Sargassum inundates a beach on Barbados. Credit: H. Oxenford/Mission Blue

By Jewel Fraser
PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad, Jul 25 2017 (IPS)

As Tobago’s tourism industry struggles to repel the sargassum invasions that have smothered its beaches with massive layers of seaweed as far as the eye can see – in some places half a metre thick – and left residents retching from the stench, the island’s government is working to establish an early warning system that will alert islanders to imminent invasions so they can take defensive action.

The Deputy Director of Trinidad and Tobago’s Institute of Marine Affairs (IMA), Dr. Rahanna Juman, told IPS, “After the 2015 sargassum event, the IMA got stakeholders together and developed a sargassum response plan. We looked at some sort of early warning mechanism [using satellites]. We know that it comes off of the South American mainland. If we know when it is coming and we can forecast which part of the coast it is going to land, we can inform the relevant regional authority so they can put things in place.A particularly heart-rending consequence of the sargassum invasions has been the devastation it causes to turtle nesting sites on the island.

“We have this network set up. We got the Met Services to provide an idea of where [the sargassum] is going to land,” she said.

The 2010-2015 State of the Marine Environment (SOME) report, released in May this year by the IMA, states, “Sargassum invasion of Trinidad and Tobago’s beaches is a relatively novel phenomenon for which we have been largely unprepared for in the past. However, with climate change causing continuous warming of the oceans, it appears that future events are likely.”

The country experienced massive onslaughts of sargassum, a type of seaweed, in 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2015, and some again this year. “Sargassum is a natural phenomenon,” said Dr. Juman, but it was the quantity of the seaweed that stunned the public during these years.

The consequences for Tobago’s tourism industry have been debilitating.

A director on the board of the Tobago Hotel and Tourism Association, Environment Tobago and the Association of Tobago Dive Operators, Wendy Austin, told IPS the first major event for the Tobago tourism industry was in 2015. “People were cancelling their bookings. Visitors were having to move, particularly from the north end of the island. Speyside had it very bad and the smell was awful. The restaurants had to close because people were not coming out to eat.” As the sargassum rotted, it emitted a nauseating stench.

“This year we have been hit fairly hard once again,” Austin added. “Recommendations have been put forward to the Tobago House of Assembly (THA) as to how the situation can be handled environmentally so that tourism would then have fewer problems. However, there is no money to put these recommendations into action.”

The THA reportedly spent approximately 500,000 dollars during one year to clear up the decaying sargassum.

Apart from the tourism industry taking a hit, the country’s marine environment has also been adversely affected .

A particularly heart-rending consequence of the sargassum invasions has been the devastation it causes to turtle nesting sites on the island. The SOME report notes, “Ecologically, both adult and juvenile sea turtles can become entangled in the thick masses.”

Dr. Juman said hatchlings making their way out to sea from Tobago’s shores in 2015 got caught in the mass of sargassum, as well as many leaving the beaches of Trinidad in the northeast after they were hatched. Local media reports earlier this year expressed fears that turtle hatchlings would die because of becoming entangled in the masses of sargassum that washed ashore in April.

Further, “sargassum can smother your coral reef and seagrass, and they can bring in organisms that are not native to [Tobago], so that can have a negative impact on the native species,” said Dr. Juman, who is a wetlands ecologist.

The SOME report notes that the seagrasses which the sargassum destroyed off southwest Tobago are important for the marine environment since they “stabilize bottom sediments, slow current flow, prevent erosion, and filter suspended nutrients and solids from coastal waters.”

In response to this phenomenon, as well as other threats caused by climate change to the nation’s coastlines, the Trinidad and Tobago government has established as a priority of its new Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM) policy the objective of maintaining “the diversity, health and productivity of coastal and marine processes and ecosystems”.

Deputy Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Planning Marie Hinds said via e-mail that this objective, the eighth one listed under the ICZM policy, incorporates tackling the sargassum problem.

She said achieving the objective would involve implementing a “programme to manage/control the introduction of alien invasive species into the coastal and marine zones.”

Establishment of an ICZM policy was a requirement of the Inter-American Development Bank for Trinidad and Tobago to access funding to deal with climate change, Hinds added. The ICZM policy will facilitate coordination and cooperation between civil society, government and the private sector in addressing the impacts of climate change.

However, there is still relatively little research data on which to base decision-making and management of the sargassum problem because it is such a new phenomenon, said Dr. Juman.

Among the proposals for disposing of the sargassum is to transform it into a biogas. But, “if you are going to invest in some sort of industry…you have to have a known quantity, you need to know how much, you need to have a consistent supply.

“You also need research to quantify such an industry’s impact on the fishing and shipping industry, as well as tourism. We do not have that kind of data,” said Dr. Juman. “Having the research and knowing how to treat with it so we can be proactive not reactive,” she said, was important for the IMA in finding solutions to the sargassum problem.

In the Turks and Caicos, the government is searching for new ways to manage the conch and lobster populations. Credit: Zadie Neufville/IPS

By Zadie Neufville
KINGSTON, Jamaica, Apr 28 2017 (IPS)

Caribbean scientists say fishermen are already seeing the effects of climate change, so for a dozen or so years they’ve been designing systems and strategies to reduce the impacts on the industry.

While some work on reef gardens and strategies to repopulate over fished areas, others crunch the data and develop tools designed to prepare the region, raise awareness of climate change issues and provide the information to help leaders make decisions.As the oceans absorb more carbon, the region’s supply of conch and oysters, the mainstay of some communities, is expected to decline further.

In December 2017, the Caribbean Regional Fisheries Mechanism (CRFM) secretariat, with funding from the UK government, announced a Climate Report Card to help formulate strategies to lessen the impact of climate change on regional fisheries.

“The CRFM is trying to ensure that the issue of climate change as it relates to the fisheries sector comes to the fore… because the CARICOM Heads of Government have put fish and fishery products among the priority commodities for CARICOM. It means that things that affect that development are important to us and so climate change is of primary importance,” said Peter Murray, the CRFM’s Programme Manager for Fisheries and Development.

The grouping of small, developing states are ‘fortifying’ the sectors that rely on the marine environment, or the Blue Economy, to withstand the expected ravages of climate change which scientists say will increase the intensity of hurricanes, droughts, coastal sea level rise and coral bleaching.

In its last report AR5, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported: “Many terrestrial, freshwater and marine species have shifted their geographic ranges, seasonal activities, migration patterns, abundances and species interactions in response to ongoing climate change,” patterns that are already being noted by Caribbean fishers.

In an email to IPS, Murray outlined several initiatives across the Caribbean that ,he says are crucial to regional efforts. The Report Card, which has been available since March, will provide the in-depth data governments need to make critical decisions on mitigation and adaptation. It provides information covering ocean processes such as ocean acidification; extreme events like storms, surges and sea temperature; biodiversity and civil society including fisheries, tourism and settlements.

In addition, the 17-members of the CRFM agreed to incorporate the management of fisheries into their national disaster plans, and signed off on the Climate Change Adaptation and Disaster Risk Reduction Strategy for the fisheries sector. 


“It means that anything looking at climate change and potential impacts is important to us,” Murray says.

The IPCC’s gloomy projections for world fisheries has been confirmed by a 2015 World Wildlife Fund (WWF) report indicating that for the last 30 years, world fisheries have been in decline due to climate change. In the Caribbean, reduced catches are directly impacting the stability of entire communities and the diets and livelihoods of some of the region’s poorest. Further decline could devastate the economies of some islands.

But even as climate change is expected to intensify the effects of warming ocean waters, pelagic species could avoid the Caribbean altogether, bringing even more hardships. So the regional plan is centred on a Common Fisheries Policy that includes effective management, monitoring and enforcement systems and tools to improve risk planning.

In addition to the disaster plan and its other activities, the Community has over time installed a Coral Reef Early Warning System; new data collection protocols; improved computing capacity to crunch climate data; an insurance scheme to increase the resilience of fishing communities and stakeholders; as well as several tools to predict drought and excessive rainfall.

Worldwide, three billion people rely on fish as their major source of protein. The industry provides a livelihood for about 12 per cent of the world’s population and earns approximately 2.9 trillion dollars per year, the WWF reports. With regional production barely registering internationally, the Caribbean is putting all its efforts into preserving the Blue Economy, which the World Bank said earned the region 407 billion dollars in 2012.

In the coming weeks the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre, known regionally as the 5Cs, has coordinated and implemented a raft of programmes aimed at building systems that will help the region cope the effects of climate change.

Through collaboration with the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the 5Cs has been setting up an integrated network of climate and biological monitoring stations to strengthen the region’s early warning mechanism.

And as the oceans absorb more carbon, the region’s supply of conch and oysters, the mainstay of some communities, is expected to decline further. In addition, warming sea water is expected to shift migration routes for pelagic fish further north, reducing the supply of available deep sea fish even more. Added to that, competition for the dwindling resources could cause negative impacts of one industry over another.

But while scientists seek options, age-old traditions are sometimes still pitted against conservation projects. Take an incident that played out in the waters around St. Vincent and the Grenadines a few weeks ago when whale watchers witnessed the harpooning of two orcas by Vincentian fishermen.

The incident forced Prime Minister Ralph Gonsavles to announce the end of what was, until then, a thriving whaling industry in the village of Barouille. For years, government turned a blind eye as fishermen breached regional and international agreements on the preservation of marine species. The continued breaches are also against the Caribbean Community’s Common Fisheries Policy that legally binds countries to a series of actions to protect and preserve the marine environment and its creatures.

On April 2, five days after the incident, Gonsalves took to the airwaves to denounce the whaling caused by “greed” and announce pending regulations to end fishing for the mammals. The incident also tarnished the island’s otherwise excellent track record at climate proofing its fishing industry.

Murray’s email on regional activities outlines SVG activities including the incorporation of the regional strategy and action plan and its partnership with several regional and international agencies and organisations to build resilience in the marine sector.

Over in the northern Caribbean, traditions are also testing regulations and international agreements. In Jamaica, the Sandals Foundation in association with major supermarket chains has launched a campaign to stop the capture and sale of parrotfish for consumption.

Scientists say that protecting the parrot is synonymous with saving the reefs and mitigating the effects of climate change. And further north in the Turks and Caicos, the government is searching for new ways to manage the conch and lobster populations. While trade is regulated, household use of both, sea turtles, and some sharks remain unregulated; and residents are resistant to any restrictions.

And while many continue to puzzle about the reasons behind the region’s climate readiness, scientists caution that there is no time to ease up. This week they rolled out, among other things, a coastal adaptation project and a public education and awareness (PAE) programme launched on April 26 in Belize City.

The PAE project, named Feel the Change, is funded by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and Japan-Caribbean Climate Change Project (J-CCCP) public awareness programme. Speaking at the launch, project development specialist at 5Cs Keith Nichols pointed to the extreme weather events from severe droughts to changes in crop cycles, which have cost the region billions.

“Climate change is not just sea level rise and global warming; climate change and climate variability is all around us,” he said.

A total of 60 fragments from five species of corals have been placed on the trees in the coral nursery. Credit: Andrew Ross

By Zadie Neufville
KINGSTON, Jul 13 2015 (IPS)

With time running out for Jamaica’s coral reefs, local marine scientists are taking things into their own hands, rebuilding the island’s reefs and coastal defences one tiny fragment at a time – a step authorities say is critical to the country’s climate change and disaster mitigation plans.

Five years ago, local hoteliers turned to experimental coral gardening in a desperate bid to improve their diving attractions, protect their properties from frequent storms surges and arrest beach erosion.“The fishermen have done a beautiful job of keeping the corals alive and the fish sanctuary successful." -- Andrew Ross

In 2014, their efforts were boosted when the Centre for Marine Science (CMS) at the University of the West Indies (UWI) Mona scored a 350,000-dollar grant from the International Development Bank (IDB) for the Coral Reef Restoration Project.

Project director and coastal ecologist Dale Webber told IPS that his team will carry out genetic research, attempt to crack the secrets of coral spawning and re-grow coral at several locations across the island and at the centre’s Discovery Bay site. The project will also share the research findings with other islands as well as another IDB project, Belize’s Fragments of Hope.

The reefs of Discovery Bay have been studied for more than 40 years, and are the centre of reef research in Jamaica. It is also home to several species of both fast and slow growing corals that Webber says are particularly resilient.

“They have tolerated disease, global warming, sea level rise, bleaching, etc. – all man and the environment have thrown at them – and are still flourishing. So they have naturally selected based on their resilience,” he explains.

A total of 60 fragments from five species of corals have been placed on the trees in the coral nursery. The five species are Orbicella annularis; Orbicella faveolata; Siderastrea siderea; Acropora palmata and Undaria agaricites. These fragments are being monitored as they grow and will be planted on the reefs.

Jamaica’s reefs – which make up more than 50 per cent of the 1022 kilometres of coastline, have over the years been battered by pollution, overfishing and improper development.  Finally in 1980 Hurricane Allen smashed them.

Many hoped the reefs would regenerate, but sluggish growth caused by, among other things, frequent severe weather events and an increase in bleaching incidences due to climatic changes sent stakeholders searching for options.

A massive Caribbean-wide bleaching event in 2005 resulted in widespread coral death and focussed attention on continuing sand loss at some of the island’s most valuable beaches. But aside from the devastation caused by the hurricane, scientists say the poor condition of the reefs are also the result of a die-off of the sea urchin population in 1982 and the continued capture of juvenile reef fish and the parrot.

Predictions are that the region could lose all its coral in 20 years. Some reports say that only about eight per cent of Jamaican corals are alive. However, new surveys conducted by the UWI at several sites across the island show coral cover of between 12 and 20 per cent.

Along Jamaica’s north coast from Oracabessa in St. Mary to Montego Bay, coral recovery projects have yielded varying levels of success. The Golden Eye Beach Club, the Oracabessa Fish Sanctuary and Montego Bay Marine Park are among those that have experimented with coral gardening.

The process is tedious, as divers must tend the nurseries/gardens, removing algae from the fragments of corals as they grow. The pieces are then fixed to the reefs. The results are encouraging and many see this is an expensive but sure way to repopulate dying reefs. A combination of techniques, management measures and regeneration have boosted coral cover at Discovery Bay from five percent to 14 per cent in recent years.

“We hope to supplement this and get it growing faster,” Webber who also heads UWI’s Centre for Marine Sciences says.

At the Centre’s newest Alligator Head location in the east of the island, the aim is to increase the coral cover from the existing 40 per cent. The nurseries have also been set up at the site in Portland to compare the differences in growth rate between sites.

At the NGO-operated Montego Bay Marine Park, where an artificial reef and coral nursery was established in the fish sanctuary, outreach officer Joshua Bailey reports:  “There have been moderate successes. New corals are spawning and attracting fish.”

He cautioned that the impact of “urban stressors” on the park and in surrounding communities – high human population density  and high levels of run-off – makes it difficult to judge the success of the restoration.

One of the most recent projects proposed the construction of an artificial reef off the shore of Sandals Resorts International Negril, as one of many solutions to reduce beach erosion along the famous ‘Seven Mile’ stretch of the Negril coast. The National Environment and Planning Agency (NEPA) approved the construction of an artificial reef in 1.2 metres of water offshore the Resort’s Negril bay property.

Andrew Ross is responsible for the Sandals and several other projects. A marine biologist and head of Seascape Caribbean, he explains that the Negril project lasted one year. It allowed for the study of fast and slow growing coral species and included the construction of a wave attenuation structure to determine how wave action influences sand accumulation. The coral nursery and the structures were populated with soft corals, sponges and a variety of other corals from the area.

In Oracabessa, a fishing village on 16 kilometres east of the tourist town of Ocho Rios, the commitment of the fishermen who initiated the project and their private sector partners have kept the reef and replanted corals clean and healthy, demonstrating how successful the process can be in restoring the local fisheries.

“The fishermen have done a beautiful job of keeping the corals alive and the fish sanctuary successful,” Ross says of the project he started in 2009.

Much of Jamaica’s reefs have reportedly been smothered by silt from eroding hillsides, the algal blooms from eutrophication as a result of agricultural run-offs and the disposal of sewage in the coastal waters.

The reefs are critical to Jamaica’s economy as tourism services account for a quarter of all jobs and more than 50 per cent of foreign exchange earnings.  Fisheries directly employ an estimated 33,000 people. Overall, the Caribbean makes between 5.0 and 11 billion dollars each year from fishing and tourism, an indication of the importance of reefs to the economies of the islands.

