Roger Bradbury, an Australian ecologist, wrote a terrific piece in the NY Times recently, appealing to the need for rapid adaptation to man-made climate change.
July 13, 2012
A World Without Coral Reefs
By ROGER BRADBURY
Canberra, Australia
IT’S past time to tell the truth about the state of the world’s coral reefs, the nurseries of tropical coastal fish stocks. They have become zombie ecosystems, neither dead nor truly alive in any functional sense, and on a trajectory to collapse within a human generation. There will be remnants here and there, but the global coral reef ecosystem — with its storehouse of biodiversity and fisheries supporting millions of the world’s poor — will cease to be.
Overfishing, ocean acidification and pollution are pushing coral reefs into oblivion. Each of those forces alone is fully capable of causing the global collapse of coral reefs; together, they assure it. The scientific evidence for this is compelling and unequivocal, but there seems to be a collective reluctance to accept the logical conclusion — that there is no hope of saving the global coral reef ecosystem.
What we hear instead is an airbrushed view of the crisis — a view endorsed by coral reef scientists, amplified by environmentalists and accepted by governments. Coral reefs, like rain forests, are a symbol of biodiversity. And, like rain forests, they are portrayed as existentially threatened — but salvageable. The message is: “There is yet hope.”
Indeed, this view is echoed in the “consensus statement” of the just-concluded International Coral Reef Symposium, which called “on all governments to ensure the future of coral reefs.” It was signed by more than 2,000 scientists, officials and conservationists.
This is less a conspiracy than a sort of institutional inertia. Governments don’t want to be blamed for disasters on their watch, conservationists apparently value hope over truth, and scientists often don’t see the reefs for the corals.
But by persisting in the false belief that coral reefs have a future, we grossly misallocate the funds needed to cope with the fallout from their collapse. Money isn’t spent to study what to do after the reefs are gone — on what sort of ecosystems will replace coral reefs and what opportunities there will be to nudge these into providing people with food and other useful ecosystem products and services. Nor is money spent to preserve some of the genetic resources of coral reefs by transferring them into systems that are not coral reefs. And money isn’t spent to make the economic structural adjustment that communities and industries that depend on coral reefs urgently need. We have focused too much on the state of the reefs rather than the rate of the processes killing them.
Overfishing, ocean acidification and pollution have two features in common. First, they are accelerating. They are growing broadly in line with global economic growth, so they can double in size every couple of decades. Second, they have extreme inertia — there is no real prospect of changing their trajectories in less than 20 to 50 years. In short, these forces are unstoppable and irreversible. And it is these two features — acceleration and inertia — that have blindsided us.
Overfishing can bring down reefs because fish are one of the key functional groups that hold reefs together. Detailed forensic studies of the global fish catch by Daniel Pauly’s lab at the University of British Columbia confirm that global fishing pressure is still accelerating even as the global fish catch is declining. Overfishing is already damaging reefs worldwide, and it is set to double and double again over the next few decades.
Ocean acidification can also bring down reefs because it affects the corals themselves. Corals can make their calcareous skeletons only within a special range of temperature and acidity of the surrounding seawater. But the oceans are acidifying as they absorb increasing amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Research led by Ove Hoegh-Guldberg of the University of Queensland shows that corals will be pushed outside their temperature-acidity envelope in the next 20 to 30 years, absent effective international action on emissions.
We have less of a handle on pollution. We do know that nutrients, particularly nitrogenous ones, are increasing not only in coastal waters but also in the open ocean. This change is accelerating. And we know that coral reefs just can’t survive in nutrient-rich waters. These conditions only encourage the microbes and jellyfish that will replace coral reefs in coastal waters. We can say, though, with somewhat less certainty than for overfishing or ocean acidification that unstoppable pollution will force reefs beyond their survival envelope by midcentury.
This is not a story that gives me any pleasure to tell. But it needs to be told urgently and widely because it will be a disaster for the hundreds of millions of people in poor, tropical countries like Indonesia and the Philippines who depend on coral reefs for food. It will also threaten the tourism industry of rich countries with coral reefs, like the United States, Australia and Japan. Countries like Mexico and Thailand will have both their food security and tourism industries badly damaged. And, almost an afterthought, it will be a tragedy for global conservation as hot spots of biodiversity are destroyed.
What we will be left with is an algal-dominated hard ocean bottom, as the remains of the limestone reefs slowly break up, with lots of microbial life soaking up the sun’s energy by photosynthesis, few fish but lots of jellyfish grazing on the microbes. It will be slimy and look a lot like the ecosystems of the Precambrian era, which ended more than 500 million years ago and well before fish evolved.
Coral reefs will be the first, but certainly not the last, major ecosystem to succumb to the Anthropocene — the new geological epoch now emerging. That is why we need an enormous reallocation of research, government and environmental effort to understand what has happened so we can respond the next time we face a disaster of this magnitude. It will be no bad thing to learn how to do such ecological engineering now.
