The Hon. Karmenu Vella, Commissioner-designate for Environment, Maritime Affairs and Fisheries (nominated by Malta), had to answer a number of difficult questions during his hearing by the European Parliament‘s Committees on Environment, Public Health & Food Safety (ENVI) and Fisheries (PECH) on 29 September. Vella’s answers to these 5 toughest questions reveal best how he managed to handle the parliamentary grilling:
Can your reassure us about your plans to reform the birds and habitats directives?
How will you ensure that sustainability is a cornerstone of the Juncker agenda?
Do you envisage European Union legislation on shale gas?
How will you take forward the Clean Air Package?
Will you receive the proposals on access to justice & environmental inspections?
Between 1970 and 2010 populations of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish around the globe dropped 52 percent, says the 2014 Living Planet Report released today by World Wildlife Fund (WWF). This biodiversity loss occurs disproportionately in low-income countries—and correlates with the increasing resource use of high-income countries.
In addition to the precipitous decline in wildlife populations the report's data point to other warning signs about the overall health of the planet. The amount of carbon in our atmosphere has risen to levels not seen in more than a million years, triggering climate change that is already destabilizing ecosystems. High concentrations of reactive nitrogen are degrading lands, rivers and oceans. Stress on already scarce water supplies is increasing. And more than 60 percent of the essential "services" provided by nature, from our forests to our seas, are in decline.
"We're gradually destroying our planet's ability to support our way of life," said Carter Roberts, president and CEO of WWF. "But we already have the knowledge and tools to avoid the worst predictions. We all live on a finite planet and its time we started acting within those limits."
The Living Planet Report, WWF's biennial flagship publication, measures trends in three major areas:
populations of more than ten thousand vertebrate species;
"There is a lot of data in this report and it can seem very overwhelming and complex," said Jon Hoekstra, chief scientist at WWF. "What's not complicated are the clear trends we're seeing -- 39 percent of terrestrial wildlife gone, 39 percent of marine wildlife gone, 76 percent of freshwater wildlife gone – all in the past 40 years."
The report says that the majority of high-income countries are increasingly consuming more per person than the planet can accommodate; maintaining per capita ecological footprints greater than the amount of biocapacity available per person. People in middle- and low-income countries have seen little increase in their per capita footprints over the same time period.
While high-income countries show a 10 percent increase in biodiversity, the rest of the world is seeing dramatic declines. Middle-income countries show 18 percent declines, and low-income countries show 58 percent declines. Latin America shows the biggest decline in biodiversity, with species populations falling by 83 percent.
"High-income countries use five times the ecological resources of low-income countries, but low income countries are suffering the greatest ecosystem losses," said Keya Chatterjee, WWF's senior director of footprint. "In effect, wealthy nations are outsourcing resource depletion."
The report underscores that the declining trends are not inevitable. To achieve globally sustainable development, each country's per capita ecological footprint must be less than the per capita biocapacity available on the planet, while maintaining a decent standard of living.
At the conclusion of the report, WWF recommends the following actions:
Accelerate shift to smarter food and energy production
Reduce ecological footprint through responsible consumption at the personal, corporate and government levels
Value natural capital as a cornerstone of policy and development decisions
Over 35 years, a 40 percent reduction in calcium carbonate deposits in Australia's Great Barrier Reef
Lizard Island.
An expedition from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Carnegie Institute of Science has measured a roughly 40% reduction in the rate of calcium carbonate deposited in Australia's Great Barrier Reef in the last 35 years — a scenario that could damage the reef framework and endanger the entire coral ecosystem.
Coral reefs are the most ecologically diverse and productive ecosystem in the ocean, with rich and diverse communities of fish, corals and mollusks making them a major attraction for marine and underwater tourism. Producing almost 50% of the net annual calcium carbonate in the oceans, corals play an important role in the global carbon cycle.