The Restoration Project provides the CMS with the resources to undertake a series of research activities “to among other things mitigate coral depletion, and identify and cultivate species that are resistant to the ravages of the impact of climate change,” Webber says.

In an email outlining the process, he notes that the project will provide “applicable information and techniques to other countries in the region that are experiencing similar challenges,” during its 18-month lifetime.

Expectations are that at the end of the project, there will be visible changes in coral cover. The successes seen in Oracabessa, where fishermen report improvements in catch rates and fish sizes, and at other sites are an indication that coral gardening is working.

Like Ross, Webber expects that there will be changes in coral cover at replanting sites within a three- to five-year period.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

CODRINGTON, Barbuda. The fisheries sector in the CARICOM Region is an important source of income. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Kitty Stapp
NEW YORK, Jul 8 2015 (IPS)

Thanks to its varied geography and climate, the Caribbean region is one of the world’s greatest centers of unique biodiversity. With most people living near the coast, marine ecosystems, including mangroves, beaches, lagoons and cays, are essential not only for biodiversity, but as protection from storms. Many are now threatened, along with the coral reefs the region is famous for.

KINGSTOWN, St. Vincent. Rising sea levels haves resulted in the relocation of houses and erection of this sea defence in Layou, a town in southwestern St. Vincent. Credit: Kenton X. Chance/IPS

By Kitty Stapp
NEW YORK, Jun 18 2015 (IPS)

From constructing barriers against rising sea levels to rehabilitating mangroves and providing agrometeorology services, the Caribbean isn’t waiting for a new international agreement on climate change to start implementing adaptation measures. But funding to roll out such projects on the necessary scale remains a key issue, and many communities remain desperately vulnerable to storms and flooding.

By Desmond Brown
GEORGETOWN, Guyana, Jun 15 2015 (IPS)

With less than six months to go before the next full United Nations Conference of the Parties also known as COP 21 – widely regarded as a make-or-break moment for an agreement on global action on climate change – Caribbean nations are still hammering out the best approach to the talks.

The Caribbean Community’s (CARICOM) Director of Sustainable Development, Garfield Barnwell, said “the region’s expectations are extremely sober” with regards to COP 21, scheduled for Paris during November and December of this year. This is due to the poor response from the major emitting countries in addressing the issue of climate change."For the region, climate change magnifies the growing concerns regarding food security, water scarcity, energy security and the resource requirements for protection from natural disaster." -- CARICOM Chair Perry Christie

“An ideal 2015 agreement for the Caribbean would be one that first and foremost addresses the global rate of emissions and if that could be as close as possible to 1.5 degrees stabilisation of the global emissions level,” Barnwell told IPS.

“If there are commitments on the part of the major emitters meeting their commitments; and also if the international community would acknowledge the importance of adaptation and that they would provide adequate resources for all developing countries to address their adaptation needs, certainly that would be a good starting point with regards to further discussions in addressing the serious challenge of dangerous climate change.”

Barnwell said the region has been taking stock of what has been happening at the global level with regards to greenhouse gas emissions and “great concerns” remain concerning the responses from the major emitting countries.

He pointed to “the lack of action in meeting the commitments made in the past” on the climate change issue.

“The expectation is that there would be a number of announcements with regards to how the major emitters plan to meet their goals with respect to the expected discussions, but the (countries of the) region do, to a large extent,  have a measured level of expectation regarding the Paris talks in December.”

Caribbean countries are also trying their utmost to seek the mobilisation of resources to more aggressively implement their adaptation programmes at the national level.

“Adaptation is of great significance to us in the Caribbean because our region as a group contributes less than one percent of the total global greenhouse gasses. When we calculated the amount, it comes up to about 0.33 percent of global greenhouse gasses so mitigation is not an issue for the Caribbean given our contribution,” Barnwell said.

“However, it must be stated that the impact of both temperature rises and precipitation levels poses serious challenges for our survival as a region and a national security (concern) to many of our member states given that most of us are either islands or most of our populations and social and economic infrastructure reside on the coastal belt which brings into focus the issue of sea level rise which is of great concern to all our member states.”

Climate change poses significant challenges to the natural resource base of the Caribbean, with most countries having resource-based economies including tourism where there is great reliance on the sea in terms of the beaches which are a major source of attraction.

Some countries are also primary producers of agricultural crops, and the agricultural sector, like tourism, is significantly affected by climate change.

“We have a problem with regards to rising sea levels in terms of the oceans coming more inland and that poses a challenge not only for the beaches but also for the hotels and the airports that to a large extent are roughly about three centimetres away from the sea in many of our islands,” Barnwell said.

“For many of our islands, we are challenged and have been challenged by the impact of natural disasters and again as a result of rising sea levels and warming oceans, the potential for a greater impact of natural disasters poses some significant challenges in terms of the frequency and the impact.

“For those agriculture-oriented economies in the region, we also face challenges associated with the change in temperatures and also the precipitation rates with regards to patterns with respect to planting, with respect to reaping of our products. All these are significant problems with regards to how we have been living and the kinds of activities we’ve been engaged in. So climate change poses significant challenges for our region in terms of our livelihood and our survival,” Barnwell added.

At the just ended two-week Climate Change Conference in Bonn, Germany, Caribbean negotiators maintained the pressure to limit global warming to below 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial level.

They noted that limiting global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius instead of 2 degrees Celsius would come with several advantages, including avoiding or significantly reducing risks to food production and unique and threatened systems such as coral reefs.

The Caribbean negotiators also requested that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) ensure that the lowest marker scenario used in its 6^th Assessment Report is consistent with limiting warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Chairman of CARICOM and Prime Minister of The Bahamas Perry Christie said as a result of the impacts of climate change, the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre (CCCCC), which spearheads the technical work for CARICOM on this issue, estimates the cost of global inaction in the sub-region to be approximately 10.7 billion dollars per year by 2025 and that this figure could double by 2050.

He said the Caribbean is urging parties that have made pledges towards the initial capitalisation of the Green Climate Fund (GCF) to enter into their contribution agreements with the GCF as soon as possible and scale up their contributions in line with the pledge for 100 billion dollars per year by 2020.

“For the region, climate change magnifies the growing concerns regarding food security, water scarcity, energy security and the resource requirements for protection from natural disaster,” Christie told IPS.

“Another significant threat is linked to the projected impact of climate change on public health, through an increase in the presence of vectors of tropical diseases, such as malaria and dengue, and the prevalence of respiratory illnesses.

“These diseases will affect the well-being and productivity of the workforce of the sub-region and compromise the economic growth, competitiveness and development potential of the Caribbean Community,” he said.

Meantime, Dominica’s Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerritt, who chairs the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS), said they are constantly reminded that the power to bring about the desired change in the global climate system rests with those countries that are the biggest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions.

“We in the OECS are among the smallest of the small and despite or negligible contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, we are on the frontline as the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change,” Skerritt told IPS.

“For us, climate change and its related phenomenon are issues affecting our very survival and can be viewed as a matter of life and death.

“As an organisation comprising and representing the smallest of the small, ours is a solemn duty and responsibility to articulate and champion the cause of all our member states – those that are sovereign as well as those that are not; and those that are party to the UNFCC as well as those that are not.”

Skerritt said they have adopted this posture in the knowledge that climate change has absolutely no regard for political status and that it impacts, with equal severity, the islands and low-lying and coastal regions regardless of political or sovereign status.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Grenadian fishermen prepare to head out to sea. They say they have been catching less fish and their livelihoods are threatened by climate change. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Desmond Brown
PALMISTE, Grenada, Apr 27 2015 (IPS)

Henry Prince has lived in this fishing village for more than six decades. Prince, 67, who depends on the sea for his livelihood, said he has been catching fewer and fewer fish, and the decrease is taking a financial toll on him and other fisher folk throughout the island nation of Grenada.

I heard about the climate change but never paid too much attention towards it,” Prince told IPS, adding that “we don’t catch jacks as before.”

Jacks, a small fish widely used by the fishermen as bait, are also fried and eaten by poor families for whom they are an inexpensive source of protein.

Over the last few years, fisher folk have not been catching the jacks, which are usually found in abundance around the month of November. Due to the scarcity of jacks, fishermen have been forced to import sardines from the United States to use as bait.

Grenada’s Agriculture, Land, Fisheries and the Environment Minister Roland Bhola believes the dwindling numbers of fish in the country’s waters are a direct result of climate change.

“Our fishermen are reporting less and less catches in areas where there was once a thriving trade,” Bhola said.

“We have been able to associate that with the issues of climate change … the destruction of our coral reefs and other ecosystems like mangroves,” he said.

“The catch is one day good, one day bad as far as I am looking at it,” Ralph Crewney, another fisherman, told IPS.

“For the last few months we hardly catch anything. Last June, it was just at the last moment that we made big catches.”

Grenadian fishermen Henry Prince (right) and Ralph Crewney see beachfront living as a virtual birthright, despite the risks posed by climate change. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

Crewney, 68, has been living on the seashore for close to 20 years. He noted that in recent times the sea is getting a lot closer to his small shack. But he has no immediate plans to move.

“I feel comfortable here because I like to be away from the noise,” he explained.

Other families in the area are now thinking about relocating to communities in hilly areas but are reluctant to move too far from their source of livelihood.

Fishing families in the Caribbean see beachfront living as a virtual birthright, with an alarming 70 percent of Caribbean populations living in coastal settlements.While storms and beach erosion have long shaped the geography of coastal environments, rising sea levels and surge from more intense storms are expected to dramatically transform shorelines in coming decades, bringing enormous economic and social costs.

In the CARICOM region, the local population is highly dependent on fish for economic and social development. This resource also contributes significantly to food security, poverty alleviation, employment, foreign exchange earnings, development and stability of rural and coastal communities, culture, recreation and tourism.

The subsector provides direct employment for more than 120,000 fishers and indirect employment opportunities for thousands of others – particularly women – in processing, marketing, boat-building, net-making and other support services.

Experts say that while storms and beach erosion have long shaped the geography of coastal environments, rising sea levels and surge from more intense storms are expected to dramatically transform shorelines in coming decades, bringing enormous economic and social costs.

Scientists and computer models estimate that global sea levels could rise by at least one metre (nearly 3.3 feet) by 2100, as warmer water expands and ice sheets melt in Greenland and Antarctica.

Global sea levels have risen an average of three centimetres (1.18 inches) a decade since 1993, according to many climate scientists, although the effect can be amplified in different areas by topography and other factors.

On Apr. 16, delegates attending a one-day National Stakeholder’s Consultation here urged the authorities to re-establish the National Climate Change Council as the island moves to strengthen measures to deal with the impact of climate change.

They said while Grenada had made progress on dealing with climate change and the environment, it still has some way to go to become climate resilient and to develop the capacity to implement climate resilience actions.

The one-day consultation was jointly organised by the World Bank and the Grenada government.

A government statement issued after the consultation said that the re-establishment of the Council will help “drive the climate change agenda of integrating climate change at the national planning level, the mainstreaming of climate change adaptation” as well as monitoring and reporting.

Grenada’s Environment Minister Roland Bhola says the small developing country has very high vulnerability to climate change. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

The Climate Investment Fund (CIF) Pilot Programme for Climate Resilience (PPCR) recently approved a 10.39-million-dollar grant funding for a Caribbean pilot programme for climate resilience.

Grenada along with St. Vincent, St. Lucia, Dominica, Jamaica and Haiti stand to directly benefit from this grant.

A 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said the devastation wreaked on Grenada by Hurricane Ivan in 2004 “is a powerful illustration of the reality of small-island vulnerability.”

The hurricane killed 28 people, caused damage twice the nation’s gross domestic product, damaged 90 percent of the housing stock and hotel rooms and shrank an economy that had been growing nearly six percent a year.

Grenada and its tourism-dependent Caribbean neighbours are thought to be among the globe’s most vulnerable countries.

Scientists say the island has a high risk of being adversely impacted by climate change in several areas. These include coastal flooding due to natural disasters and storm surges. They also point to marine ecosystems being affected by increased ocean temperature, and increased freshwater run-off resulting in coral reef destruction and food chain interruption which affect fishing and tourism industries.

Over the last 25 years, the fragile Grenadian islands of Carriacou and Petite Martinique have also been bombarded by storms, hurricanes, higher tides and sea surges.

This resulted in severe loss of mangrove vegetation along the coastline, beach erosion, damage to soil and serious threat to the local tourism industries which depend heavily on the pristine condition of the beaches and health of the marine life.

Meanwhile, as countries prepare to adopt a new international climate change agreement at the Paris climate conference in December, Bhola said Grenada is looking forward to the implementation with great anticipation.

“My country, Grenada, a small developing country, has very high vulnerability to climate change. A successful agreement for us therefore has to reduce the risks that we face from climate change and has to assist us in coping with the impacts on our country, our people and our livelihoods,” Bhola said.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Vendors at the fish market in Belize. Courtesy of the Fisheries Department Belize City, Belize.

By Zadie Neufville
KINGSTON, Mar 17 2015 (IPS)

Caribbean nations have begun work on a plan to ‘climate smart’ the region’s fisheries as part of overall efforts to secure food supplies.

The concept is in keeping with plans by the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) to improve the “integration of agriculture and climate readiness” as the region prepares to deal with the impacts of climate change and the increasing demand for food.“With the projections, we're looking at almost total loss of our corals. For us in the Caribbean our reefs are important, not from the perspective of tourism, but from the perspective of livelihoods when you consider fisheries." -- Dr. Orville Grey

Olu Ajayi, CTA’s senior programme coordinator, told IPS in an email that climate-smarting the region’s aquatic resources will “enable the sector to continue to contribute to sustainable development, while reducing the vulnerability associated with the negative impacts of climate change”.

“Climate-smart fisheries require improving efficiency in the use of natural resources to produce fish, maintaining the resilience of aquatic systems and the communities that rely on them,” he noted.

The fisheries sector of the Caribbean Community is an important source of livelihoods and sustenance for the estimated 182,000 people who directly depend on these resources. In recent years, fishermen across the region have reported fewer and smaller fish in their nets and scientists believe these are signs of the times, not just the result of over-exploitation and habitat degradation.

“We believe the signs of climate change are already affecting our vital fisheries sector in the increase in seaweed events causing the loss of access to fishing grounds and increased frequency of coral bleaching events,” Peter A. Murray, Caribbean Regional Fisheries Mechanism (CRFM) Secretariat’s Programme Manager, Fisheries Management and Development, told IPS.

Listing some of the predicted changes, including climatic variations that promote the spread of invasive species, as well as increased salination, Murray noted that climate change is also expected to impact traditional species and contribute to coastal erosion due to more frequent and devastating hurricanes.

In fact, the secretariat’s Deputy Executive Director Susan Singh Renton told reporters at the Caribbean Week of Agriculture last November that warmer seas could also push larger species to the north, making them less available to regional fishers. CRFM is the Caricom organisation charged with the promotion of responsible use of regional fisheries.

Two weeks after launching its Climate Smart Agriculture project at the 13th celebration of Caribbean Week of Agriculture in Paramaribo, Suriname in November 2014, the CTA began development of several initiatives. The programmes, they said would help the region to “tackle the impact of agriculture on small-scale producers” – among them small-scale fishers and fish farmers – in a way that will facilitate the construction of “resilient agricultural systems”.

The project came on the heels of the announcement of a Caribbean Community Common Fisheries Policy (CCCFP) and the CRFM Climate Change Action Plan. These are two of several proposals by Community organisations to monitor and regulate capture fisheries as well as implement common goals and rules on the adaptation, management, and conservation of the resources.

Ajayi pointed out that since 2010, the CTA has been working closely with regional agencies including the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre (5Cs) and the CRFM to implement the Regional Framework for Achieving Development Resilience to Climate Change.

Timely, since some of the species most fished and traded by the region’s fishermen are already under pressure from over-exploitation, degraded habitats and pollution. The Queen Conch, the Caribbean Spiny Lobster, the Nassau Grouper and the Parrotfish are among a growing list of species under closer scrutiny for tougher regulations on their capture and trade. Climate change is expected to make the problems worse.

“The support is aimed at developing common regional policy platforms and advocating regional policy initiatives in regional and global forums; strengthening national capacities through training and other supports and conducting comparative analyses of issues on a regional and sub-regional basis,” Ajayi said.

Scientists agree that there is need for immediate action. Technical officer in Jamaica’s Climate Change Division, Dr. Orville Grey, told reporters recently at the Jamaica Observer’s weekly exchange: “If you look at what is happening with sea surface temperatures, you’ll see that we are losing our corals through the warming of the oceans.”

