Without swift, national action to protect the ocean's vast diversity of life from acidifying waters corals, shellfish, salmon and a whole host of beautiful creatures will be lost. We need your help to ask President Barack Obama and the Environmental Protection Agency to get working on a bold plan to curb ocean acidification. Carbon dioxide pollution is also being absorbed by the ocean, causing its chemistry to change and become more acidic.

This spells trouble for marine animals that are now having difficulty building shells, growing and sometimes even surviving in increasingly corrosive waters. Seafood is the critical source of protein for more than 2. Official catch data from FAO rarely includes small-scale, sport or illegal fishing and does not count fish discarded at sea.

A more exhaustive study, taking over a decade shows that the annual catches between and were much bigger than thought, but that the decline after the peak year of was much faster than official figures. The new research estimates the peak catch was million tons, but declined at 1. Prof Daniel Pauly, at the University of British Columbia in Canada and who led the work, said the decline is very strong and "is due to countries having fished too much and having exhausted one fishery after another.

Prof Boris Worm, at Dalhousie University in Canada and not involved in the new research said. While the results necessarily remain uncertain, they undoubtedly represent our most complete picture yet of the global state of fish catches. Worm said the world's fisheries were being over-exploited but that some stocks were being sustainably managed: Global fish catches rose from the s to as fishing fleets expanded and discovered new fish stocks to exploit. But afterfew undiscovered fisheries were left and catches started to decline.

The decline since has largely been in fish caught by industrial fleets and to a lesser extent a cut in the number of unwanted fish discarded at sea. There has been success in some places where fishing has been restricted for a few years, for example in the Norwegian herring and cod fisheries. On resumption, catches were bigger than ever. We know how to fix this problem but whether we do it or not depends on conditions that are difficult. A study showed nearly Chinese fishing vessels operating off west Africa, with scores of cases of illegal fishing, according to Greenpeace.

Illegal and pirate fishing take place in many parts of the world. Prof Callum Roberts, at the University of York in the UK and not part of Pauly's team, said: We can also see, that in efforts to stem declines, we have been using more and more bycatch that was once thrown away.

Seabirds have been around for sixty million years, and they are true survivalists: But now seabirds seabird abundance has dropped Edd Hammill with Utah State University and co-author of the paper, noted: Ben Lascelles, with Birdlife International, found the research alarming because the decline appeared practically indiscriminate, hitting a "large number of species across a number of families.

Michelle Paleczny with the University of British Columbia and the Sea Around Us Project said: It gives us an idea of the overall impact we're having. There are nearly species of seabirds worldwide.

Living on both the open ocean and the shoreline, they face overfishing, drowning in fishing lines or nets, plastic pollution, invasive species like rats in nesting areas, oil and gas development and toxic pollution moving up the food chain. And then there is climate change and ocean acidification which threaten to flood nesting sites and disrupt food sources.

Seabirds are about twice as likely as land-based birds to be threatened with extinction. Paleczny also called for the creation of international marine protected areas to cover the wide ranges of seabirds.

Hammill said the "most pressing issue" is plastic pollution. Seabirds continually mistake plastic for fish eggs, devouring large amounts. Plastic in animals' stomachs not only release deadly toxins, but can also lead to slow starvation by obstructing the animals' bowels. Birds even feed plastic bits to their young, killing their fledglings en masse.

In the end, large-scale actions to help seabirds could also go a long way in cleaning-up our increasingly trashed marine ecosystems. All of these activities need investment and support of governments around the world to make them happen," Lascelles said.

Scientists call it Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation AMOC. But we may as well think of it as the heartbeat of the world ocean system. And when that heartbeat begins to slow down, we'd best sit up and start paying attention:.

Near Greenland in the North Atlantic, salty, dense, ocean water issuing from the tropics along the Gulf Stream begins to cool. The heavier water, burdened with salt, sinks to the bottom in the North Atlantic. This drives a massive ocean conveyer belt, driving less oxygen rich bottom waters to the surface where they can be reinvigorated.

