In Menezes’ view, livestock farming stimulates the most deforestation, thus favouring the illegal occupation of land by large farmers.

One solution to this problem, he suggested, would be for public finance to be redirected to agriculture and livestock farming in areas that have already been deforested, and to invest in technological development to increase productivity and avoid further expansion into the rainforest.

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By Adrianne Appel
BOSTON, May 12 2009 (IPS)

When a North Atlantic right whale swimming near Boston bellows at 3 a.m., a phone rings in a small town in upstate New York.

The world's 400 remaining right whales must navigate through tankers, small vessels and fishing boats, and waters clogged with fishing gill nets, lines and gear. Credit: New England Aquarium

"They may get woken out of bed. It’s not an easy job," Chris Tremblay, manager of the alert system, said of the 15 analysts. The Right Whale Listening Network is run by the Bioacoustics Research Laboratory at Cornell University’s Ornithology Laboratory.

The Cornell alert system works 24 hours a day, seven days a week, whenever a whale call is detected by any of 16 listening buoys installed near Boston, or 10 buoys near New York City.

The analysts put up with the strange work hours because they think of it as an opportunity to protect one of the most endangered animals in the world, Tremblay said.

"They feel like they are doing something important," Tremblay told IPS.

At 65 tonnes and 15 metres long, these whales don’t rush. They lumber through the cool waters along the East Coast of North America, as far north as the Bay of Fundy, at top speeds of just 16 kilometres per hour, as they have for thousands of years.

The whales amble through the water with their crooked mouths gaping wide, feeding and calling out to each other.

"'The only thing you can say is they are very odd," Charles "Stormy" Mayo, a senior scientist of the Provincetown Centre for Coastal Studies, told IPS. "Gigantic mouths occupy the front third of the animal, and they have huge walls of baleen, leading to this capacity to filter monstrous amounts of water."

"They have tails much bigger than other whales because they need it to push their giant mouths through the water," said Mayo, who has been studying what, where and how the whales eat for more than 35 years.

The North Atlantic right whale was hunted almost to extinction in the 1800s and its population has not recovered.

Today, the whales’ waters are cluttered with tankers, small vessels and fishing boats, and clogged with fishing gill nets, lines and gear. Collisions with ships and gear entanglements are their biggest killers, said Mary Colligan, a whale expert with the federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

She is one of hundreds of conservationists, researchers and government experts who are desperately trying to keep the whales from becoming extinct.

"Our goal is zero entanglements," Colligan said. "It’s a very difficult issue because there is no easy solution," she said of keeping the "urban" whales safe.

The whales naturally live to 70 years, but the average lifespan today is just 15, mostly due to human causes, according to Cornell’s bioacoustics programme.

More than 75 percent of the right whales have scars from ship propellers or commercial fishing gear, according to the Provincetown centre.

"The most severe entanglements involve the mouth. The tackle gets caught in the mouth and impedes feeding," Colligan said.

The whale population was declining for decades and since about 1999, ever stricter shipping and fishing rules have been in force, and elaborate alert systems like the one in Boston installed.

"The waters they migrate through, and their habitats, are now safer because of the conservation measures we’ve been able to put in place," Moira Brown, senior scientist at the New England Aquarium, told IPS.

Recently, "things have been looking better for the right whales," Brown said.

The whale population has started to grow at one percent a year, after years of declining. This year a "bumper crop" of 39 calves were born, she said.

Brown’s dedication to the whales takes her out at sea, near Boston, in January, when the temperature may be minus 6 degrees C. on land. She and a crew take turns standing on deck, to observe and photograph any whales. They dress in one-piece, insulated suits.

"With a flotation in it, just for safety purposes, not that we plan to go over the side," she said.

The photographs are entered into a database of every known whale, which many researchers contribute to. The whales are identified by a unique pattern of raised, white bumps on the backs of their heads, called callosities. As calves they were born with completely smooth skin but within weeks, callosities form and stay with them for life.

Officially, the researchers catalogue the animals by number. Unofficially, some are known as Nantucket, or Silver, a male missing part of his tale fluke, or Kingfisher, who lives year in and year out with fishing gear tangled around his flippers.

Ruth Leeney and her crew take aerial photographs of whales that feed in Cape Cod Bay.

"This work is particularly interesting because you get to fuse research with conservation," Leeney told IPS.

*This story is part of a series of features on sustainable development by IPS and IFEJ – International Federation of Environmental Journalists ­- for Communicators for Sustainable Development (www.complusalliance.org ).

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By Stephen de Tarczynski
MELBOURNE, May 6 2009 (IPS)

Scientists have been surprised by the rapid recovery of coral reefs from mass bleaching on Australia’s iconic Great Barrier Reef, but they warn that reefs remain particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

“An unusual combination of circumstances led to a really lucky escape for coral reefs in the Keppel Islands,” says Dr Laurence McCook from the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority – the government’s main advisory body for the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) – and the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (COECRS).