He continued, “With the projections, we’re looking at almost total loss of our corals. For us in the Caribbean our reefs are important, not from the perspective of tourism, but from the perspective of livelihoods when you consider fisheries”.

Murray pointed out that because the marine resources are shared, it is important that the Caribbean Community work together to implement supporting policies and agreements.

He noted, “The region has an action plan to address climate change in fisheries, but to be fully ready it has to be taken aboard by all stakeholders.”

There are also efforts to empower fisherfolk to access and share information that will enable them to participate in policy development at the local and regional levels. But fisherfolk are still not ready.

Mitchell Lay, coordinator of the Caribbean Network of Fisherfolk Organisations (CNFO), said, however, climate smarting is on the group’s agenda for 2015

Both governments and NGOs have upped their activities to protect the resources. But while the former has been slow to act at the national and regional levels, environmentalists are upping the ante by seeking protection for several species that are seen to be in need of protection.

Two years ago, U.S.-based WildEarth Guardian petitioned to have the Queen Conch listed as threatened or endangered under U.S. law. For Caribbean nations like the Turks and Caicos Islands, the Bahamas, Jamaica and Belize that depend on economically important species like conch and lobster, the ability to trade is critical to the local economies.

On Nov. 3, 2014 the NOAA denied the petition, but many believe regional trade of these species is on borrowed time, particularly as the effects of climate change grows.

“The CRFM Action Plan seeks to work towards a regional society and economy that is resilient to a changing climate and enhanced through comprehensive disaster management and sustainable use of aquatic resources,” Murray said.

He pointed to the five objectives of the plan, which among other things include actions to mainstream climate change adaptation into the sustainable development agendas of member states, and promoting actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and employing renewable and clean energy sources. Historically, however, the region has been slow to enact Community policies.

Key to successful climate smarting is the participation of the fisherfolk who have been the beneficiaries of several CTA-sponsored programmes to help them access information; assist them to become more efficient; and to enable them to engage in policy development at the local and regional levels.

The next steps are dependent on the implementation of relevant and necessary policies and the strengthening the legislation. Until then, fisherfolk and supporting institutions continue to wait.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The research team has been studying this relatively acidic coral reef in the Palauan archipelago. Seawater pH on this reef today represents acidification levels predicted for tropical western Pacific by the end of the 21st century. Credit: Tom DeCarlo, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute

By Leila Lemghalef
NEW YORK, Feb 6 2015 (IPS)

A recent study suggests that one of the multiple threats to coral reefs contains both the problem and solution.

The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), based in Cape Cod, conducted a study highlighting multiple threats to coral reef ecosystems and also identifying a management strategy that could slow reef decline."Management of a local coral reef, in terms of limiting human nutrient supplies to that coral reef, can actually have real substantial effects over the next century." -- marine researcher Thomas DeCarlo

Coral reefs are animal organisms that are like sea castles, vibrant with algae and home to sponges, mollusks and creatures seeking shelter. In fact, 25 per cent of marine life relies on coral reefs as part of their habitat.

Coral reefs build their skeletons using limestone, or calcium carbonate. The increase of acid in the ocean due to excess carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere causes the carbonate ion to become less available. Coral reefs rely on carbonate to produce their well-cemented skeletons, which they are doing more slowly.

As a result, the natural equilibrium governing production–erosion of coral reefs has been disrupted in favour of erosion.

To add to the imbalance, the added component of ‘nutrients’ to water accelerates the rate of erosion 10 times.

The interaction between high levels of nutrients with acidity makes the effect of ocean acidification 10 times greater.

‘Nutrients’ refer here to pollution by humans on a local scale.

And herein lies the study’s seed of good news as it says in encouraging terms that “…people can take action to protect their local reefs. If people can limit runoff from septic tanks, sewers, roads, farm fertilizers and other sources of nutrient pollution to the coastal ocean, the bioeroders will not have such an upper hand, and the balance will tip much more slowly toward erosion and dissolution of coral reefs”.

Mark Eakin is coordinator of Coral Reef Watch, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“Reducing erosion by tenfold is major,” he told IPS.

He also explained that coral reefs face both global and local threats, thereby requiring solutions at each level, regardless of whether the global stressors or the local factors, such as overfishing, are paramount (and in fact, both are severe).

“In addressing things like pollutant runoffs that contribute to the local issue of why ocean acidification can be so harmful, what you’re doing is you’re pointing to a local solution to a local problem,” said Eakin.

While the climate change remains a problem of planetary scale, requiring concerted efforts on a cross-national level, the plus-side of local problems is that they can be addressed on a local scale.

“And by doing that what you’re doing is making the reefs more resilient to climate change and ocean acidification. So that better helps them to survive, while we work on getting the global problems under control,” he said.

A good warning sign

Thomas DeCarlo is doing his PhD in the joint programme of oceanography between Massachusetts Institute of Technology and WHOI. He led the Woods Hole study.

In an interview with IPS, DeCarlo was asked the extent to which cleaning up waters locally could alleviate the overall strains on coral reef development.

He explained that local action could buffer or limit to some extent the global impact of ocean acidification, which is certain to continue over the next century.

“I guess the source of optimism is that whereas the CO2 ocean acidification problem is really truly global, and that’s a really big problem because reefs can’t really escape that, it’s such a global phenomenon that all coral reefs are going to be seeing this ocean acidification effect.

“But the nutrient problem from human nutrient addition is really a pretty local problem, in a lot of respects so, the optimism is that that can actually be limited and controlled on a local scale, so management of a local coral reef, in terms of limiting human nutrient supplies to that coral reef, can actually have real substantial effects over the next century,” he said.

There is an economic incentive that could help the political agenda bend to the needs of nature, with the total dollar value of coral reef services estimated in the billions annually in the U.S. alone.

Furthermore, coral reefs protect shorelines by absorbing storm energies and perform many other roles in the world as we know it.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The humble CREWS buoy hosts several instruments designed to measure conditions above and below the water, and keep track of these developing threats. Credit: Aaron Humes/IPS

By Aaron Humes
BELIZE CITY, Oct 20 2014 (IPS)

Home to the second longest barrier reef in the world and the largest in the Western Hemisphere, which provides jobs in fishing, tourism and other industries which feed the lifeblood of the economy, Belize has long been acutely aware of the need to protect its marine resources from both human and natural activities.

However, there has been a recent decline in the production and export of marine products including conch, lobster, and fish, even as tourism figures continue to increase.“What happens on the land will eventually reach the sea, via our rivers." -- Dr. Kenrick Leslie

The decline is not helped by overfishing and the harvest of immature conch and lobster outside of the standard fishing season. But the primary reason for less conch and lobster in Belize’s waters, according to local experts, is excess ocean acidity which is making it difficult for popular crustacean species such as conch and lobster, which depend on their hard, spiny shells to survive, to grow and mature.

According to the executive director of the Caribbean Community Climate Change Center (CCCCC), Dr. Kenrick Leslie, acidification is as important and as detrimental to the sustainability of the Barrier Reef and the ocean generally as warming of the atmosphere and other factors generally associated with climate change.

Carbon dioxide which is emitted in the atmosphere from greenhouse gases is absorbed into the ocean as carbonic acid, which interacts with the calcium present in the shells of conch and lobster to form calcium carbonate, dissolving those shells and reducing their numbers. Belize also faces continuous difficulties with coral bleaching, which has attacked several key sections of the reef in recent years.

Dr. Leslie told IPS that activities on Belize’s terrestrial land mass are also contributing to the problems under Belize’s waters. “What happens on the land will eventually reach the sea, via our rivers,” he noted.

To fight these new problems, there is need for more research and accurate, up to the minute data.

Last month, the European Union (EU), as part of its Global Climate Change Alliance Caribbean Support Project handed over to the government of Belize and specifically the Ministry of Forestry, Fisheries and Sustainable Development for its continued usage a Coral Reef Early Warning System (CREWS) buoy based at South Water Caye off the Stann Creek District in southern Belize.

Developed by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), it has been adopted by the CCCCC as a centrepiece of the effort to obtain reliable data as a basis for strategies for fighting climate change.

Dr. Leslie says the CREWS system represents a leap forward in research technology on climate change. The humble buoy hosts several instruments designed to measure conditions above and below the water, and keep track of these developing threats. The data collected on atmospheric and oceanic conditions such as oceanic turbidity, levels of carbon dioxide and other harmful elements and others are monitored from the Centre’s office in Belmopan and the data sent along to international scientists who can more concretely analyse it.

The South Water Caye CREWS station is one of two in Belize; the other is located at the University of Belize’s Environmental Research Institute (ERI) on Calabash Caye in the Turneffe Atoll range. Other stations are located in Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, and the Dominican Republic, with more planned in other key areas.

According to the CEO of the Coastal Zone Management Authority and Institute (CZMAI), Vincent Gillet, this is an example of the kind of work that needs to be done to keep the coastal zone healthy and safeguard resources for Belize’s future generations.

A report released at the start of Coastal Awareness Week in Belize City urges greater awareness of the effects of climate change and the participation of the local managers of the coastal zone in a policy to combat those effects. Several recommendations were made, including empowering the Authority with more legislative heft, revising the land distribution policy and bringing more people into the discussion.

“We need to be a little more…conscious of climate change and the impacts that it has,” Gillett said. He added further that the Authority expects and has the government’s support in terms of facilitation, if not necessarily in needed finance.

The report was the work of over 30 local and international scientists who contributed to and prepared it.

In receiving the CREWS equipment, the Ministry’s CEO, Dr. Adele Catzim-Sanchez, sought to remind that the problem of climate change is real and unless it is addressed, Belizeans may be contributing to their own demise.

The European Union’s Ambassador to Belize, Paola Amadei, reported that the Union may soon be able to offer even more help with the planned negotiations in Paris, France, in 2015 for a global initiative on climate change, with emphasis on smaller states. Belize already benefits from separate but concurrent projects, the latter of which aims to give Belize a sustainable development plan and specific strategy to address climate change.

In addition, Dr. Leslie is pushing for even more monitoring equipment, including current metres to study the effect of terrestrial activity such as mining and construction material gathering as well as deforestation on the sea, where the residue of such activities inevitably ends up.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The town of Taboga viewed from the sea. Credit: Creative Commons

By Emilio Godoy
TABOGA, Panama, Oct 16 2014 (IPS)

Fermín Gómez, a 53-year-old Panamanian fisherman, pushes off in his boat, the “Tres Hermanas,” every morning at 06:00 hours to fish in the waters off Taboga island. Five hours later he returns to shore.

Skilfully he removes the heads and scales of his catch of sea bass, snapper, marlin and sawfish. He delivers the cleaned fish to restaurants and hotels, where he is paid four dollars a kilo, a good price for the local area.

“I use baited hooks, because trammel nets drag in everything. That’s why the fishing isn’t so good any more: the nets catch even the young fry,” said this father of three daughters, who spent years working on tuna-fishing vessels.

Gómez lives 200 metres from Taboga island’s only beach, in a town of 1,629 people where the brightly painted houses are roofed with galvanised iron sheets. Located 11.3 nautical miles (21 kilometres) from Panama City, the mainstay of the island is tourism, especially on weekends when dozens of visitors board the ferry that plies between the island and the capital twice a day.

Gómez, who comes from a long line of fishermen, tends to go out fishing at midnight, the best time to catch sea bass. On a good day he might take some 30 kilograms.

“The fishing here is good, but we are dependent on what people on the other islands leave for us,” said Gómez, tanned by the sun and salt water.

The island of Taboga, just 12 square kilometres in area, lies in the Gulf of Panama and is the gateway to the Las Perlas archipelago, one of the most important nodes of coral islands in this Central American country of 3.8 million people.

From the air, they appear as mounds emerging from the turquoise backdrop of the sea, surrounded by what look like dozens of steel sharks, the ships waiting their turn to pass through the Panama Canal.

The isthmus of Panama possesses 290 square kilometres of coral reefs, mostly located on the Atlantic Caribbean coast, which harbour some 70 species. Coral reefs in the Pacific ocean host some 25 different species.

What the fisherfolk do not know is that their future livelihood depends on the health of the coral reefs, which is threatened by rising sea temperatures, maritime traffic, pollution and illegal fishing.

 Seabed corals on underwater mountains in Coiba National Park in Panama. Credit: Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute

In Coiba National Park, in western Panama, and in the Las Perlas islands, “the diversity of the coral and associated species has been sustained in recent years. We have not detected any bleaching, but a troublesome alga has appeared,” academic José Casas, of the state International Maritime University of Panama (UMIP), told IPS.

“It’s threatening the reef,” said the expert, who is taking part in a project for the study and monitoring of reef communities and key fisheries species in Coiba National Park and the marine-coastal Special Management Zone comprising the Las Perlas Archipelago. The study’s final report is due to be published in November.

Algal growth blocks sunlight and smothers the coral, which cannot survive. Experts have also detected the appearance of algae in Colombia and Mexico.

The project is being carried out by UMIP together with Fundación Natura, Conservation International, the Autonomous University of Baja California, in Mexico, and the Aquatic Resources Authority of Panama (ARAP).

Researchers are monitoring the coral in Coiba and Las Perlas in Panama. They took measurements in March and August, and they will repeat their survey in November.

There are differences between the two study zones. Coiba is little disturbed by human activity; it is a designated natural heritage area and a protection plan is in place, although according to the experts it is not enforced. Moreover, Coiba Park is administered by the National Environmental Authority (ANAM).

A protection programme for Las Perlas, to be managed by ARAP, is currently in the pipeline.

Reefs are essential for the development and feeding of large predators like sharks, whales, pelagic fish such as anchovy and herring, and sea turtles, the experts said.

In Panama’s coral reefs, ARAP has identified species of algae, mangroves, sponges, crustaceans, molluscs, conches, starfish, sea cucumber, sea urchin, as well as groupers, snappers, angelfish and butterflyfish.

Fishing generates some 15,000 jobs in Panama and annual production is 131,000 tonnes, according to the National Institute of Statistics and Census.

An Environmental Agenda for Panama 2014-2019 (Agenda Ambiental Panamá 2014-2019), published by the National Association for the Conservation of Nature (ANCON),

Fundación MarViva, Fundación Natura and the Panama Audubon Society, proposes the passage of a law for wetlands protection, emphasising mangroves, mudflats, marshes, swamps, peat bogs, rivers, coral reefs and others.

On the Caribbean coast, coral reefs around the nine islands of the Bocas del Toro archipelago, 324 nautical miles (600 kilometres) west of Panama City, are experiencing bleaching caused by high water temperatures.

This was a finding of a study titled “Forecasting decadal changes in sea surface temperatures and coral bleaching within a Caribbean coral reef,” published in May by the U.S. journal Coral Reefs.
Angang Li and Matthew Reidenbach, of the U.S. University of Virginia, predict that by 2084 nearly all the coral reefs they studied will be vulnerable to bleaching-induced mortality.

They simulated water flow patterns and water surface heating scenarios for the present day and projections for 2020, 2050 and 2080. They concluded that reefs bathed by cooler waters will have the greatest chances of future survival.

Bocas del Toro adjoins the Isla Bastimentos National Park, one of 104 protected areas in Panama covering a total of 36,000 square kilometres, equivalent to 39 percent of the national territory.

“Local communities need education in resource management, sustainable use, fisheries zoning and fisherfolk organisation,” Casas said.

The next phase of the corals project, financed with 48,000 dollars this year and requiring about 70,000 dollars for 2015, will involve quantifying the value of ecosystem services provided by coral reefs.

Gómez has no plans to change his trade, but he can see that his grandchildren will no longer follow the same occupation. “Fishing is going to be more complicated in future. They will have to think of other ways of earning a living,” he told IPS, gazing nostalgically out to sea.

Edited byEstrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Valerie Dee

Gerald Price sees a bleak future for Barbuda's fishermen under the Blue Halo initiative. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Desmond Brown
CODRINGTON, Barbuda, Sep 16 2014 (IPS)

Local fishermen are singing the blues over a sweeping set of new ocean management regulations, signed into law by the Barbuda Council, to zone their coastal waters, strengthen fisheries management, and establish a network of marine sanctuaries.

