Global Ocean Commission- Media Coverage (15 Oct.-15 Nov.)

Global Ocean Commission- media coverage (15 Oct.-15 Nov.)

Articles by, or mentioning, Global Ocean Commissioners:

The high cost of ocean decline – Andrés Velasco in Business World Online (and others) via Project Syndicate, 15 Oct (Page 3) 海洋退化的沉重代价 (as above in Chinese) – Caijing.com, 18 Oct – NB this article was also published in other major languages La urgencia de proteger el Océano, una creciente demanda social. Cristina Narbona in El Huffington Post, 22 Oct. The Urgency of Protecting the Ocean: A Social Demand. Cristina Narbona in The Huffington Post Green, 22 Oct. (Page 3) Survey Reveals Support for Single Global Governance of Oceans. The Fish Site, 22 Oct. (Page 6) G20 must deal with climate change says former Canadian PM. Paul Martin in ABC, 29 Oct. (Page 8) Environmental concerns discussed with Global Ocean Commission – Foua Toloa in Samoa News, 05 Nov (Page 10) ［論点］海の恵みを次世代に公海ガバナンス強化を…川口順子氏 – Yoriko Kawaguchi in Yomiuri Shimbun, 08 Nov

IMPAC3 stories:

Comienza el III Congreso sobre Areas Marinas Protegidas. ABC Natural, 21 Oct. Bold Plan for 50 Ocean Hope Spots Announced at IMPAC 3, National Geographic, 22 Oct. (Page 12) Aires marines : la gestion de la haute mer en question au congrès international Impac 3 à Marseille. Le Marin, 23 Oct. Marine Protected Areas: Pitcairn’s Bounty. The Chicago Tribune, 24 Oct. (Page 14) A Ajaccio, une vingtaine de pays appellent à préserver d'urgence la biodiversité marine. Le Monde, 27 Oct. Andaman & Nicobar, Lakshadweep declared new ‘hope spot’ The Economic Times (India Times), 28 Oct. (Page 15)

Other articles mentioning the Global Ocean Commission, or related to its work:

Des chercheurs appellent à la fin des subventions sur les chalutiers. Libération, 15 Oct. Climate change will affect almost every corner of ocean, study says. Los Angeles Times, 15 Oct. (Page 15) Supporters in new push for scaled back Antarctic reserve. BBC News, 16 Oct. (Page 16) Business urged to do more on ocean – Reuters, 16 Oct (Page 18) The ocean is broken. The Herald, 18 Oct. (Page 20)

Maritime waste: Our oceans are threatened by a toxic tide. The Telegraph (Callum Roberts), 21 Oct. (Page 24) Nations discuss fresh bid to create world's largest marine park. ABC, 22 Oct. (Page 26) Facing Vote on European Subsidies, Fishermen Cling to Way of Life, NY Times, 23 Oct. (Page 27) L'Europe ne veut pas subventionner de nouveaux bateaux de pêche. Le Monde, 23 Oct. Europa rechaza la reintroducción de ayudas a la construcción de nuevos barcos. EFE, 23 Oct. Whales bombarded by constant shipping noise. The Vancouver Sun, 23 Oct. (Page 31) European Parliament Rejects New Subsidies for Fishing Fleets. NY Times, 24 Oct. (Page 33) Researchers find coral spawns cloud to ward off global warming . The Australian, 24 Oct. (Page 35) Acidification of oceans threatens to change entire marine ecosystem. The Vancouver Sun, 25 Oct. (Page 37) Operation aims to chase the last drift nets out of the North Pacific. The Globe and Mail, 26 Oct. (Page 39) India makes its claim for sulphide mining from the Indian Ocean. Times of India. 28 Oct. (Page 42) Australie : la Grande Barrière de corail menacée par les intérêts de l'industrie minière Le Monde, 30 Oct. Ocean generated energy could be capable of supplying the entire world's energy requirements – Balkans.com, 31 Oct (Page 43) The devolution of the Seas – the Consequences of Oceanic Destruction – Alan Sielen in Foreign Affairs, Nov/Dec edition (Page 45) Antarctic fishery first to require ID numbers for all fishing vessels – Pew Charitable Trusts, 01 Nov (Page 50) Atlantic deep sea fishing: MEPs call for bottom trawling ban in vulnerable areas – European Parliament news service, 04 Nov (Page 51) La piraterie en Somalie, un chiffre d'affaires de 300 millions en sept ans – Le Marin, 04 Nov New UN-backed initiative to drive advances in high seas management – UN News Centre, 05 Nov (Page 52) Interpol alerta del peligro de la práctica del “aleteo” de tiburones – EFE Verde, 06 Nov Costa Rica uses INTERPOL ‘Purple Notice’ to warn about shark-finning – INTERPOL, 06 Nov (Page 54) Emissions of CO2 driving rapid oceans ‘acid trip’ – BBC News, 14 Nov (Page 56)

The high cost of ocean decline

SANTIAGO -- The world’s oceans are in trouble. In late September, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported that the oceans are warming, seawater is acidifying, and oxygen concentrations are dropping. Last week, another initiative, the International Program on the State of the Ocean, outlined the toll that these and other factors, such as destructive fishing and pollution, are having on marine life.

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The Urgency of Protecting the Ocean: A Social Demand

By Christina Narbona

Posted: 10/22/2013 1:13 am

"The global ocean will continue to warm during the 21st century. Heat will penetrate from the surface to the deep ocean and affect ocean circulation" - IPCC 2013

The last report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) emphasised the impacts of global warming on the ocean. Scientists had previously warned us on sea level rise and explained its consequences for people - after all, most of us inhabit coastal areas. But in recent years, there has been growing evidence on other climate change processes affecting marine ecosystems: ocean acidification, biodiversity loss, and connections between the ocean and extreme weather events. Appropriate action is urgently needed.

In February, at the launch of the Global Ocean Commission, I published an article in these pages entitled "Managing the ocean to ensure our future". Since then, the Commission has started work on translating scientific knowledge into concrete

3 proposals for action to reverse ocean degradation. Without a doubt, we Global Ocean Commissioners share the urgency revealed by the IPCC report.

Today, the Commission is publishing findings from an opinion survey carried out in 13 countries encompassing all continents and levels of development. Seventy-four percent of respondents consider it essential that an international organisation is charged with ensuring adequate protection in high seas waters - the waters beyond national jurisdiction that comprise two-thirds of the entire ocean. Only 12% said they were against progress in this global governance challenge. Surprisingly, the same study reveals that a majority of people believe that at least 25% of the high seas is already protected by some kind of legal instrument. The real figure is actually less than 1%. This shows a general belief that conservation tools applied on land (national parks, the Natura 2000 Network, biosphere reserves...) have been successfully transposed to the international ocean.

Beyond national jurisdiction, the ocean is sadly seen as a free space. This leaves it open to various kinds of damage, and in some cases, illegal activities. This occurs because it seems far and invisible to all of us. Also, there is no integrated and holistic approach to ocean concerns. The International Seabed Authority, which was established under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, designates areas of environmental interest, but only for the ocean floor. It means that the seabed is regulated separately from the water column, which does not reflect modern scientific understanding - it is as though there were no interconnection between different parts of the marine environment. Other institutions, for instance the International Maritime Organization, regulate specific activities. But they do it in a sectoral manner. Regional Fisheries Management Organizations (RFMOs) are expected to sustainably manage fish stocks; but their mandates are narrow and their records patchy. The United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity has no power to protect high seas biodiversity. UNESCO can establish World Heritage Sites in the high seas, though it has not yet done so.

It is therefore not surprising that high seas biodiversity protection is a patchwork of competencies and agencies, whose mandates and priorities are sometimes contradictory. The Global Ocean Commission promotes a holistic and integrated understanding of processes affecting the ocean, and aims to develop global and effective measures to address current challenges.

The ecological balance in areas where food resources abound must also be maintained. The ocean provides food to a world population heading towards nine billion. If we do not conserve fish stocks in rapid decline, we will not eradicate hunger. Citizens of today and tomorrow have the right to access food. But the abyss between those suffering from hunger and those with excess of food keeps growing.

During my term as Environment Minister, I launched the process of creating El Cachucho, the first marine protected area in Spain. This was part of the European Commission's Natura 2000 Network - the European network of protected areas, which now covers 27% of our territory. El Cachucho is a large seamount located 65 km from the coast of Asturias on the Atlantic coast in Northern Spain. It rises from 5000 metres deep to peak just 425m below the sea surface. Its northern slope is one of the steepest in the world, and its

4 rocky floor allows corals and sponges to grow. It is a rich, well developed habitat in which more than 600 species have been identified, including an extraordinary giant squid.

El Cachucho is also an important nursery for commercially important fish including blue whiting, white hake, and monkfish. They are attracted by the presence of food and they benefit from marine currents spreading their larvae.

The protection of El Cachucho has been made possible thanks to the wide range of stakeholders involved in the process - with, in some cases, divergent interests. The Spanish Oceanographic Institute together with other national and foreign experts brought their essential scientific knowledge. Environmental organisations such as WWF/Adena and Oceana initially proposed protection for El Cachucho in 2006. From then on, the Environment Ministry led the stakeholder process together with other Ministries and the Regional Government of Asturias. In 2007, Parliament successfully approved the Law on Natural Heritage and Biodiversity, which includes the definition of a Marine Protected Area.

Still, the effort would not have succeeded without the very positive participation of local fishermens' groups. Their life experience coincided with scientific knowledge: protecting El Cachucho would allow the preservation of fish stocks, thus sustaining their economic activity.

Establishing protection measures in national waters can be a complex and lengthy process. In the case of El Cachucho, it took five years - the corresponding Decree dates from November 2011. But that looks simple when set alongside the process for creating protected areas in the high seas. And, still, for the high seas there isn't any organisation with overall responsibility of protecting biodiversity.

According to my own experiences as Minister of Environment, I can affirm that the "environment vs economy" paradigm needs urgently to be dismantled. If we do not take into account ecological concerns, humanity will increasingly be confronted with natural resource depletion, extreme weather events and pollution. The economic cost is high.

This week, I will be speaking at the International Marine Protected Areas Congress in Marseille, organised by the government of France and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). It will be a perfect occasion for sharing successful experiences and identifying measures needed to improve current figures of ocean protection.

A ministerial conference will follow immediately afterwards in Ajaccio. Governments from more than 130 countries will assess how far we stand from the ambitious target (agreed in 2010) of protecting 10% of the global ocean by 2020. At the current pace, we would need 100 years to achieve the target. I will be representing the Global Ocean Commission in both events. My central message will be that the public demands a better management of the ocean - and that governments, with food security and other issues in mind, must respond.

Survey Reveals Support for Single Global Governance of Oceans

22 October 2013

GLOBAL - A substantial majority of the world’s population would like to see one organisation given responsibility for protecting nature in international parts of the ocean, according to an opinion survey conducted for the Global Ocean Commission.

Seventy-four per cent agreed that ‘There? needs to be one organisation?with overall responsibility for?protecting international?waters and the life in them’, while 12 per cent disagreed.

Currently, no organisation has overall responsibility for conservation in the high seas – the internationally governed and managed part of the ocean that covers nearly half of the world’s surface.

Respondents also over-estimated the proportion of the high seas that is protected. Sixty-one percent thought that more than a quarter is protected; the real figure is less than 1%.

‘These results show there is real public concern about the lack of protection for life in the high seas,’ said Cristina Narbona, former Environment Minister of Spain and a member of the Global Ocean Commission.

‘We know that many marine species are in sharp decline because of issues such as destructive fishing and climate change, and clearly the public feels there needs to be some mechanism for protecting it.

‘On land, we have national parks to conserve wildlife and provide people with sustainable livelihoods; why aren’t we doing the same in the ocean?’

The Global Ocean Commission is an independent high-level panel aiming to reverse the trajectory of decline in the ocean and restore it to full health and sustainable productivity.

The high seas are managed under a ‘patchwork’ regime, with separate organisations managing industries such as shipping, fisheries and seabed mining. None of these

6 organisations has overall responsibility for conserving nature, and in most of the high seas there is no clear legal mechanism for establishing protected areas.

‘If you go back half a century, this wasn’t too much of a problem because we didn't really use the high seas,’ said Robert Hill, the former Australian Defence and Environment Minister who was instrumental in persuading the United Nations to set up a working group on high seas biodiversity and is now a member of the Global Ocean Commission.

‘But increasing demand for resources such as fish and our increasing technological capacity to catch them in industrial quantities have changed that paradigm; high seas biodiversity is now absolutely a major issue.

‘Scientists, concerned citizens and some of us in politics have been arguing for years that we need to do better; and our survey shows that the public worldwide shares our concern.’

More than 12% of the Earth’s land area is protected. In 2010, governments committed to protect 10% of the entire ocean by 2020 – but the figure so far is 2.3 per cent, and only a fraction of that is in the high seas.