Roger Bradbury, an ecologist, does research in resource management at Australian National University.
What we will be left with is an algal-dominated hard ocean bottom, as the remains of the limestone reefs slowly break up, with lots of microbial life soaking up the sun’s energy by photosynthesis, few fish but lots of jellyfish grazing on the microbes. It will be slimy and look a lot like the ecosystems of the Precambrian era, which ended more than 500 million years ago and well before fish evolved.
Coral reefs will be the first, but certainly not the last, major ecosystem to succumb to the Anthropocene — the new geological epoch now emerging. That is why we need an enormous reallocation of research, government and environmental effort to understand what has happened so we can respond the next time we face a disaster of this magnitude. It will be no bad thing to learn how to do such ecological engineering now.
I feel about "ecological engineering" the same way I felt about about nuclear power. It was unimaginable to me, given the harm it could cause, until I began to analyze the economics of transforming our energy economy. Writer Robert Bryce recently described the global demand as requiring the addition of one Brazil each year, for the foreseeable future. That's the scale of demand, and renewables like wind and solar will not get us there by a long shot.
Ours is a developed nation and the systems providing our essential infrastructure are all in place to obscure what is happening. Yes we are preoccupied with jobs, the economy, and housing markets. But roads all work (unless you live in a municipality on the verge or over the edge to bankruptcy) and the lights turn on when you flick the switch. The unanticipated benefits of increased natural gas supply, in the meantime, both mask the transition from coal and imported oil and also wreak havoc in ways that may not fully materialize for generations. By the time we reverse course and halt the instant gratifications of the hydrocarbon economy it will be too late, by generations, to avoid massive dislocation and attempts at mitigation.
Our species cannot evolve fast enough to keep pace with the rate of change we unleashed, and our attempts to stimulate "clean energies" are also muddied by inconvenient facts.
I've done a conversion on nuclear power and now believe it to be the only way to deliver energy at scale to replace fossil fuels. To me, that seems an impossible thing to say after the first the Fukushima crises and the lies by TEPCO and the Japanese government, afterwards. And the contradictions don't end there.
From my own experience fighting a major utility at Turkey Point, I know that energy corporations are driven by shareholder, short-term profits and cannot be trusted to manage the growth and allocation of investment to nuclear power. Florida Power and Light is the manifest example, with top executives reaping enormous compensation packages by inflating balance sheets through early cost recovery on new nuclear planned at sea level in a region that is more at risk from sea level rise than any other major urban area in the world. Today, the NRC -- the federal agency charged with nuclear oversight -- is not a watchdog. It is a lap dog of industry.
From my own experience fighting a major utility at Turkey Point, I know that energy corporations are driven by shareholder, short-term profits and cannot be trusted to manage the growth and allocation of investment to nuclear power. Florida Power and Light is the manifest example, with top executives reaping enormous compensation packages by inflating balance sheets through early cost recovery on new nuclear planned at sea level in a region that is more at risk from sea level rise than any other major urban area in the world. Today, the NRC -- the federal agency charged with nuclear oversight -- is not a watchdog. It is a lap dog of industry.
It is a confusing picture and one severely complicated by fossil fuel advocates and billionaires like the Koch brothers fomenting inchoate, right-wing extremists, whether expressed through the Tea Party or its backers like Karl Rove.
After a recent trip to India, I wrote about a nation so busy growing it is entirely shrouded in a haze of pollution. A recent blackout affected its population, turning off air conditioning, lights, and industry for twice the population of the United States.
For Americans, the scale of the energy problem is hard to grasp, but think of what losing the oceans' coral reefs means. Anyone snorkeling in the Florida Keys or the Caribbean can see the evidence, directly. Those cathedrals of life look as bombed out as Munich or Berlin after World War Two. And to know: the Florida GOP, including Senator Marco Rubio, is determined to stop the US EPA from imposing limits on nutrients in Florida waters that the state itself has proven powerless to impose. Excess nutrients kill coral, wreck rivers and bays, and are the source of billions in profits too, for Big Sugar and other economic interests.
As Bradbury describes, the Anthropecene era we triggered couldn't be a bigger mess. (And, the GOP fights contraception.) Read Bradbury by clicking, 'read more'. Have a great weekend.
July 13, 2012
A World Without Coral Reefs
By ROGER BRADBURY
Canberra, Australia
IT’S past time to tell the truth about the state of the world’s coral reefs, the nurseries of tropical coastal fish stocks. They have become zombie ecosystems, neither dead nor truly alive in any functional sense, and on a trajectory to collapse within a human generation. There will be remnants here and there, but the global coral reef ecosystem — with its storehouse of biodiversity and fisheries supporting millions of the world’s poor — will cease to be.
Overfishing, ocean acidification and pollution are pushing coral reefs into oblivion. Each of those forces alone is fully capable of causing the global collapse of coral reefs; together, they assure it. The scientific evidence for this is compelling and unequivocal, but there seems to be a collective reluctance to accept the logical conclusion — that there is no hope of saving the global coral reef ecosystem.