Director of the Barbuda Research Complex John Mussington has criticised the Blue Halo initiative, not for its laudable goals, but because he believes it needs a more inclusive approach that takes into account climate change and offers fishermen an alternative.“I have been in places where there is no management, like Jamaica where I spent several years, and I can say from firsthand experience that the fishers there are extraordinarily poor and they are poor because fishing has been so badly managed that there is nothing left to catch.” -- Dr. Nancy Knowlton

“I don’t think you are going to get the cooperation of the Barbuda fishermen,” he cautioned.

“I have been involved directly in conservation efforts in Barbuda since 1983, even more so from 1991, where every single project related to conservation of the resources, particularly related to fishing, I have been involved in, so when I speak concerning this matter I am speaking on that basis,” Mussington told IPS.

The regulations establish five marine sanctuaries, collectively protecting 33 percent (139 km2) of the coastal area, to enable fish populations to rebuild and habitats to recover.

To restore the coral reefs, catching parrotfish and sea urchins has been completely prohibited, as those herbivores are critical to keeping algae levels on reefs low so coral can thrive. Barbuda is the first Caribbean island to put either of these bold and important measures in place.

But Mussington said the regulations and the initiatives which have been signed onto are not likely to work for three reasons.

“One, the science on which the initiative is based is poor and once you have poor science to start off with you cannot expect to get good results,” he said.

“The second reason why it will be challenged has to do with the local government administration which has a track record of not adhering to regulations and a lack of will and capacity with respect to enforcing regulations.

“The third issue on which this initiative is going to likely fail has to do with the engagement of stakeholders. You cannot come into a community and basically engage stakeholders in a manner which essentially results in division and sidelining of persons. Things have not worked that way,” Mussington added.

Chair of the National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, Dr. Nancy Knowlton, disagrees. She cited a recent major report based on 90 different locations around the Caribbean which clearly shows that in places where fishing is properly managed, reefs are much healthier.

“In many of these places a big part of alternative livelihoods is in fact ocean-related tourism, and in order for that to take hold you need to have a healthy ecosystem, so I am much more optimistic about the chances for the Blue Halo to be a kind of flagship for the successful management of reefs in the Caribbean,” she told IPS.

“I have been in places where there is no management, like Jamaica where I spent several years, and I can say from firsthand experience that the fishers there are extraordinarily poor and they are poor because fishing has been so badly managed that there is nothing left to catch.”

The report, which synthesised a three-year study by 90 international experts and was issued by the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network (GCRMN), the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), had a spot of surprisingly good news.

According to the authors, restoring parrotfish populations and improving other management strategies, such as protection from overfishing and excessive coastal pollution, can help reefs recover and even make them more resilient to future climate change impacts.

The study also shows that some of the healthiest Caribbean coral reefs are those that harbour vigorous populations of grazing parrotfish.

These include the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary in the northern Gulf of Mexico, Bermuda and Bonaire, “all of which have restricted or banned fishing practices that harm parrotfish, such as fish traps and spearfishing”.

The study is urging other countries to follow suit.

Still, according to the former president of the Antigua and Barbuda Fisherman’s Cooperative, Gerald Price, the future looks “very bleak” for Barbudan fishermen under Blue Halo.

He said the last time he checked the statistics for Barbuda, there were about 43 active fishing vessels, and each one may have three to four fishermen aboard. “What are they going to do and how are they going to make a living?” Price wondered.

“Barbuda is slightly different from Antigua in that in Antigua, our fishermen usually have an alternative. They are either a carpenter or a mason or they get work at a hotel. In Barbuda, as we understand it, they are 100 percent dependent on fishing. It’s going to be bleak, very bleak.”

Creation of the new regulations on Barbuda occurred under the umbrella of the Barbuda Blue Halo Initiative, a collaboration among the Barbuda Council, Government of Antigua & Barbuda, Barbuda Fisheries Division, Codrington Lagoon Park, and the Waitt Institute. The Waitt Institute provided all of the science, mapping, and communications, offered policy recommendations, and coordinated the overall Initiative.

“I enthusiastically applaud the measures put in place in Barbuda, particularly the protection of parrotfish and sea urchins. Protection of these vitally important herbivores is the essential first step toward the recovery of Caribbean reefs from the severe degradation they have undergone in the last 50 years,” said Jeremy Jackson, director of the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network (GCRMN) at the International Union of the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

Also included in the regulations is a two-year fishing hiatus for Codrington Lagoon, the primary nursery ground for the lobster and finfish fisheries. The lagoon, a Ramsar wetland of international importance, is one the Caribbean’s most extensive and intact mangrove ecosystems, and home to the world’s largest breeding colony of magnificent frigate birds.

But Mussington said having the Codrington Lagoon declared as a sanctuary zone will backfire.

“The cultural significance of that lagoon, the resources which are there and the history on which it is based in terms of providing livelihood and food security for Barbudans — you would understand that making such a declaration is counterproductive,” he said.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at destinydlb@gmail.com

A Barrier Reef Anemonefish (Amphiprion akindynos) in host anemone. Pixie Garden, Ribbon Reefs, Great Barrier Reef. Credit: Richard Ling/cc by 2.0

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Aug 21 2014 (IPS)

Increased effort is needed to protect Australia’s iconic Great Barrier Reef, which is in serious decline and will likely deteriorate further in the future, according to a new report.

“Greater reductions of all threats at all levels, reef-wide, regional and local, are required to prevent the projected declines,”said an outlook report by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, the government agency responsible for protecting the reef.“A thriving commercial fishery is gone, so are the dolphins and dugongs.” -- Richard Leck of WWF-Australia

However, the same agency recently approved the dumping of five million tonnes of dredging spoil in the reef region. Scientists and coral reef experts universally condemned the decision.

Documents obtained by Australia’s ABC TV investigative programme this week revealed scientists inside the Park Authority also opposed the dumping inside the UNESCO World Heritage Area.

“That decision has to be a political decision. It is not supported by science at all, and I was absolutely flabbergasted when I heard,”Charlie Veron, a renowned coral reef scientist, told ABC. Veron is the former chief scientist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science.

The Great Barrier Reef (GBR) is one of the seven greatest natural wonders of the world. Visible from space, it is a startlingly beautiful mosaic made up of thousands of reefs, sea grass beds, and islands running 2,300 km along the coast of the state of Queensland.

The GBR from above. Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

In 1981 UNESCO declared the GBR a World Heritage Area, calling it “an irreplaceable source of life and inspiration”. It was home to 10 percent of all fish on the planet. Dugongs and many varieties of dolphins and sea turtles were once abundant.

Although protected as a marine park for decades, more than half of the coral is dead.Without concerted action, just five to 10 percent of the coral will remain by 2020, according to a 2012 scientific survey reported by IPS.

“I’ve worked on the reef for over a decade and those survey results were absolutely stunning,”said Richard Leck, spokesperson for WWF-Australia.

“The GBR is likely the best monitored reef in the world and we’re seeing the impacts of massive coastal development,”Leck told IPS.

In 2010, the Australian government approved four massive liquid natural gas (LNG) processing plants with port facilities at the coal port of Gladstone in central Queensland. Extensive dredging resulted in the dumping of 46 million tonnes of material in the harbour and inside the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park boundaries.

Much of the most toxic dredging material was to be contained inside a huge retaining or bund wall in the Gladstone Harbour. It soon began to fail, eventually leaking as much as 4,000 tonnes of material daily. The impacts have been devastating.

“A thriving commercial fishery is gone, so are the dolphins and dugongs,”said Leck. “Gladstone was a clear failure by state and national governments.”

Local tourist operators say the water quality and clarity has declined significantly.

Queensland is also a major mining and export region, shipping 156 million tonnes annually, mostly to Asian markets. Now there are proposals to expand that output sixfold to nearly one billion tonnes annually by 2020.

India’s Adani Group plans to spend six billion dollars to build Queensland’s biggest coal mine, including a new town and a 350 km railway to connect to Port Abbot, near the tourist town of Bowen.

Other Indian miners, along with a number of Chinese mining interests, have locked up an estimated 20 billion tonnes of coal resources in central Queensland. Australian mining companies,including mining billionaire Gina Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting, are also expanding their operations.

In December 2013, Australia’s Minister of Environment Greg Hunt approved a plan to create one of the world’s largest coal ports at Port Abbot. A few months later, and in spite of strong opposition from its own scientists, the Park Authority agreed to allow five million tonnes of dredged material from Port Abbot to be dumped in the GBR.

“The Park Authority was in a difficult position. Saying ‘no’meant rejecting the minister’s approval of the dredging,”said Leck.

Hunt told ABC TV that he’d conducted “a very careful and deep review”and concluded that “the unequivocal advice we received was: this can be done safely.”

There is substantial scientific literature showing sediment from dredging can smother and kill marine species. Sediment also reduces light levels, causes physiological stress, impairs growth and reproduction, clogs the gills of fish, and promotes diseases, said Terry Hughes, director of the Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University in Townsville, Queensland.

Some dredge spoil is very fine sediment — tiny little particles suspended in the water column — readily dispersed by winds, currents and waves. Over a period of just a few months they can travel 100 kilometres or more, Hughes told IPS.

A recently published modelling study predicts that fine sediments in suspension can spread up to 200 kilometres from coal ports within 90 days. It also measured sediments found in coral reefs in the GBR near another coal port and found high levels of chemicals called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) which are associated with coal dust.

Given the perilous health of the reef, which is also facing enormous threats from rising water temperatures and ocean acidity due to CO2 emissions from fossil fuels, Hughes and other scientists are calling for a complete ban on dumping in the GBR or anywhere near it.

The additional threat posed by coal ports and other industrial developments along the coast is so serious that UNESCO warned Australia it would change the reef’s prestigious World Heritage Site designation to a “World Heritage Site in Danger”.

The UNESCO decision is expected mid-2015, which is also when the Port Abbot dredging is scheduled to begin.

Edited by: Kitty Stapp

Protection from overfishing and excessive coastal pollution could help reefs recover and make them more resilient to future climate change impacts. Credit: Jim Maragos/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

By Desmond Brown
ST. JOHN’S, Antigua, Jul 9 2014 (IPS)

Marine environmentalist Eli Fuller, who for the past two decades has been exploring the coastline of Antigua and Barbuda, warns that while there has been “dramatic changes” to coral reefs since he was a little boy, “it’s getting worse and worse.”

So he is not surprised by the largely pessimistic findings of a three-year study by 90 international experts in a report by the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network (GCRMN), the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).“Those reefs are the frontline barriers against storm waves." -- marine biologist John Mussington

But there was a spot of surprisingly good news. According to the authors, restoring parrotfish populations and improving other management strategies, such as protection from overfishing and excessive coastal pollution, can help reefs recover and even make them more resilient to future climate change impacts.

“We have seen definitely the last two summers, and here we are in summer again, we are seeing ever so slightly raised sea levels, but in conjunction with that we are seeing eroded coral barriers, especially on the north coast and east coast of Barbuda and quite a few areas in Antigua,” Fuller told IPS.

“Between Prickly Pear and Long Island, those reefs out there – they almost used to get to the surface. Now I am seeing sailboats sail over areas where they would have run aground and had to be salvaged before.

“We are seeing more surge come ashore and more erosion. You are having areas that were never affected by erosion getting eroded terribly. I look at the north coast of Barbuda and I can’t believe some of the erosion they are facing, and when you go offshore to those reefs only the bases of the big, huge coral structures are there. All the tops have died and eroded away so we are seeing more water coming to our shoreline,” he added.

Fuller is worried about the future of tourism in a region where it is the number one industry and foreign exchange earner for most countries.

Marine environmentalist Eli Fuller says Caribbean reefs are in “big trouble”. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

“We are in big trouble right now, let alone in the future when the reefs erode more and more and sea levels come up and up,” he said.

Like Fuller, for marine biologist John Mussington, the drastic decline of Caribbean coral is “not surprising.”

“We have actually seen the decline. The causes that they have listed include tourism, pollution, climate change in terms of global warming being a factor as well as overfishing,” he told IPS.

Mussington said the reefs are critical and serve several very important roles.

“The beach is a beautiful place. We have nice white sand beaches and we have crystal clear water. The reefs are responsible for that. If you lose your reefs you are no longer going to have sand and you will no longer have clear water,” he said.

“Those reefs are the frontline barriers against storm waves. If you have any rough weather, groundswells, tropical storms or hurricanes, those reefs are responsible for breaking the impact of those waves. So if you lose the reefs you are going to be further exposed to erosion and the destruction from storms.

“Another function that is very critical to us is that the reefs provide us with food. The marine resources in terms of fish, lobster and conch are associated with the reef system and when you lose that you are going to lose those things,” he said.

Mussington said the report should serve as a wake-up call for the Caribbean.

“All those things that I’ve mentioned, you realise that that is the sum total of the main attraction for our tourism industry which is number one – so if you lose all of that, it’s obvious that you lose everything,” Mussington explained.

But Mussington said it is not all doom and gloom for the Caribbean, noting there is a technique for re-growing and restoring reefs which is touted as one of the major solutions that small islands like those in the Caribbean should focus on.

“All you need to have is a wire frame and a very low voltage electrical source that will encourage deposition of calcium on the framework. Once you have that deposition of calcium on the framework then coral will grow,” he explained.

The study also shows that some of the healthiest Caribbean coral reefs are those that harbour vigorous populations of grazing parrotfish.

These include the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary in the northern Gulf of Mexico, Bermuda and Bonaire, “all of which have restricted or banned fishing practices that harm parrotfish, such as fish traps and spearfishing”.

The study is urging other countries to follow suit.

“Barbuda is about to ban all catches of parrotfish and grazing sea urchins, and set aside one-third of its coastal waters as marine reserves,” said Ayana Johnson of the Waitt Institute’s Blue Halo Initiative, which is collaborating with Barbuda in the development of its new management plan.

“This is the kind of aggressive management that needs to be replicated regionally if we are going to increase the resilience of Caribbean reefs,” she added.

The IUCN said that reefs where parrotfish are not protected have suffered tragic declines, including Jamaica, the entire Florida Reef Tract from Miami to Key West, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

President and founder of the Coral Restoration Foundation, Ken Nedimyer, concurs that “there are some simple things which can be done like changing fishing habits and reducing inputs from the hotels, resorts, golf courses. Those are things that can be done and should be done and places that take these steps will reap the rewards.”

Chair at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, Dr. Nancy Knowlton, believes the surprising part of the report is that it’s not actually happening everywhere and that there are places like Bonaire and Bermuda and the flower garden reef off the Gulf of Mexico where coral reefs are thriving.

“That’s because of careful management of the reef and to me that’s actually despite a sort of overwhelmingly bad news of reefs disappearing in the next 20 years,” she told IPS.

“On the positive side, there are examples where when people manage reefs properly they actually don’t decline. I think that is the most important message from the report and the one that’s most surprising because I think that everyone had thought that Caribbean reefs were just doomed.

“Coral reefs are ecosystems which are routinely battered by hurricanes over thousands and thousands of years and yet they have in the past always bounced back, and the reason they bounce back is because the local conditions are favourable for coral growth. So creating those favourable conditions for corals to rebound is really the most important thing to do,” Knowlton added.

The fisheries sector in the CARICOM Region is an important source of food and income. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Desmond Brown
CODRINGTON, Barbuda, Apr 26 2014 (IPS)

A marine biologist has cautioned that the mass deaths of starfish along the United States west coast in recent months could also occur in the Caribbean region because of climate change, threatening the vital fishing sector.

Since June 2013, scientists began noticing that starfish, which they say function as keystone species in the marine ecosystem, have been mysteriously dying by the millions."It’s a fight that the world has to win if it is to survive because if the small states don’t win, it means that the globe as a whole does not win." -- John Mussington

“The cause of the starfish die-off which is taking place in the Pacific Ocean is not known at this time but it could turn out to be from a number of factors including climate change,” John Mussington told IPS.

“If it turns out that climate change factors such as ocean warming are indeed implicated in the starfish die-off, then there is the possibility that the same thing could happen in the Atlantic and affect Caribbean species.

“We are living in an era when the predicted consequences of climate change are now reality. Large scale die-off of can therefore happen to us in the Caribbean,” Mussington added.

Starfish play a key role in marine ecosystems. They eat mussels, barnacles, snails, mollusks and other smaller sea life so their health is considered a measure of marine life on the whole in a given area. Starfish are in turn eaten by shorebirds, gulls, and sometimes sea otters.

Mussington explained that something similar to what’s happening in California has happened in the region before.

He told IPS that in 1983 there was a Caribbean-wide die-off of the black sea urchin, spreading from as far north as The Bahamas right down the chain of islands to the south.