It also drives this ocean revitalizing train of currents through every major corner of the world ocean. However, scientists have been warning policymakers for 30 years that this salt and heat driven thermohaline circulation could be disrupted, reducing oxygen levels throughout the whole ocean system, and greatly reducing the oceans' ability to support life and shifting one step closer to the nightmare ocean state called a Canfield Ocean. This disruption could be caused by warmer, salty water cooling and sinking in the North Atlantic.

And any disruption of the overturning process in the North Atlantic basically kills off a life-giving circulation to the entire world ocean system.

For details and graphs, click on the link in the headline. A group of marine experts published a study in the journal Science which drew conclusions that were both heartening and disturbing: While ocean ecosystems are still largely intact, the marine world is facing unprecedented disturbance, including acidification from the absorption of greenhouse gases and widespread habitat destruction from deep-sea mining, oil and gas drilling, development, and aquaculture.

Lead author Douglas McCauley, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, noted that, while there was a sixth mass extinction that's been happening, the sixth mass extinction is not underway in the oceans.

Seabed mining can only be described as a gold rush that's underway under the ocean now. We just need to be smarter about how to industrialize the ocean and put industry in the right places. And the numbers involved are a bit scary -- a million square kilometers that have been staked out in this marine gold rush". Some of the "corals are beginning to show the capacity for resiliency to cope with some of these temperature increases.

It's something that we need to very actively tell our policy makers to do. But there is a growing awareness that we need to build international alliances to think about marine wildlife issues. Rising greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are causing global temperatures to rise, which is leading to the melting of the polar ice caps, which in turn has resulted in rising sea levels and a host of ecological issues.

On the fish counters of Barcelona's central market, thousands of sea creatures making up dozens of species are on display. But by the end of this century, many of these animals may be history due to man's reckless abuse of the planet. The oceans are taking up the greenhouse gases that we dump into the air, which turns the waters deadly to its inhabitants. Many species on the market's fish counters are also on one or more European "at-risk" lists: Bivalves such as clams, oysters and mussels use calcium carbonate to make their shells.

However, in as little as 20 years they will be very different and, in some parts of the world, entirely gone.

Other sea creatures with shells don't make their shells the same way but the acidification appears to harm the working of the gills and change the behavior of the crustaceans when they are very young. This acidification is the fastest change in the ocean's chemistry in million years, according to scientists. A significant amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere comes from the burning of carbon fuels.

Carbon dioxide is absorbed by seawater, lowering the pH level and increasing its acidity. It has already gone down to 8. It hasn't been that low for 55 million years. Along the coasts and out in the deep, huge "dead zones" have been multiplying. They are the emptiest places on the planet, where there's little oxygen and sometimes no life at all, almost entirely restricted to some unicellular organisms like bacteria.

Vast blooms of algae-organisms that thrive in more acid and less alkaline seawater and are fed by pollution-have already rendered parts of the Baltic Sea pretty much dead.

A third of the marine life in that sea, which once fed all of Northern Europe. What worries Pelejero most is the rapidity of today's changes. The same shifts that happened over the course of a few thousand years during the PETM Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum are now due to happen over just a few centuries, counting from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and the widespread use of fossil fuels.

One ray of hope is that the Obama administration announced a series of measures aimed to conserve the ocean as a key food supply. These included more ocean sanctuaries to curtail overfishing, and new funds to research ocean biochemistry, including acidification. In this radically changed environment, some creatures died out while others adapted and evolved.

The study is the first to use the chemical composition of fossils to reconstruct surface ocean acidity at the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum PETMa period of intense warming on land and throughout the oceans due to high CO2. The oceans have absorbed about a third of the carbon humans have pumped into the air since industrialization, helping to keep earth's thermostat lower than it would be otherwise.

But that uptake of carbon has come at a price. Chemical reactions caused by that excess CO2 have made seawater grow more acidic, depleting it of the carbonate ions that corals, mollusks and calcifying plankton need to build their shells and skeletons. For more, follow the link at http: Under this intense pressure global fisheries are collapsing. Of the 21 marine species known to have been driven extinct in the past years, 16 disappeared since In addition to overfishing impacts from commercial fishing, coral reefs -- anchors of biodiversity that support thousands of fish species and as many as a million species overall -- are often damaged or destroyed by trawlers and dredging.

