Banning the trade of shark fins

A note unrelated to climate change: The NY Times reports that the state of California is considering a ban on the sale and possession of shark fins. Frankly, it is hard to believe that dealing in shark fins is not already illegal in North America. There is no better example of a cultural obsession with a particular "delicacy" - in this case, shark fin's soup - contributing to the demise of a wild population.

I took the picture at left just a couple weeks back in a market on the Pacific Coast of Central America. Frankly, it the photo could be from the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean or the western Pacific, I've seen the same thing on the coasts of all the tropical oceans.
You'll notice the fin-less sharks in the bin are all small: the larger sharks are dumped at sea after being "finned". The fin is worth so much more than the meat that there's no value in bringing a big heavy dead shark back ashore, even though it is obviously a potential food source. In Kiribati, people do catch sharks and sell the fins, but at least they also take the shark home to eat.

You don't have to be the least bit interested in marine conservation or the dwindling global shark population to see the practice as finning and leaving the shark behind as ridiculously wasteful. Perhaps a ban of shark fishing may be politically or logistically impossible in today's world, I don't know. I can say that if we are going to continue to catch sharks for human consumption, let's at least catch the whole shark.

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Coping with Commitment: New study on the challenge facing coral reefs

Maribo's back from a long hiatus, during which the host was overseas collecting data, samples and unfortunately some sort of parasite.

Good timing, for the return home, not the parasite, since a new study of mine on climate change and coral reefs appeared in PLOS-One today (link - no subscription required).

As many of the regular readers have heard before, one of the biggest challenges posed by climate change is the timing.

First, you have the time lag between greenhouse gas emissions and the climate effect of those emissions. Basically, it takes time for the big complicated mix of atmosphere, ocean, land and ice to come to equilibrium. That’s why you sometimes here the climate compared to a big ship. You can hit the brakes but it will take a while for ship to actually come to a stop. Similarly, even if we froze emissions today, the climate would continue to warm a bit, because that warming is physically built into the system. This is often referred to as "committed warming".

Society may impart a second warming commitment. There is a lag between the decision to take action and the action itself. Using the ship analogy, it takes time for the officers on deck who first see the iceberg to relay the message to the captain. In other words, even if we decided to drastically emissions tomorrow, those reductions would not occur for some time. Hence all the hysteria about the construction of new coal-burning power plants. Since coals plants may last for decades they come with a considerable emissions “commitment”.

The new study looks at the implications of “committed warming” for conserving the world's coral reefs.
 
The dangerous impacts of climate change on coral reef are expected to occur sooner than most other prominently discussed climate change impacts (e.g. ice sheet melt, rainfall shifts in the topics). Why? Water temperatures, only 1-2 degrees Celsius over the usual summer maximum temperatures can cause bleaching of corals and some other reef organisms. Bleaching, described here many times, is the paling of the corals caused by a breakdown of the symbiosis between the reef-building animals themselves and the colourful algae that live in the coral tissue. A bleached coral is still alive, but is deprived of its primary energy source. If the conditions persist, the bleached coral can die.

Now, corals can grow back after a bleaching event, just as trees grow back after a fire, but it takes time. If bleaching events happen too often – say, because of ocean warming - most corals and the ecosystem as a whole will be unable to recover. Now, combine that with the rise in CO2 levels reducing the ability of corals to actually build the reef, and you’ve got one of the most threatened ecosystems on the planet.

This new study evaluates the “committed" frequency of bleaching events, and what it all means for coral reef conservation and for climate policy. The results show that the physical commitment alone is enough to make bleaching events harmfully frequent at over half of the world’s reefs by the end of the century. A possible additional commitment, caused by the time required to shift from a “business-as-usual” future to a GHG “mitigation” future, may cause over 80% of the world’s coral reefs to experience harmfully frequent events by 2030.

There is a possible silver lining. Thermal adaptation of 1.5 degrees C, whether via biological mechanisms, coral community changes or extreme management interventions, could postpone the forecast for 50-80 years in the “business-as-usual" case. That could provide time to change the trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions and then prevent the majority of the world's reefs from experiencing harmfully frequent bleaching events this century.