The ecological success of coral reefs depends on their calcium carbonate (CaCO3, limestone) structures that function as a huge filter to obtain plankton from the open ocean. Yet recent environmental changes including coastal nutrient pollution, global warming and ocean acidification caused by atmospheric CO2 increasingly threaten the existence of these unique ecosystems.
To better understand the effect of acidification on coral growth decline, Hebrew University scientists led by Prof. Jonathan Erez and Prof. Boaz Lazar at the Fredy and Nadine Herrmann Institute of Earth Sciences, together with Carnegie Institute colleagues Dr. J. Silverman and Dr. K. Caldeira, carried out a community metabolism study in Lizard Island at the Great Barrier Reef in Australia.
The researchers compared calcification rates documented in 2008 and 2009 to those measured using similar techniques in 1975-6. Despite the fact that the coral cover remained similar, the researchers found that the recent calcification rates had decreased by between 27% and 49%. These lower rates are consistent with predictions that took into account the increase in CO2between the two periods, suggesting that ocean acidification is the main cause for the lower calcification rate at Lizard Island. The prediction of how coral reef communities should respond to ocean acidification comes from work conducted by Dr. Silverman for his PhD at the Hebrew University, with Dr. Lazar and Prof. Erez as his advisers.
While previous studies on individual reef building corals have shown that they lower their calcification rates in response to ocean acidification, in the present study this was demonstrated for the whole community. These findings suggest that coral reefs are now making skeletons that are less dense and more fragile. While they still look the same, these coral reefs are less able to resist physical and biological erosion.
According to Erez and Silverman, "The results of this study show a dramatic decrease in the calcification of the reef, and that it was likely caused by ocean acidification. When the rate of calcification becomes lower than the rate of dissolution and erosion, the entire coral ecosystem could collapse and eventually be reduced to piles of rubble. The collapse of this habitat would ultimately lead to the loss of its magnificent and highly diverse flora and fauna."
Erez and Silverman added, "Routine measurements of net community calcification should be continued not only at Lizard Island but at other reefs around the world in order to monitor their well-being in a high CO2 world."
United States President, Barack Obama, at the UN Climate Summit. Photo by John Gillespie (CC)
Environmental scientists are being urged to broaden the advice they give on global climate change, say experts who are also frustrated that decision makers are not taking enough action.
Writing in the journal Nature Climate Change, The University of Manchester researchers argue that scientists are expressing a strong desire to fix the problems highlighted by their studies into human-induced climate change
The authors suggest there are problems with environmental scientists offering practical solutions that can help societies adapt to a fast-changing Earth - one where climatic zones will shift and sea levels will rise significantly.
Professor Noel Castree, the lead author of the paper, said: "We are grateful that environmental scientists alert us to the impact that people are having on our planet like shifting climatic zones and rising sea levels.
"But knowing how to respond to these impacts requires a broader skill-set than natural science alone provides.. It requires honest recognition of, and mature discussion about, the different values that can guide humans towards a different, better future."
Today, say the authors, few people doubt that man-made climate change is real. And few of us doubt that climate scientists lack integrity. The problem, they believe, is the lack of action on the part of decision makers and the societies they represent.
Castree, a professor of Geography, and co-author Dan Brockington, a professor of Conservation and Development, ask whether climate change scientists risk over-stepping the mark and trying to shape the political agenda while pretending to remain non-political.
They argue that the scientists often view the world as presenting problems that, like mechanics, they believe they can fix. They say that recent scientific discussions about 'geoengineering' technologies reflect this view.
"Global environmental change raises profound questions - such as whether humans lack humility and wisdom," said Castree. "But we are concerned that environmental scientists risk using their authority to convince others that future Earth surface change is no more than a fiendishly complicated alteration to fairly well understood physical systems."
Castree said: "What is needed is a deeper appreciation that such change will cause fundamental disagreements about responsibilities, rights and duties - among humans and towards nature. We think social scientists and humanists could significantly enrich public debates about how to respond to environmental change."