Another survey result, released in March, showed that 85% of the global public believes the high seas should be sustainably managed, while only five per cent do not.

‘Increasingly we are seeing a public mandate emerge for the Global Ocean Commission’s mission,’ said José María Figueres, the former Costa Rican President and Co-chair of the Commission.

‘That’s partly because science is showing us that the deep ocean isn’t a desert for life, as people used to assume; scientists are turning up new species virtually every time they go searching.

‘Each and every one of those species is part of the marine web of life, which supplies us with necessities such as oxygen and food, while also protecting us from climate change; we neglect it at our peril.’

The Global Ocean Commission released the survey results on the eve of the Third International Marine Protected Areas Congress (IMPAC-3) in Marseille and Ajaccio, France, on 21-27 October, at which Dr Narbona will be speaking.

The results will feed into the Commission’s work of developing a set of ambitious yet pragmatic recommendations that will be released by the middle of 2014.

- See more at: http://www.thefishsite.com/fishnews/21582/survey-reveals-support- for-single-global-governance-of-oceans#sthash.mLCREYpc.WStHGofl.dpuf

G-20 must deal with climate change says former Canadian PM

Updated Tue 29 Oct 2013, 9:21pm AEDT

Later this year Australia will take over as the chair of the G-20 - the grouping of the world's 20 biggest and most populous economies. Canada's former prime minister, the Right Honourable Paul Martin, who's visiting Australia as a guest of the Lowy Institute, is known as the father of the G-20. He believes climate change is a major global issue the G-20 must deal with.

DAVID MARK: Later this year Australia will take over as the chair of the G20, the grouping of the world's 20 biggest and most populous economies.

Next year, and for the first time, it will host the G20 leader's summit in Brisbane.

Canada's former prime minister, the Right Honourable Paul Martin, is known as the father of the G20.

He believes climate change is a major global issue the G20 must deal with.

He says the new Government's Direct Action policy of dealing with climate change is not at odds with other countries setting up emissions trading schemes.

I began by asking Paul Martin how the G20 evolved from a grouping of finance ministers to leaders.

PAUL MARTIN: The G20 finance ministers was a considerable success in terms of what we had to deal with, but it was very clear to me when I was prime minister that it should be elevated to the leaders' level, that in fact the issues were far beyond those that finance ministers should deal with and the G8 at the time, which did not have Australia, did not have China, did not have India and the other major powers in the world, was just simply circumscribed in its capacity.

And so I began to work very hard and got all of the countries involved to agree, except for the United States. They wouldn't, George Bush would not say yes, wouldn't say no. Subsequently as you know, and I think there was pressure put on by Australia and by France as well, because of the 2008 crisis George Bush suddenly decided it should be elevated to the leaders' level. I was out of office by that time and the meeting took place.

DAVID MARK: Paul Martin, Australia is going to assume the chair of the G20 in December this year, and it will host the next leaders' summit in Brisbane next November.

What is the role of the chair in the lead up to that summit?

PAUL MARTIN: It's very, very important. Essentially, the chair sets the tone for the meeting and often basically picks the priority issues that have to be dealt with, and all of the preparation is really left to the host country.

That's why the Lowy Institute asked me to come over with some others, because Lowy has been given the responsibility of helping the Australian Government prepare for it.

The preparations take place within Australia but they also take place within all the other countries of the G20, and so Australia is making a constant outreach to the rest of the world, to the rest of the G20 countries so that they in fact are studying the issues that have to be dealt with, that they're trying to come up with solutions; there'll be working groups throughout the next year until the meeting takes place, and all of that will be led by Australia.

DAVID MARK: This is an organisation that accounts for the vast majority of the world's population; overwhelmingly, the world's major economies.

You say the G20 has to be an ongoing global steering committee. Given that, what should be the priorities for the meeting next November?

PAUL MARTIN: The fundamental issue that they have to deal with is how do we, with a globally integrated economy, make sure that we have sustained growth? And that requires an enormous amount of coordination and cooperation between countries.

The G20 was very successful at the very beginning when the 2008 crisis hit. What I'm sure Australia's working on at the present time is how do we make sure that countries cooperate so that in fact the actions of one country don't spill over and hurt another?

DAVID MARK: What are the roadblocks then to achieving that?

PAUL MARTIN: Well, countries are still used to operating not on a global basis but on a national basis. I mean, most of the problems we deal with are now global, whether it be climate change, whether it be migration, whether it be the way corporations operate around the world, but governments are still intensely national.

DAVID MARK: You mentioned climate change: we've just got a new government in Australia as you know that promised to repeal the carbon tax that we have in Australia. This is happening at the same time that a lot of other states are bringing in mechanisms for reducing carbon, whether they be emission trading schemes or so on.

The Australian Government has a policy known as Direct Action, which is to put money directly into means of cutting carbon emissions. Is that an effective way of achieving that goal?

PAUL MARTIN: Well I certainly think it's a very important way. This goes back to the whole question of the newer technologies which are going to be the way in which that is done.

I don't think that we should get hung up on a way of going at it. One country will do it one way, another country will do it another way.

What we will get hung up on and which is absolutely important is that every single member at the G20 recognise that in fact this is a major global issue and no country can shy away from it.

DAVID MARK: Staying on that theme, one of the great conundrums it seems to me internationally is this issue of carbon abatement while at the same time allowing developing countries to grow their economies.

Now the G20 has three of the largest developing countries: China, India, and Brazil. How does the G20 help to solve that conundrum, allow those countries to grow, but reduce carbon emissions?

PAUL MARTIN: Well, you've put your finger on one of the reasons for the G20, and why the G8 without China, without India at the table, just simply could not deal with this kind of an issue.

But the fact of the matter is, I think we are now at the point where the reduction of poverty does not have to be done at the expense of the environment.

These large population countries may not have caused climate change - that may be the industrial world - but if these large population countries continue in the same vein that we did, then they're going to make it very difficult not just for us but for themselves as well.

DAVID MARK: I was speaking to Canada's former prime minister, Paul Martin.

Former Head of Tokelau government calls on Acting Governor Lemanu

By Samoa News staff

Lt. Gov. Lemanu Peleti Mauga, who is also acting governor (left); Paula Faiva, special assistant to the Ocean Commission of the Tokelau government; and Tokelau government’s Minister of Energy Aliki Foua Toloa (right) following a meeting last Friday at the Governor’s Office. [photo: Leua Aiono Frost]

Lt. Gov. Lemanu Peleti Mauga, who is also the current acting governor, met last Friday with former Ulu o Tokelau, or head of the Tokelau government, Aliki Foua Toloa, who shared the mission of an international group called Global Ocean Commission. Lemanu was accompanied by three other ASG officials.

The outcome of the meeting is not yet available but it's expected to be released later this month.

Toloa, currently Tokelau’s Minister of Energy and the only Pacific islander on the Commission, is visiting Pacific island leaders to discuss various issues that can be addressed by the Commission, which was formed early this year, is made up of 17 leaders in politics, business and law in order to restore the global ocean to health and sustainable productivity.

In a news release, Toloa says the Commission will play a significant role in bringing Pacific island concerns to the attention of world leaders. The Commission will meet later this year in Oxford, Great Britain.

“I’m looking forward to discussing the concerns that the island leaders have about their priorities for the ocean, and discussing with them what the Commission can do,” he said. “Pacific nations depend more than most on a healthy ocean, for fish, for recreation and tourism, and to shelter us from the worst impacts of climate change.”

“The Commission was set up to address these concerns, so it’s crucial that Commissioners hear the Pacific voice. I will make sure that they do,” he added.

According to a Commission release, the work at the Oxford meeting will focus on developing policy recommendations to address issues compromising the health of the global ocean, including climate change and ocean acidification, overfishing, illegal fishing and pollution.

Additionally, the Commission focuses on high seas, the area of the ocean beyond nations’ exclusive economic zone. It says high seas make up nearly half of the Earth’s surface and are set to become increasingly important for the global economy in the future with the development of new industries such as deep-sea mining.

The Commission says it will release a set of ambitious yet pragmatic recommendations for reform by mid-2014, shortly before the start of high-level United Nation talks on protecting high seas biodiversity.

Bold Plan for 50 Ocean Hope Spots Announced at IMPAC 3

Posted by Brett Garling in Ocean Views on October 22, 2013

Exciting news has come out of the 3rd International Marine Protected Areas Congress (IMPAC 3): Her Deepness Sylvia Earle, Mission Blue and IUCN have launched 31 new Mission Blue Hope Spots — Marine Protected Areas — across the globe to massively scale up the level of marine protection that experts consider necessary for a sustainable future.

A Hope Spot is an area of ocean that merits special protection because of its wildlife and significant underwater habitats. Each Hope Spot can give the ocean a breathing space from human activities so that it may recover and flourish. Dr. Earle named these areas Hope Spots because they represent a real hope to restore the health of our imperiled ocean.

The 31 new announcements come in addition to the 19 Hope Spots that Mission Blue has worked to protect over the last four years. Click on the thumbnail below to hear about Hope Spots straight from Sylvia.

When Dr. Earle won the TED Prize in 2009, she implored ocean supporters “to use all means at your disposal – films, the web, expeditions, new submarines, a campaign! – to ignite public support for a network of global marine protected areas, Hope Spots

12 large enough to save and restore the ocean, the blue heart of the planet.” Click on the thumbnail below to hear the TED talk.

Today, that dream inches closer to reality as gathered ocean experts at the IMPAC 3 Congress are confronted with this boldest vision to protect the Earth’s Blue Heart, the shimmering global ocean that drives planetary chemistry and sustains all life on the planet. As IMPAC 3 will set the Marine Protected Area agenda for the next few years and tackle issues of management, financing, ecological representativity, local integration and high seas stewardship, the increase to 50 Hope Spots could not be more timely.

We are fortunate to live in ‘a sweet spot in time.’ Now we know what is happening to our fragile blue planet and its ocean, and we also know what steps are needed to change the course we are on. With this message of hope, Mission Blue and IUCN are mobilizing a growing international community of stakeholders to take the urgent action needed to reverse the ocean’s current state of peril while we are still in this special sweet spot in time.

Please support Mission Blue and IUCN to help ignite support for a global network of 50 Marine Protected Areas that can form the seeds of tomorrow’s healthy ocean.

Marine protected areas: Pitcairn's bounty

5:35 p.m. CDT, October 24, 2013

The South Pacific is about to get the world's biggest national park

ON LAND, nature reserves are ten a penny. About one-sixth of the earth's land surface is protected in one way or another. Reserves at sea are much scarcer, covering, at most, 3%. But a proposal to designate the Exclusive Economic Zone around the Pitcairn islands in the South Pacific as a marine protected area (MPA) may help redress the balance.

The British dependency of Pitcairn (population, 65) is home to descendants of the Bounty mutineers. The idea of a reserve, promoted by the American-based Pew Charitable Trusts, is to ban fishing in 830,000 square km (320,000 square miles) of sea around Pitcairn. The immediate cost to Pitcairn's economy would be trivial: some $30,000 in licence fees for tuna fishing forgone each year. In return the world's smallest democracy would not only enjoy the kudos of having the world's biggest MPA, but also hope to draw tourists. The Great Barrier Reef is reckoned to bring in about $4 billion for Australia each year.

Hopes are high that the British government will endorse the idea. Pitcairn relies on annual British subsidies equivalent to £50,000 ($81,000) per inhabitant. And the MPA plan is broadly welcomed by islanders. Simon Young, Pitcairn's deputy mayor, says it has "always been a seafaring nation, protective of its marine environment". If Britain enacted legislation for the reserve, it would not face local opposition as it did when it designated a reserve around the Chagos archipelago in the Indian Ocean in 2010. Locals had been forced out in the late 1960s and early 1970s to make way for an American base; the reserve was seen as another way to stop them ever returning.

The Pitcairn islands could scarcely be more remote, with New Zealand 4,800km (3,000 miles) to the west and Ecuador 6,000km to the east. Arguably, this isolation prevents overfishing. The worst overfishing takes place in what Peter Jones, a geographer, calls "metropolitan seas" near larger populations. It is, he says, politically easier to designate an MPA in a remote area than where fisheries are heavily used. Britain's struggle to create significant MPAs around its own coast underlines the point.

Andaman & Nicobar, Lakshadweep declared new ‘hope spot’

B Sivakumar, TNN Oct 28, 2013, 05.26AM IST

CHENNAI: Andaman & Nicobar and Lakshadweep islands have been named as the new "hope spots" by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and oceanographer Sylvia Earle of Mission Blue, an organization involved in the study of oceans.

A hope spot is an area of ocean that merits special protection because of its wildlife and significant underwater habitats. The two islands are the first spots in India and part of 31 new hope spots across the world added to the existing 19 spots. "What we've done here is identify a number of critical areas that represent a real hope to restore the health of our imperilled ocean," IUCN quoted Sylvia as saying.