“The long-spined sea urchin was a kestone species in the Caribbean marine ecosystem, similar to the affected starfish in the Pacific-California ecosystem. The designation as ‘keystone’ is due to the fact that if there is anything affecting their large populations, then this can be interpreted as a reliable indication of problems in the entire ecosystem that will likely affect other species,” Mussington said.

“Something went very wrong with our Caribbean marine ecosystem in 1983 and the black sea urchin was wiped out – the species is considered today to be functionally extinct. With the decline of this keystone species, the Caribbean has seen significant decline in its coral reefs and the marine communities they support, including economically important commercial species.”

Mussington said the spiny urchin grazes on algae and it is important to control the number of algae on coral reefs.

Habitat degradation, specifically of coral reefs, has been cited by numerous studies as the primary cause of ongoing fish declines of Caribbean fish populations.

An Arapaima, the world’s largest freshwater fish, being kept in a man-made pond in Guyana. The Arapaima can weigh over 800 pounds and reach lengths of up to 10 feet. Unfortunately, they’ve been overfished commercially and are currently a threatened species. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

Caribbean coral reefs have experienced drastic losses in the past several decades. Fish use the structure of corals for shelter and they also contribute to coastal protection.

Established research has predicted that the communities located in coastal areas, as well as national economies in the general Caribbean region, are likely to sustain substantial economic losses should the current trends in coral reef degradation and destruction continue.

It has been estimated that fisheries associated with coral reef in the Caribbean region are responsible for generating net annual revenues, which have been valued at or above approximately 837 million Eastern Caribbean dollars, or about 310 million U.S. dollars.

Continued degradation of the region’s few remaining coral reefs would diminish these net annual revenues by an estimated 95-140 million U.S. dollars annually by 2015. The subsequent decrease in dive tourism could also profoundly affect annual net tourism revenues

“There has to be some balance and once you have a major species dying off, it’s going to have repercussions for the entire system. We must not forget that man is a integral part of this system and the repercussions for us will be serious,” Mussington told IPS.

The fisheries sector in the CARICOM Region is an important source of livelihoods and sustenance. The local population is highly dependent on this resource for economic and social development. This resource also contributes significantly to food security, poverty alleviation, employment, foreign exchange earnings, development and stability of rural and coastal communities, culture, recreation and tourism.

The subsector provides direct employment for more than 120,000 fishers and indirect employment opportunities for thousands of others – particularly women – in processing, marketing, boat-building, net-making and other support services.

But the coordinator for the United Nations Environmental Programme’s Caribbean Regional Coordinating Unit-Caribbean Environment Programme, Nelson Andrade Colmenares, told IPS the vital sector is being threatened by climate change.

“The Caribbean Sea, home to a vibrant ecosystem benefitting fisherfolk, the tourism industry and the region’s people alike is currently threatened,” he said, adding that “over harvesting of fisheries, climate change and pollution from sewage, agricultural runoff and industrial effluent has led to 75 percent of coral reefs in the region being labeled as at risk.”

Acting permanent secretary in Dominica’s fisheries ministry, Harold Guiste agrees, explaining that the future of the Caribbean’s conch and lobster fisheries remains under threat despite regional efforts to protect it.

Guiste blames the problem of overfishing squarely on nations outside the Caribbean that trawl the region’s seas illegally.

“Globally we have noticed a rush to fish accompanied by a lack of responsible behaviour in the fishing sector,” he told IPS. “This type of hooligan behaviour has resulted in severe decline in some major fisheries of the world and collapse in some others.”

The Dominican official called for a collaborative approach to safeguard against the depletion of the region’s already challenged resources.

The spiny lobster trade brings in about 456 million US dollars to CARICOM nations but demand has led to overfishing of a once healthy stocks.

While admitting that “some factors are out of our control as it relates to mitigating against global warming”, Mussington said both developing and developed countries need to do more.

“We need to do things which will discontinue the rise in global temperatures and those things that need to happen have to do with less use of fossil fuels and modification of certain things that countries do,” he told IPS.

In fact, the persons who are going to be suffering most – the people living in these Small Island Developing States – we are not the ones ultimately responsible in large measure for the problems we are having now, the developed countries are.”

“So far the developed countries have been very resistant to implementing those policies and changes that need to happen,” Mussington added.

In the end, he said the annual Conference of the Parties (COP) negotiations should not be simply about the smaller countries winning.

“It’s a fight that the world has to win if it is to survive because if the small states don’t win, it means that the globe as a whole does not win, which means that Planet Earth will lose out and the human race on planet earth might very well face total extinction,” warned Mussington.

“That’s what’s facing us. The globe will become unlivable,” he added.

Handling lionfish requires special care: some of their fins are tipped with venom that make even the slightest puncture extremely painful, though not fatal. Credit: Christopher Pala/IPS

By Christopher Pala
NASSAU, The Bahamas, Feb 28 2014 (IPS)

The lionfish, with its striking russet and white stripes and huge venomous outrigger fins, wasn’t hard to spot under a coral reef in 15 feet of clear water. Nor was it a challenge to spear it.

As I approached and brought the point of my Hawaiian sling to within a foot of it, it simply looked back, utterly fearless until I pierced it and brought it back to the surface.“They’re everywhere now. It’s a doomsday scenario.” -- Pericles Maillis

Within a half-hour, we had caught four of these gorgeous one-pound fish, and the fillets made excellent eating that night.

But the arrival of a tasty, abundant and easy-to-shoot fish on the Caribbean’s much-depleted coral reefs is anything but good news. A recent scientific paper brought new detail to previous studies, showing that a year after colonising a reef, lionfish reduced the number of native fish by about half.

“They’ll eat just about anything they can swallow and almost nothing eats them,” said principal author Stephanie Green of Oregon State University. That’s why they’re so easy to catch, she explained.

However tasty they may be, only a miniscule fraction of the invaders has been removed, while their numbers continue to grow exponentially, reaching densities never seen in the Pacific, their native habitat.

This suggests the lionfish, believed to have been introduced to the Atlantic coast by aquarium lovers in the 1980s, will likely wipe out most Caribbean reef fish in a decade or two, scientists agree. As a result, many corals that depend on herbivore fish will die and eventually turn to rubble, making shorelines more vulnerable to waves just as global warming is lifting sea levels.

As he steered his boat back to shore, my host, a Bahamian lawyer of Greek descent named Pericles Maillis, balefully contemplated our catch and said, “They’re everywhere now. It’s a doomsday scenario.”

Maillis, a lifelong fisherman, conservationist and a former president of the Bahamas National Trust, has been trying to promote a commercial fishery in The Bahamas, but the fish, first spotted here in 2004, has become nearly ubiquitous since 2010. And shooting it while scuba diving is still banned.

His pessimism is not unwarranted. Scientists from the southern Caribbean are reporting seeing densities of lionfish that until a couple of years ago were only documented in The Bahamas, the fish’s jumping off point from Florida into the Caribbean.

In the Atlantic, their range now covers 3.3 million square kilometres. They can reach densities hundreds of times higher than in their native range, for reasons that remain a mystery. “Something is controlling their abundance,” says Mark Hixon of the University of Hawaii. “We’re guessing a small predator that’s absent in the Atlantic is targeting baby lions, but we have no idea what it is.”

In addition to adult little reef fish, the lionfish swallow virtually all species of bigger fish when they appear on the reef as bite-sized juveniles.

Isabelle Côté of Simon Fraser University said that today, when she surveys reefs in the Bahamas, where she does most of her research, “you can see there are a lot fewer little fish than there used to be just four years ago.”

No so for the larger predators like snappers and groupers that are the mainstay of the local fishermen’s reef catch. A stroll along Nassau’s fishing docks confirms what scientists have observed: despite the explosion in the number of lionfish, the decades-old slow decline in the numbers of large predators has not accelerated – yet.

Because they take years to mature, it will take a while for the generation of juveniles that’s being gobbled up now to fail to replace the current adults, who are too large to be lionfish prey.

At Nassau’s waterside fish market, where a “Me? Worry?” mood prevailed, fisherman Carson Colmar, 45, said he’s not seen any significant drop in his catch of reef fish and lobsters. He started spearing lionfish simply because they’re so easy and abundant. “I sell 50 a week,” he said. “I’d catch more if I could sell them.” The fillets sell for eight dollars a pound, compared to twelve dollars for grouper or snapper.

One problem is that handling lionfish requires special care: some of their fins are tipped with venom that make even the slightest puncture extremely painful, though not fatal. So local people, already taken aback by their unusual appearance, often believe that the flesh may be poisonous too, which it is not. That, fishermen complain, limits demand.

In the United States, the notion that this lethal predator could be controlled by becoming dinner for the ultimate predator, homo sapiens, has received wide coverage. Lad Akins, the founder of REEF, the Reef Environmental Education Foundation, who has been working on lionfish control for nearly a decade, noted that the commercial take of lionfish in Florida, where REEF is based, quintupled in just a year to 6.1 tonnes in 2012.

“It’s growing fast, but we don’t know yet if it’s putting a dent in the lionfish population,” says Akins, who is based in Key Largo. Scientists said the strategy of “eat them to beat them” has failed to have any overall effect and is unlikely to do so because spearing lionfish is too time-consuming to be profitable.

So far the only documented successes have come from recreational diving companies, which are literally defending their turf. Seeing how the colourful reef fish that underpin the businesses could soon be gone, they have started methodically exterminating the invaders from their regular dive sites.

In Bonaire, a diving mecca the Dutch West Indies, the first lionfish was caught in 2009, and within two years they were proliferating, according to Fadilah Ali of the University of Southampton. But some 300 volunteers were given special spears, more than 10,000 lionfish were killed and soon their density dropped in the areas favoured by divers. “Today, on a typical dive, you’ll see very few or no lionfish,” she said.

Green of Oregon State said some reefs might survive if the recreational divers go beyond the reefs favoured by their clients, which tend to have many different species but few juveniles. To protect the young fish, they would have to eliminate lionfish from shallow areas around mangroves, which serve as nurseries, she said.

Because many deep-sea ecosystems are so stable, even small changes in temperature, oxygen, and pH may lower the resilience of deep-sea communities. Credit: Courtesy NOAA HURL Archives

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Oct 15 2013 (IPS)

Oil, gas and coal are contaminating the world’s oceans from top to bottom, threatening the lives of more than 800 million people, a new study warns Tuesday.

“It took a year to analyse and synthesise all of the studies on the impacts of climate change on ocean species,” Camilo Mora, an ecologist at University of Hawai‘i in Honolulu and lead author, told IPS."We are seeing greater changes, happening faster, and the effects are more imminent than previously anticipated." -- Alex Rogers of the University of Oxford

Mora is also lead author of ground-breaking climate study published in Nature last week.

“It was very sad to see all the responses were negative. We were hoping there might be some safe havens,” he said.

The study found that carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels are overheating the oceans, turning them acidic and reducing the amount of oxygen in seawater. This is happening too fast for most marine species to adapt and ocean ecosystems around the world will collapse.

By 2100, no corner of the oceans that cover 70 percent of the Earth’s surface will be untouched.

“The impacts of climate change will be felt from the ocean surface to the seafloor. It is truly scary to consider how vast these impacts will be,” said Andrew Sweetman of the International Research Institute of Stavanger, Norway, co-author of the PLOS Biology study published Oct. 15.

This ambitious study examined all the available research on how current and future carbon emissions are fundamentally altering the oceans. It then looked at how this will impact fish, corals, marine animals, plants and other organisms. Finally the 29 authors from 10 countries analysed how this will affect the 1.4 to 2.0 billion people who live near the oceans or depend on them for their food and income.

Some 500 million to 870 million of the world’s poorest people are likely to be unable to feed themselves or earn incomes from oceans too contaminated by fossil fuel emissions, the “Biotic and Human Vulnerability to Projected Changes in Ocean Biogeochemistry over the 21st Century” study concludes.

“We are making a big mess of the oceans. Climate change is having a major impact illustrating the need for urgent action to reduce emissions,” said Mora.

The researchers used models of projected climate change developed for the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to build their analysis. These models are validated using measurements from past decades.

Additionally the findings of the PLOS Biology study were verified using actual observations. There were some differences but not significant enough to alter the conclusions, said Mora.

More shocking is that the oceans will be dramatically altered even with reduced growth in use of fossil fuel in coming decades and major declines starting in 2050, he said.

Only an abrupt decline in consumption of oil, gas, and coal within the next 10 years will minimise the impacts on the oceans.

This study only looked at how climate change is impacting the oceans and did not look at other impacts such as overfishing, chemical and nutrient pollution or plastic trash.

However, the 2013 update to the Ocean Health Index also released Tuesday did look at all current impacts on oceans. It ranked the current overall health of the oceans as a 65 out of possible 100. The index was launched in 2012 and is annual international collaboration to assess health of oceans based on 10 measures such as biodiversity, coastal livelihoods and protection, food provision.

The oceans’ ability to provide food only scored 33 out of 100, showing that food security is already at risk. It also means fish and other foods from the oceans are being harvested far faster than nature can replace them, the index reports.

China, Taiwan, Russia, India and Japan had the worst scores indicating that their regional wild-caught fisheries are nearly depleted.

“The Ocean Health Index measures how well we are sustainably producing seafood,” said Andrew Rosenberg, director of the Centre for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Fish are a vital source of protein for many but the index shows food security is at risk in some parts of the world, said Rosenberg in a release.

In regions subject to damaging storms and cyclones, the health of their coastal zones including mangroves, salt marshes, seagrass beds and coral reefs are a poor 57 out of 100, the index found. Tropical cyclones cause an estimated 26 billion dollars a year in lost property.

“Coastal habitats mitigate the damage that storms cause…. We must try to restore naturally protective coastal habitats,” Elizabeth Selig, director of Marine Science at Conservation International, said in a statement.

The Index “reveals the areas that must be improved in order to provide our children and their children a healthy thriving ocean,” said well-known oceanographer Sylvia Earle who is explorer-in-residence at National Geographic.

“This must be done as if it’s a matter of life and death – because it is,” Earle said in a statement.

Yet another independent assessment of ocean health reached a similar conclusion.

The world’s oceans are changing faster than previously thought with potentially dire consequences for both human and marine life, said the State of the Oceans report released last week by the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

Climate change combined with other impacts like chemical pollution and overfishing have put the oceans into a downward spiral.

“We are seeing greater change, happening faster, and the effects are more imminent than previously anticipated,” Alex Rogers of the University of Oxford and IPSO’s scientific director told IPS.

“What these latest reports make absolutely clear is that deferring action will increase costs in the future and lead to even greater, perhaps irreversible, losses,” said Dan Laffoley of the IUCN in a release.

At this Bonaire reef, the olive-green coral is alive, but the mottled-gray coral is dead. Credit: Living Oceans Foundation/IPS

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Jul 9 2013 (IPS)

Environmentalists on Monday filed a petition with the U.S. government requesting regulatory safeguards for 81 particularly vulnerable marine wildlife species, from corals to sharks.

According to WildEarth Guardians, a conservation watchdog, U.S. officials have failed to protect ocean-dwelling species at anywhere near the rate received by animals that live on land, despite legislative and executive mandates to do so. More importantly, the group suggests, the relevant science does not support such a disparity."We’ve repeatedly seen action at the international level become stymied by politics." -- Bethany Cotton of WildEarth Guardians

For decades the United States has had federal legislation, known as the Endangered Species Act (ESA), in place to offer protections to those plants and animals officially deemed in danger of extinction. According to figures provided by WildEarth Guardians, the ESA has officially protected 2,097 species since its enactment in 1973.

Yet just 94 of these have lived in the oceans and seas. The petition’s list would thus nearly double the marine species receiving federal protection.

“To date the U.S. has largely failed to protect marine species under the ESA,” WildEarth Guardians stated Monday. “[This new petition] aims to begin righting this imbalance, which does not reflect the scientific reality of species at risk of extinction. The petition demonstrates that threats to marine species are no less dire or diverse than those jeopardising terrestrial species.”

The group says it wants to use the petition, listing only species that have been deemed endangered or critically endangered by widely recognised international scientific groups, to “jumpstart” the national discussion on this disparity and, more broadly, on the increasingly perilous state of marine wildlife and ecosystems.

“There’s been a clear historical imbalance in terms of offering federal protections to marine species, partially because for a long time the science was stronger for terrestrial species – it was just easier to tell when they were in bad shape,” Bethany Cotton, wildlife programme director for WildEarth Guardians, told IPS.