The global fish crisis has become so severe, scientists and wildlife managers are breaking the human population taboo, calling not only for reduced consumption and better regulation, but for alleviation of poverty and "stabilization of the world's human population". Ten million scallops that have died in the waters near Qualicum Beach due to rising ocean acidity are the latest victims in a series of marine die-offs that have plagued the West Coast for a decade.

Human-caused carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere are being absorbed by the ocean and may have pushed local waters through a "tipping point" of acidity beyond which shellfish cannot survive, according to Chris Harley, a marine ecologist at the University of B. Rising ocean acidity is a global phenomenon, made worse by higher natural acidity in local waters, Harley said.

High acidity interferes with the ability of baby scallops to form a protective shell, forcing them to expend more energy and making them more vulnerable to predators and infection. Scallop operations big and small are reporting die-offs this year. Mysterious scallop die-offs have also been reported in China since Oyster die-offs in Washington state and Oregon dating back a decade have also been linked by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration researchers to acidification and rising carbon dioxide levels.

Oyster larvae started dying inexplicably in Researchers found that deep water welling up from the depths of the ocean was mixing with surface water rich in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, rendering the water uninhabitable to some shellfish.

Several other stresses include overfishing and eutrophication excess fertilizers adding to depletion of oxygen in the water. Together they create significant challenges for ocean ecosystems. The cod fishery off Newfoundland, Canada collapsed inleading to the loss of some 40, jobs in the industry. Twenty years later, the fishery has yet to recover. For the other 7 facts about overfishing, click on the link in the headlines.

Despite an increased awareness of overfishing, the majority of people still know very little about the scale of the destruction being wrought on the oceans. This film presents an unquestionable case for why overfishing needs to end and shows that there is still an opportunity for change. Reform of the EU's Common Fisheries Policy is almost complete. Fisheries ministers and members of the European Parliament, MEPs, are negotiating a deal for the future EU fisheries subsidies, which should support and end to EU overfishing.

In the meantime you can support the campaign to end overfishing by signing the petition at: Fishery regulators are likely to impose devastating cuts on the New England fishing fleet in the vast Gulf of Maine; however, blame for the disappearance of once-abundant cod and flounder populations is shifting from fishermen to warming waters and an evolving ocean ecosystem possibly related to man-made climate change. Researchers acknowledge they don't know whether prized cod and flounder stocks will ever rebound and what species will take their place.

John Bullard, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's regional chief. To ease the pain, the New England Fishery Management Council, a governmental body made up fishermen, industry representatives, state officials, and environmentalists, will also decide whether to open more than 5, square miles of conservation area now closed to most fishermen.

Fishermen are struggling to comprehend how the sacrifices they made in the last decade to idle boats and catch fewer fish were for naught. Some fisherman say that cuts may not be as drastic as they sound because so many fishermen can't catch their quota anyway. The sea floor is recording temperatures of There have been cycles of cooling and warming, and scientists are not sure whether the Gulf of Maine's warming is from natural cycles, climate change, or a combination of both. NOAA research shows that about half of 36 fish stocks they analyzed in recent years, including cod, flounder, and lesser-known species, have been shifting northward or into deeper waters in the last four decades.

While locally caught Atlantic cod are disappearing from restaurants and stores, other fish that thrive in warmer water, such as Atlantic croaker, could take their place. But it's unclear if fishermen will be able to make as much money from these species.

The timing of spring plankton blooms -- the foundation of the marine food web -- may also be shifting, scientists say, coming earlier in the spring, as it did this year. Plankton changes, combined with rising ocean temperatures, could affect the success of young marine life because so many species time their spawning to the spring bloom. Predator fish that feed on cod are increasing in the area. Chaos theory says the particulars of the breakdown of the earth's ecosystems are unpredictable.