Climate change will affect almost every corner of ocean, study says

By Tony Barboza

3:55 PM PDT, October 15, 2013

Seawater is heating up and becoming more acidic, but those are only the first in a cascade of changes the world’s oceans are expected to go through by the end of the century as they respond to greenhouse gas emissions, a new study says.

"The entire world's ocean surface" will undergo huge changes in ocean chemistry, habitat and biodiversity by 2100 as a result of climate change, with hundreds of millions of people who depend on the sea suffering as a result, the study predicts.

A team of more than two dozen scientists used projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change along with biological and socioeconomic data to predict how oceans might be altered by the century's end. By then, almost no part of the world’s oceans will be untouched by climate change and a suite of related effects, they found.

Oceans will continue to warm and lower in pH while plankton production and dissolved oxygen levels will decline, the study found. A tiny fraction of the ocean’s surface in polar regions could see increases in oxygen and productivity, but practically nowhere will seawater cool or see its pH increase.

Those changing conditions will reduce the growth and size of sea creatures, increase mortality, disrupt ocean food webs and cause species to shift toward the poles and into deeper water, the study found.

Shallow water environments, including coral reefs and seagrass beds, will see more drastic changes than deep-sea habitat, the study predicts. Whales, seals, squid and krill are among the sea creatures projected to experience greater shifts in response to changing ocean chemistry and ecology.

The oceanic changes will affect between 470 million and 870 million poor people who live in coastal areas of countries that rely on the sea for food and jobs and have little ability to adapt, researchers estimated.

The study, published in the journal PLOS Biology, also warned that developing countries will pay most of the environmental and social costs of climate change, which will be compounded by rising sea levels.

“If global CO2 emissions are not reduced, substantial degradation of marine ecosystems and associated human hardships are very likely to occur,” the study concluded.

Science & Environment

16 October 2013 Last updated at 11:44 ET Supporters in new push for scaled back Antarctic reserve

By Matt McGrath Environment correspondent, BBC News

A bloc of countries has issued a joint call for the creation of marine reserves in Antarctica.

The group, which includes the US, EU, France, New Zealand and Australia, saw their initial plans thrown out by opposition from Russia earlier this year.

But the new plan suggests significant scaling down of one reserve in the hope of securing agreement.

It will be submitted to a meeting in Tasmania next week.

The Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR), made up of 25 members with interests in the Southern Ocean, has been working since 2005 to establish marine protected areas (MPAs) in the region.

At a special meeting in July, plans to establish two giant reserves in the Ross Sea and in east Antarctica were tabled by a number of countries.

Doubling the world's reserves

The Ross Sea proposal, supported by the US and New Zealand, would have banned commercial fishing in an area of 1.6m sq km.

The other reserve, supported by France, Australia and the EU aimed to protect 1.9m sq km on the Pacific side of Antarctica.

But Russia and the Ukraine questioned the legal basis of the plan that would have more than doubled the size of the world's marine reserves at a stroke.

Other countries, including Norway, China and Japan queried the science and the size of the proposed reserves and wanted the inclusion of a "sunset clause", which meant the decision could be reviewed in the future.

As CCAMLR operates on a consensus basis, the nations in favour of the plans were forced to withdraw.

Now ahead of the Commission's annual meeting in Hobart, the proponents of the reserves have issued revised plans and a call for their adoption.

Last month New Zealand and the US published details of a new Ross Sea plan. It cut the size of the reserve by 40% and left a question over the permanence of the arrangement.

While the proposal for east Antarctica was also revised, it remains essentially the same in terms of the area covered.

"The original bigger Ross Sea plan is now off the table," Paulus Tak from the Pew Charitable Trust told BBC News.

"It is now for a smaller area than was originally proposed. They are making the concessions to get the opponents onboard.

"Whether that will be a useful move for Russia and the Ukraine who put forward legal objections, remains to be seen."

Further concessions feared

In today's statement, the foreign ministers call on all members of the Commission to support the plans, saying that these regions are "widely recognised for their remarkable ecological and scientific importance".

They argue that the proposals before the Commission are based on "sound and best available science and will provide a unique laboratory for marine research, and will have profound and lasting benefits for ocean conservation."

However environmental campaigners like Paulus Tak are concerned that the proponents of the MPAs will make further concessions during the meeting.

"We call upon the states to maintain the ambition level, and as such each downgrading of the proposal is a matter of some concern from our side, but we want to see a successful outcome of these negotiations."

Another issue that could hold up the MPA proposal is the US government shutdown, which could prevent the American delegation from attending.

If that happens, the discussion on protecting the Antarctic could be held off for another year.

Business urged to do more to save oceans -World Bank study

Wed, Oct 16 2013

* Oceans risk irreversible damage-international report

* "Paradigm shift" needed, with public-private partnerships

By Environment Correspondent Alister Doyle

OSLO, Oct 16 (Reuters) - Businesses should play a bigger role in helping to save depleted fish stocks as part of efforts to prevent irreversible damage to the oceans, a World-Bank backed report said on Wednesday.

The study, by 21 experts including government ministers, academics, conservationists and company leaders, said policies for protecting the oceans from over-fishing, pollution and climate change were often ineffective and fragmented.

It recommended more public-private partnerships involving companies, governments, local communities and others to protect ecosystems that are the main source of protein for a billion people, mainly in the developing world.

"A paradigm shift is needed in how we use and conserve ocean resources to address current inadequacies," the report said.

The panel, set up by the World Bank, is one of several groups trying to find ways to deal with threats to the oceans. A separate Global 0cean Commission, for instance, is looking at how to safeguard the high seas, outside national jurisdictions.

There have been many failures despite past calls for action; a U.N. summit in Johannesburg in 2002, for instance, set a goal, set to be missed, of restoring world fisheries to health by 2015.

The 29-page report provides an outline for action for a group of 140 nations who have signed up to seek solutions to the problems.

"It is vital to have the CEOs of major seafood companies around the table," Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, chair of the panel and director of the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland in Australia, told Reuters by telephone.

He said that better management would make it easier to apply lessons from one part of the world elsewhere.

"The same problems that are occurring for coral reefs in Thailand are occurring in Tanzania," he said. "This is about creating that platform where you could swap ideas and develop technologies as a global community."

IRREVERSIBLE CHANGE

Chris Lischewski, President and CEO of Bumble Bee Foods, North America's biggest branded seafood company, said businesses were often wrongly seen as "the bad guys" in ocean management.

"Sustainable fisheries is key to our future," Lischewski, who is also a member of Wednesday's panel, told Reuters in a telephone interview.

He said Bumble Bee Foods, which has a turnover of about $1 billion, worked with conservationists, for instance, to ensure that the tuna it sells is only caught from sustainable sources.

And he said the company was working with countries including Fiji, Mauritius and Colombia and would soon announce a new partnership with "a group of coastal countries".

Last week, an international report by a group of scientists also warned the oceans were suffering a "deadly trio" of threats from global warming, declining oxygen levels and acidificiation.

And a report by the U.N.'s panel on climate change said last month that land and ocean surface temperatures had warmed by about 0.9 degree Celsius (1.6 F) since the late 19th century, almost half way to a 2 C (3.6 F) ceiling set by almost 200 governments to prevent dangerous change.

Wednesday's report did not look at costs of implementing recommendations. "Regardless of what we do, fish is going to cost more in the future," Lischewski said, saying the world population was rising and many fish stocks were at maximum yields.

The ocean is broken

By GREG RAY

Oct. 18, 2013, 10 p.m.

 Ivan Macfadyen aboard the Funnel Web. Picture by Max Mason-Hubers

IT was the silence that made this voyage different from all of those before it.

Not the absence of sound, exactly.

The wind still whipped the sails and whistled in the rigging. The waves still sloshed against the fibreglass hull.

And there were plenty of other noises: muffled thuds and bumps and scrapes as the boat knocked against pieces of debris.

What was missing was the cries of the seabirds which, on all previous similar voyages, had surrounded the boat.

The birds were missing because the fish were missing.

Exactly 10 years before, when Newcastle yachtsman Ivan Macfadyen had sailed exactly the same course from Melbourne to Osaka, all he'd had to do to catch a fish from the ocean between Brisbane and Japan was throw out a baited line.

"There was not one of the 28 days on that portion of the trip when we didn't catch a good-sized fish to cook up and eat with some rice," Macfadyen recalled.

But this time, on that whole long leg of sea journey, the total catch was two.

No fish. No birds. Hardly a sign of life at all.

"In years gone by I'd gotten used to all the birds and their noises," he said.

"They'd be following the boat, sometimes resting on the mast before taking off again. You'd see flocks of them wheeling over the surface of the sea in the distance, feeding on pilchards."

But in March and April this year, only silence and desolation surrounded his boat, Funnel Web, as it sped across the surface of a haunted ocean.

North of the equator, up above New Guinea, the ocean-racers saw a big fishing boat working a reef in the distance.

"All day it was there, trawling back and forth. It was a big ship, like a mother-ship," he said.

And all night it worked too, under bright floodlights. And in the morning Macfadyen was awoken by his crewman calling out, urgently, that the ship had launched a speedboat.

"Obviously I was worried. We were unarmed and pirates are a real worry in those waters. I thought, if these guys had weapons then we were in deep trouble."

But they weren't pirates, not in the conventional sense, at least. The speedboat came alongside and the Melanesian men aboard offered gifts of fruit and jars of jam and preserves.

"And they gave us five big sugar-bags full of fish," he said.

"They were good, big fish, of all kinds. Some were fresh, but others had obviously been in the sun for a while.

"We told them there was no way we could possibly use all those fish. There were just two of us, with no real place to store or keep them. They just shrugged and told us to tip them overboard. That's what they would have done with them anyway, they said.

"They told us that his was just a small fraction of one day's by-catch. That they were only interested in tuna and to them, everything else was rubbish. It was all killed, all dumped. They just trawled that reef day and night and stripped it of every living thing."

Macfadyen felt sick to his heart. That was one fishing boat among countless more working unseen beyond the horizon, many of them doing exactly the same thing.

No wonder the sea was dead. No wonder his baited lines caught nothing. There was nothing to catch.

If that sounds depressing, it only got worse.

The next leg of the long voyage was from Osaka to San Francisco and for most of that trip the desolation was tinged with nauseous horror and a degree of fear.

"After we left Japan, it felt as if the ocean itself was dead," Macfadyen said.

"We hardly saw any living things. We saw one whale, sort of rolling helplessly on the surface with what looked like a big tumour on its head. It was pretty sickening.

"I've done a lot of miles on the ocean in my life and I'm used to seeing turtles, dolphins, sharks and big flurries of feeding birds. But this time, for 3000 nautical miles there was nothing alive to be seen."

In place of the missing life was garbage in astounding volumes.

"Part of it was the aftermath of the tsunami that hit Japan a couple of years ago. The wave came in over the land, picked up an unbelievable load of stuff and carried it out to sea. And it's still out there, everywhere you look."

Ivan's brother, Glenn, who boarded at Hawaii for the run into the United States, marvelled at the "thousands on thousands" of yellow plastic buoys. The huge tangles of synthetic rope, fishing lines and nets. Pieces of polystyrene foam by the million. And slicks of oil and petrol, everywhere.

Countless hundreds of wooden power poles are out there, snapped off by the killer wave and still trailing their wires in the middle of the sea.

"In years gone by, when you were becalmed by lack of wind, you'd just start your engine and motor on," Ivan said.

Not this time.

"In a lot of places we couldn't start our motor for fear of entangling the propeller in the mass of pieces of rope and cable. That's an unheard of situation, out in the ocean.

"If we did decide to motor we couldn't do it at night, only in the daytime with a lookout on the bow, watching for rubbish.

"On the bow, in the waters above Hawaii, you could see right down into the depths. I could see that the debris isn't just on the surface, it's all the way down. And it's all sizes, from a soft-drink bottle to pieces the size of a big car or truck.

"We saw a factory chimney sticking out of the water, with some kind of boiler thing still attached below the surface. We saw a big container-type thing, just rolling over and over on the waves.

"We were weaving around these pieces of debris. It was like sailing through a garbage tip.

"Below decks you were constantly hearing things hitting against the hull, and you were constantly afraid of hitting something really big. As it was, the hull was scratched and dented all over the place from bits and pieces we never saw."

Plastic was ubiquitous. Bottles, bags and every kind of throwaway domestic item you can imagine, from broken chairs to dustpans, toys and utensils.

And something else. The boat's vivid yellow paint job, never faded by sun or sea in years gone past, reacted with something in the water off Japan, losing its sheen in a strange and unprecedented way.

BACK in Newcastle, Ivan Macfadyen is still coming to terms with the shock and horror of the voyage.