“But that science has now caught up for many of these [marine] species, and their imperilment is very clear. Yet to a certain extent, the public can still deal with the ocean as ‘out of sight, out of mind’, which makes it easier for large, charismatic animals like whales to receive attention but not for smaller or lesser-known species.”

She continues: “However, it is the government’s responsibility to focus on the science, and it hasn’t been doing that on its own.”

Cotton cites current “unprecedented threats” to marine ecosystems from ocean acidification, increased pollution levels and over-fishing, particularly in international waters. She also notes that marine species are particularly vulnerable to over-exploitation by international trade.

A spokesperson for the National Marine Fisheries Service, Connie Barclay, told IPS that the department’s endangered species team had not yet seen the WildEarth Guardians petition, and so could not comment on its content.

“The purpose of the Endangered Species Act is to conserve threatened and endangered species and their ecosystems. It helps guide conservation efforts and ensures that a species does not go extinct,” Barclay said by e-mail, noting: “Our process for listing species under the ESA is transparent and offers opportunities for public comment.”

81 test cases

The petition comes in the aftermath of an executive order issued in 2010 by President Barack Obama expressing concern over the deterioration of ocean ecosystems and ordering all U.S. government agencies to “use the best available science and knowledge … [to] protect, maintain, and restore the health and biological diversity of ocean … ecosystems”.

That order built on recommendations by a national task force, which also led to the creation of a new comprehensive national marine policy. Three months ago, President Obama’s administration published a final plan for implementation of this new National Ocean Policy.

“The Obama administration has put more focus on creating a comprehensive framework for managing our oceans,” Miyoko Sakashita, oceans director for the Center for Biological Diversity, an advocacy group, told IPS.

“That said, one of the pieces that fell short was using powerful existing laws to protect the oceans, and the Endangered Species Act is an example of legislation that was probably underutilised in the National Oceans Plan.”

Taking advantage of a provision within the Endangered Species Act that allows for science-based petitions from the public, the WildEarth Guardians request builds upon the assessments of two international wildlife observer groups, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), a 1973 global agreement.

All 81 species included in the new petition have been deemed endangered or critically endangered by the IUCN and CITES. As such, environmentalists see the new petition as a way to test U.S. regulators’ seriousness following President Obama’s 2010 order.

“If [the government] won’t take action in situations as dire as those faced by these critically imperilled species,” Jay Tutchton, WildEarth Guardians’ general counsel, said Monday, “it signals the agency doesn’t really want to do anything but talk about declining ocean health.”

Problems of the commons

Importantly, the Endangered Species Act allows the U.S. government to offer protections to species not living within the country’s territory. Doing so can assist in, for instance, cutting down on U.S. demand for certain wildlife products and making available funding for overseas management activities.

“There is certainly increased awareness of the significance of the threats to marine health and ocean ecosystems, but we’ve repeatedly seen action at the international level become stymied by politics,” Bethany Cotton says.

“Just as the most politically volatile such discussions on terrestrial animals revolve around elephants, because of the money involved in the ivory trade, this is also true of the coral used in jewellery and the sharks killed for the lucrative fin trade. That’s why it’s particularly important that the United States, which has supported protection efforts on sharks and coral at the international level, to do whatever it can under domestic laws to protect those species.”

Once the National Marine Fisheries Service has officially received the WildEarth Guardians petition, officials will have three months to decide which, if any, of the requested species warrant investigation. Thereafter, the agency will have 12 months to decide whether protections are merited and to offer proposals for draft rules.

“Oceans are tricky, as they cross a lot of jurisdictions and encounter lots of problems of the commons,” the Center for Biological Diversity’s Sakashita says.

“But the United States can play a very important role in this regard, both elevating the importance of protecting a particular animal and establishing itself as a leader in protecting the oceans more generally.”

Scientists and researchers are working together in a new initiative to collect data that will help determine the effects of climate change on coral in the Caribbean Sea.

“We want to know how climate change will impact our corals. So we will measure variables that would impact corals due to climate change,” said Mark Bynoe, senior research economist at the Belize-based Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre (CCCCC).

Bynoe told IPS that the idea behind the project is to be able to able to monitor parameters that can affect corals from a climatological standpoint, such as increased acidification, sea temperature, and water quality.

The CCCCC has awarded the Florida-based global company, YSI Integrated Systems and Services, a contract for five marine monitoring buoys that will collect high-quality data for researchers studying climate change in the Caribbean Sea.

“Our waters are the bread basket for the region, and we must be diligent in protecting and sustaining them,” Kenrick Leslie, executive director of the CCCCC, said.

The CCCCC has said that climate change is already profoundly affecting the region’s biological and socioeconomic systems. Belize, for example, has substantial natural capital along its cost, including the largest coral reef ecosystem in the Americas, mangrove areas, tropic forests and inland wetlands. The coral reefs are extremely important economically and environmentally.

But since the 1970s, Belize’s coral reefs have felt the impact of a warmer sea. “Live coral cover on shallow patch reefs has decreased from 80 percent in 1971 to 20 percent in 1996, with a further decline from the 20 percent in 1996 to 13 percent in 1999,” the CCCCC noted.

A critical resource

In an address to graduating students of the University of Belize late last month, Leslie described how climate change has affected the country. “We have seen serious degradation in our coral reef system due to warmer sea temperatures, mechanical damage from tropical cyclones, and sedimentation caused by more frequent and intense flooding,” he said.

“These conditions can only be further exacerbated by the further warming of the atmosphere and oceans,” he said, adding that the private sector “would be advised to start thinking about their assets and how climate change may impact them”.

Coral reefs also play an extremely important role in the Caribbean tourism economy, as well as in food production and food security, but they have been adversely affected by rising sea temperatures and pollution.

“There are threats from land based sources, from agrochemicals, pollutants from the tourism sector, threats from the fishing industry where guys moor the boats and drop them on corals as well as the cruise ships. There are also threats from nature,” Bynoe added.

Monitoring environmental conditions in the Caribbean will help researchers track the health of the reefs. This monitoring mirrors similar systems already installed at key reef sites in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The data gathered will help develop climate models and ecological forecasting for coral reefs.

The CCCCC said that the customized buoys will measure, record, and transmit in real-time meteorological and water quality data as the key components of five Coral Reef Early Warning Systems (CREWS). The data gathered will be used by researchers, scientists and non-governmental organisations.

The CCCCC will work with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and YSI to install and operate this network beginning in the spring of 2013.

Regional impact

“The Caribbean is a closed basin, so what happens in Trinidad and Tobago could affect what happens in Cuba,” said Bynoe. “The five stations that we are installing is a contribution to a regional network. These five we believe will capture the variability within the basin. We are basically covering the area necessary…. areas with the most significant corals.”

At the Twelvth International Coral Reef Symposium in Cairns, Australia last year, researchers noted that fast-blooming seaweed is the main reason why the Caribbean’s coral reefs take longer to recover from stress than Australia’s Great Barrier Reef in Australia and those in the Indo-Pacific region.

“Indo-Pacific reefs have less seaweed than the Caribbean Sea,” explained George Roff of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies in Australia, in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution. The ARC is a leading research centre on coral reefs. One of its studies includes survey data from the Indo-Pacific and Caribbean reefs from 1965 to 2010.

“Many of the doom and gloom stories have emanated from the Caribbean, which has deteriorated rapidly in the last 30 years,” said Peter Mumby, professor at the University of Queensland, Australia. “We now appreciate that the Indo-Pacific and Caribbean are far more different than we thought.”

An oil spill has threatened the coral reefs and marine ecosystems in the Milne Bay Province of Papua New Guinea. Credit: Mauricio Ramos/IPS

By Catherine Wilson
SYDNEY, Jan 7 2013 (IPS)

Coral reefs and marine ecosystems in the Milne Bay Province of the Pacific Island nation of Papua New Guinea are at serious risk of long-term environmental damage. The reason: an oil spill from a ship that ran aground on a reef on Kwaiawata Island on Christmas Eve, and authorities’ long delay in mobilising an appropriate response to the accident.

“The area has some of the fastest currents in the world and this delay has increased the likelihood of the oil spreading quickly beyond the vessel,” Chalapan Kaluwin, professor of environmental science at the University of Papua New Guinea, told IPS.

“It is too early to assess the full scale of the damage, but there are fragile marine and island ecosystems in this area and the impacts on reefs, marine life and the marine resources that island communities depend on is likely to be long term, rather than short term.”

The MV Asian Lily aground on a reef on the remote Kwaiawata Island in Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea. Photo Credit: National Maritime Safety Authority.

The Japanese-owned 136-metre reefer vessel MV Asian Lily, which wasn’t carrying any refrigerated cargo at the time, was negotiating Milne Bay – a province comprising 160 islands to the southeast of the Papua New Guinean mainland – en route from New Zealand to the Philippines, when the incident occurred.

Milne Bay Governor, Titus Philemon, only learned the news from local villagers several days after the ship ran aground.

Nurur Rahman, executive manager of Maritime Operations at the National Maritime Safety Authority (NMSA), told IPS that fuel oil, which leaked from one of the ship’s tanks, had spread along approximately 115 metres of the island’s coastline.

The remote Kwaiawata Island, which is no more than three kilometres long and located in the Samarai Murua District north of the Jomard Passage – a busy international shipping lane – has a population of about 200 people.  Henry Vailasi, Milne Bay Provincial Administrator, said there weren’t any coastal villages in the direct vicinity of the stricken vessel, but the oil spill had impacted the island’s shoreline.

Milne Bay contains a high diversity of corals and marine life, including more than 1,000 species of fish, 630 species of molluscs and 360 species of hard coral, as well as seagrasses and mangrove forests.  Coral reefs are vital to the livelihoods of local communities, providing habitats for fish and protection to island coastlines. Seventy percent of households in the Samarai Murua District depend on fisheries and other marine resources for subsistence.

In a public statement the NMSA said a Papua New Guinea tugboat has been at the site of the MV Asian Lily since Dec. 27 and a team of international salvage experts was currently onboard the vessel with its crew.

Representatives of the ship owners met with local villagers last week regarding the incident, a meeting that will likely be followed in due course by a consultation between national and provincial authorities and affected communities.

A spokesperson for Pacific Towing PNG Ltd, which is working to salvage the vessel, said the oil leak had been contained and the scale of the damage to the vessel was being assessed. Preparations are currently underway for an attempted refloating of the ship on Jan. 10.

On Jan. 5, the International Tanker Owners Pollution Federation, which has been engaged to advise the government on how best to address the oil spill, presented a shoreline clean up proposal to authorities in Papua New Guinea.

Milne Bay presents serious navigational challenges to shipping, with hazards including extensive reef systems and many maritime areas not yet properly charted.  The Jomard Passage, which lies to the west of the Louisiade Archipelago in the south of the province, connecting the Coral and Solomon Seas, is plied by up to 1,000 ships, including bulk carriers, every year.  Many are engaged in commerce between the Australian east coast and North Asia.

There have been several maritime mishaps in recent years.  In 2006, the bulk carrier, Zhi Qiang, with a cargo of 40,000 tonnes of raw sugar, ran aground on a reef in the Louisiade Archipelago during a voyage from northern Queensland, Australia, to Korea, releasing heavy fuel oil and raw sugar into the sea.

Vailasi told IPS that the provincial government was seriously concerned about the level of guidance and monitoring of ships through Milne Bay and the Jomard Passage.

“This vessel did not have a pilot onboard at the time it went aground,” he said. “We want the region to be a compulsory pilot area and we have asked the NMSA to advise us on how this can be done.”

“This is a wakeup call for the government and ship owners,” Kaluwin stressed.  “There is a regional oil spill contingency plan, but developing national and provincial oil spill contingency plans remains a challenge facing the government.”

A recent National Marine Pollution Risk Assessment conducted by the NMSA and PNG Ports Corporation, in association with international consultants, reported that the country’s maritime laws need to be updated and aligned with all International Maritime Organisation (IMO) conventions.

The report further stated that until five new marine pollution bills, drafted by the NMSA, are fully enacted, the government’s powers to prevent and control marine pollution from ships, and enforce the payment of compensation from polluters, are constrained.

(END)

Coastal erosion threatens a roadway on the south coast of Antigua. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Desmond Brown
BASSETERRE, St. Kitts, Sep 26 2012 (IPS)

Prime Minister Dr. Denzil Douglas remembers how quiet – even uneventful – this tiny twin-island federation was for the first four decades of his life.

But over the past 10 years, St. Kitts and Nevis, as well as the rest of the Caribbean, have seen radical climatic shifts. There is no question in Douglas’s mind that these changes are the direct results of climate change.

“Growing up, I knew nothing of hurricanes, (but) in the last decade St. Kitts and Nevis has felt the wrath of hurricanes like never before,” said Douglas, who has been the head of government here for the last 17 years.

Yet the islands of St. Kitts and Nevis are “hardly unique” in experiencing these hurricanes, Douglas said. “We can remember only too well the brutality of  (hurricanes) Ivan and Emily” in Grenada in 2004 and 2005, despite the fact that at the time, Grenada was considered “very safely nestled in the more southerly reaches of our archipelago”, he told IPS.

In July 2005 Hurricane Emily left a trail of destruction in Grenada, which was still recovering from the ravages of Hurricane Ivan the previous year.

Those who live in the region face multifaceted and troubling ramifications as a result of climate change, Douglas, who has primary responsibility for the environment and climate change in the quasi-cabinet of the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS), told audience members from across the region during a climate change seminar earlier in September.

The OECS is a nine-member group comprised of Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, Montserrat, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Anguilla and the British Virgin Islands are associate members.

Douglas stressed that policymakers need to jump into action, as climate change has a dimension to it that is both urgent and existential.

“More than ever we are confronted with the threat of frequent and severe droughts, hurricanes, dwindling fish stock and all of the other threats that so clearly reflect the nature of our own island existence,” Douglas said.

Engaging the community

Michael Taylor from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) agreed with Douglas on the need for urgent action, saying the conference at which Douglas spoke was quite timely. But he added that while government involvement is key in terms of sustainability, community participation is even more critical for continuity.

“The training of civil society organisations and non-governmental organisations is critical in building general awareness to secure effective resilience of communities and their adaptation to climate change,” Taylor said.

“Unless the local population fully understands the issues and are prepared to make a commitment to participate actively, success can be jeopardised,” he said.

Last year, USAID supported a similar workshop in St. Lucia that examined climate impacts related to managing water resources. As a result, national initiatives are now being implemented in several Caribbean countries.

These include Nevis, through the development of a master plan for the water sector; rainwater harvesting in St. Vincent; and the distribution of desalinated water procured through reverse osmosis to householders in Bequia.

OECS Commissioner of St. Kitts Astonia Browne told IPS that like most small-island developing states, the environments of OECS member states and the challenges they face are characterised by their small geographic area, small open economies, limited infrastructure and high vulnerability to natural disasters. These countries must find their own way in confronting these challenges, as external funding is hard to come by.

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change identifies the Caribbean region as one of the most vulnerable regions to be threatened by climate change impacts over the next 30 to 50 years. The region will have to grapple with increased temperatures, more tropical storms, flooded wetlands and coastal lowlands, sea level rise, and more.

“We cannot wait for the developed world to determine whether or not we survive climate change. Each of us must do what is within our power to act towards reducing our vulnerabilities and building our resilience,” Browne said.

She expressed concern that natural resources are degraded by practises such as poorly planned development, population growth, pollution, exploitation of resources, and more. Unless they are brought under control, countries will not be able to withstand the impacts of climate change.

They will lose the ability to “provide services and functions vital to the sustainable development of our small island economies”, Browne warned.

Preserving the tourism industry

Participants in the two-day seminar, held under the theme “Climate Change and Our Coast – Exploring Possibilities, Finding Solutions”, examined the impact of climate change on the critical sector of tourism and the policies and processes used to address these challenges.

Douglas called the implications of climate change “obvious and catastrophic for tourism”. He said that adaptation integrated across a wide range of sectors, rather than in a piecemeal fashion, is the only way the region will be able to deal with the effects of climate change.

“Tourism will be particularly hard hit by climate change. As ocean temperatures rise, many coral reefs will experience bleaching”, which leads to “decreased interests in diving and snorkelling and a significant loss in associated revenues”, he said. “With more frequent and violent storms, beaches, coastal development and coastal infrastructure will be severely threatened.”