Let's be clear. This is no panacea - the ecological costs of proposed adaptive mechanisms and the implications for climate policy are outlined in the discussions. Here's the final paragraph:

In summary, the results of this study indicate that a combination of greenhouse gas mitigation and improved coral reef management will be required to avoid the degradation of the world’s coral reef ecosystems from frequent mass coral bleaching events. Actions that enhance reef resistance and reef resilience - including protection of bleaching-resistant reefs, reduction of other stressors, and possibly even more radical suggestions like “seeding” reefs with more temperature-tolerant species of Symbiodinium – may be necessary to help coral reef ecosystems endure through the committed warming over the next several decades. These management actions, while important, will alone prove to be insufficient to protect coral reefs through the latter half of the century. The difference between the future scenarios presented in this study demonstrates that protecting the world’s coral reefs from increasing thermal stress will require a dramatic reduction in greenhouse gas emissions over the next several decades.

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Bush protects remote Pacific Islands

Maribo began last year with an "elevator figure" describing the threat that climate change poses to the world's coral reefs. This year, we'll begin with some good news.

In a decision that has drawn widespread applause from scientists and conservationists, and had a lot of reporters scrambling for an atlas, the outgoing US President used a century-old antiquities law to create three huge marine protected areas or "national monuments" out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Two of the monuments protect the Marianas Trench, offshore of the Northern Marianas Islands, and Rose Atoll, an isolated atoll north of American Samoa. The third, grouped together as the "Pacific Remote Islands", includes the water around seven "islands": Kingman Reef and Palmyra Atoll, Wake Island, Johnston Atoll, Howland, Baker, and Jarvis Island

These places are probably only be known to WWII buffs, marine scientists or members of the military -- they are almost all either off limits to non-military personnel (e.g. Johnston), uninhabited (Rose), or uninhabitable (landless Kingman). But these islands, especially the Pacific Remote Islands, are exciting to scientists.

Kingman Reef and Palmyra Atoll were the subjects of an extensive biological survey co-ordinated by colleagues at Scripps and National Geographic a couple years ago. Kingman is generally considered "pristine"; the survey found an "inverted" food web, dominated by large predators like sharks, thanks to the lack of human pressure and also to favourable currents.

While Kingman and Palmyra have more of the fanfare, I'd bet that Howland, Baker and Jarvis could prove to be just as important. They lie closer to the equator, in an area more directly affected by the El Nino / Southern Oscillation. Thanks to tempermental El Nino, the surface waters in the area can be highly variable, at least by equatorial standards. The reefs may - that is may, not will - help us better understand if and how corals can acclimate or adapt to heat stress (not that this is mentioned in the lengthy White House press release).

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Fierce urgency of now (reprise)

If you are involved in marine or coral reef conservation, this is an opportune time. Not only does the incoming US President support serious action on climate change, he grew up in Hawaii.

When you are snorkeling through the coral reefs, you realize that a slight change in temperature or increase in sediment and runoff could end up destroying it all and making it unavailable for your children. That is something you worry about - Barack Obama

The urgent need for new messages and new policies to protect the world's coral reefs from climate change was discussed here, after July's International Coral Reef Symposium. So, all of you out there in the community, this really is your moment. What needs to be done? Imagine you're trapped in an elevator or on a basketball court with hoops-mad US President-elect Obama. What would you say?

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The practice of shark finning

Last week, Andrew Sharpless wrote a Gristmill post about legislation before the US Congress that will tighten the restriction on selling shark fins. I was initially reluctant to comment, as the legislation is outside my area of expertise. But, as someone that has spent a lot of time in boats with indigenous fishermn in the tropics, I can say with confidence that we should support any effort to stop the practice of shark 'finning'. And not only for the obvious reason - the effect on shark populations and marine ecosystems - but because, from what I've seen, it can hurt the local fishing communities as well.

