by Arpita Bhattacharyya

With two fifths of the world’s population now living within 100 km of the shoreline, keeping our oceans healthy is not just an extraordinarily important environmental issue — it’s also a human development one.

This is the core case of the new UNEP Report, “Green Economy in a Blue World,” which urges protecting the oceans from pollution, overfishing, and climate change, while fueling economic growth through developing new marine industries.

Among other immeasurable benefits, the ocean provides coastal populations food, millions of jobs, a thriving tourism industry, transportation, sites for renewable energy development, and vast carbon sinks.  The implications of mismanaging such a bountiful resource are clear and coastal communities cannot afford to do it.

Achim Steiner, UNEP Executive Director warns that with the growing population, “pressures and impacts [on the ocean] are likely to intensify unless the world becomes more intelligent about managing these essential resources.”

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by Michael Conathan

This piece was originally printed as an op-ed in the Energy Guardian.

America’s oceans provide tremendous value to our economy, and are among the most valuable natural resources we possess. In an effort to maintain both the financial and environmental benefits of our marine resources, last week, the White House issued a draft implementation plan for the National Ocean Policy outlining the specific steps it will direct federal agencies to take to establish a more comprehensive, collaborative, and efficient approach to managing our ocean resources.

Since its initial release in 2009, the National Ocean Policy has been pilloried by the president’s political opponents as a misguided effort to circumvent congressional approval and impose new regulations that slow the pace of business and innovation. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

The policy creates no new regulations and relies entirely on existing authority to do precisely what Republicans have touted as one of their highest policy priorities—improve the efficiency of the federal government.

Much of the opposition centers on a concept known as coastal and marine spatial planning. In most cases, planning is considered a good thing. Business plans are the foundation of most successful ventures. And across the country, federal, state, and local governments have established land use plans that prioritize certain activities to protect private property and ensure we get the best value from public space.

Yet somehow, when these principles are applied to our oceans, even those who recognize the value of solid, well-conceived plans suddenly decry them as the tactics of government heavies, coming to kill jobs and abscond with our fundamental freedoms.

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Rising human carbon dioxide emissions may be affecting the brains and central nervous system of sea fishes with serious consequences for their survival, an international scientific team has found.

Carbon dioxide concentrations predicted to occur in the ocean by the end of this century will interfere with fishes’ ability to hear, smell, turn and evade predators, says Professor Philip Munday of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and James Cook University.

“For several years our team have been testing the performance of baby coral fishes in sea water containing higher levels of dissolved CO2 – and it is now pretty clear that they sustain significant disruption to their central nervous system, which is likely to impair their chances of survival,” Prof. Munday says.

That’s from an ARC news release on a new Nature Climate Change study, “Near-future carbon dioxide levels alter fish behaviour by interfering with neurotransmitter function” (subs. req’d).

The authors “report world-first evidence that high CO2 levels in sea water disrupts a key brain receptor in fish, causing marked changes in their behaviour and sensory ability.”

We’ve known for quite some time about the threat global warming and human activity poses to marine life (see Nature Geoscience study concludes ocean dead zones “devoid of fish and seafood” are poised to expand and “remain for thousands of years“).  And we’ve known the threat ocean acidification poses to shell-forming mollusks and crustaceans (see The Great Oyster Crash and Why Ocean Acidification Is “A Ticking Time Bomb” for Both Marine Life and Humanity and links below).

Here’s more on this ground-breaking new paper:

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Are Oceans Interior?  We Must Make Sure NOAA Stays Strong No Matter Where it Resides

The Oscar Dyson, a NOAA vessel, headed to summer feeding grounds off the Alaskan coast to study whales that have been teetering on extinction for decades. Even though our oceans aren’t exactly part of the “interior,” moving the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration out of the Department of Commerce isn’t a bad idea if it’s done right. SOURCE: AP/ NOAA

by Michael Conathan

On January 13, President Barack Obama announced his plan to implement a sweeping reorganization of the Department of Commerce by consolidating six agencies involved in trade and economic competitiveness. One unintended consequence of this reshuffling is that by redesigning the Commerce Department, we now must find a home for the agency that comprised more than 60 percent of its budget—the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, our nation’s primary ocean research agency.

In a December 2010 report, “A Focus on Competitiveness,” John Podesta, Sarah Rosen Wartell, and Jitinder Kohli detailed why President Obama’s proposed restructuring makes sense for America. But it’s worth taking a closer look at how such a move would affect NOAA and in turn affect how we manage our oceans.