No wonder scientists were "surprised" to find that the size of individual fish in the world's oceans is likely to shrink by as much as one quarter in the coming decades. Chaos theory asserts that - as an increasing number of essential parts of a complex system break down - such as a stock market, climate or mechanical engine - the overall system is destabilized, and its exact behavior becomes impossible to predict. This event precedes what's known as "runaway," which occurs when a critical number of those parts stop working and irreversible "tipping points" have been passed.

Applied to the ecosystems in the earth's oceans, the number of variables that bear upon that species - temperature, salt levels and the state of species nearby or across the world, for example - becomes too great to be included in any predictive model.

The relationships between parts within the system become so complex and the changes occur so rapidly that scientists cannot keep up. By the time they identify a problem and propose a solution, their work becomes obsolete, their discoveries made irrelevant. This fact can make it difficult to trust their predictions. Scientists don't want to be seen as alarmist, so most will err on the conservative side of the estimates that result from their work.

Professor Callum Roberts of the University of York, who was not among the study's authors, said "Additional impacts of climate change such as the acidification of the ocean and reduction of nutrients in surface waters could decrease fish stocks even further. With 9 billion people expected bythat number will assuredly rise, as will the importance of our understanding of how ecological systems deteriorate.

Predictive models can remain meaningful in the short term, but over time, the growing number of variables that play a role in determining the fate of any plant or animal becomes virtually impossible to make sense of. In their efforts to understand the unraveling, scientists can only scramble to bring their models up to date as their subjects approach levels of complexity that lie beyond the power of any human to comprehend.

Aside from the unsettling fact that the systems that support human and other life are disintegrating at an increasing rate, no one can say for sure exactly what the world we're rushing into will look like. The French scientific research vessel Tara, which has been sailing the world's oceans for 2. The researchers had expected levels ten times lower. The Southern Ocean is rich in wildlife, from penguins and fish to seals and whales.

Chris Bowler, scientific co-ordinator of Tara Oceans said, "We had always assumed that this was a pristine environment, very little touched by human beings. The fact that we found these plastics is a sign that the reach of human beings is truly planetary in scale. In addition to plastic bags, bottles and other plastic items, the world's oceans also contain microscopic fragments that result from the degradation of larger items through years of exposure to seawater and sunlight.

In addition, synthetic fibres, largely made up of clothing residues from washing machines, also comprised a significant portion of the plastic fragments they found. Plastic pollution has many long-lasting and even fatal impacts on marine life. Birds, fish and other animals are known to regularly consume plastic waste, mistaking it for jellyfish or other prey, but it cannot be digested and remains in the stomach. Plastics also slowly release toxins and other chemicals, which can build up in the food chain.

Much of the waste in the Southern Ocean is thought to originate from Africa, South America or Australia. While it is too late to do much about the plastic already circulating in our oceans, which it will take thousands of years to degrade, we can take action against future pollution by advocating the use of biodegradable materials and by changing consumer attitudes and behaviour. But within the last million years, never has the rate of ocean acidification been comparable to the ongoing acidification," said Dr Schmidt of Bristol's School of Earth Sciences.

The most comparable event was 55 million years ago and was most likely 10 times slower than the current acidification. Dr Claudine Hauri, an oceanographer from the University of Alaska Fairbanks said: The chemistry of these waters is changing at such a rapid pace that organisms now experience conditions that are different from what they have experienced in the past.

And within about 20 or 30 years, the chemistry again will be different from that of even today. Carbon dioxide emissions have lowered the pH in the oceans, causing acidity to rise faster than in the past million years, according to researchers at Columbia University who have been studying organisms in Antarctic waters. The past million years is a period that includes four mass extinctions, researchers have found.

During those times, increases in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere warmed the planet and made the oceans more acidic. In the past increases in the atmosphere's carbon dioxide levels resulted from volcanoes and other natural causes, but today the increases are due to human activities, say the scientists. But if industrial carbon emissions continue at the current pace, we may lose organisms we care about - coral reefs, oysters, salmon.