What we hear instead is an airbrushed view of the crisis — a view endorsed by coral reef scientists, amplified by environmentalists and accepted by governments. Coral reefs, like rain forests, are a symbol of biodiversity. And, like rain forests, they are portrayed as existentially threatened — but salvageable. The message is: “There is yet hope.”
Indeed, this view is echoed in the “consensus statement” of the just-concluded International Coral Reef Symposium, which called “on all governments to ensure the future of coral reefs.” It was signed by more than 2,000 scientists, officials and conservationists.
This is less a conspiracy than a sort of institutional inertia. Governments don’t want to be blamed for disasters on their watch, conservationists apparently value hope over truth, and scientists often don’t see the reefs for the corals.
But by persisting in the false belief that coral reefs have a future, we grossly misallocate the funds needed to cope with the fallout from their collapse. Money isn’t spent to study what to do after the reefs are gone — on what sort of ecosystems will replace coral reefs and what opportunities there will be to nudge these into providing people with food and other useful ecosystem products and services. Nor is money spent to preserve some of the genetic resources of coral reefs by transferring them into systems that are not coral reefs. And money isn’t spent to make the economic structural adjustment that communities and industries that depend on coral reefs urgently need. We have focused too much on the state of the reefs rather than the rate of the processes killing them.
Overfishing, ocean acidification and pollution have two features in common. First, they are accelerating. They are growing broadly in line with global economic growth, so they can double in size every couple of decades. Second, they have extreme inertia — there is no real prospect of changing their trajectories in less than 20 to 50 years. In short, these forces are unstoppable and irreversible. And it is these two features — acceleration and inertia — that have blindsided us.
Overfishing can bring down reefs because fish are one of the key functional groups that hold reefs together. Detailed forensic studies of the global fish catch by Daniel Pauly’s lab at the University of British Columbia confirm that global fishing pressure is still accelerating even as the global fish catch is declining. Overfishing is already damaging reefs worldwide, and it is set to double and double again over the next few decades.
Ocean acidification can also bring down reefs because it affects the corals themselves. Corals can make their calcareous skeletons only within a special range of temperature and acidity of the surrounding seawater. But the oceans are acidifying as they absorb increasing amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Research led by Ove Hoegh-Guldberg of the University of Queensland shows that corals will be pushed outside their temperature-acidity envelope in the next 20 to 30 years, absent effective international action on emissions.
We have less of a handle on pollution. We do know that nutrients, particularly nitrogenous ones, are increasing not only in coastal waters but also in the open ocean. This change is accelerating. And we know that coral reefs just can’t survive in nutrient-rich waters. These conditions only encourage the microbes and jellyfish that will replace coral reefs in coastal waters. We can say, though, with somewhat less certainty than for overfishing or ocean acidification that unstoppable pollution will force reefs beyond their survival envelope by midcentury.
This is not a story that gives me any pleasure to tell. But it needs to be told urgently and widely because it will be a disaster for the hundreds of millions of people in poor, tropical countries like Indonesia and the Philippines who depend on coral reefs for food. It will also threaten the tourism industry of rich countries with coral reefs, like the United States, Australia and Japan. Countries like Mexico and Thailand will have both their food security and tourism industries badly damaged. And, almost an afterthought, it will be a tragedy for global conservation as hot spots of biodiversity are destroyed.
What we will be left with is an algal-dominated hard ocean bottom, as the remains of the limestone reefs slowly break up, with lots of microbial life soaking up the sun’s energy by photosynthesis, few fish but lots of jellyfish grazing on the microbes. It will be slimy and look a lot like the ecosystems of the Precambrian era, which ended more than 500 million years ago and well before fish evolved.
Coral reefs will be the first, but certainly not the last, major ecosystem to succumb to the Anthropocene — the new geological epoch now emerging. That is why we need an enormous reallocation of research, government and environmental effort to understand what has happened so we can respond the next time we face a disaster of this magnitude. It will be no bad thing to learn how to do such ecological engineering now.
Roger Bradbury, an ecologist, does research in resource management at Australian National University.
2 comments:
The loss of natural systems happens on a large scale over time but also on a small scale from myriad decisions that accumulate and have unintended consequences. Governor Scott's decision to support massive port expansions with deep dredging throughout Florida will devastate and destroy natural areas- in Miami scraping Biscayne Bay bottom, blasting and destroying acres of coral reefs offshore that have existed for hundreds of years, same for the coral reefs that will be blasted and destroyed in Broward for port Everglades expansions. In Jacksonville, the St johns river will see increased salinity, affecting marshlands, cypress trees far island, devastating ecosystems dependent on a delicate balance of freshwater. Same with the savannah river and other coastal ecosystems.
The losses are permanent. Every generation before us has a left a world that provides life sustenance but what will we leave?
Post a Comment