“It has been suggested that climate change is the greatest threat that small island nations face,” Douglas said. He agreed with the idea, he continued. “Climate change compounds all the other threats and hazards that we face.”

At this Bonaire reef, the olive-green coral is alive, but the mottled-gray coral is dead. / Credit:Living Oceans Foundation/IPS

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Sep 18 2012 (IPS)

Limiting climate change to two degrees C won’t save most coral reefs, according to new, state-of-the-art research.

About 70 percent of corals are projected to suffer from long-term degradation by 2030 with two degrees C of warming, the first comprehensive global survey reported Sunday in the journal Nature Climate Change.

The planet will get far hotter than two degrees C based on current commitments by countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, mainly from burning oil, gas and coal. Humanity is on course to heat up the atmosphere an average of three and even four degrees C, according to the Climate Action Tracker, an international scientific monitor. Those temperature levels are what most scientists consider “catastrophic”.

Global temperatures have risen an average of about 0.8C so far and already melted much of the Arctic and generated costly extreme weather events around the planet. Keeping that global average increase below two degrees is only a matter of “political will” not technology, said Bill Hare, director of Climate Analytics, one of the partners in the Climate Action Tracker.

If humanity wants to keep at least half of the remaining coral reefs, then global temperatures cannot rise to 1.5C. “Limiting global warming to 2 C is unlikely to save most coral reefs,” the paper reports.

“We must realise what is at stake as global temperatures rise,” said co-author Malte Meinshausen of School of Earth Sciences at the University of Melbourne.

“Countries must be as ambitious as possible in their emission reductions to give corals a chance,” Meinshausen told IPS.

Coral reefs are considered by many to be one of the life-support systems essential for human survival. For more than 2.6 billion people, seafood is the main source of protein. Corals act as the nurseries and habitat for many fish species, and are vital for up to 33 percent of all ocean species, according to the World Conservation Union (IUCN).

Reefs also provide vital shoreline protection from storms. Without reefs, for example, Belize would suffer 240 million dollars in damage from storms, according to one estimate.

This study used the very latest climate models and applied them to growing science about the impacts of rising temperatures and acidification levels projected in the decades to come, said co-author Simon Donner, a marine biologist and climatologist at the University of British Columbia.

The increasing ocean acid conditions appear to be reducing coral’s thermal tolerance, Donner said in an interview. Tropical corals have a narrow water temperature range in which they thrive. When water temperature rises only two or three degrees, they “bleach” or turn white.

Corals can survive this, but if the heat stress persists long enough – weeks instead of days – the corals can die in great numbers, as they did in 1998 when 16 percent of the world’s tropical corals died.

Emissions of greenhouse gases are not only warming the oceans, they have also made them 30 percent more acidic. The oceans and the atmosphere are intimately connected. When CO2 is released into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels, some of that extra CO2 combines with carbonate ions in seawater, forming carbonic acid. This level of change in ocean chemistry has not happened in millions of years and is beginning to dissolve reefs.

Some corals will undoubtedly survive and some will adapt to the new conditions, although the changes are far more rapid than anything corals have ever experienced, said Donner.

“The bottom line is that humanity will lose the services that corals have provided for thousands of years,” he said.

Even at 1.5 C degrees of warming, only about half corals are likely to survive, the study found. That adds scientific weight to the small island nations’ and other countries’ call for a global target of 1.5 C, Donner said.

Every nation in the world officially agreed to keep global temperature increase below two degrees C at a U.N. climate meeting in Cancun, Mexico in 2010. An alliance of small islands and African countries had lobbied for the global target of less than 1.5 C due to the damages they are expected to suffer if temperatures rise above that mark.

Emissions must begin to decline this decade for either target so it is pointless to debate these targets right now, says Meinshausen. Once emissions are in significant decline, then how fast and how deep those cuts will have relevance for the final target, he said.

“I fear we’re going to miss our only chance to peak emissions this decade,” he said.

Some of that fear arises from recent musings by U.S. representatives at a recent U.N. climate meeting in Bangkok on the need for a more flexible target than two degrees C.

There are a number of studies showing how the two-degree target can be reached at modest cost and with a number of benefits such as reduced air pollution.

“It’s very important to get people motivated to do their fair share,” Meinshausen said. “A strong international agreement is essential if we’re to have any hope of getting emissions low enough.”

At this Bonaire reef, the olive-green coral is alive, but the mottled-gray coral is dead. Credit: Living Oceans Foundation/IPS

By Stephen Leahy
CAIRNS, Australia, Jul 24 2012 (IPS)

Most corals thrive only in shallow waters, where there is enough light for them to grow. But the rapid rise in sea level, due to the melting of polar ice, is making these conditions increasingly scarce.

Measurements from tropical seas around the world reveal that the rise in sea level (3.3 mm/year) is happening at a faster rate than many corals have grown in the past 10,000 years, according to new research released at the 12th International Coral Reef Symposium (ICRS).

“The Caribbean once had 60 percent coral cover, and that has now collapsed to 10 percent,” said Jeremy Jackson, professor emeritus at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California, in a special address to the symposium, held Jul. 9-13 in Cairns, Australia. “Corals are critical and endangered ecosystems.”

Sea-level rise is just one threat to corals, which have been decimated by overfishing, pollution, and bleaching from warmer sea temperatures due to climate change, Jackson added.

A colorful piece of coral is made up of thousands of tiny animals called polyps, which create cup-like limestone skeletons around themselves using calcium from seawater. Coral gets its beautiful colors from microalgae that live symbiotically with it.

Reefs form as generation after generation of coral polyps live, build and die, creating a habitat for themselves and about 30 percent of all the species living in the oceans.

When corals are stressed by overly warm sea temperatures or pollution, they begin to look white or bleached due to the death of the algae. They become vulnerable to disease and die if the bleaching lasts long enough.

Eventually, weakened or dead coral is broken into rubble by waves and storms.

Jamaica may be the Caribbean country where reefs have deteriorated most. While it once possessed a great abundance of living coral, only five to ten percent remains, because of pollution and overfishing. “That’s happened because the people are so poor,” said Jackson.

Each island is different, however. Bonaire and Curaçao have 20 to 30 percent coral cover left, and that may be growing due to good reef management, which has created no-fishing zones, reduced sources of pollution from the land, and controlled tourist access, he said.

“Reefs provide coastal protection, food, tourism and other important services that have huge implications for human society if we lose them,” said Roberto Iglesias Prieto, a research scientist from the Institute of Marine Sciences and Limnology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).

One study in Belize estimated that without reefs protecting the coastal communities, storms would cause 240 million dollars in damages.

Overall, some one billion people depend directly or indirectly on reefs for their livelihoods, and more than two billion depend on seafood as a major source of protein.

With only a few exceptions in remote locations, the quality of coral reefs has declined around the world and will continue to decline, said Iglesias Prieto.

“It will be a tragedy for humanity to lose the benefits and services that reefs provide,” he told Tierramérica *.

Marine scientists are united in saying that those vital services will almost certainly be lost unless urgent action is taken to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide that are both warming the oceans and making them more acidic.

“When Captain Cook sailed by Cairns less than 300 years ago, the atmosphere contained 280 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide. It is now 392 ppm, a 40 percent increase,” said Janice Lough, senior research scientist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science.

In tropical oceans, most species live within a narrow range of water temperatures of about two or three degrees Celsius. If temperatures stay higher for long periods, then some cannot cope, nor can they always move somewhere else, Lough said.

“Small changes can have big impacts,” she told Tierramérica.

For many tropical reef fish, growth and reproduction decline when the water temperature goes up just two or three degrees, said Philip Munday, a researcher at the School of Marine and Tropical Biology at James Cook University in Australia.

One apparently small but unexpected change is the fact that emissions of carbon dioxide are turning the oceans sour. The oceans have now absorbed about a third of all human emissions of this greenhouse gas. This has kept the global climate from warming faster, but the additional carbon dioxide is altering the oceans’ chemistry, making them 30 percent more acidic.

Munday has also discovered that increased ocean acidity affects fish behavior in surprising and unexpected ways.

“The ocean acidity we expect before the end of this century affects the central nervous system of some species, altering their sense of smell, hearing and reactions,” he said.

The colorful clown fish (Amphiprion ocellaris), more popularly known as Nemo from the movie, will be fatally attracted to the smell of predators under these conditions, Munday has learned.

These “sensory impairments” of reef fish and large predatory fish occur when the atmosphere contains 600 to 850 ppm of carbon dioxide, which is expected before the end of this century without efforts to reduce emissions, he said.

The rates of changes in the oceans are far faster than species have ever had to adjust to, said more than 2,500 marine scientists in the Consensus Statement on Climate Change and Coral Reefs released at the symposium.

But despite all the bad news about coral, there are “glimmers of hope” as shown in Bonaire, Curaçao and other places where there is good reef management and the impacts and stresses on these ecosystems are low, said oceanographer Jackson.

“Fortunately, taking actions that are good for human society (like reducing emissions) are also good for reefs,” he added.

* 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.

Pristine coral reef situated in a Jordanian marine reserve wrapped by a drifting fishing net. Credit: Malik Naumann/Marine Photobank

By Stephen Leahy
CAIRNS, Australia, Jul 10 2012 (IPS)

Coral reef scientists urged local and national governments to take action to save the world’s coral reefs and said they’d be “on call 24/7” to assist politicians and officials.

Without global action to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and greatly improve local protection, most of the world’s coral reefs will be devastated and the benefits they provide billions of people will be lost in the coming decades, scientists warned at the opening of 12th International Coral Reef Symposium (ICRS) in Cairns, Australia.

The international coral reef science community is in 100 percent agreement on the urgent need for action to protect reefs and more than 2,500 marine scientists have signed a consensus statement to that effect, said Stephen Palumbi, director of Hopkins Marine Station at Stanford University in California.

“It will take strong leadership by policy makers to make changes to protect reefs. We want them to know we are here to help, to provide the science to support those changes,” Palumbi told IPS.

Protecting reefs locally may mean reducing fishing, preventing pollution, constraining coastal development and other measures that may be seen as politically risky or difficult, he acknowledged. However, scientists stand ready to back up local and global efforts to save reefs.

“We have the science to defend those decisions. There is very good data on how to protect reefs and we know what works,” he said.

For more than 2.6 billion people, seafood is their main source of protein, said Jane Lubchenco, a marine scientist and head of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Corals act as the nurseries and habitat for many fish species in addition to providing shoreline protection from storms.

“Corals are extraordinarily valuable to humanity,” Lubchenco said in her address to the more than 2,100 attendees from more than 80 countries.

“A study from Belize estimated that without reefs protecting the shoreline, storms would cause 240 million dollars in damages,” she said.

Over the past decade threats to reefs have gone from “worrisome to dire”, she said. Before mid-century, half of the remaining reefs will experience severe bleaching due to rising ocean temperatures. Healthy corals can recover if bleaching does not last too long.

Bleaching, overfishing, pollution and disease have largely wiped out the fabulous coral communities of the Caribbean. The region has lost 80 percent of its corals since the 1970s, said Jeremy Jackson, professor of oceanography emeritus, Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

A few small well-protected areas like those around the island of Bonaire are doing okay, Jackson told IPS. Otherwise it is only “coral reefs that are too remote to be polluted or plundered that look great,” he said.

However, in future, bleaching and increasingly acidic oceans will impact even the remotest reefs.

Carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted from using fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas has made the oceans about 30 percent more acidic, researchers discovered less than 10 years ago. Oceans absorb one-third of this CO2, which has slowed the rate of global warming.

The bad news is oceans are now more acidic and it will get worse as more CO2 is emitted. This is basic, well-understood ocean chemistry.

There is no scientific disagreement on these points. The “Consensus Statement on Climate Change and Coral Reefs” states that: “CO2 emissions at the current rate will warm sea surface temperatures by at least 2-3°C, raise sea-level by as much as 1.7 meters, reduce ocean pH from 8.1 to less than 7.9, and increase storm frequency and/or intensity. This combined change in temperature and ocean chemistry has not occurred since the last reef crisis 55 million years ago.”

Without major reductions in CO2 emissions, climate change’s “evil twins” of hotter oceans and more acidic oceans will leave perhaps only 10 percent of world’s reefs alive by 2070, said Robert Richmond, president of the International Society for Reef Studies and a marine biologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Reefs have recovered from nuclear bomb testing in 1950s so they are tough, but the chronic impacts of pollution, overfishing, sedimentation and overfishing leave them weakened and incapable of withstanding disease outbreaks and the stresses of bleaching and acidification, he said.

“What we leave to our grandchildren will directly reflect what we do here and over the next few years.”

View of Australia's Great Barrier Reef as seen from space. Credit: NASA/public domain

By Stephen Leahy
CAIRNS, Jul 9 2012 (IPS)

The planet’s richest region of coral and marine life, which feeds 130 million people, is in trouble.

More than 85 percent of the coral reefs in a huge triangular region encompassing Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines and smaller Pacific islands are in decline or on the edge, according a new report.

Reefs in the six-million-square-kilometre “Coral Triangle” are incredibly important to coastal communities for food, livelihoods, and protection from waves during storms, said Lauretta Burke, senior associate at World Resources Institute and a lead author of the report released Monday at 12th International Coral Reef Symposium (ICRS) in Cairns, Australia.

Coral reefs are often called the rainforests of the oceans for the richness of species they harbour, representing 25 to 30 percent of all marine species. More than 2,000 scientists from 80 countries are sharing their research here in Cairns at this global symposium that convenes every four years.

Overfishing, fishing reefs with explosives, land-based pollution and the live fish trade are the local threats to reefs and the thousands of species that live in the Coral Triangle, Burke told IPS at the symposium.

“Explosives are used on overfished reefs to scoop up the last remaining fish. Poison chemicals are widely used to stun fish so they can be captured for the aquarium and live fish markets,” she said.

But the main global threat to reefs is from the use of fossil fuels, which is both heating up the oceans and turning them more acidic, weakening corals and making them more vulnerable to disease and storms, she said.

“The benefits reefs provide are at risk, which is why concerted action to mitigate threats to reefs across the Coral Triangle region is so important.”

Although the Coral Triangle covers only 1.6 percent of the ocean, it contains nearly 30 percent of the world’s coral reefs and more than 3,000 species of fish – twice the number found anywhere else in the world. More than 130 million people living in the region rely on reef ecosystems for food, employment, and revenue from tourism, the report found.

Without concerted action to address the threats, more than 90 percent of reefs in the region will be decimated by 2050, the report concludes.

Some 16 percent of reefs in the Coral Triangle are in marine protected areas (MPAs) but the report estimates that less than one percent of MPAs are fully effective at reducing threats such as overfishing and destructive fishing. This is substantially lower than the global average of 28 percent.

Lack of resources devoted to managing MPAs and the remoteness of many reefs makes protection and enforcement very difficult, Burke said.

A global study of reefs in the rest of the world found that on average 60 percent are under threat. Even Australia’s famous Great Barrier Reef, which many consider the best protected reef system in the world, is in decline.

“In my lifetime I have seen reefs disappear before my eyes,” Terry Hughes, director of the Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University in Australia.

Nearly all the corals in the Caribbean Sea where Hughes started his marine science career have been destroyed by pollution, overfishing, coral bleaching and disease. Coral bleaching occurs when seawater temperatures rise to 30 degrees C or more. Climate change has already increased ocean temperatures 0.7 C degrees on average.

“I came to Australia’s as a kind of Caribbean reef refugee to work on the Great Barrier Reef,” said Hughes, who is also the organiser of the coral reef symposium here.

The Great Barrier Reef is the world’s largest reef system, with 3,000 reefs spanning 3,000 km along the east coast of Australia. Although protected as a marine park for decades, coral cover has declined 50 percent since 1960s due to human impacts from land-based pollution, bleaching and outbreaks of crown of thorns starfish that eats coral.

“Coral reefs are crucial for coastal societies and their economies,” Hughes told IPS. The Great Barrier Reef generates nearly six billion dollars in annual revenues from tourism and fishing.

Healthy reefs are more resilient to global threats like climate change, which places great importance on good local management, says Hughes.

In 2009, the six countries of the Coral Triangle launched a special initiative to promote sustainable fishing, improve MPA management, strengthen climate change adaptation, and protect threatened species in the region. This is a great initiative and the right response to the threats to reefs in the region, said Burke.

“Our hope is that leaders of the Coral Triangle Initiative will use the data in our report to take stronger actions to protect reefs,” she said.