The one argument I've heard (in the Pacific, in Madagascar, and here at home) in defense of cutting off the fins and leaving the sharks to die is that the prized fins fetch a high price and provide the fisherman in impoverished areas with a solid source of income. My informal observations in the field - these are anecdotal comments, so should be read with caution - suggest there is little basis for that argument. Only the middlemen or the distributors seem to be getting rich off the practice.

The fishermen I've met who are encouraged to take shark fins end up fishing only for shark fins rather than engaging in their customary subsistence fishing or small income fishing practices. Catching sharks often means going farther, which costs more, and means being away from family for multiple days. They only see a fraction of the money fetched in the end by the seller of a fin, because the fishermen - we're talking about people in small villages in places like Madagascar - have no personal access to the market for shark fins (Asia) and have no leverage. There's not enough space in the boat, so even if the fishermen wanted to take the entire shark back for food, they can't. Add in the fact that the local shark populations are being depleted, and the destructive practice also turns out to be bad business for the local fishers.

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Lessons from the coral reefs of the Line Islands

The results from a comprehensive survey of the coral reefs of the Northern Line Islands - a chain of atolls south of Hawaii including several Kiribati islands - were published this week in PLOS-One. A companion essay by Jeremy Jackson and Nancy Knowlton appears in PLOS-Biology.

The surveys revealed startling differences in macro- (Sandin et al) and micro-biology (Dinsdale et al.) of the Line Islands coral reefs along a gradient of human disturbance, from the more polluted and fished reefs of equatorial Kiritimati, pronounced "Christmas" (the 'ti' sounds like an 's' in i-Kiribati), and more or less pristine Kingman Reef several hundred kilometres to the north. Taken together, the results also seem to suggest that more pristine reefs are more resilient to coral bleaching events.

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The Phoenix Islands Protected Area in Kiribati

As was reported last week, Kiribati is working with international conservation groups to create the Phoenix Islands Protected Area, the largest marine protected area in the world. The project has been in the works for a couple years.

It's worth looking at a map of Kiribati to make sense of the announcement. The NY Times called Kiribati a 'tiny island nation'. Yes, the islands themselves are tiny; the 32 atolls plus Banaba Island have a total area of ~729 sq. km (depending on the tide). The nation is not. It covers 3.5 million sq. km, which is about the area of India, and includes three distinct island chains.

The 410 000 sq km Phoenix Islands Protected Area will encompass the central island chain in Kiribati, to the east of the International Date Line. Around 30-40 people live on Kanton Atoll and serve as informal caretakers for the island chain. Otherwise, the Phoenix Islands are uninhabited. In fact, you could argue they are uninhabitable.

The majority of the 100,000 i-Kiribati live in western "Gilbert" Islands chain, particularly the capital of Tarawa Atoll (*). Previous attempts by the British to (forcefully) resettle i-Kiribati from the more crowded Gilbert island chain to the Phoenix Islands failed because of prolonged droughts and the lack of groundwater resources.

Most of the Kiribati government revenue comes from foreign fishing licenses. The protected area status will limit large-scale commercial fishing around the Phoenix Islands and any marine resource development efforts. So the real key to this plan is the creation of an international endowment raise funds to offset the lost revenues for the Kiribati government. If successful, PIPA may serve as a model for the creation of marine protected areas in the developed world.

Some of the news reports have suggested that tourism will also help offset lost fishing revenue. While that's not impossible, don't get the idea you'll be able to book a seat on the 747 direct from LAX to Kanton and spend a week at a posh eco-resort. The Phoenix Islands are very remote, very inaccessible and have limited local resources. The only likely tourists are scientists on research expeditions and maybe people with the resources to spearhead a multi-week boat trip from Fiji. This announcement is very much about conservation, not tourism.

* I use quotations because the word Kiribati (Keer-ee-bas) is a local transliteration of Gilberts. The country was not really renamed upon independence from the UK in the 1970s. It simply adopted the spelling and pronunciation of Gilberts in the local language.

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