The president’s plan would relocate NOAA to the Department of the Interior. In his remarks, President Obama went so far as to suggest that the Department of the Interior was a “more sensible place” for NOAA, and that it only ended up at Commerce at its inception in 1970 because then-President Richard Nixon was feuding with then-Secretary of the Interior Walter Hickle, who had publicly criticized President Nixon’s handling of the Vietnam War.

While this storied example of Beltway pettiness has circulated among ocean policy wonks for years, the reality is rather more complex. In fact, when NOAA was established in 1970, 80 percent of its budget and more than two-thirds of its employees came from the Environmental Science Services Administration—an agency that included the Weather Bureau, the Coast and Geodetic Survey, and Environmental Data Services—which was already housed at the Department of Commerce.

Since the announcement, many environmental groups have decried the move as potentially compromising NOAA’s scientific integrity by shifting the agency to a department that has developed a reputation for being industry friendly. Certainly, degradation of NOAA’s science-first attitude is to be avoided at all costs. Yet there is no reason the agency’s mission can’t be maintained under the auspices of Interior provided the agency retains its structural integrity and its budgetary clout.

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by Michael Conathan

If rhetoric from the Republican Presidential candidates is to be believed, the Environmental Protection Agency is “a tool to crush the private enterprise system” (Mitt Romney), “a cemetery for jobs” (Rick Perry), and “should be re-named the job-killing organization of America” (Michele Bachmann). But it’s a safe bet the tens of thousands of people who may soon find jobs implementing EPA regulations aimed at cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay would disagree with those assertions.

A new report released today by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation highlights the job creation numbers — 240,000 full-time jobs — expected to come from achieving new pollution goals set by the EPA’s “Total Maximum Daily Load” restrictions. Finalized in December 2010, these rules require a 25 percent reduction of pollution flowing into the Bay by 2025 and have already spurred state and federal investment in stormwater mitigation projects, upgrades at sewage treatment facilities, addition of power plant smokestack scrubbers, and improvements to management of agricultural runoff and livestock waste management.

The Bay’s watershed covers more than 64,000 square miles including all of Maryland and the District of Colombia, large areas of Virginia and Pennsylvania, and portions of Delaware, New York, and West Virginia. Therefore infrastructure projects to reduce pollution will encompass a massive region and provide a major boost to the economy.

Of course, the clock is already ticking on a newly minted, 60 day, congressional mandate for the President to issue a decision on the controversial Keystone XL pipeline that would carry dirty Canadian tar sands oil from the great white north across America’s heartland and endanger a critical aquifer. By setting up what one former pipeline inspector called a potential “disaster,” the pipeline would ultimately deliver massive quantities of oil to the Gulf Coast only to see the vast majority of it exported.

Keystone proponents, including House Speaker John Boehner, have asserted that the project would immediately create “tens of thousands” of American jobs. These claims seem just a tad hyperbolic now that the oil company itself has conceded that the actual number of jobs that would be created is closer to 6,000 to 6,500, and would only last for two years.

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by Michael Conathan

This year was a big one for fisheries. If you’re into fishery legislation and important milestones, you already know that it was the 35th anniversary of the Fishery Conservation and Management Act, the law that first ejected foreign fishing fleets from the United States’ exclusive economic zone and provided the foundation for how we manage our fisheries. It was also the 15th anniversary of the Sustainable Fisheries Act and the fifth anniversary of passage of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Reauthorization Act, the last two major updates to our fisheries statute.

But there were also many significant developments this year that will benefit our fishing industries and our marine environment for generations to come. Here’s a quick rundown of the top five stories in fishery management from 2011.

1. Ending overfishing in America

By far the biggest story of the year in fisheries management was the successful implementation of annual catch limits in our fisheries. This effectively ended overfishing in America. In March, National Marine Fisheries Service Administrator Eric Schwaab announced that his agency was on track to implement science-based catch limits on all 528 federally managed species of fish, thereby preventing overfishing—the act of catching more fish than science dictates can be sustainably harvested—from occurring in U.S. fisheries.

Of course, fisheries science remains an elusive discipline, and our estimates of fish stock populations are rife with variables. This means that as more data are collected, our perceptions of the health of fish populations may change, and we may realize that what we thought were sustainable harvest levels may have been overly optimistic.

Still, given that fisheries scientists don’t have a crystal ball showing what the future holds for fish populations, operating within limits that reflect the best science we have still gives the United States worldwide bragging rights to say our fisheries are the most sustainably managed on the planet. And that’s no small feat. So whether you’re putting a piece of Alaskan salmon or Atlantic swordfish on your plate, you can end 2011 with the assurance that if it’s U.S.-caught, it’s sustainable.