Oceans absorb that carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, where it turns into a carbon acid. This dissolves the carbonates needed by some organisms, like corals, oysters or the tiny snails salmon eat.

The scientists review appeared March 1 in the journal Science, The closest modern parallel was about 56 millions ago in what is called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum PETMwhen atmospheric carbon concentrations doubled, pushing up global temperatures.

Extinctions in the deep sea accompanied this shift. This story also appeared on PBS NEWSHOUR. A related story can be found on American Public Media's Marketplace. Fishing villages near the Danajon Double Barrier Reef off of Bohol Island in the southern Philippines are embracing birth control for the first time, not just as a means to plan their families but as a path to long-term food security, ensuring that future generations enjoy the same abundance of fish.

The area is one of the richest marine biodiversity hot spots in the world. More than a million people depend on these fishing grounds for their main source of protein and livelihoods. As the population of this area has nearly tripled in the last three decades, the effect on the reef has been devastating. Illegal fishing has become rampant. Many use dynamite or cyanide, indiscriminately killing everything within their reach.

The shift to smaller families in the rural fishing village Humayhumay is already paying dividends. Fishermen have created a marine preserve to help revive fish stocks. With smaller families, thinking about future generations is a luxury fishermen can afford. Every year the Philippines, now with million people, adds about 2 million more mouths to feed and isn't expected to stabilize its population untilat million.

The country is already beyond its carrying capacity. Family planning is helpful because if you control the number of your children, you don't need as many fish to support your family. If you have many children, it's difficult to support them.

It's really, really different when you have a small family. Sometimes, we would only eat once a day because we were so poor. We couldn't go to school. I did not finish my school because there were just so many of us. A community-based family planning programs has made birth control options like the pill accessible and affordable - at about 70 cents a month. Distributors are able to sell pills and condoms anytime. They are as easy as buying soft drinks or matches.

PATH Foundation Philippines, a group funded mostly through USAID, has made this possible, placing its emphasis on local partners and bringing access to the people. In just six years since the program was first established here, family sizes have dropped from as many as 12 children to a maximum of about four today.

The program shows how closely tied family planning is with environmental conservation and putting food on the table. Jason and Crisna Bostero, both practicing Catholics, don't see a conflict between their religious beliefs and family planning. For them, it's about something much more immediate, like what kind of future they're going to pass on to their two children.

This is not an easy way to earn a living. Outside of Humayhumay, where birth control remains largely out of reach, the struggle to put food on the table from one day to the next dominates life. People have to collect government assistance checks for food. Countries like Thailand and Indonesia have largely avoided this scene, thanks to state-sponsored family planning programs.

But Congressman Walden Bello says in the Philippines, any efforts to do the same have faced stiff resistance. Recently, it even threatened the president with excommunication for supporting the bill. Filipino Archbishop Emeritus Oscar Cruz says "if you have more mouths to feed, then produce more food to eat!

Not the other way around. But trying to produce more food tests the limits of ecosystems, both on land and sea. Today, the Philippines imports more rice than any other nation on the planet. And according to the World Bank, every major species of fish here shows signs of severe overfishing. Technological advances to boost the food supply have not kept pace with the Philippine's surging population growth.

More than half of all pregnancies in the Philippines are unintended, according to the Guttmacher Instititute. The future of the people in the Philippines could easily be overwhelmed by outside forces, in a world that's projected to have 9 billion mouths to feed by the middle of the century. The officials don't enforce the laws.

We were visiting the Greek island of Mykonos while on tour with the Durango Choral Society. We walked along the harbor with our guide, David, admiring the many small fishing boats.

He explained facets of the failing Greek economy as well as the ancient and modern sites on this beautiful island. The Aegean Sea around Mykonos was so overfished, David said, that there were few fish left to catch.

We found proof that David was correct when we sat down to eat. Restaurants, even those overlooking the beautiful blue Aegean, had menus that listed few seafood dishes. Any seafood was prohibitively expensive since it had been caught in distant seas. The situation that we encountered in Greece is a good illustration of the "tragedy of the commons".

