Deeper Peril for Coral Reefs

Coastal development, overfishing and climate change are creating a “perfect storm” for the world’s coral reefs, nearly three-quarters of which are now at risk of serious degradation, a top federal environmental official warned this week at the unveiling of a comprehensive new report.

“Mounting pressures on land, along the coast and in the water converge in a perfect storm of threats to reefs,” Jane Lubchenco, administrator at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said at a briefing.

The study, “Reefs at Risk Revisited,” an assessment led by the World Resources Institute, a conservation group, is an update to a 1998 study also led by the institute that classified 60 percent of the world’s reefs as threatened. “Threats have gone from worrisome to dire,” Dr. Lubchenco said.

Pressures identified in 1998 like coastal development and destructive fishing continue to pose the main threat to reefs. But the report also factored in global threats from climate and rising ocean acidity caused by carbon dioxide pollution, for the first time.

The threat to reefs from warming seas is hardly hypothetical: in 2010, one of the warmest years on record, spiking water temperatures damaged coral on a global scale rarely witnessed before.

“Reducing greenhouse gas emissions, especially carbon dioxide, is absolutely necessary if we want any hope of preventing a lot of the dire situations that are presented in the report,” Dr. Lubchenco said.

Still, local human impacts like overfishing and pollution remain the most pressing threat for reefs, the report noted. And while 25 percent of reefs are now within “marine protected areas,” less than a quarter of these protected zones were rated as “effectively managed.”

If unchecked, growing global and local pressures will place more than 90 percent of reefs at risk by 2030, the report found.

Source:
New York Times,"Deeper Peril for Coral Reefs", by John Collins Rudolf, accessed February 26, 2011

Researchers warn Arctic fishing under-reported

The amount of fish caught in the Arctic has been dramatically under-reported for decades, making the northern ocean environment appear far more pristine than it really is, according to a new study. (At left: salmon)

An estimated 950,000 tons of fish were caught in Russian, Canadian and U.S. Arctic waters between 1950 and 2006, which is 75 times higher than reported by the United Nation's agency that records catch levels, according to Canadian researchers.

Ineffective reporting "has given us a false sense of comfort that the Arctic is still a pristine frontier when it comes to fisheries," lead researcher Dirk Zeller of the University of British Columbia said in a written statement.

The results of the study were published this week in the journal Polar Biology.

The researchers said they collected data on fish catches from a variety of sources in the region, including those kept by indigenous people, and compared it to what was reported to the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization.

The researchers estimate that, between 1950 and 2006, 89,000 tons of fish were caught in Alaskan coastal waters in the Arctic and 94,000 tons in Canadian waters, but neither Canada nor the United States supplied that data to the U.N.

An estimated 770,000 tons of fish were caught in Russian waters off Siberia, far above the 12,700 tons reported by the United Nations, according to the study.

The researchers said that most Arctic conservation efforts concentrate on protecting animal such as seals and polar bears, and they warned that the marine mammals will not survive if the rest of the region's ecosystem is neglected.

The researchers said the problems could become worse if climate change pushes more fish into polar waters and melting sea ice allows greater access by the world's fishing fleets.

Researchers at the university issued a study in December warning that global fleets were running out of fishing grounds, and the waters of the Arctic and Antarctic were among the few areas remaining for exploitation.


Source:
Reuters, "Researchers warn Arctic fishing under-reported", accessed February 5, 2011

Freshwater losses pose risks for food, health: U.N.

Damage to rivers, wetlands and lakes threatens to destabilize the diversity of freshwater fish species, posing risks for food security, incomes and nutrition, a Rivers and lakes are the source of 13 million metric tonnes of fish annually, which in turn provide employment to 60 million people, the study by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and the World Fish Center showed.

Fish from inland waters is also important for nutrition, especially in Africa and parts of Asia, by supplying micronutrients such as vitamin A, calcium, iron and zinc, the report added.

It said such factors highlighted the risks to humans from the destruction of freshwater ecosystems and the urgency to protect them from pollution, climate change, overfishing and construction of dams.

The report was released on the sidelines of an Oct 18-29 U.N. meeting in Nagoya, Japan, aimed at pushing governments and businesses to do more to fight accelerating losses in animal and plant species.

While fish production had grown in Asia and Africa over the past 40 years, catch in other regions had leveled off and in some cases, fallen, with environmental damage cited as a factor, the report said.

Fisheries in the Volga River in Europe have declined because of dams, while fisheries in Lake Malawi and Lake Malombe in Africa have fallen from overfishing and environmental degradation.

"It takes a concerted effort to protect and maintain these so-to-speak 'free' ecosystem services around the world," Yumiko Kura of the World Fish Center told a news conference on the sidelines of the Nagoya meeting.

"It is important to maintain these natural ecosystem services from human destruction because it is very costly to replace these ecosystem services once they are lost."

Source:
Reuters, "Freshwater losses pose risks for food, health: U.N.", accessed October 22, 2010