2. Cracking down on pirate fishing

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Oceans make up 70% of the earth’s surface and hold 90% of natural carbon. So why do they only make up a small portion of the research on the global impact of carbon emissions?

The role of “blue carbon” in climate change is getting more interest from the international community. With a growing body of research exploring how an increase in atmospheric carbon is impacting the chemistry and biology of ocean ecosystems — and thus influencing climate change — people are starting to pay more attention.

However, it’s still not a well-explored concept outside the scientific community. At the COP climate talks in Durban, for example, there is endless talk about atmospheric carbon and about how to control terrestrial carbon emissions through deforestation programs like REDD+. But there are still very few mentions of oceanic carbon.

“Hopefully, by exposing the science to higher level decision makers, we will bridge a gap of communication for that necessary understanding” of the role that oceans play in climate change, said Alberto Piola, an oceanographer with the Naval Hydrographic Service in Argentina, speaking at a side event on Blue Carbon at COP 17 this week.

We can look at Blue Carbon in two ways. The first is the climate change impact of releasing natural carbon from the oceans through the destruction of ecosystems. Most research in this area is focused on near-shore ecosystems like mangroves and sea grasses. The second is the impact of burning fossil fuels on ocean ecosystems by adding geologically-trapped CO2 to the carbon cycle.

Considering the immense shift already underway in the oceans, it’s amazing that the concept hasn’t gotten more attention in the international negotiations on addressing climate change.

In pre-industrial times, the ocean was a source of CO2, and the atmosphere was a sink. But the release of staggering amounts of geologic carbon has made the oceans a net sink.

We’ve reversed the natural carbon cycle in about 200 years.

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by Cole Mellino

When copying the model of land-based industrialized farming, current aquaculture practices can have many of the same negative environmental impacts inherent in industrial-scale agriculture.

U.S. aquaculture operations, primarily producing shellfish, are subject to stringent environmental regulations. But due to the poorly regulated use of high amounts of chemicals and antibiotics to maintain massive, centralized monocultures of fish and shrimp particularly in South America and southeast Asia, aquaculture farms have gained a reputation for polluting water and producing poor-quality food.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. The Atlantic had a fantastic piece this week on the growing movement to clean up aquaculture operations — producing better food, sustainable biproducts, and making them a solution to environmental problems:

Unsurprisingly, once information got out among the general public, “aquaculture” quickly became a dirty word. Industry responded with a strategy of mislabeling seafood and upping their marketing budgets, rather than investing in more sustainable and environmentally benign farming techniques.

But a small group of ocean farmers and scientists decided to chart a different course. Rather than relying on mono-aquaculture operations, these new ocean farms are pioneering muti-tropic and sea-vegetable aquaculture, whereby ocean farmers grow abundant, high-quality seafood while improving, rather than damaging, the environment.

One of the keys? Seaweed. This type of algae, which can be used for everything from food to fertilizer, could be a major piece of creating a network of sustainable farming operations:

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AP Photo/Scott Heppell

by Michael Conathan

Last Tuesday, two letters about the New England groundfishery, which includes 12 bottom-dwelling species such as cod, haddock, and flounders, landed on desks in Washington, D.C. One focused on the past, the other on the future. But taken together, they illuminate a disconnect among distinct portions of the fishing industry and some of the politicians who represent them. And while one requested declaration of a “fishery resource disaster,” a much larger potential disaster still looms on the horizon.

A letter from Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick to Secretary of Commerce John Bryson, supported by Sens. John Kerry (D-MA) and Scott Brown (R-MA), as well as by Massachusetts Reps. Barney Frank, John Tierney, Bill Keating, and Ed Markey, cites both a loss of fishing revenue and consolidation of operations in the groundfishery that left 109 fewer vessels fishing for groundfish in 2010 than in 2009. Patrick’s letter focuses particularly on a group of small-boat fishermen operating outside the major ports of New Bedford and Gloucester, and asks for $21 million to alleviate the disaster.

Gov. Patrick blamed this situation squarely on the transition to a new “catch share”-style management system that regulators implemented in the groundfishery in 2010. This system allocates percentages of the total amount of fish that can be caught to fishermen who join collective groups known as “sectors” based on how many fish each fisherman has caught in the past. They are then permitted to trade allocation to others within or outside their sector. The fear is that such trading will result in excessive consolidation of too many fish in too few hands.

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