That tragedy can occur when a limited resource is open to uncontrolled use by many people. Any one user may think he can benefit from taking as much of the resource as possible. This behavior is rational only in the narrow sense of self-interest. Regrettably, unbridled use of a resource is likely to lead to its depletion.

The term "commons" referred to pastureland that was available for everyone to graze his sheep in old England.

Now it includes many different vital resources such as the air we breathe, the water we drink and the fish in the Aegean. Most of us learned to share in kindergarten. Unfortunately, some adults never mastered that lesson or have forgotten it. When there are many people using the same resource, any person who takes more than his share may deprive others of their fair share. Even worse, selfish people can deplete the resource, so eventually no one benefits from it. In the case of fishing off Mykonos, there had been plenty of seafood for centuries.

In the past the boats and fishing techniques only allowed small, sustainable catches, so the small proportion of sea life that ended up in nets was quickly replaced.

Now, with more fishermen and more effective fishing techniques and many more mouths to feed, the fish supply has been exhausted. The Greek government has tried to prevent depletion by having a "no fish" zone, with poor results. People don't seem to pay attention to the law, or the reason that it is needed. Human population growth is one factor leading to the tragedy of the commons: Ironically, some of the pollutants we have unintentionally added to drinking water may serve as a feedback mechanism to slow human population growth.

Endocrine disruptors are chemicals that have unintended hormonal effects. They are found in much of our country's drinking water. Some come from insecticides and other agricultural chemicals. Many plastics contain BPA, which has undesirable effects. Another source is the waste of women taking hormones. These chemicals have been shown to produce fish and other animals with sexual aberrations.

It is possible that endocrine disruptors will lead to decreased human fertility. The amount of fresh water on the planet is limited and, in some cases, is very slow to be replenished. The Ogallala aquifer is an example of a resource that is being used in an unsustainable manner. Much of the food grown in our country's midwestern breadbasket depends on water from this aquifer.

Tragically, there are some places in eastern Colorado and in other states that rely on the Ogallala where the water table has dropped 40 feet in just 15 years! As our human population has grown, the apparent size of the commons has shrunk. Although the first few wells in the Ogallala made little difference to the water table, now we seem to be sucking it dry.

Dumping waste into a river or the atmosphere made little difference with few people and fewer factories, but these resources have become toxic in our populous, industrialized nation.

We are learning the problems that can be caused by abusing the commons.

UK BAP priority bird species

The people who will suffer the most may be those who come after us, the "seventh generation" in the Iroquois law. Unless we think and plan ahead, our progeny will not have the use of many of the resources that we have enjoyed.

An administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration NOAA said that coastal development, overfishing and climate change are creating a "perfect storm" for the world's coral reefs, nearly three-quarters of which are now at risk of serious degradation, a top federal environmental official warned this week at the unveiling of a comprehensive new report.

The updated report added in global threats from climate and rising ocean acidity caused by carbon dioxide pollution to the list of threats to coral reefs. Inone of the warmest years on record, spiking water temperatures damaged coral on a global scale rarely witnessed before. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions, especially carbon dioxide, is absolutely necessary to prevent a lot of the dire situations presented in the report.

The Atlantic blue fin tuna are delicious and may be on the brink of extinction due to overfishing. The European Union agreed to propose protecting them as an endangered species. Blue fin tuna have been eaten for centuries, but in the s, demand and prices soared, particularly in Japan.

As a result, stocks, especially of large, breeding age fish, have plummeted, and international conservation concerns have increased. This tuna is one of the most highly prized fish used in Japanese raw fish dishes. Prices were highest in the late s and s. The practice of tuna farming has brought down prices. The EU agreement came ahead of a meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species CITES that will take place from March 13 to March 25 to consider a number of species, including blue fin tuna, elephants and polar bears.