A hormone that governs sleep and jet lag in humans may also drive the mass migration of plankton in the ocean, scientists at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, have found. The molecule in question, melatonin, is essential to maintain our daily rhythm, and the European scientists have now discovered that it governs the nightly migration of a plankton species from the surface to deeper waters. The findings, published online today in Cell, indicate that melatonin's role in controlling daily rhythms probably evolved early in the history of animals, and hold hints to how our sleep patterns may have evolved.
In vertebrates, melatonin is known to play a key role in controlling daily activity patterns – patterns which get thrown out of synch when we fly across time zones, leading to jet lag. But virtually all animals have melatonin. What is its role in other species, and how did it evolve the task of promoting sleep? To find out, Detlev Arendt's lab at EMBL turned to the marine ragworm Platynereis dumerilii. This worm's larvae take part in what has been described as the planet's biggest migration, in terms of biomass: the daily vertical movement of plankton in the ocean. By beating a set of microscopic 'flippers' – cilia – arranged in a belt around its midline, the worm larvae are able to migrate toward the sea's surface every day. They reach the surface at dusk, and then throughout the night they settle back down to deeper waters, where they are sheltered from damaging UV rays at the height of day.
"We found that a group of multitasking cells in the brains of these larvae that sense light also run an internal clock and make melatonin at night." says Detlev Arendt, who led the research. "So we think that melatonin is the message these cells produce at night to regulate the activity of other neurons that ultimately drive day-night rhythmic behaviour."
Maria Antonietta Tosches, a postdoc in Arendt's lab, discovered a group of specialised motor neurons that respond to melatonin. Using modern molecular sensors, she was able to visualise the activity of these neurons in the larva's brain, and found that it changes radically from day to night. The night-time production of melatonin drives changes in these neurons' activity, which in turn cause the larva's cilia to take long pauses from beating. Thanks to these extended pauses, the larva slowly sinks down. During the day, no melatonin is produced, the cilia pause less, and the larva swims upwards.
"When we exposed the larvae to melatonin during the day, they switched towards night-time behaviour," says Tosches, "it's as if they were jet lagged."
The work strongly suggests that the light-sensing, melatonin-producing cells at the heart of this larva's nightly migration have evolutionary relatives in the human brain. This implies that the cells that control our rhythms of sleep and wakefulness may have first evolved in the ocean, hundreds of millions of years ago, in response to pressure to move away from the sun.
"Step by step we can elucidate the evolutionary origin of key functions of our brain. The fascinating picture emerges that human biology finds its roots in some deeply conserved, fundamental aspects of ocean ecology that dominated life on Earth since ancient evolutionary times," Arendt concludes.
Wandering Albatross (Diomedea exulans). Photo by Mario Quevedo (CC)
Mercury and persistent organic pollutants (POPs) reduce albatrosses' chances of successfully breeding, a recent study finds. These pollutants add to the list of environmental pressures, including climate change, disease and fishery bycatch, affecting this highly threatened species.
Seabirds, such as albatrosses, are at risk of consuming high levels of pollutants that accumulate up through the marine food chain. Albatross populations are already threatened around the world, and, as a result of lab tests showing the toxic effects of heavy metals and POPs, some scientists have suggested that these pollutants may have contributed to the birds' decline. However, little is known about their effects on birds in the wild.
The researchers explored the effects of mercury, cadmium and a range of POPs, including PCBs and DDTs, on an island population of wandering albatross (Diomedea exulans) in the Southern Indian Ocean. This population has fallen from around 850 breeding pairs in the 1960s, to 300-400 pairs today.
The blood of 147 adult birds was tested for contaminants, and the researchers combined this information with data gathered over 5 years in an ongoing monitoring programme on the island. The programme regularly checks birds for signs of population change, including: number of eggs laid, chick survival, fledging and adult survival.
Mercury reduced the likelihood of birds breeding and of eggs hatching. The researchers believe this may be because the metal is an 'endocrine disruptor' which could have damaged the birds' reproductive systems. In addition, mother birds may have passed on mercury to their unborn chicks, which could affect embryo development.