"The ocean is broken," he said, shaking his head in stunned disbelief.

Recognising the problem is vast, and that no organisations or governments appear to have a particular interest in doing anything about it, Macfadyen is looking for ideas.

He plans to lobby government ministers, hoping they might help.

More immediately, he will approach the organisers of Australia's major ocean races, trying to enlist yachties into an international scheme that uses volunteer yachtsmen to monitor debris and marine life.

Macfadyen signed up to this scheme while he was in the US, responding to an approach by US academics who asked yachties to fill in daily survey forms and collect samples for radiation testing - a significant concern in the wake of the tsunami and consequent nuclear power station failure in Japan.

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"I asked them why don't we push for a fleet to go and clean up the mess," he said.

"But they said they'd calculated that the environmental damage from burning the fuel to do that job would be worse than just leaving the debris there."

Maritime waste: Our oceans are threatened by a toxic tide Modern mariners are more likely to observe man- made junk than the wonders of nature

One poignant moment for Mick Dawson and Chris Martin as they pulled themselves across the North Pacific came when they found an Albatross closely guarding a rubber ball Photo: Alamy

By Callum Roberts

8:22PM BST 21 Oct 2013

The ocean can be a lonely place. Ivan MacFadyen expected long weeks of isolation when in March he set sail from Melbourne to race his yacht to Japan, and then on to San Francisco. Having completed the same race 10 years earlier, he expected the company of other ocean travellers. “I’ve done a lot of miles on the ocean in my life and I’m used to seeing turtles, dolphins, sharks and big flurries of feeding birds. But this time, for 3,000 nautical miles there was nothing alive to be seen,” he said. Only the clatter of rigging and slap of water broke the monotony.

MacFadyen’s experience could hardly be more different from the French explorer La Pérouse’s crossing of the Pacific in 1787. Near the equator, he wrote that terns “flew in such numbers around our ships, especially during the night, that we were deafened by their noise and it was difficult to hold a conversation on the upper deck, so that our fairly successful hunts provided us with some revenge for their screeching”.

Comparisons are hard to make across the centuries, but the logs of other 18th-century sailors relate similar tales of abundance, such as that of the English navigator George Shelvocke in 1726: “Whales… and other fish of a monstrous bulk, are in such numbers off the coast of Patagonia that they were really offensive to us very often.

For they would come sometimes so close to us as to stifle us with their stench when they blew, and would lie so near us that I have frequently thought it impossible to escape striking upon them on every send of a sea.”

My student Annie Murray has extracted records from such logs and contrasted them with encounters by modern adventurers, trans-oceanic rowers such as Roz Savage. Rowers have the time to observe life, but they reported only half the variety spotted by sailors of old, and the numbers of animals seen at a time could usually be counted on the fingers of two hands, as opposed to tens, hundreds or thousands.

MacFadyen blames overfishing for the dearth of life. Seabirds and tuna might seem unlikely allies, but birds depend on them to drive prey within reach. If big predatory fish disappear, so do birds, and our insatiable appetite for tuna has driven down stocks to the point where birds are also dwindling. Terns dance on the waves as they pluck prey from the surface, so it is hardly surprising they have suffered big losses. In other places, industrial fishing targets forage fish – species such as herring and pilchards that support prolific foodwebs – to the point of collapse. Penguin colonies in Namibia have fallen silent as nearby waters have been stripped of the fish they depended upon.

What rowers did see that 18th-century explorers did not was the flotsam and jetsam of modern life. Plastics were pervasive. One poignant moment for Mick Dawson and Chris Martin as they pulled themselves across the North Pacific came when they found an Albatross closely guarding a rubber ball. They were passing through the midst of a giant circulating current that concentrates floating trash in “the Great Pacific Garbage patch”. In a heartbreaking mismatch of ancient instinct with modernity, Laysan albatross cannot distinguish floating plastic from food. They scour thousands of miles of ocean to bring home “junk” food for their young. Chicks starve with full bellies and when their bodies rot away, they leave tragic piles of bottle tops, pens, cigarette lighters and plastic fragments to bleach in the sun.

Tangled junk rafts snare bigger victims. I saw a photograph of a turtle dragging a ball of fishing net 20 times its size. Condemned to pull its burden through the sea, its life seemed as hopeless as that of Sisyphus, forced to roll a rock uphill only to have it roll down time and again.

Near Hawaii, MacFadyen ran across the horrifying legacy of the Japanese tsunami which thickened the Pacific soup of debris when it launched the remains of coastal towns into the ocean. Lumps of debris as large as houses and countless wooden power poles trailing wire mingled with thousands of fishing floats and millions of pieces of polystyrene.

MacFadyen’s pitiful voyage is emblematic of our reckless disregard for the ocean. For centuries we have treated it as endless and bottomless; a place that gives forth riches and swallows waste. But with more and more of us crowding the planet, we have gained the ability to destroy before finding the wisdom to exercise restraint. We depend utterly on the sea for life, not just in the sense of food, but for its role in keeping our world habitable. This year a high level Global Ocean Commission has been convened to consider what can be done to turn the tide. For the sake of all of us, let’s hope the world’s leaders listen and act when it reports next year.

Callum Roberts is Professor of Marine Conservation at the University of York. 'Ocean of Life: How Our Seas are Changing’ (Penguin) is shortlisted for the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books.

Nations discuss fresh bid to create world's largest marine park

By Tyson Shine

Updated Tue 22 Oct 2013, 10:57am AEDT

The future of what would be the world's largest marine reserve could be decided at a meeting in Hobart this week.

A fresh bid to have areas of the ocean off East Antarctica and a revised protection plan for the Ross Sea are being discussed by the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR).

Hundreds of scientists began discussions on Monday and delegates will begin their meeting tomorrow.

Two main proposals will be considered.

High on the agenda is a proposal to create a series of marine protected areas off East Antarctica, covering 1.6 million square kilometres.

It would effectively ban fishing in the last pristine marine environment on earth.

Australia, France and the European Union are pushing for the change and most of CCAMLR's 25 members support it, but Russia's position is unclear.

Another proposed protected zone for the Ross Sea, jointly suggested by the US and New Zealand, has been reduced by 40 per cent, after Russia and the Ukraine blocked the plan at CCAMLR's last meeting in Germany in July.

Russia holds lucrative fishing licences in the area and raised legal objections.

If the new bid succeeds it would result in the protection of 1.25 million square kilometres.

It is understood Norway will now support the creation of the protected areas after holding initial reservations about the zones' impact on its fishing industry.

Conservationists lobbying for the park are being led by the Antarctic Ocean Alliance.

Spokesman Steven Campbell says it is important to protect the areas "while its key ocean ecosystems are still intact."

The countries that make up CCAMLR need to show real leadership to deliver on their commitments to establish a network of [Marine Protected Areas] on Antarctica," he said.

The alliance will attend the meetings to try to convince member nations to back the proposal.

The results of the meeting are not expected to be known until the meeting winds up in two weeks.

Facing Vote on European Subsidies, Fishermen Cling to Way of Life October 22, 2013

By DAVID JOLLY

COMBRIT, France — In a world of giant trawlers and fish-farming operations, Gwenaël Pennarun still sets out most days from this Breton village to catch sea bass the old-fashioned way, with baited hooks.

It is a way of life, and work, that he hopes the European Union will continue to support, depending on a coming vote on its fishing policies.

Early on a crisp and windy morning recently, Mr. Pennarun, 50, was a few miles offshore in the Bay of Biscay, hooking minnows and playing out several dozen long lines with an efficiency born of 30 years on the job. Though the risk of a fatal fall overboard is always present for someone working alone, he nevertheless appeared oblivious to the tilt of the deck and the soaking spray as his 8.5-meter, or 28-foot, aluminum boat climbed and plunged with each wave.

A kilogram — or 2.2 pounds — of line-caught sea bass fillets, known in French as “bar de ligne,” can retail for more than 100 euros, or $137, in a Paris fish market, about double that of trawled fish and perhaps four times that of most farmed. The line-caught fish reach the dock fresh, and often alive, not frozen like trawled fish, and many customers prefer the taste and texture of the wild fish to that of farmed. Eco- conscious consumers may also be willing to pay more for fish caught according to a method that groups like Greenpeace endorse for “sustainability.”

While he is able to support his family, like many “artisanal” fishermen and women here Mr. Pennarun worries that his livelihood is at risk from industrial fishing operations subsidized by the European Union. Even the Union’s executive arm, the European Commission, has acknowledged that the subsidies, worth hundreds of millions of euros each year, support a fleet that is two to three times as large as is ecologically or commercially sustainable.

A vote by the European Parliament, set for Wednesday in Strasbourg, France, could determine whether those subsidies continue to support the big-fleet approach or, instead, help pay for changes meant to steer the European Union’s saltwater fishing industry toward a more environmentally sound future.

While the amount of money — about 6.5 billion euros — for the bloc’s Common Fisheries Policy is not in dispute, the funding targets may be the subject of hot debate.

Fishery ministers from the 28 European Union member states and members of the fisheries committee of Parliament back the industry in seeking to steer the money — to be paid out in installments over seven years beginning in 2014 — toward things like engine replacement, first boats for beginning fishers and scrapping older craft.

On the other side stand people including Maria Damanaki, the European fisheries commissioner, who led an overhaul of the Common Fisheries Policy in May that was meant to end overfishing and stop the widely criticized practice of discarding perfectly good, but unwanted, species at sea.

Ms. Damanaki and conservationists oppose financing new fishing boats and engines, saying that the goal should instead be to reduce the fleet and finance the new environmental policy.

They have been joined by 200 fishery scientists from around the world, who urged Parliament in an open letter “to move away from direct fleet subsidies,” and aim the money at “compliance with management rules, data collection, scientific research and stock assessments.”

Government-subsidized fishing is a worldwide concern for those who fear depletion of stocks. Rashid Sumaila, a scientist at the University of British Columbia who presented subsidies data to the European Parliament’s Fisheries Committee last week, estimates that the global industry receives about $35 billion a year in subsidies, of which the biggest portion — about 20 percent — is fuel aid that allows ships to go farther and stay out longer in search of fish.

Brussels is not the only source of handouts for the European industry. Fuel subsidies in the form of direct payments and diesel-tax exemptions amount to hundreds of millions of euros of additional aid each year, while member states steer millions of euros more from their own budgets, according to the European Commission. None of that money is on the table for discussion, suggesting that despite Ms. Damanaki’s efforts, government-financed overcapacity will not soon go away.

Javier Garat, president of Europêche, a fishing industry group in Brussels, acknowledged that the subsidy program had been a lightning rod for criticism, but said the public’s understanding of the issue was “simplistic.”

Fishers need financial help adapting to the changing regulatory environment, he said, because without that support, “it would be very difficult to comply.”

“We need aid to increase the selectivity of the fishing gear,” he said, to reduce the netting of unwanted species. “We also need to invest in finding new markets for species that traditionally had no value,” but which can no longer be discarded under the new rules.

Part of the challenge for people on both sides of the debate is that no one, not even the European Commission, is certain how much money is flowing to the industry, which employs about 400,000 people, according to Europêche, including more than 120,000 working on 85,000 boats. Oceana, a marine conservation group, estimates that since 2000, the European Union has provided 8 billion euros of subsidies to the industry, with national governments led by Ireland, Spain, Italy and France topping that up with an additional total of 4.9 billion euros.

A scathing report by the French Court of Auditors, leaked in July to the newsmagazine Le Nouvel Observateur, illustrates the lack of transparency. According to the auditors, not even the authorities in Paris know how much public money France is handing out because there is no central record of the aid that is given out across all levels of government. But the subsidies, the report notes, are critical; without them, many French fishing operations “would not be viable.”

Claire Nouvian, director of Bloom Association, a French environmental organization, pointed to a direct link between subsidies and environmental destruction. She notes that the French industry has nine bottom deep sea trawlers, boats that fish in a manner that has been compared to “driving a tractor across the seabed.”

“Just take away the fuel-tax exemption and these boats would already be unprofitable,” Ms. Nouvian said. But the boats also receive millions of euros a year aid directly from the French state, she said. Without the various subsidies, she said, “they’d be bankrupt.”

While the focus of attention is on subsidies to the big operators, even the artisanal fishermen lauded by conservationists gain. Mr. Pennarun, the Breton, acknowledged that if he did not receive a diesel-tax exemption, for example, his fuel bill — currently about 40 euros a day — would rise, and he would have to catch more fish each day just to break even.

In a good week, Mr. Pennarun, who learned the trade from his father, can bring in 250 kilograms of fish, worth as much as 3,500 euros, much of which travels no further than the plates of guests at the Hotel du Bac restaurant here in Combrit. But it is an irregular business. When the weather in Brittany is poor, as it often is, days may pass before he can venture out, and in February and March, when the fish are spawning, he does not go out at all.