Large-scale coral bleaching – stress-induced loss of colour – occurred at reefs around the Keppel Islands, which lie in the southern area of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, in early 2006.

The world heritage-listed GBR is the largest reef system on earth, containing close to 3,000 individual reefs and 900 islands. It stretches along the coast of Australia’s north-eastern state of Queensland for more than 2,500km.

Along with other Australian-based scientists, McCook co-authored a paper on the recovery of the reefs from the adverse effects of global warming, titled ‘Doom and Boom on a Resilient Reef’, which was published Apr. 22 in the online scientific journal, PLoS ONE.

The bleaching that occurred resulted from the premature onset of high sea surface temperatures towards the end of 2005, which researchers attribute to climate change.

“The water went up a couple of degrees above the mean, so the corals rapidly responded and they bleached,” says another co-author of the ‘Doom and Boom’ report, Dr Guillermo Diaz-Pulido from the University of Queensland’s Centre for Marine Studies and COECRS.

Bleaching and mortality took place after the corals “expelled the zooxanthellae, the microscopic algae that live within the tissue,” Diaz-Pulido told IPS.

A bloom of seaweed then covered the damaged reefs, an event which could have led to total loss of the corals.

But while cases of coral bleaching resulting from climate change are not uncommon – coral reefs in the Maldives, Seychelles and Palau have suffered devastating bleaching events – the speedy recovery of reefs in the Keppel Islands amazed the scientists.

“We were astonished,” says McCook, explaining that a fortunate combination of biological circumstances was essential to the corals’ resurgence.

“Most of the seaweeds died back because of their own inherent seasonality, and that gave the corals the chance to recover. The second factor was that the corals had this spectacular growth ability.”

Normally, when bleaching occurs to the extent that it did in the Keppel Islands – in this case, bleaching affected an estimated 77 to 95 percent of coral colonies – reefs take more than a decade to recover.

“Baby corals basically have to come in from a distant reef, settle and grow to re-establish coral populations,” McCook told IPS.

But surviving tissue in the bleached corals was able to take advantage of the seaweed’s die-back, leading to the dramatic recovery of coral populations just a year after they were decimated.

While scientists say that luck played a vital role in the coral re-growth on the reefs, they point out that good management of the marine environment was also important.

“The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park is being well managed in terms of water quality,” says Diaz-Pulido.

Although shipping and aquaculture, as well as run-off from coastal development and agriculture remain threats to the water quality at the GBR, the park’s authorities aim to protect the reef system through zoning and regulatory practices.

Among other concerns for park officials are over-fishing and tourism. Each year, close to two million tourists and five million recreational visitors spend time at the GBR.

But McCook says authorities are “doing everything we can to manage those risks, and there’s no doubt that was a factor in the recovery that we saw.”

He says that compared to many reefs around the world, “especially in the Caribbean where there has been widespread degradation,” reefs in Australian waters reap the benefits of the nation’s relative prosperity.

But the marine scientist warns that the threat to reefs posed by climate change means that “we need to continue to be as watchful and as careful as we can be.”

Global warming represents a major danger to the existence of coral reefs, particularly through ocean warming and ocean acidification. Besides bleaching, stronger and more frequent storms are expected to lead to increased coral mortality, while slower growth rates of coral are also anticipated as sea levels rise.

According to networks of coral reef conservation groups, much damage has already been done to the “rainforests of the ocean”, so called due to their biodiversity.

The International Coral Reef Action Network says that the decade to 2008 – last year was the ‘International Year of the Reef’ – saw unprecedented levels of deterioration in coral reefs, while Brian Huse, executive director of the United States-based Coral Reef Alliance says that reefs continue to decline “at an alarming rate.”

Huse argues that although the world’s coral reefs support the livelihoods of some 100 million people through income and food – in addition to the protective barrier they provide for coastal communities – “we could lose up to 70 percent of the world’s coral reefs by 2050.”

McCook agrees that the outlook for reefs remains grim.

“It is pretty gloomy. There’s pretty broad scientific consensus that the combined effects of climate change are going to have a lot of direct impacts,” he says.

McCook warns that while a combination of lucky circumstances and good management saved the coral reefs around the GBR’s Keppel Islands this time, efforts to tackle climate change at its source, rather than attempts to mitigate its effects, are required for the long-term survival of such fragile ecosystems.

According to scientists, protection measures such as those implemented by the GBR’s marine park authority are about “buying time” for coral reefs.

“In many ways, what we do is we buy time as we, hopefully, set about addressing the cause of climate change,” McCook says.

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