The ambassadors attached a number of conditions, including a one year delay to the ban on fishing, and an opt out for fishermen using small boats to supply local markets. Malta voted against the proposed ban while Sweden and Austria abstained. Environmental groups said the EU had not done enough to reduce over sized blue fin tuna fishing fleets. Over eight years the EU blue fin tuna fishing industry received subsidies totaling Several Arab countries joined Japan in arguing it would hurt poor fishing nations and was not supported by sound science.

Supporters of the ban, including the European Union and the United States, say it is necessary this is a migratory species that swims from the western Atlantic to the Mediterranean.

There is also a growing threat from illegal fishing fleets and the failure of existing measures to keep the population sustainable. Undersea photojournalist Brian Skerry sees the oceans in crisis: North Atlantic right whales, once so plentiful that "a man could almost walk across Cape Cod Bay upon their backs," now number on the planet. Much of this has taken place since mechanized fishing. Daniel Pauly, leader of the Sea Around Us Project at the University of British Columbia, reports that, humans have "reduced the populations of large commercial fish.

The documentary End of the Line says: Skerry has photographed underwater around the world. In Mexico he found that the reefs were anemic. They were highly overfished. They consisted of a lot of dead coral, from warming and bleaching.

They'd also sustained heavy hurricane damage. In New England he noticed that the huge schools of herring and pollock that he saw in the '70s and early '80s weren't there anymore. Skerry has witnessed excessive and destructive fishing like catching shrimp. In the process, everything else - all the little stuff that lives on the bottom, the sponges and the coral and all the habitat for baby animals - you wipe all that out.

To catch one pound of shrimp, we might kill 12 pounds of other animals that get thrown back into the sea as by-catch. The giant bluefin tuna continue to grow their entire life. So their stocks have plummeted over 90 percent in just the last 30 years. The industry has been struggling - severely curtailing fishing quotas and limiting time at sea in order to help replenish those decimated species.

Some have been rebuilt: There have been quite a few success stories. Many were renamed so that they could be marketed: Yet even as America struggles to manage its depleted stocks - and those independent fishermen are subjected to ever more draconian regulations - corporate overfishing continues at alarming rates in places such as the European Union and Asia, with governments showing little inclination to rein it in.

Another problem, says Skerry - is ocean acidification. That's when an excess of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, soaked up by the ocean, leads to a decrease in the water's pH level, stripping the sea of carbonate ions, which are crucial for calcification.

The result, says Skerry, is that it "wipes out things like coral reefs - anything with a calcium structure, including shellfish and these little mollusks that are consumed by a lot of other animals. Meanwhile, Annala is noticing other changes. That's becoming fresher and cooler as the Greenland ice cap melts. Rothschild says that that "puddle of fresh water" floating atop the briny Atlantic "prevents the typical overturn of nutrients going up and down and recycling to make phytoplankton and zooplankton.

If this is a recurring phenomena, it's going to change the productivity of the northwest Atlantic in ways that we don't know yet. Skerry says the Obama administration's gestures and rhetoric so far have been encouraging.

But the unfortunate reality is there's so much on their plate right now. People's retirement money is vanished and they're losing their jobs and we're gonna send another 40, troops to Afghanistan and there's terrorism. The Humpback whale could be removed from the protections of the Endangered Species Act, or downlisted to "threatened" status, if the National Marine Fisheries Service finds that their numbers have increased sufficiently.

Humpbacks were listed as endangered inbut recent surveys have found that humpback whale populations are generally on an upward trend, up to an estimated 20, in the North Pacific now. Miyoko Sakashita, oceans program director at the Center for Biological Diversity said: Direct threats to the species include entanglement in fishing gear, collisions with ships, offshore oil development, and military sonar.

Nearly every marine animal studied has had an adverse response to acidification. The National Marine Fisheries Service is soliciting information and accepting comments on the humpback-whale status review until October 11, More people require more vehicles which emit more carbon dioxide and create other impacts on the planet unless something is done quickly.

After World War II, population growth and rising incomes drove up the demand for seafood. The oceanic fish catch climbed from 19 million tons in to 93 million tons in The human appetite for seafood is outgrowing the sustainable yield of oceanic fisheries.