He noted that 15 years ago, he decided he needed a new boat if he was going to keep up with his bigger rivals; an E.U. subsidy covered 25 percent of the cost of the craft, which was built by a company in Normandy.

Because the quantity of sea bass has greatly diminished over the course of his career, he said, that more modern boat, which has vastly more sophisticated electronic technology for finding fish, has been crucial to his ability to continue as a fisherman.

“Thirty years ago I worked fewer hours. I had less equipment, less technology,” Mr. Pennarun said. “But I caught more fish.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 22, 2013

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated the amount of money under discussion in the European Union's Common Fisheries Policy. It is 6.5 billion euros, not 4.4

Whales bombarded by constant shipping noise

Increased tanker traffic in B.C. waters puts endangered and threatened whales at risk, international study finds

By Larry Pynn, Vancouver Sun October 23, 2013

A bombardment of constant shipping noise and increased tanker traffic is putting whales along the B.C. coast at ever-greater risk, a new international study concludes.

Endangered killer whales are suffering the highest levels of noise in their designated critical habitat while threatened fin and humpback whales living in some of the quietest waters are at risk from increased tanker traffic associated with planned LNG and pipeline projects.

"Think about the cocktail party effect," said the study's lead author, Rob Williams, a B.C.-based marine biologist with the Sea Mammal Research Unit at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

"Everyone's talking and as the background noise gets louder you can't hear the person you're trying to have a conversation with. When it gets noisy, when whales live near a shipping lane, their voice, their sound just doesn't travel as far as under quiet conditions."

The study, published Tuesday in the journal Animal Conservation, notes that shipping noise inhibits the ability of whales to communicate, search for prey, navigate and select mates. Military sonar and seismic surveys are other forms of underground noise that can damage or even kill whales, other cetaceans and fish.

Researchers measured ocean noise over three years by anchoring hydrophones 1.5 to 2.5 metres above the sea floor at 12 sites along 840 kilometres of B.C. coastline.

They found that median noise levels are enough to "reduce the communication spaces" for fin, humpback and killer whales by 1, 52 and 62 per cent, respectively, and under "noisy conditions" by 30, 94, and 97 per cent.

What that means is that under the noisiest conditions, killer whales would fail to communicate with their family members 97 times out of 100 across a distance of up to eight kilometres, and 30 and 94 times out of 100, respectively, for fin and humpback whales across up to 32 kilometres.

The calculation is based on killer whales communicating at a frequency of 1.5 to 3.5 kilohertz, a relatively high pitch that competes directly with shipping noise. Fin whales are less affected because they communicate at a much lower frequency of 17 to 28 hertz, while humpbacks have a broad range of frequencies from 71 to 708 hertz that overlaps shipping.

The low-frequency sound of fin whales can be heard "halfway across" the Atlantic, he said, although it's unknown whether they are communicating such vast distances, say, for the purposes of mating or coordinating feeding.

"Humpbacks have this beautiful haunting song that includes bass and tenor and soprano, more like an orchestra than a soloist," he added, noting they lack the intensity of fin whales to project across great distances.

Other contributors to the study included B.C.'s Oceans Initiative (a non-profit research organization cofounded by Williams) and the Bioacoustics Research Program at Cornell University in New York.

The area of the north coast from Kitimat to Caamano Sound is proposed as critical habitat for humpbacks but is also important to fin whales.

This area has some of the quietest low-frequency levels observed in the study, but "there is no legal requirement to keep those habitats quiet" and they are "poised to become much noisier, given a number of major industrial developments proposed," the study found. The same applies to Vancouver and Prince Rupert due to port expansion.

Killer whales in areas such as Haro Strait in the southern Strait of Georgia experience the highest levels of shipping noise despite those waters being designated critical habitat for their recovery.

Northern resident killer whales at Robson Bight, a protected area in Johnstone Strait, are also experiencing high noise levels.

Measurements of the quietest sites offer a glimpse of what B.C. waters may have sounded like in the preindustrial area, while the noisier sites offer a glimpse of the risks faced as coastal shipping grows. The study noted that "identifying quiet areas and keeping them quiet will be easier than trying to remove sound sources from noisy areas."

Killer whales used to feed in Broughton Archipelago until salmon farms deployed acoustic harassment devices to keep harbour seals away, the study noted. These devices were turned off in 1999 and the archipelago proved to be the quietest spot in the study, but the whales have not returned after more than a decade.

"This cases study serves as an important reminder that high-amplitude noise can have real and lasting consequences for animal conservation," researchers state.

The International Maritime Organization and the International Whaling Commission are on board with the aim to reduce shipping noise by half over the next decade, Williams said.

"You don't have to introduce fleetwide draconian measures," he said. "You don't have to quiet every ship. It turns out ... if you can identify the noisiest 10 per cent of the ships, and quiet those, you'll probably get a 50-per-cent reduction."

Williams challenged Canada, including Seaspan, which has secured more than $11 billion in federal shipbuilding contracts, to adopt the latest technology to make ships quieter. "Someone has to go first. It would be great to see Canada lead."

Other management options include speed restrictions on ships in critical whale habitat, the regulation of noise through marine protected areas, and financial incentives for companies to use quieter ships, he said.

European Parliament Rejects New Subsidies for Fishing Fleets

Pascal Rossignol/Reuters

The European Parliament defeated a proposal backed by fishermen, like these off northern France, for subsidies to build boats.

By DAVID JOLLY

Published: October 23, 2013

PARIS — The European Parliament voted Wednesday to reject most new subsidies for the saltwater fishing industry and provide financial support for new ecologically friendly measures meant to prevent overfishing. But in a nod to commercial fishing fleets, the lawmakers did maintain some handouts to the industry.

The vote in Strasbourg was on a 6.5 billion euro, or $8.9 billion, budget to finance the European Union’s Common Fisheries Policy for seven years beginning in 2014. Legislators rejected a proposal favored by the fishing industry to subsidize the construction of new boats and backed a call by conservationists and scientists to

33 provide better funding for research on fish stocks and enforcement of conservation- minded regulations.

The fishing industry won on some points, including subsidies for vessel owners to replace their engines with more modern models — something opponents argued amounts to a de facto increase in fishing capacity, since the new engines are often more efficient and thus can keep vessels at sea longer. Legislators also agreed to provide payments to fishermen to hang up their nets temporarily, which might reduce overfishing in the short term but which conservationists fear could create a reserve army of unemployed fishermen instead of permanently reducing capacity.

Maria Damanaki, the European fisheries commissioner and a proponent of conservation measures, said she nonetheless was “pleased with the overall outcome of the vote” and noted that it cleared the decks for final negotiations by Parliament, member-countries’ fisheries ministers and the European Commission on the deal. She expressed hope that an agreement would be reached in time for money to start flowing in January, although industry experts in Brussels suggested that the target might be hard to meet.

Europe’s fishing fleet is two or three times larger than is ecologically and economically sound, according to the European Commission. Revisions of the Common Fisheries Policy aim to bring the fleet’s capacity into line with a sustainable level of fishing, with all stocks meant to be managed according to the scientific principle known as maximum sustainable yield by 2015.

Environmental organizations described Wednesday’s results as a mixed bag. Markus Knigge, policy adviser to the Ocean2012 coalition and the Pew Charitable Trusts, said Parliament had improved on the positions put forward by national fisheries ministers, who are generally closer to industry.

“They have significantly strengthened fisheries management,” Mr. Knigge said, pointing to the increased funding for data collection, control and enforcement. But legislators “failed to show ambition for fundamentally abolishing subsidies that contribute to overfishing.”

Javier Garat, president of Europêche, a fishing industry group in Brussels, said that he was “happy with the main issues” decided Wednesday but that “we still have some uncertainties.”

This year is the first in which Parliament has an equal voice in the setting of fisheries policy with the 28 member states and European Commission, the executive arm of the bloc.

Parliament voted on more than 600 amendments Wednesday, and in some cases it will be up to the body’s legal department to explain the final result, Mr. Garat said.

On one measure that the industry had strongly supported — a proposal to provide aid to vessel owners who decommission their boats — legislators actually approved contradictory measures, Mr. Garat said, simultaneously approving continued scrapping while denying the necessary funds.

Mr. Garat said he was also happy that Parliament had voted to provide “temporary cessation” aid to fishers who halted operations to give depleted stocks time to recover. But he said that the industry would look to ensure that such funds were also extended in cases where access to foreign waters is cut off, as has happened in Morocco in a human rights dispute that has idled Spanish fishermen on about 70 ships.

Researchers find coral spawns cloud to ward off global warming

SUE NEALES The Australian October 24, 2013 12:00AM

AIMS researcher Cherie Motti on the coastline near Townsville examining a piece of coral. Source: Supplied

AUSTRALIAN scientists have discovered coral polyps are more resilient to rising sea temperatures than previously thought, with inbuilt mechanisms to protect their cells from damage and toxins caused by heat stress and climate change.

Magically, the team from the Townsville-based Australian Institute of Marine Science and James Cook University's Centre for Coral Reef Studies has also found coral animals collectively can produce a gas that helps rain clouds form above the reefs, in an apparent attempt to better shield themselves from overheating by the sun.

In the paper published today in the prestigious science journal Nature today, the Australian scientists have found evidence that instead of being an innocent bystander or victim of rising sea temperatures, the new research proves corals can actively play a part in trying to survive and mitigate against the potentially deadly effects of short- term water heat stress.

The breakthrough findings raise hope that some of Australia's 2600km-long Great Barrier Reef - the world's largest living structure - may be able to endure early rises in sea temperature predicted to accompany global warming.

Cherie Motti, one of the AIMS researchers involved in the latest research, said yesterday the key to the corals' ability to protect themselves rests with each polyp's production of a sulphur-based molecule called dimethylsulphoniopropionate or DMSP.

Besides being the compound that gives corals and oysters the characteristic "smell of the seas", DMSP both acts like an immune system tonic to the polyp internally, and converts into the "sulphur aerosol" gas that encourages rain clouds to form in the air above, potentially leading to a cooling-down effect on the reef.

"So what have discovered is that coral animals are more resilient than we thought, and have the ability to actively adjust to heat stress," Dr Motti said yesterday.

"They protect themselves in two ways once they start to experience mild heat stress; by producing more DMSP which is like taking a Vitamin C pill because it mobs up tonics produced when they are under stress, and by giving off a related gas that appears to help in the formation of a protective and cooling cloud above the reef it is part of."

In the past two decades, rising sea temperatures caused by hot and dry El Nino seasons have caused episodes of mass bleaching of corals on the Great Barrier Reef.

But scientists have long been puzzled about why some coral reefs have survived and returned to their former glorious and colourful health, while the more exposed or intertidal reefs died.

Dr Motti said it was now known that the complex coral polyps reacted in different stages to heat stress, and independently of the plant algae that also lives within each polyp's hard skeletal shell.

The first step, once coral reefs experience sea temperatures exceeding about 30C, is for each polyp to expel the symbiotic coloured algal living within its walls - rather like humans have helpful bacteria in their stomachs - into the surrounding sea, leading to the classic white bleaching of reefs.

But the coral animals remain alive, although heat stressed. This is when they respond by producing the special extra amounts of DMSP compound, via genes programmed to try and protect themselves both within and above from further heat stress.

Dr Motti said it is not until oceans get hotter than 33C for an extended period, that death for the coral polyps - and so the entire Great Barrier Reef - appears inescapable.

"So our work shows what is likely to happen between sea temperatures 30 and 33 degrees; or short periods of heat stress," Dr Motti said.

"We think because some corals have this inbuilt ability to cope, regulate and adjust their own climates up to a certain point, we can say that reef mortality because of greater temperature variation and is not inevitable until a threshold, probably 33 degrees, is reached."

Conversely, the Nature paper also points out that if large-scale coral reefs die because oceans get too warm and a mortality tipping point is reached, then sea temperatures will exponentially soar further because of the absence of the polyps' cloud-making magic.

"Cloud production, especially in the tropics, is an important regulator of climate, because clouds shade the Earth and reflect much of the sun's heat back into space," says fellow AIMS researcher Jean-Baptiste Raina.

" If predicted increases in coral mortality worldwide (occur), the associated decline in sulphur aerosol production from coral reefs (will lead to) fewer clouds produced and less heat reflected, which ultimately will lead to even warmer sea surface temperatures."

Acidification of oceans threatens to change entire marine ecosystem

By Larry Pynn, Vancouver SunOctober 25, 2013

Ocean acidification due to excessive release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is threatening to produce large-scale changes to the marine ecosystem affecting all levels of the food chain, a University of B.C. marine biologist warned Friday.

Chris Harley, associate professor in the department of zoology, warned that ocean acidification also carries serious financial implications by making it more difficult for species such as oysters, clams, and sea urchins to build shells and skeletons from calcium carbonate. Acidic water is expected to result in thinner, slower-growing shells, and reduced abundance. Larvae can be especially vulnerable to acidity.