POPs also reduced the probability of birds breeding and the chances chicks successfully fledging. Again, the researchers believe that the birds' hormonal system was damaged. Separate research on gulls has indicated that POPs reduce the secretion of prolactin, a hormone involved in parental care.
No impacts of cadmium were observed and there were no signs that any of the pollutants affected adult survival.
The researchers then summed up the overall effects of mercury and POPs on population growth. If there were none of these contaminants in the bloodstream, the albatrosses' population growth rate would be 1.027 (not considering other population threats), i.e. each new generation of albatrosses would be 1.027 times bigger than the previous generation. However, the combined average effect of mercury and POPs reduce the growth rate to 0.991. This means that the population is in decline as each generation is smaller than the previous one.
This study provides an example of how pollution can affect wildlife. The POPs it considers are all banned or restricted under the UN'sStockholm Convention, signed by the EU in 2004. However, they remain in the environment for many years, even after their use has ceased. In line with its mercury strategy, the EU is currently preparing for the ratification of the Minamata Convention on Mercury, an international agreement signed last year, which is designed to prevent emissions and releases of this toxin on a global scale.
Fish population crashes have occurred occasionally since early 1400s, but more often in past 60 years
Terminal Island Fish Harbor, San Pedro, California, by Millard Sheets, 1935.
As a child in southern California, Ryan Rykaczewski spent a fair amount of time on his grandfather's boat, fishing with him off the Pacific coast near Los Angeles. At the time, he didn't think there was much rhyme or reason to their luck on the water.
"Sometimes we'd catch a lot of fish and sometimes we didn't," he says. "I just thought it was chaotic, that we could never understand what was going on."
But education changed his mind. Now an oceanographer and assistant professor at the University of South Carolina, he's working to understand the many factors that determine how plentiful fish might be in the sea.
And he's part of a team that just found a way to look deep into the ocean's past. They've shown that natural processes can cause dramatic year-to-year drops in fish populations and growth rates and raised questions about whether human activities might be making those declines more frequent.
Upwelling means phytoplankton, the perfect 'sea food'
The focus of the research is the California current, which stretches from Washington state to the Baja peninsula and is one of a handful of coastal waters on Earth from which an inordinately large portion of the world's fish harvest originates.
"There's the California current, the Humboldt current off the coast of Peru and Chile, the Canary current off the coast of Portugal and Morocco, and the Benguela current off of South Africa and Namibia," Rykaczewski says. "They're all along the western edges of the major continents, and because of the way the air circulates on the globe, all of these regions have winds that blow towards the equator. Couple that with the rotation of the Earth, and you get a certain type of vertical flow in the water column called upwelling."
The upwelling brings cold, nutrient-rich water to the surface. Phytoplankton thrive in those waters, as does every species higher on the food chain.
"These four relatively small areas end up providing about a third of the world's fish catch," he says. "That's huge for such a relatively small surface area of the planet."
Trouble off the California coast
That makes recent dips in the yearly Pacific catch worrisome. "The past 30 years have been relatively extreme," says Rykaczewski. Climate models predict lessening of the coastal winds that underpin the California current, he adds, so people are wondering if recent drops in fish harvest might be the new norm.
It's hard to answer that question, though, given the limited time period for which hard data are available. Because instrumental records date back just a little over 60 years, the team decided to look at landlubbing proxies that can yield hundreds of years of annual data points — namely, trees.
They first used three measurements in the instrumental record (sea level height, a measure of coastal wind strength, and the pressure difference between Australia and the northeast Pacific) to calculate a single number to represent the winter marine climate for each year. Summer is when winds blow strongest and upwelling is most prevalent, but the major cause of a diminished fish catch is actually low upwelling in the winter, Rykaczewski says.