The public also plays an important role in pushing policy makers to make the right decisions to protect interests of future generations. Public awareness about the importance of coral reefs is key.

“I’d like to see people ask where the fish they are eating comes from. And for tourists to only stay at hotels that have minimum impact on the environment,” Burke said.

“Reefs are resilient – they can recover from coral bleaching and other impacts,” she added.

In Jamaica, trees have been cut down to provide wood for cooking or charcoal - just one form of human activity that damages the country's ecosystems. Credit: Zadie Neufville/IPS

By Zadie Neufville
KINGSTON, Jun 6 2012 (IPS)

Experts here fear that that the impact of climate change on Jamaica’s fragile ecosystems will worsen the ravages of human activity and destroy the country’s tourism industry.

Tourism is one of the few local sectors that experienced growth even as the global economy declined. In Jamaica, tourism grew some 4.2 percent between 2002 and 2007. It provides close to 2 billion U.S. dollars annually, roughly 50 percent of the island’s foreign exchange earnings and about a quarter of all jobs.

The sector is aware of the challenges it faces, Tina Williams, a director in the ministry of tourism, told IPS. She noted that sea level rise is expected to inundate much of the island’s coastal areas, its infrastructure, hotels and attractions.

More intense rainfall and hurricanes and drier and hotter days are also expected to intensify the pressure on local ecosystems and the tourism industry.

But Williams noted that while the sector is not focused specifically on climate change, stakeholders are implementing disaster risk reduction strategies and programmes that they hope will make their product more resilient.

“Climate change will exacerbate all the vulnerabilities the sector faces – landslides, flooding – and with many small owners who are dependent on local agriculture, the industry will no doubt feel the impact,” Williams, who is responsible for overseeing climate change policy in the ministry, told IPS.

The sector’s dependence on natural ecosystems places it on the frontline of the climate change fight. Yet the industry itself has exacted a heavy toll on the local environment, causing irreversible damage in some areas.

Dying reefs

Reports indicate that as much of 30 percent of the island’s original coastal vegetation has been lost. Most of the 1,240 square kilometres of coral reefs, with an estimated 111 species of coral, is mostly dead from a combination of human activities and disease. Of the remaining coral, about 60 percent are at risk, the World Resources Institute noted in a 2010 report.

High levels of nutrients from agricultural run-off and the disposal of sewage in coastal waters have also damaged the reefs. According to government data, the resort towns of Negril, Montego Bay, Ocho Rios and areas along the south coast in the Portland Bight protected area have felt the greatest impact.

Marine biologist Andrew Ross noted that ongoing coral bleaching, overfishing, land clearance and pollution – particularly that of sewage – have all contributed to the decline of reefs.

“Places with regular tourism visitation will see a lot of accidental and/or anchor damage and even some harvesting or collecting for the knickknack shelf,” he said.

But nowhere is the situation more telling than along the Negril coastline. Here, the sand dunes have long given way to concrete houses, hotels and sewage plants. Here, scientists say, the widespread destruction of coastal vegetation, forests and wetlands is providing a glimpse of the ravages climate change is expected to bring.

The true cost of development

Negril’s tourism infrastructure was built at the expense of its coastal wetlands. Coastal mangrove forests and sea grass beds were removed to provide access to the gleaming white sands that tourists love.

Now, the famous white sand that earns roughly half of Jamaica’s tourism earnings is being washed away at rates between a half and one metre per year. According to reports, some areas have lost as much as 55 metres of beach in the last 40 years.

The erosion, scientists from the University of the West Indies (UWI) have found, is the direct result of development. When they removed the wetlands, developers destroyed the carbon-secreting organisms that inhabited the sea grass beds and produced at least half of the sand.

“The significant lack of coral in the beach sand indicate that algal fragments are probably not derived from the reef but rather from algae in the shallow shelf environment of the inner bay,” the 2002 study said.

“Human activities also play a major role” in reef degradation, noted a report from the Risk and Vulnerability Methodology Development Project (RiVAMP) of the United Nation’s Environment Programme (UNEP), even as the report acknowledged that external phenomena were nonetheless important factors.

The report noted that the traditional use of sea grass as compost for farming and its use in traditional drinks have taken away from existing beds. Locals also cut down mangroves to provide fuel wood and as material for housing.

The future of tourism in Jamaica

Even as visitor arrivals are projected to increase to 3.1 million by 2050, climate change could see the numbers fall to 2.7 million by that time, experts have said.

Jamaican tourism is rooted in its white sand beaches and sun and is location-specific to resort towns such as Negril. Much of the island’s infrastructural development has gone into these resort areas, which also happen to lie within predicted flood zones.

Increasingly, the industry is expanding its offerings to include bird watching, community tourism, nature trails and health tourism.

To lessen the impact and repair some of the damage, the island is undertaking a broad-based climate change adaptation and risk reduction programme, replanting hardwood and mangrove forests as well as sea grass beds. One local NGO, with assistance from corporate Jamaica, is building an artificial reef in the Portland Bight area, as well as in Negril.

Williams noted that the tourism ministry is also working with other agencies to sensitise stakeholders.

Central to the adaptation plan is a Natural Resources Valuation process aimed at developing tools to aid stakeholders in assigning monetary value to natural resources, environmental economist Maurice Mason told IPS.

“We are building formulae that will help us to determine the value of our natural resources whether we want to develop, keep it for future use or just keep it for the satisfaction of having it,” he said.

Mason, who works with the UWI Risk Reduction Centre, noted that the methodologies will provide authorities with the tools to help with decision making that promotes the sustainable use and development of the natural environment.

“It will also aid in the development of alternative employment for the many poor Jamaicans for whom alternative livelihoods must be found if the natural ecosystems are to be preserved and/or sustainably exploited,” Mason said.

Ross, whose company Seascapes Caribbean specialises in the replanting of coral reefs, pointed out that it will take “absolute commitment” to halt the decline of the local environment on which the industry depends.

“We could be talking about a return of the 1970s heyday of us providing the best scuba diving in the world,” he said. “Return of coral also means return of the fisheries and coastal protection, including protection of roads and infrastructure.”

In Antigua, these boats now sail through a channel, behind where they are docked, where coral once thrived. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Desmond Brown
ST. JOHN'S, Antigua, May 23 2012 (IPS)

Eli Fuller is a third-generation Antiguan who, for the past two decades, has been exploring the Antigua and Barbuda coastline. But he laments the fact that he can no longer see the coral that he recalls were somewhat of an underwater jungle when he was a young boy, akin to what you’d see in the Amazon rain forest.

Eli Fuller, a marine environmentalist and third-generation Antiguan who remembers when coral reefs once resembled underwater jungles. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

“Nobody ever thought – I didn’t think – the corals would be dead in my lifetime,” Fuller, a marine environmentalist, told IPS.

“When I was a child, no sailboat would ever sail through certain areas, but nowadays yachts are sailing through all of these channels because the reef is…dead, gone. They’re broken up.”

Scientists say warmer seas and a record hurricane season in 2005 devastated more than half of the coral reefs in the Caribbean. The World Conservation Union (WCU) warned in a report that this severe damage to reefs would probably become a regular event, given predictions of rising global temperatures due to climate change.

Fuller said Caribbean countries could do several things to help damaged coral reefs rejuvenate, including designating certain places as marine protected areas.

A protected area is a specific region of land or water legally protected from specific human activities because of its ecological, archaeological or other type of value. A marine protected area may be declared, for instance, to safeguard its fish stocks, reefs, wreckages, breeding sanctuaries and the like.

In Belize, marine protected areas where fishing was forbidden rejuvenated much more quickly than did unprotected reefs in Jamaica after suffering similar hurricane damage, Fuller said.

When a coral gets damaged, algae naturally grow on it, he explained. Then, parrotfish and other herbivorous fish like blue tang eat the algae.

In Belize’s marine protected areas, “there are millions of parrotfish. The hurricanes came, destroyed the coals, algae grew up and the fish just ate it all and slowly the coral starts growing back.”

Protected areas, in name only

Fuller said while technically there are marine protected areas dictated by the Antigua and Barbuda Fisheries Act, in reality, there is no real protection.

As a result, “you have large scale overfishing of key species…important to keep(ing) the reefs healthy,” he said. A ban on hunting parrotfish and blue tang would help corals recover much more quickly from hurricanes, but as Fuller pointed out, parrotfish are easy to shoot with a spear gun, “and a lot of local people love parrotfish”.

“If there is one fish in Antigua I’d say you have to protect, it’s the parrotfish, but the Fisheries Department exports it,” Fuller added.

Apart from Belize, other examples of successful, zoned marine protected areas exist in the Caribbean.

In Antigua, the absence of barrier reefs forces developers to use boulders to protect against groundswells coming ashore. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

The 6,600 hectares Tobago Cays Marine Park in St. Vincent and the Grenadines is divided into nine different zones. Included are specifications for mooring different sized vessels and for turtle and seabird reserves. The protected area offers great economic benefits to the population and is a valued part of its social, cultural and environmental landscape.

Soufriere Marine Management Area in St. Lucia, encompassing 11 kilometres of coastline, is divided into five zones. Conflicts between different types of users and declining near-shore catches led to the reserve’s creation.

Many marine protected areas, including Tobago Cays, prohibit fishing, thus allowing sea life in the area to grow and reproduce unimpeded.

Studies have also shown that such no-fish areas help “replenish” fish stocks in other areas, with increased catch sizes and larger individual fish. No-fish zones also protect other sea life that might otherwise inadvertently be caught in nets.

The fishing conundrum

Vince Best, environmental scientist and lecturer at the Antigua State College, told IPS that coral bleaching provides direct evidence of the effects of climate change on reef ecosystems. Scientists speculate that coral bleaching will become an annual event by approximately 2020.

“Another detrimental effect of global climate change,” Best noted, will be the increase in carbon dioxide in oceans that will increase the acidity of ocean water, therefore “reducing the solubility of other compounds…needed by corals in reef-building.”

To this end, he said, administrations in Antigua and Barbuda, as well as other nations with this unique source of life, need to do more to protect their coral reefs.

“Many of the administrations in affected nations have concentrated on economic growth, primarily with little regard to the damage caused to the very resources which allow for said economic growth,” Best said.

For example, “in the Caribbean, we are highly reliant on tourism as the mainstay of our particular economies, yet coral reefs are one of the many resources which attract tourists to our shores.”

And while actual estimates of the direct economic value of coral reefs to Antigua and Barbuda are difficult to obtain, established research has estimated that the communities located in coastal areas, as well as national economies in the general Caribbean region, are likely to sustain substantial economic losses should the current trends in coral reef degradation and destruction continue.

It has been estimated that fisheries associated with coral reef in the Caribbean region are responsible for generating net annual revenues, which have been valued at or above approximately 837 million East Caribbean dollars, or about 310 million U.S. dollars.

Continued degradation of the region’s few remaining coral reefs would diminish these net annual revenues by an estimated 95-140 million U.S. dollars annually by 2015. The subsequent decrease in dive tourism could also profoundly affect annual net tourism revenues.

Meanwhile, one of the Caribbean’s main sources of income is simultaneously causing some of the worst damage to reefs.

“Fishing has historically been recognized as a given to the growth of the Caribbean economy,” Best said. It not only serves as a source of food for the region, but as part of the export market, it also contributes millions of dollars to regional economies.

In the Caribbean, Best said, fisheries are an unregulated “free access resource”. Yet “the location and distribution of the fish are highly predictable,” he added.

While all hope is not lost, Best pointed out that tremendous damage has already been done to reef systems in the Caribbean, and in some cases, he said, damage is so severe that many of the reefs are beyond repair.

But he said there are a number of inexpensive and practical measures, which can be taken to ameliorate the physical status of reefs in the Caribbean. One initiative, the Reefs at Risk project, suggests several possible actions.

They include “the establishment of better management practices to encourage sustainable fisheries, to protect reefs from direct damage, and to integrate the sometimes conflicting approaches to management in the watersheds and adjacent waters around coral reefs”.

“Fundamental to supporting these actions is wider involvement of the public and stakeholders in the management process, as well as an improved level of understanding of the importance of coral reefs,” he added.

(END)

Scientific studies show that global warming is causing irreversible damage to the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef System, the world’s second largest coral reef, yet efforts to protect this biologically and economically vital ecosystem remain insufficient.

Rising sea temperatures provoke an increase in “bleaching” or loss of pigmentation in coral reefs.

“This basically means the death of the coral due to the disappearance of the zooxanthellae algae that live in symbiosis with these ecosystems,” expert Juan Carlos Villagrán from the Guatemalan branch of The Nature Conservancy (TNC) told Tierramérica*.

Coral gets its colors from the zooxanthellae that cover the polyps – the tiny individual animals that make up a piece of coral – and produce sugars and amino acids to feed them. In exchange, the algae get a safe place to live with just enough light to grow through photosynthesis.

A colorful piece of coral is an ecosystem made up of thousands of polyps, which create cup-like limestone skeletons around themselves using calcium from seawater.

Bleached coral in the Mesoamerican Reef. Credit: Courtesy of Christine Loew

Reefs form as generation after generation of coral polyps live, build and die, creating habitat for themselves and many other plants and animals.

“We are witnessing an accelerated loss of these ecosystems, with serious economic consequences,” said Villagrán, “because they support many species that are important for commercial fisheries, such as lobster, snails, grouper and red snapper.”

The Mesoamerican Barrier Reef System is the longest in the Western hemisphere and the second longest in the world after the Great Barrier Reef of Australia. It stretches more than 1,000 km from the northern tip of Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula down the coasts of Belize and Guatemala to the Bay Islands of Honduras.

The Guatemalan coral reefs of Punta de Manabique and Sarstún, off the Caribbean coast near the border with Honduras, have not escaped the effects of climate change either.

But “in Guatemala, as in many countries in Central America, the issue of marine-coastal areas has historically been given little attention, despite their enormous economic, social and environmental importance,” commented Villagrán.

The 2010 Report Card for the Mesoamerican Reef, prepared by the non-governmental agency Healthy Reefs/Iniciativa de Arrecifes Saludables (HRI), revealed that while six percent of the sampled reef sites were in critical condition in 2008, that figure had jumped to an alarming 31 percent just two years later.

The main threats to the reef include coastal development, tourism, overfishing, rising sea temperatures and hurricanes, the study noted.

It also revealed that Mesoamerican Reef corals have experienced serious bleaching events in 1995, 1998, 2003, 2005, 2008, 2009 and 2010.

The impact of climate change “is beyond the control of our region and is not something we can remedy ourselves,” Mario Díaz, an official from the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources of Guatemala, told Tierramérica.

Central America contributes less than 0.5 percent of total worldwide emissions of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming, according to the study “Economics of Climate Change in Latin America and the Caribbean 2009”, published by the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). But it is one of the regions most vulnerable to destructive meteorological events.

However, the Mesoamerican Reef countries also scored poorly on an evaluation of measures that they could adopt themselves to protect the reef from climate change and other human activities.

Overall, the efforts of the four countries were given a score of 2.7 points out of five, classified as “fair” in the 2011 Eco Audit of the Mesoamerican Reef Countries, conducted by HRI in collaboration with the World Resources Institute (WRI).

With regard to mapping reefs that are potentially resilient to warming seas, and thus coral bleaching, Mexico, Belize, Guatemala and Honduras received an average score of two points, considered “poor”.

As for engagement in international or regional treaties that support conservation, the four countries averaged a “fair” score of three points.

In Honduras, the impacts of sea warming on coral have become evident in the last 15 years, activist Andrés Alegría of the non-governmental organisation Friends of Roatan Marine Park told Tierramérica.

“The challenge,” he said, “is to ensure that the reefs remain healthy, so that when these large-scale changes occur, they are strong enough to recover.”

In Honduras, coral is an important source of income for two sectors: industrial and artisanal fishing, “which provides food for thousands of people,” and tourism, explained Adrián Oviedo of the Honduras Coral Reef Fund, another non-governmental group.

But climate change is not the only deadly threat to the Mesoamerican Reef.

The HRI Eco Audit determined that the sustainability of the private sector and sanitation and sewage treatment were both areas in which the four countries earned “poor” scores.

Marisol Rueda, the HRI coordinator in Mexico, told Tierramérica that governments must “adopt Class I wastewater management standards, which means fewer pollutants permitted in wastewater flows and adequate infrastructure to treat them.”

In terms of the private sector, Rueda stressed the need for greater participation by the hotel and recreational industries in the adoption of voluntary standards and ecological certification programs.

* 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.