“The aquaculture industry is deeply concerned,” Harley said. “They are trying to find out, basically, how they can avoid going out of business.”

While there is potential for, say, commercial oyster growers to reduce acidity for larvae in land-based facilities, the greater marine environment doesn’t have that luxury. “For wild populations, you can’t just take part of their lifecycle and babysit it,” he said.

A total of 10,000 tonnes of oysters, clams, scallops and mussels worth $21.7 million were harvested in B.C. in 2010. The sea urchin fishery was worth another $9 million, based on a harvest of 2,300 tonnes.

Lab studies at the University of B.C. also show that acidic water can impair the ability of salmon to grow and smell properly, which has implications for their ability to find native spawning streams. Research in Australia’s coral reefs has found that acidity can erode a fish’s ability to sniff out their best habitat and to avoid predators.

Development of small creatures such as pteropods — free-swimming snails that are food for salmon — will also be stunted by acidity.

Harley was speaking in an interview at the conclusion of a week-long meeting on ocean acidification involving some 20 scientists and research students from Canada, the U.S., Scandinavia, Australia, Italy, Great Britain, and Hong Kong.

Harley said that research into ocean acidification is only about a decade old, which is why it is important to bring researchers together from different parts of the world to share findings and better understand the big picture.

“We know the impacts are going to be really widespread. The last big unknown is whether species will be able to adapt.”

Coral reefs in tropical waters also stand to be severely impacted, which he described as a pending “biodiversity catastrophe.”

On the other hand, kelp and seaweed, including those found on the B.C. coast, may benefit from increased carbon dioxide through enhanced photosynthesis. They will also benefit from a decline in grazers such as urchins and snails. “If they become less abundant or smaller, they’ll eat less kelp and that’s a win-win for the kelp.”

Purple sea stars also grow faster under acidic conditions. “That good for them, but it’s bad for the mussels, which are their favourite food,” Harley noted.

Average pH levels in the oceans have dropped form 8.2 to 8.1 and are “headed to 7.8 or below by the end of this century,” he said.

While part of the equation involves the upwelling of naturally acidic waters from the deep ocean, researchers believe that the major driver is carbon dioxide released from burning fossil fuels.

While the issue is global in scale, there are steps that can be taken locally to lessen the impact such as by reducing fertilizer runoff from farms and protecting biodiversity through measures such as marine protected areas.

“Every little bit helps. The more we can transition from fossil fuels, the better off we’ll be.”

Operation aims to chase the last drift nets out of the North Pacific

Justine Hunter

Published Saturday, Oct. 26 2013, 8:00 AM EDT Last updated Saturday, Oct. 26 2013, 8:00 AM EDT

In a darkened and hushed aircraft interior, Private Paul Edwards adjusts the sensors on a bank of surveillance equipment to study the registration markings on a ship displayed on one of the screens.

The crew aboard the Royal Canadian Air Force Aurora aircraft are on a routine patrol over the Strait of Georgia. This is a short run, but since 1993, the 407 Long Range Patrol Squadron has been part of an international hunt for illegal fishing activities – an operation to chase the last drift-net fleets out of the North Pacific.

Once the domain of environmental-conservation groups like Sea Shepherd, the campaign against drift nets has become an increasingly high-tech effort. Operation High Seas Driftnet is run by enforcement agencies in five countries – Canada, the United States, Russia, Japan and South Korea.

With 3.4 million square nautical miles of ocean to monitor, the joint fisheries mission has, over the span of 20 years, nudged the partner countries toward genuine cooperation.

Under the unwieldy title of the North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission, the enforcement agencies seek to protect an economic asset – their respective commercial

39 fisheries of Pacific salmon and steelhead trout – as well as a fragile ecosystem threatened by the deadly floating nets.

The last vessel seized by the joint forces was the Da Cheng, which was found 1,500 kilometres east of Japan. Running without any national flag, the crew had set a net almost 20 km long. In the ship’s holds, investigators found 30 tonnes albacore tuna, a large number shark carcasses and 500 kilograms worth of shark fins. What that inventory doesn’t show is the byproduct of drift-net fishing – the dead and dying marine mammals that retired fishery officer Robert Martinolich has seen entangled in the nets or bleeding on the decks, destined to be tossed overboard.

The past

Mr. Martinolich, former chief of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans’ enforcement operations for the Pacific, and later the head of the joint commission’s enforcement committee, recalls the futility of Canada’s first aerial surveillance efforts.

“It was, ‘go out and fly, and hopefully run into something,’ ” he said in an interview.

“My first flight was in 1991. We spent 10, 12 hours a day staring out the window at water. There was not much excitement.” The CP-140 Auroras are aging and costly to keep in the air, but they are among the few aircraft in the world equipped to effectively search such a vast expanse.

Canada’s political commitment began with an extraordinary private meeting, in 1989, between Japanese prime minister Toshiki Kaifu and prime minister Brian Mulroney, where the Canadian leader demanded that Japan stop using drift nets in Pacific fishing.

At that time, up to 1,000 ships were setting five million square kilometres of translucent nets each year in the Pacific.

“It kills everything – birds, marine mammals,” said Larry Paike, the DFO’s director of conservation and protection for the Pacific region. “And if it becomes too cumbersome, they’ll cut the net and leave it. Then, when all the flesh rots, it rises to the surface and starts all over again.” Late in 1989, the General Assembly of the United Nations called for a moratorium on the “highly indiscriminate and wasteful” practice of drift-net fishing, to be enacted by 1992. Canada was part of the international pressure that led to the global moratorium on all large-scale driftnet fishing, but the U.S. wielded the heaviest stick, threatening trade sanctions against Japan if it did not abandon its drift-net fleets.

The co-ordinated enforcement effort began in 1993 and has officially yielded 19 seizures of boats. (Mr. Martinolich puts the count at 28 – if salmon are not clearly the main target, the commission doesn’t count the ship even when it has been apprehended.) Many of the ships hailed from Russia, China and Taiwan, but others flew flags of convenience or were registered nowhere at all.

The vessel’s nation is responsible for prosecuting the violator, and when Russia stepped in for the first time to prosecute ships from its own ports, a measurable chill went through the industry.

“The Russians intercepted one, seized the vessel, cut it up for scrap and threw everyone in jail,” said Mr. Paike, with satisfaction. That single, concrete commitment to enforcement made a measurable dent in the illegal activities.

The present

Blair Thexton of Canada’s Maritime Security Operations Centre said tactics have evolved significantly in the 20 years of the mission. His task is to help narrow down high-risk areas, incorporating advanced satellite imagery technology from the Canadian military, along with data about sea surface temperatures (which help predict salmon locations), historic vessel movements and past intercepts.

Within those 3.4 million square nautical miles of blue ocean, the air surveys this year focused on an area just one-tenth the size, close to the Japanese and Russian coastlines.

But, as the surveillance gets more sophisticated, so too do their targets.

“The drift netters are not unintelligent. They hide their equipment, paint over registration numbers, fly fake flags,” Mr. Thexton noted. “They monitor radio frequencies and they can cut their nets loose.”

Arrests peaked in the late 1990s and the partner countries have had to become more collaborative to keep up the pressure. This year the operation was based in Hakodate, Japan – a significant diplomatic breakthrough that has allowed the Aurora crews far more time patrolling the high-risk areas than they had at their previous Alaska base.

The future

But the decline in arrests and boat seizures – there have been none this year – has two possible explanations. Either the drift netters are outwitting their hunters, or they have been deterred.

“That’s a difficult question to answer,” said Mr. Paike. “There is a decrease in the number of vessels we are encountering, which is a good thing … I like to think we are deterring the industry.” The risk of success, however, is that the federal government might reconsider its financial commitment.

Brent Napier is the DFO’s chief of enforcement programs for conservation and protection in Ottawa.

There are always cost pressures, he agreed, but he believes Canada has learned from its Atlantic fishery experience – a maintained enforcement presence is required, or the deterrent factor disappears.

“We’re very leery of that – when you pull out enforcement, we see a resurgence of the illegal activity,” he said. The drift-net industry is too lucrative to just hope it will not rebound.

He said there is another fiscal imperative, not so easy to measure as a budget line item: What would Canada`s fisheries look like if it had not taken on the drift-net industry?

“The key is the conservation piece, they are taking this catch at the expense of future generations. That’s the cost that needs to be factored in,” Mr. Napier said.

“What does it cost you not to do it?”

India makes its claim for sulphide mining from the Indian Ocean

Arun Janardhanan, TNN Oct 28, 2013, 05.59AM IST

CHENNAI: India has made its first ever claim before the International Seabed Authority (ISA) for the exploration of poly-metallic sulphide from the Mauritius seas.

Prior to country's first ever seabed exploration for sulphides, a preliminary study has been completed with the help of the National Centre for Antarctic and Ocean Research (NCAOR) in the Rodriguez Triple Junction, a geologic junction in the southern Indian Ocean where three tectonic plates meet, near Mauritius. The junction has been named after the island of Rodrigues which lies nearby the African Plate.

A senior earth science ministry official said the claim proposal has already been sent to ISA. "We are awaiting a response from the ISA, an autonomous international organization established under the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. "We already have a dedicated region in the Indian Ocean region for the mining purpose. For any further extension or new explorations beyond the designated sub basin region, we have to make a claim through ISA to avail rights for mining. This is all about administering the resources of the sea and now we are in the queue," said the official.

Before submitting the proposal India has completed a survey using Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROV) in the deep sea region near Mauritius. M A Atmanand, director of National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT) said any clearance from

42 the ISA will be based on the demand and capability of the country in mining exploration in the past. "We have prepared a profile consisting experience in the sector, based on extensive experience in the seabed mining in the designated Indian Ocean basin. Since the sulphides contain a lot of minerals, clearance for the exploration from ISA will help us to meet the demand for rare earth metals," he said.

India has been mining magnesium nodules from the Indian Ocean basin for quite some time. According to the senior scientist, ongoing mining explorations for cobalt, nickel and magnesium satisfies the Investment Ratio of Return (IRR) in the sector, which is measured by investment gains that compare favourably to investment cost. While cobalt and nickel are largely being used as an ingredient in the making of steel products, cobalt is also used as a radioactive material.

Any clearance from ISA includes larger political lobbying too. "It is similar to that of a real estate industry or cybersquatting where a lot of small islands and countries play the game of ownerships and claims they have made years ago," said an official.

But the Exclusive Economic Zone of the country which is around 200 nautical miles from the shores doesn't have a potential mining region. The ISA lists more than 100 high-potential sulphides exploration sites in the high seas and at least 25 of them are having high-temperature black-smoker venting. "Preliminary studies conducted by the NIOT and NCAOR captured videos of these black-smoker regions using its advanced ROV equipments," said a senior NIOT scientist.

Ocean generated energy could be capable of supplying the entire world's energy requirements

Balkans.com Business News Correspondent - 31.10.2013

A multi-million Euro project has advanced global progress on capturing tidal and wave energy thus bringing the EU closer to its target of generating 20% of its energy consumption from renewable sources by 2020. Co-ordinated by University College Cork, Ireland, the EUR 11 million initiative with the help of EUR 9 million in EU funding - MARINET - provides marine

43 energy development companies, entrepreneurs, start-ups and researchers with free, fully funded access to marine energy experts and the world's leading wave, tidal and offshore-wind test facilities.

EU Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science Máire Geoghegan- Quinn said: 'MARINET is a model of success and demonstrates what the EU can achieve in terms of collaboration and sharing knowledge transnationally. Whilst marine energy is a hugely desirable electricity source, it is very costly to develop and test these renewable energy technologies. By providing fully funded access to the world-class test facilities that exist throughout the EU, the MARINET initiative is clearly accelerating the development and commercial deployment of marine renewable energy technologies.'

Estimates suggest that 0.1 percent of ocean generated energy could be capable of supplying the entire world's energy requirements five times over. But currently it only provides a minimal amount. To develop this vast potential MARINET focused on sharing resources and global knowledge. The team have already prevented expensive mistakes and unnecessary duplication by independent researchers operating throughout the EU, saving researchers millions of Euros.

The project's EUR 11 million budget is being used to directly fund access to international marine testing and research facilities, including travel costs and to promote networking, testing standardisation and research. The cost of access to world-class test facilities can range from EUR 1 000 to over EUR 30 000 per week depending on the scale and complexity of the facility.

Professor Tony Lewis, UCC and lead partner of MARINET explains: 'MARINET is unique in its approach to research and development. This is the first time that an initiative of this scale has brought together world-class test facilities with renowned marine energy experts and academics along with commercial operators to accelerate testing and consequently drive more positive results.'