By comparing the winter climate index number with observed biological activity of a variety of marine and terrestrial species (recorded since the early 1970s), the team was able to establish a tight connection between the winter marine climate, marine biological productivity, terrestrial climate and terrestrial biological productivity. In part, the team showed that high-pressure systems off the coast, which favor upwelling and consequently make fish grow like gangbusters, also block storms from moving inland, depriving the coast of rainfall.
In other words, slow tree growth means lots of fish, and vice versa.
Looking back over the centuries
They then used tree rings to extrapolate back in time almost 600 years. They found that very low winter upwelling and its concomitant diminished growth of marine species had, in fact, occurred in the distant past, and with equal severity.
"What we've experienced recently is extreme, but it's not unprecedented," Rykaczewski says. "It's not outside the envelope of what we've seen over the last six centuries. One bad year doesn't necessarily mean that the ecosystem is going to hell in a handbasket, because we've seen that this has happened in the past, and the ecosystem does bounce back."
One trend bears watching in coming years, though. The team of scientists from across the country, which just published their work in the journal Science, reports that the frequency of exceptionally low upwelling has increased recently.
"That is perhaps something to be concerned about in terms of climate change. We need to see if it persists in the future," Rykaczewski says. "Increased variability of the marine ecosystem is one projected consequence of anthropogenic global climate change, but for now we can't nail down that the increased variability we've seen recently is specifically the result of global climate change. It's been highly variable recently, but it's also been highly variable during other periods in the past 600 years."
Seafood and survival
Finding connections between the marine world and the terrestrial one was a particularly interesting aspect of the project, Rykaczewski says, and the ability to use the connections to look into the ocean's past should prove profitable in other geographic locations. Past marine productivity and variability have been estimated from sediments and fossilized coral elsewhere, he says, but those methods only resolve time points to a decade or more and, in the case of coral, are limited to tropical waters.
And the results are more than purely academic.
"There are a number of countries, usually poorer ones, that depend a lot on fisheries for their protein source and their economy," Rykaczewski says. "It's specifically in these regions where you catch so many fish that climate can have a really big impact on their society."
This is an illustration of water in our Solar System through time from before the Sun's birth through the creation of the planets. Credit: Bill Saxton, NSF/AUI/NRAO
Water was crucial to the rise of life on Earth and is also important to evaluating the possibility of life on other planets. Identifying the original source of Earth's water is key to understanding how life-fostering environments come into being and how likely they are to be found elsewhere. New work from a team including Carnegie's Conel Alexander found that much of our Solar System's water likely originated as ices that formed in interstellar space. Their work is published in Science.
Water is found throughout our Solar System. Not just on Earth, but on icy comets and moons, and in the shadowed basins of Mercury. Water has been found included in mineral samples from meteorites, the Moon, and Mars.
Comets and asteroids in particular, being primitive objects, provide a natural "time capsule" of the conditions during the early days of our Solar System. Their ices can tell scientists about the ice that encircled the Sun after its birth, the origin of which was an unanswered question until now.
In its youth, the Sun was surrounded by a protoplanetary disk, the so-called solar nebula, from which the planets were born. But it was unclear to researchers whether the ice in this disk originated from the Sun's own parental interstellar molecular cloud, from which it was created, or whether this interstellar water had been destroyed and was re-formed by the chemical reactions taking place in the solar nebula.
"Why this is important? If water in the early Solar System was primarily inherited as ice from interstellar space, then it is likely that similar ices, along with the prebiotic organic matter that they contain, are abundant in most or all protoplanetary disks around forming stars," Alexander explained. "But if the early Solar System's water was largely the result of local chemical processing during the Sun's birth, then it is possible that the abundance of water varies considerably in forming planetary systems, which would obviously have implications for the potential for the emergence of life elsewhere."
In studying the history of our Solar System's ices, the team—led by L. Ilsedore Cleeves from the University of Michigan—focused on hydrogen and its heavier isotope deuterium. Isotopes are atoms of the same element that have the same number of protons but a different number of neutrons. The difference in masses between isotopes results in subtle differences in their behavior during chemical reactions. As a result, the ratio of hydrogen to deuterium in water molecules can tell scientists about the conditions under which the molecules formed.
