Oceans & Coasts
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The UNEP Magazine for Youth for young people · by young people · about young people Oceans & Coasts Deep mysteries Heating up Pollution alert Swimming with Ocean power sharks Meet Ellen MacArthur TUNZA the UNEP Magazine for Youth is available at www.ourplanet.com Contents United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Editorial 3 PO Box 30552, Nairobi, Kenya Tel (254 20) 621 234 Fax (254 20) 623 927 Heating up 4 Telex 22068 UNEP KE E-mail [email protected] Deep mysteries 6 www.unep.org ISSN 1727-8902 Swimming with sharks 7 Director of Publication Eric Falt TUNZA answers your questions 8 Coordinator Wondwosen Asnake Editor Geoffrey Lean Guest Editor Erin Senff Ripple effect 9 Nairobi Coordinator Naomi Poulton Circulation Manager Manyahleshal Kebede Saving fisheries 10 Youth Contributors Leyla Acaroglu, Australia; Millicent Burggraf, Australia; Ibrahim Ceesay, Gambia; Sarah and Protect to prosper 11 Kate Charters, Australia; Yazmin Lucero Cobos Becerra, Colombia; Kate de Mattos, UK; Ding Chen, China; Gerard Ocean power 12 G. Dumancas, Philippines; Oliver Goh, Singapore; Tatiane Guimarães, Brazil; Priyank Gupta, India; Rosidah Hardiani, Indonesia; Rahima Indria, Indonesia; Suffocating the sea 14 Lester Louis L. López, Philippines; Yvonne Beatrice Masilingi Maingey, Kenya; George Muchina Nguri, Coast-effective 15 Kenya; Tan Jack Young, Singapore; Reinier A. Tinapay, Philippines; Aleksandra Tomkiewicz, Poland; Elizabeth Winning ways 16 Tubbs, UK; Uli Wilke, Germany Other Contributors Adrian Chia; Ron Douglas, City Finding solutions 16 University London; Ellen MacArthur; Rosey Simonds and David Woollcombe, Peace Child International; Total freedom, endless opportunity 17 Mark Spalding, The Nature Conservancy; Andrew Thomlinson Big responsibility 18 Design Edward Cooper, Ecuador Web Editor Graham Barden Production Banson Raising sights 19 Head, UNEP’s Children and Youth/Sport and Environment Unit Theodore Oben Meeting my minuscule match 20 Printed in the United Kingdom The other corals 21 The contents of this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of UNEP or the editors, nor are they an Home from home 21 official record. The designations employed and the presentation do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of UNEP concerning the legal status 7 Seas 22 of any country, territory or city or its authority, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries. The non-copyrighted contents of this magazine may be reprinted without charge provided that TUNZA and the author or photographer concerned are credited as the source and the editors are notified in writing and sent a voucher copy. TUNZA welcomes articles, reviews, illustrations and photos for publication but cannot guarantee that they will be published. Unsolicited manuscripts, photographs and artwork will not be returned. UNEP and Bayer, the German-based up current projects, transfer successful Subscriptions If you wish to receive TUNZA on a regular international enterprise involved in initiatives to other countries and develop basis and are not currently on the mailing list, please contact Manyahleshal Kebede, Circulation Manager, health care, crop science and materials new youth programmes. Projects include: TUNZA, for subscription details, giving your name and science, are working together to TUNZA Magazine, the International address and your preferred language (English, French strengthen young people’s environmental Children’s Painting Competition on or Spanish). awareness and engage children and the Environment, the Bayer Young Change of address Please send your address label youth in environmental issues Environmental Envoy in Partnership with together with your new address to: Manyahleshal worldwide. UNEP, the UNEP TUNZA International Kebede, Circulation Manager, TUNZA, UNEP, PO Box 30552, Youth Conference, youth environmental Nairobi, Kenya. A partnership agreement lays down a networks in Asia Pacific, the Asia-Pacific This magazine is printed using vegetable-based inks on basis for UNEP and Bayer, who have Eco-Minds Forum, the Eco Forum in paper made from 100 per cent recycled waste material. collaborated on projects in the Asia and Poland and a photo competition, It is bleached without any damage to the environment. Pacific region for nearly 10 years, to step ‘Ecology in Focus’, in Eastern Europe. 