'By offering European-wide access to marine energy test facilities, the best facilities and expertise in the world are being shared, which saves several thousands and often hundreds of thousands of euro in the costs of development, it promotes standardisation and also ensures that marine renewable prototypes are tested in all sorts of marine conditions', he added.

The MARINET initiative has already supported over 350 marine energy developers and granted 412 weeks of testing at facilities located throughout Europe. More than 100 devices have been tested for their suitability for marine energy generation at over 30 test facilities in Europe.

MARINET project partners and beneficiaries will disseminate their developments in a seminar due to take place in Rome from 5th to 6th November 2013.

Set for completion in March 2015, a final call for MARINET applications will be issued shortly. European Union

The Devolution of the Seas

The Consequences of Oceanic Destruction By Alan B. Sielen From our November/December 2013 Issue

The old man of the sea: the fringed blenny, photographed near Japan. (Alexander Semenov / Science Photo Library)

Of all the threats looming over the planet today, one of the most alarming is the seemingly inexorable descent of the world’s oceans into ecological perdition. Over the last several decades, human activities have so altered the basic chemistry of the seas that they are now experiencing evolution in reverse: a return to the barren primeval waters of hundreds of millions of years ago.

A visitor to the oceans at the dawn of time would have found an underwater world that was mostly lifeless. Eventually, around 3.5 billion years ago, basic organisms began to emerge from the primordial ooze. This microbial soup of algae and bacteria needed little oxygen to survive. Worms, jellyfish, and toxic fireweed ruled the deep. In time, these simple organisms began to evolve into higher life forms, resulting in the wondrously rich diversity of fish, corals, whales, and other sea life one associates with the oceans today.

Yet that sea life is now in peril. Over the last 50 years -- a mere blink in geologic time -- humanity has come perilously close to reversing the almost miraculous biological abundance of the deep. Pollution, overfishing, the destruction of habitats, and climate change are emptying the oceans and enabling the lowest forms of life to regain their dominance. The oceanographer Jeremy Jackson calls it “the rise of slime”: the transformation of once complex oceanic ecosystems featuring intricate food webs with large animals into simplistic systems dominated by microbes, jellyfish, and disease. In effect, humans are eliminating the lions and tigers of the seas to make room for the cockroaches and rats.

The prospect of vanishing whales, polar bears, bluefin tuna, sea turtles, and wild coasts should be worrying enough on its own. But the disruption of entire ecosystems threatens our very survival, since it is the healthy functioning of these diverse systems

45 that sustains life on earth. Destruction on this level will cost humans dearly in terms of food, jobs, health, and quality of life. It also violates the unspoken promise passed from one generation to the next of a better future.

Humans are eliminating the lions and tigers of the seas to make room for the cockroaches and rats.

LAYING WASTE

The oceans’ problems start with pollution, the most visible forms of which are the catastrophic spills from offshore oil and gas drilling or from tanker accidents. Yet as devastating as these events can be, especially locally, their overall contribution to marine pollution pales in comparison to the much less spectacular waste that finds its way to the seas through rivers, pipes, runoff, and the air. For example, trash -- plastic bags, bottles, cans, tiny plastic pellets used in manufacturing -- washes into coastal waters or gets discarded by ships large and small. This debris drifts out to sea, where it forms epic gyres of floating waste, such as the infamous Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which spans hundreds of miles across the North Pacific Ocean.

The most dangerous pollutants are chemicals. The seas are being poisoned by substances that are toxic, remain in the environment for a long time, travel great distances, accumulate in marine life, and move up the food chain. Among the worst culprits are heavy metals such as mercury, which is released into the atmosphere by the burning of coal and then rains down on the oceans, rivers, and lakes; mercury can also be found in medical waste.

Hundreds of new industrial chemicals enter the market each year, most of them untested. Of special concern are those known as persistent organic pollutants, which are commonly found in streams, rivers, coastal waters, and, increasingly, the open ocean. These chemicals build up slowly in the tissues of fish and shellfish and are transferred to the larger creatures that eat them. Studies by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have linked exposure to persistent organic pollutants to death, disease, and abnormalities in fish and other wildlife. These pervasive chemicals can also adversely affect the development of the brain, the neurologic system, and the reproductive system in humans.

Then there are the nutrients, which increasingly show up in coastal waters after being used as chemical fertilizers on farms, often far inland. All living things require nutrients; excessive amounts, however, wreak havoc on the natural environment. Fertilizer that makes its way into the water causes the explosive growth of algae. When these algae die and sink to the sea floor, their decomposition robs the water of the oxygen needed to support complex marine life. Some algal blooms also produce toxins that can kill fish and poison humans who consume seafood.

The result has been the emergence of what marine scientists call “dead zones” -- areas devoid of the ocean life people value most. The high concentration of nutrients flowing down the Mississippi River and emptying into the Gulf of Mexico has created a seasonal offshore dead zone larger than the state of New Jersey. An even larger dead zone -- the world’s biggest -- can be found in the Baltic Sea, which is comparable in size to California. The estuaries of China’s two greatest rivers, the

Yangtze and the Yellow, have similarly lost their complex marine life. Since 2004, the total number of such aquatic wastelands worldwide has more than quadrupled, from 146 to over 600 today.

TEACH A MAN TO FISH -- THEN WHAT?

Another cause of the oceans’ decline is that humans are simply killing and eating too many fish. A frequently cited 2003 study in the journal Nature by the marine biologists Ransom Myers and Boris Worm found that the number of large fish -- both open-ocean species, such as tuna, swordfish, and marlin, and large groundfish, such as cod, halibut, and flounder -- had declined by 90 percent since 1950. The finding provoked controversy among some scientists and fishery managers. But subsequent studies have confirmed that fish populations have indeed fallen dramatically.

In fact, if one looks back further than 1950, the 90 percent figure turns out to be conservative. As historical ecologists have shown, we are far removed from the days when Christopher Columbus reported seeing large numbers of sea turtles migrating off the coast of the New World, when 15-foot sturgeon bursting with caviar leaped from the waters of the Chesapeake Bay, when George Washington’s Continental army could avoid starvation by feasting on swarms of shad swimming upriver to spawn, when dense oyster beds nearly blocked the mouth of the Hudson River, and when the early-twentieth-century American adventure writer Zane Grey marveled at the enormous swordfish, tuna, wahoo, and grouper he found in the Gulf of California.

Today, the human appetite has nearly wiped those populations out. It’s no wonder that stocks of large predator fish are rapidly dwindling when one considers the fact that one bluefin tuna can go for hundreds of thousands of dollars at market in Japan. High prices -- in January 2013, a 489-pound Pacific bluefin tuna sold for $1.7 million at auction in Tokyo -- make it profitable to employ airplanes and helicopters to scan the ocean for the fish that remain; against such technologies, marine animals don’t stand a chance.

Nor are big fish the only ones that are threatened. In area after area, once the long- lived predatory species, such as tuna and swordfish, disappear, fishing fleets move on to smaller, plankton-eating fish, such as sardines, anchovy, and herring. The overexploitation of smaller fish deprives the larger wild fish that remain of their food; aquatic mammals and sea birds, such as ospreys and eagles, also go hungry. Marine scientists refer to this sequential process as fishing down the food chain.

The problem is not just that we eat too much seafood; it’s also how we catch it. Modern industrial fishing fleets drag lines with thousands of hooks miles behind a vessel, and industrial trawlers on the high seas drop nets thousands of feet below the sea’s surface. In the process, many untargeted species, including sea turtles, dolphins, whales, and large sea birds (such as albatross) get accidentally captured or entangled. Millions of tons of unwanted sea life is killed or injured in commercial fishing operations each year; indeed, as much as a third of what fishermen pull out of the waters was never meant to be harvested. Some of the most destructive fisheries discard 80 to 90 percent of what they bring in. In the Gulf of Mexico, for example, for every pound of shrimp caught by a trawler, over three pounds of marine life is thrown away.

As the oceans decline and the demand for their products rises, marine and freshwater aquaculture may look like a tempting solution. After all, since we raise livestock on land for food, why not farm fish at sea? Fish farming is growing faster than any other form of food production, and today, the majority of commercially sold fish in the world and half of U.S. seafood imports come from aquaculture. Done right, fish farming can be environmentally acceptable. But the impact of aquaculture varies widely depending on the species raised, methods used, and location, and several factors make healthy and sustainable production difficult. Many farmed fish rely heavily on processed wild fish for food, which eliminates the fish-conservation benefits of aquaculture. Farmed fish can also escape into rivers and oceans and endanger wild populations by transmitting diseases or parasites or by competing with native species for feeding and spawning grounds. Open-net pens also pollute, sending fish waste, pesticides, antibiotics, uneaten food, diseases, and parasites flowing directly into the surrounding waters.

DESTROYING THE EARTH’S FINAL FRONTIER

Yet another factor driving the decline of the oceans is the destruction of the habitats that have allowed spectacular marine life to thrive for millennia. Residential and commercial development have laid waste to once-wild coastal areas. In particular, humans are eliminating coastal marshes, which serve as feeding grounds and nurseries for fish and other wildlife, filter out pollutants, and fortify coasts against storms and erosion.

Hidden from view but no less worrying is the wholesale destruction of deep-ocean habitats. For fishermen seeking ever more elusive prey, the depths of the seas have become the earth’s final frontier. There, submerged mountain chains called seamounts -- numbering in the tens of thousands and mostly uncharted -- have proved especially desirable targets. Some rise from the sea floor to heights approaching that of Mount Rainier, in Washington State. The steep slopes, ridges, and tops of seamounts in the South Pacific and elsewhere are home to a rich variety of marine life, including large pools of undiscovered species.

Today, fishing vessels drag huge nets outfitted with steel plates and heavy rollers across the sea floor and over underwater mountains, more than a mile deep, destroying everything in their path. As industrial trawlers bulldoze their way along, the surfaces of seamounts are reduced to sand, bare rock, and rubble. Deep cold-water corals, some older than the California redwoods, are being obliterated. In the process, an unknown number of species from these unique islands of biological diversity -- which might harbor new medicines or other important information -- are being driven extinct before humans even get a chance to study them.

Relatively new problems present additional challenges. Invasive species, such as lionfish, zebra mussels, and Pacific jellyfish, are disrupting coastal ecosystems and in some cases have caused the collapse of entire fisheries. Noise from sonar used by military systems and other sources can have devastating effects on whales, dolphins, and other marine life. Large vessels speeding through busy shipping lanes are also killing whales. Finally, melting Arctic ice creates new environmental hazards, as wildlife habitats disappear, mining becomes easier, and shipping routes expand.

IN HOT WATER

As if all this were not enough, scientists estimate that man-made climate change will drive the planet’s temperature up by between four and seven degrees Fahrenheit over the course of this century, making the oceans hotter. Sea levels are rising, storms are getting stronger, and the life cycles of plants and animals are being upended, changing migration patterns and causing other serious disruptions.

Global warming has already devastated coral reefs, and marine scientists now foresee the collapse of entire reef systems in the next few decades. Warmer waters drive out the tiny plants that corals feed on and depend on for their vivid coloration. Deprived of food, the corals starve to death, a process known as “bleaching.” At the same time, rising ocean temperatures promote disease in corals and other marine life. Nowhere are these complex interrelationships contributing to dying seas more than in fragile coral ecosystems.

The oceans have also become more acidic as carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere dissolves in the world’s water. The buildup of acid in ocean waters reduces the availability of calcium carbonate, a key building block for the skeletons and shells of corals, plankton, shellfish, and many other marine organisms. Just as trees make wood to grow tall and reach light, many sea creatures need hard shells to grow and also to guard against predators.

On top of all these problems, the most severe impact of the damage being done to the oceans by climate change and ocean acidification may be impossible to predict. The world’s seas support processes essential to life on earth. These include complex biological and physical systems, such as the nitrogen and carbon cycles; photosynthesis, which creates half of the oxygen that humans breathe and forms the base of the ocean’s biological productivity; and ocean circulation. Much of this activity takes place in the open ocean, where the sea and the atmosphere interact. Despite flashes of terror, such as the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami of 2004, the delicate balance of nature that sustains these systems has remained remarkably stable since well before the advent of human civilization.

But these complex processes both influence and respond to the earth’s climate, and scientists see certain recent developments as red flags possibly heralding an impending catastrophe. To take one example, tropical fish are increasingly migrating to the cooler waters of the Arctic and Southern oceans. Such changes may result in extinctions of fish species, threatening a critical food source especially in developing countries in the tropics. Or consider that satellite data show that warm surface waters are mixing less with cooler, deeper waters. This reduction in vertical mixing separates near-surface marine life from the nutrients below, ultimately driving down the population of phytoplankton, which is the foundation of the ocean’s food chain. Transformations in the open ocean could dramatically affect the earth’s climate and the complex processes that support life both on land and at sea. Scientists do not yet fully understand how all these processes work, but disregarding the warning signs could result in grave consequences.