For example, interstellar water-ice has a high ratio of deuterium to hydrogen because of the very low temperatures at which it forms. Until now, it was unknown how much of this deuterium enrichment was removed by chemical processing during the Sun's birth, or how much deuterium-rich water-ice the newborn Solar System was capable of producing on its own.
So the team created models that simulated a protoplanetary disk in which all the deuterium from space ice has already been eliminated by chemical processing, and the system has to start over "from scratch" at producing ice with deuterium in it during a million-year period. They did this in order to see if the system can reach the ratios of deuterium to hydrogen that are found in meteorite samples, Earth's ocean water, and "time capsule" comets. They found that it could not do so, which told them that at least some of the water in our own Solar System has an origin in interstellar space and pre-dates the birth of the Sun.
"Our findings show that a significant fraction of our Solar System's water, the most-fundamental ingredient to fostering life, is older than the Sun, which indicates that abundant, organic-rich interstellar ices should probably be found in all young planetary systems," Alexander said.
For its beauty, generosity and undiscovered secrets, nature with its bountiful resources has been immortalised for centuries by poets, musicians, artists and natural explorers who have justifiably esteemed that which has too often been overlooked by others.
As I have personally as well as professionally come to realise and thus deeply appreciate many of the remarkable benefits that our natural world confers upon us each day, I would like to share with you a few of the ways in which we as individuals can contribute to the rehabilitation and preservation of our natural resources that sustain each of us around the world regardless of where we live. ....
University of Calgary geographer leads study on association between oil spills and maritime activity.
Stefania Bertazzon, an associate professor in the Department of Geography, led a recently published study showing a large portion of the oil discharges in the Canadian Pacific Ocean stem from recreational activities, passenger traffic and fisheries. Photo by Robert Walker.
From recreational boats and fishing vessels to commercial cruise ships and private marinas, a newly published study shows that oil discharges related to human maritime activity on the Canadian coast is posing a major threat to marine ecosystems in the Pacific Ocean.
The study – published in the August edition of the journal Applied Geography, with University of Calgary associate professor in geography Stefania Bertazzon as lead author – provides a geospatial analysis of oil discharges in the Canadian Pacific Ocean.
The findings show that a large portion of oil discharge within these waters stems from recreational activities, passenger traffic and fisheries. According to this scientific analysis – conducted on oil spills observed by the National Aerial Surveillance Program with the use of remote sensing devices – these sources are polluting the ocean along the British Columbia coast more than oil tankers and commercial cargo ships.
"Cargo ships and oil tankers are much more regulated with portside inspections and they have to meet certain standards," explains Bertazzon. "They're very aware of this surveillance and this is probably why our analysis suggests that they are responsible for a smaller portion of detected oil discharges. They have to be more careful."
Bertazzon adds: "We're not saying that cargo ships and oil tankers are not polluting. What we are saying is that they are not the only source of pollution in the Canadian Pacific Ocean."
Bertazzon and her co-authors explain that fuel docks for recreational and fishing vessels can be problematic. "We know that there's a lot of oil discharge in these fuel docks, which is largely uncontrolled," she says.
"One thing that happens in these marinas is there's a lot of old boats which have been sitting there for years slowly leaking into the ocean. These are not huge spills. It's a relatively small discharge. But there's a lot of these derelict vessels and together they make for a large source of pollution."
While there's no denying the impact of large-scale oil industry disasters such as the Gulf of Mexico spill in 2010, Bertazzon argues that the oil discharges related to maritime activities are even more devastating to marine ecosystems in the long run.
"There is scientific evidence to show that these day to day activities have a larger impact on the wild life and the marine ecosystem than those accidents that are huge, but limited in space and time," says Bertazzon. "What we're talking about happens every day, all along the coast. The impact is longer term and over a larger spatial extent."