2 TUNZA Vol 3 No 4 Each of us carries in our veins ‘a salty stream in which the ele- ments sodium, potassium and calcium are combined in almost the same proportions as in sea- dito water. This is our inheritance E rial from the day, untold millions of years ago, when a remote hy on Earth do we call our planet Earth? Planet Sea would be a ancestor, having progressed from Wmuch better name, for it is the the one-celled to the many-celled water – and the benefits that it has brought – that really distinguishes it from the dry, stage, first developed a circula- barren lumps that populate the rest of the solar system. Seventy-two per cent of the tory system in which the fluid was Earth’s surface is covered by the oceans. All merely the water of the sea. life, including our own ancestors, came from ’ the sea, and no land species could survive without the rain we get from it. And the Rachel Carson oceans continue to regulate the climate of our lonely planet, sustaining it as an isolated oasis in the vast black desert of space. Yet humanity has always exploited the life-giving oceans, treating them as an apparently inexhaustible source of food and a seemingly limitless dump for our wastes. For generation after generation we have UNEP/Topham managed to get away with it; the immensity of the oceans has been able to tolerate the A. Pignone/UNEP/Topham abuse. But now, as our generation begins to assume responsibility for the health of this misnamed planet, the boundaries have been reached, or crossed. Most of the world’s fisheries are at or beyond their limits. And pollution – especially from the carbon dioxide that is the main cause of global warming – now threatens the entire life of the oceans. The problem seems to be the very thoughtless, self-centred attitude that led us to name the planet after the relatively small part of it on which we live. For it is this mindset that has led to the despoiling of the oceans, and indeed of all the world’s life support systems. As a generation, we are going to have to grapple with it if we are to save our seas, and with them the planet itself. It is no easy task, but if we falter we can always look inside ourselves to find a reminder of how much we owe the oceans. For, as the great Rachel Carson – one of the founders of the environmental movement – pointed out, our very blood carries almost exactly the same composition of salts as the seawater from which our ancestors came. Oceans & Coasts 3 RISING TIDES FAILING HEALTH The coastal nation of Bangladesh is particularly vulnerable to rising sea levels. Photo: J. Descloitres/MODIS RRT/NASA GSFC pare a thought for the people of the SCarteret Islands, a scattering of atolls off Papua New Guinea in the South Pacific. They are losing their homeland Coral suffering from moderate bleaching can to the ocean. recover if temperatures return to normal before too long, enabling the algae on which the coral For the last 20 years they have been depends to recolonize its tissues. Photo: P. Kobeh/Still Pictures desperately trying, in vain, to stop the sea that surrounds them washing their islands off the map. They have built walls to try to keep the water out, but every year the waves have washed over their land, sweeping away homes, destroying crops and making their drinking water salty. Now the ocean threatens to drown them out altogether. And within two years they will all have gone – to the nearby, mountainous island of Bougainville. If temperatures remain high, fatal bleaching The 2,000 people of the islands are the occurs. The algae that the coral needs to survive first trickle in what will become a flood die off, and the coral itself dies. Mat-forming algae then begin to grow over the dead ‘skeleton’ of of people around the world. For as global the coral. warming takes hold and raises tempera- Photo: Secret Sea Visions/Still Pictures tures, sea levels are rising worldwide. So far this has mainly been caused by the lready, global warming is causing vast bulk of the ocean expanding as it Acatastrophic crashes in sea and bird warms – as railway tracks do on a hot life. In the summer of 2005, the tiny day. But increasingly, water from melting plankton that form the base of the food glaciers and ice caps is accelerating chain of the Pacific off the northwest the process. American coast failed to appear, causing populations of fish and seabirds to fall to Scientists’ best guess is that sea levels record lows. will rise 30 to 40 centimetres this century, but it could be a metre. It doesn’t sound Much the same has happened around the like much, but it would be enough to make northern coast of Britain over recent years, many nations – like Maldives and Tuvalu – as warmer waters have driven plankton uninhabitable, and to inundate vast areas hundreds of kilometres further north. of low-lying countries like Bangladesh, making millions of people homeless. Some scientists fear that these are signs that climate change is beginning to damage And if the polar ice caps melt as global the health of the oceans irreparably. New warming continues, the rise will be still research at the University of Amsterdam more catastrophic. The melting of the suggests that, as warming continues, Greenland ice sheet would raise sea plankton will be disrupted and destroyed levels by nearly 7 metres, the loss of worldwide.