A WAY FORWARD

Governments and societies have come to expect much less from the sea. The base lines of environmental quality, good governance, and personal responsibility have plummeted. This passive acceptance of the ongoing destruction of the seas is all the more shameful given how avoidable the process is. Many solutions exist, and some are relatively simple. For example, governments could create and expand protected marine areas, adopt and enforce stronger international rules to conserve biological diversity in the open ocean, and place a moratorium on the fishing of dwindling fish species, such as Pacific bluefin tuna. But solutions will also require broader changes in how societies approach energy, agriculture, and the management of natural resources. Countries will have to make substantial reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, transition to clean energy, eliminate the worst toxic chemicals, and end the massive nutrient pollution in watersheds.

These challenges may seem daunting, especially for countries focused on basic survival. But governments, international institutions, nongovernmental organizations, scholars, and businesses have the necessary experience and capacity to find answers to the oceans’ problems. And they have succeeded in the past, through innovative local initiatives on every continent, impressive scientific advances, tough environmental regulation and enforcement, and important international measures, such as the global ban on the dumping of nuclear waste in the oceans.

So long as pollution, overfishing, and ocean acidification remain concerns only for scientists, however, little will change for the good. Diplomats and national security experts, who understand the potential for conflict in an overheated world, should realize that climate change might soon become a matter of war and peace. Business leaders should understand better than most the direct links between healthy seas and healthy economies. And government officials, who are entrusted with the public’s well-being, must surely see the importance of clean air, land, and water.

The world faces a choice. We do not have to return to an oceanic Stone Age. Whether we can summon the political will and moral courage to restore the seas to health before it is too late is an open question. The challenge and the opportunity are there.

Antarctic Fishery First to Require ID Numbers for All Fishing Vessels 50

Nov 01, 2013 Contact: John Briley, 202.540.6394

The Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, or CCAMLR, took a major step Nov. 1 in battling illegal fishing by agreeing to require unique identification numbers on all vessels fishing in commission waters.

CCAMLR is the first regional marine management organization to require these ID numbers on all vessels fishing within its jurisdiction. The numbers are administered by the International Maritime Organization, or IMO. This mandate, once adopted by other fisheries management bodies, will greatly aid in the identification of fishing fleets worldwide and the ability to develop reliable lists of authorized and illegal vessels.

“CCAMLR’s decision to require IMO numbers is highly commendable and shows real leadership in the effort to stop illicit fishing activity. It will significantly reduce the ability of unscrupulous operators to mask their vessel identities and thus will make it more difficult to fish illegally. The hope is now that other regional fisheries organizations will follow this lead,” said Tony Long, who directs The Pew Charitable Trusts’ project to end illegal fishing.

Atlantic deep sea fishing: MEPs call for bottom trawling ban in vulnerable areas Fisheries - 04-11-2013 - 19:52

©BELGA/SCIENCE

Press Release- European Parliament

Bottom trawling should be banned in areas with vulnerable marine ecosystems to be listed by the Commission, but not phased out altogether, said the Fisheries Committee in Monday's vote on a draft EU regulation on fishing deep-sea stocks in the North- East Atlantic.

"I am pleased to announce that in today's vote the Fisheries Committee introduced a new element to the proposal, banning fishing in areas with sponges, corals and other vulnerable marine ecosystems to be listed by the Commission. These areas are the spawning and nursing grounds of deep-sea species and their protection will be invaluable in achieving the recovery of deep-sea stocks. Unfortunately, the committee did not back the Commission proposal to phase out deep-sea bottom trawling altogether", said rapporteur Kriton Arsenis (S&D, EL), whose report was adopted with 19 votes in favour, 0 against and 4 abstentions.

Fisheries Committee MEPs nonetheless introduced a review clause, asking the Commission to evaluate after four years the impact of the special fishing gear used for deep-sea fishing (especially bottom trawls or bottom-set gillnets) on vulnerable deep- sea species and marine ecosystems, with the possibility of proposing a general phase- out of bottom trawling thereafter.

Deep-sea stocks are fish caught in waters beyond the main fishing grounds of the continental shelves. Most of these species are slow-growing and long-living, which makes them particularly vulnerable to fishing. Their habitats and ecosystems are largely unknown and their fragile environment, once damaged, may take centuries to recover.

Next steps

The draft legislation still needs to be approved by plenary, possibly in December or January. After that, MEPs will enter into negotiations with the Council for an agreement, which must then be put to a second reading vote in plenary.

New UN-backed initiative to drive advances in high seas fisheries management

FAO estimates that about one third of the world’s seven major tuna species are currently overexploited. Photo: FAO/A. Urcelayeta

5 November 2013 – The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) today hailed a multi-partner project focused on improving global sustainable tuna fisheries by reducing illegal catch and supporting biodiversity in the common oceans.

“High-seas fisheries support the food security and livelihoods of millions of people worldwide,” Árni M. Mathiesen, FAO Assistant Director-General for Fisheries and Aquaculture said in a statement announcing that Global Environment Facility (GEF) CEO Naoko Ishii has approved a project coordinated by FAO to boost the sustainability of tuna fisheries worldwide.

According to FAO, around one third of the world’s seven major tuna species are currently overexploited. Given continued strong consumer demand and the overcapacity of fishing fleets, the status of tuna stocks is likely to deteriorate further if fisheries management is not improved.

“Through collective action at all levels and broad cooperation that optimizes the use of scarce resources, this project – and the wider Common Oceans initiative – will help move the world away from ‘the race to fish’ and towards implementation of an ecosystem approach,” said Mr. Mathiesen, stressing that it is vital to ensure the future well-being and productivity of these crucial marine ecosystems.

“Early successes will create incentives for donors and agencies to further invest in these types of catalytic projects.” he added.

By creating synergy between FAO and its global partners, the global tuna project on fisheries management and biodiversity conservation, set to run from 2013 through 2018, is vital to advance more sustainable and efficient fisheries management and to share the best fishing practices; to reduce illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing through reinforced monitoring and control; and to lessen ecological impacts from illegal fishing.

The GEF, an international organization specialized on environment and sustainable development, has committed $30 million in support of the program, leveraging an addition $150 million of co-financing.

“I am pleased that we are able to bring together both public and private partners in this project, which give us a fighting chance to work on a scale sufficient to reverse negative trends threatening the global tuna fishery and the ocean environment that sustains it” said Mr. Ishii, commenting on GEF’s funding.

Further to the tuna project, key partners including FAO, the UN Environment Program (UNEP), the World Bank, Conservation International (CI), the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the World Wildlife Fund – US and the Global Oceans Forum are also involved in other relevant initiatives:

Increasing sustainable use of deep-sea living resources and ecosystems; strengthening global capacity to manage the areas beyond national jurisdiction (ABNJ) and fuelling oceans partnerships to promote investment in long-term, sustainable fisheries management.

FAO estimates that tunas and tuna-like species account for the most valuable fishery resource caught in the areas beyond national jurisdiction (ABNJ). About 5.4 million tonnes are landed each year, with over 85 countries harvesting tuna in commercial quantities. Capture levels are highest in the Pacific Ocean, followed by the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

Costa Rica uses INTERPOL Purple Notice to warn about illegal shark finning

Interpol-Media Release November 6, 2013

LYON, France – An alert for a method of shark finning aimed at avoiding detection of illegal practices has been circulated to all 190 INTERPOL member countries after a case was identified by Costa Rican authorities.

An INTERPOL Purple Notice has been circulated for a modus operandi of the technique where only a band of skin to keep the fin attached to the spine is retained and the remainder of the body discarded at sea. This method is aimed at circumventing legislation banning finning which states that the fins of the shark must be ‘naturally attached’ to the body.

Details of the case, which were identified by the Costa Rican National Coast Guard, were presented by the head of the INTERPOL National Central Bureau (NCB) in San José, during the second INTERPOL Fisheries Crime Working Group meeting which opened in Nairobi, Kenya on Monday, 4 November.

Head of NCB San José Gustavo Chinchilla said: “This is an opportunity to encourage other member countries to share types of modi operandi, in order to alert enforcement

54 authorities to environmental crimes. I strongly believe that international cooperation and use of INTERPOL´s tools, such as Purple Notices, allow us to provide a more coordinated and effective response to addressing fisheries issues.”

The Purple Notice – to seek or provide information on modi operandi, objects, devices and concealment methods used by criminals – was requested by Costa Rica following its first National Environmental Security Seminar (NESS) held in San José in August of this year.

The Seminar brought together law enforcement officers from national environmental enforcement agencies, the national police, NCB San José and specialized officers from INTERPOL’s Environmental Security unit from the General Secretariat headquarters in Lyon, France, and provided an opportunity for discussion and information exchange on illegal fishing and other related crimes.

“Improved communications and increased sharing of information between countries provide law enforcement with an added advantage and facilitate the identification of criminals and new criminal techniques. Costa Rica’s use of INTERPOL’s system of notices is a perfect example of this,” said David Higgins, head of INTERPOL’s Environmental Security unit.

“This is now the second Purple Notice issued in relation to fisheries crime, and we hope that it will encourage other member countries to make increased use of INTERPOL notices to combat all types of environmental crime,” added Mr Higgins.

The Purple Notice was issued under the umbrella of INTERPOL’s Project Scale, a global initiative to detect, suppress and combat fisheries crime which is estimated to cost the global economy up to USD 23 billion each year and is linked to other forms of organized and transnational crime including corruption, money laundering, document fraud, and human and drug trafficking.

Project Scale was launched in February 2013 and is funded by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the US Department of State and the Pew Charitable Trusts. In addition to raising awareness of fisheries crime. The project coordinates operations to target this criminal activity, disrupt trafficking routes and harmonize national and regional enforcement efforts.

Science & Environment

17 November 2013 Last updated at 18:13 ET Emissions of CO2 driving rapid oceans 'acid trip'

By Matt McGrath Environment correspondent, BBC News

The world's oceans are becoming acidic at an "unprecedented rate" and may be souring more rapidly than at any time in the past 300 million years.

In their strongest statement yet on the issue, scientists say acidification could increase by 170% by 2100.

The report's co-author said acidification had already caused a 30% loss of species in some ocean ecosystems.

The researchers conclude that human emissions of CO2 are clearly to blame.

The study will be presented at global climate talks in Poland next week.

In 2012, over 500 of the world's leading experts on ocean acidification gathered in California. Led by the International Biosphere-Geosphere Programme, a review of the state of the science has now been published.

This Summary for Policymakers states with "very high confidence" that increasing acidification is caused by human activities which are adding 24 million tonnes of CO2 to oceans every day.

Pickled waters

The addition of so much carbon has altered the chemistry of the waters.

Since the start of the industrial revolution, the waters have become 26% more acidic.

"This is the state of the art," said Prof Jean-Pierre Gattuso, from CNRS, the French national research agency.

"My colleagues have not found in the geological record, rates of change that are faster than the ones we see today."

What worries the scientists is the potential impact on many ocean species including corals.

Studies carried out at deep sea vents, where the waters are naturally acidic thanks to CO2, show a 30% loss of biodiversity.

These vents may be a "window on the future" according to the researchers.

"You don't find a mollusc at the pH level expected for 2100, this is really quite a stunning fact," said Prof Gattuso.

"It's an imperfect window, only the ocean's acidity is increasing at these sites, they don't reflect the warming we will see this century.

"If you combine the two, it could be even more dramatic than what we see at CO2 vents."

The effect of acidity is currently being felt most profoundly felt in the Arctic and Antarctic oceans. These chilly waters hold more CO2 and increasing levels of the gas are turning them acidic more rapidly than the rest of the world.

The more acidic they become, the more damaging they are to the shells and skeletons of marine organisms.

The researchers say that by 2020, ten percent of the Arctic will be inhospitable to species that build their shells from calcium carbonate. By 2100 the entire Arctic will be a hostile environment.

These effects are already visible says Prof Gattuso.

"In the Southern Ocean, we already see corrosion of pteropods which are like sea snails, in the ocean we see corrosion of the shell.

"They are a key component in the food chain, they are eaten by fish, birds and whales, so if one element is going then there is a cascading impact on the whole food chain."

The authors warn that the economic impact of the losses from aquaculture could be huge - the global cost of the decline in molluscs could be $130bn by 2100 if emissions of CO2 continue on their current pathway.

Adding alkaline substances such as crushed limestone to the waters has been mooted as a potential way of mitigating the worst impacts of acidification. But Prof Gattuso says it would only have a limited effect.

"Maybe in bays which have a restricted exchange with open oceans it may work, it may give some local relief.

"But the latest research is showing that it is not really practical at a global scale. It is very expensive and very energy intensive."

Marine protection zones would also give some short term benefit, but the scientists say that in the long term only significant cuts in emissions will slow the progress of acidification.