Oceanic harvests expanded as new technologies evolved, ranging from sonar to driftnets. The year-old cod fishery of Canada failed in the early s, putting some 40, fishers and fish processors out of work.

Fisheries off the coast of New England soon followed. And in Europe, cod fisheries are in decline, approaching a free fall. Negotiating catch limits at sustainable levels can be difficult. But these and subsequent cuts have not been sufficient to arrest the decline of the region's fisheries. With restrictions on the catch in EU waters, the fishing fleet has turned to the west coast of Africa. They are competing there with fleets from China, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and Taiwan.

Unfortunately for the Africans, their fisheries too are collapsing. Well over half of the mangrove forests in tropical and subtropical countries have been lost and the loss of coastal wetlands in industrial countries is even greater.

Damage to coral reefs from higher ocean temperatures and acidification caused by higher atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, pollution and sedimentation, are threatening these breeding grounds for fish. Pollution is taking a devastating toll, illustrated by the dead zones created by nutrient runoff from fertilizer and sewage.

The Mississippi River carries nutrients from the Corn Belt and sewage from cities along its route into the Gulf of Mexico. The nutrient surge creates huge algal blooms that then die and decompose, consuming the free oxygen in the water, leading to the death of fish.

This creates a dead zone each summer in the Gulf that can reach the size of New Jersey. For decades governments have tried to save specific fisheries by restricting the catch of individual species. Sometimes this worked, sometimes it failed and fisheries collapsed.

Support for the creation of marine reserves has been gaining momentum. These reserves, where fishing is restricted, serve as natural hatcheries. Coastal nations pledged to create national networks of marine parks. Other measures are to reduce the nutrient flows from fertilizer runoff and untreated sewage that create the world's or so dead zones. There are now so many fishing trawlers that their catch potential is nearly double any yield the oceans can sustain. Immediately after WW2 I was developing sonar systems and spent many weeks up in the Arctic on deep sea trawlers.

I vividly remember the enormous size of the catches after the fishing had halted for the war years. FAO estimates that one-quarter of the world's fisheries are over-exploited and facing depletion; an additional half are being fished at their maximum capacity.

Regulation hasn't stopped destruction of the world's fisheries. So in the s, environmentalists began to enlist consumer choice in the fight for more sustainable fishing. Some eco-minded entrepreneurs have created businesses aimed at promoting sustainable seafood. Some of the leaders in the sustainable seafood industry are based the Bay Area. Environmental groups in general consider a fishery is sustainable if the population of that kind of fish is allowed to maintain a healthy level, and fishing methods don't damage the ocean environment or other marine species.

The fishery prevents overfishing and allows collection of data on the fish population. The nonprofit Marine Stewardship Council provides a seal of approval to seafood that meets its sustainability standards. The Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch publishes wallet-size cards that give a green, yellow or red light to different kinds of seafood. Fishing wiped out Atlantic Bluefin tuna in Northern Europe 50 years ago.

Ongoing pressure is pushing the species to extinction. Every summer in the early s, Northern European waters teemed with Atlantic Bluefin tuna. Few could catch the fish until the s how to make counterfeit cash s when bigger, faster boats were designed.

The Bluefin population crashed in the s and more than 40 years later it still hasn't recovered despite a no-fishing ban for the past 15 years. The Atlantic Bluefin fishery is regulated by the International Commission for the Conservation of the Atlantic Tuna ICCAT that set a quota of 29, tonnes, for the Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic. Environmental groups say the ICCAT quota is twice what is sustainable.

Moreover illegal fishing is restaurants open anzac day perth 2016 and an independent study revealed the annual tuna catch approached 50, tonnes. The largest population breeds are in the Mediterranean Sea, another is found in the western Atlantic the third is found in the South Atlantic and is considered to be an endangered species.

Tagging data provides new evidence that mixing is occurring in the northern waters of the eastern Atlantic and western and eastern stocks of north Atlantic Bluefin mingle in the central Atlantic. That means tuna hunters in the North Atlantic are likely harvesting the increasingly rare western Atlantic Bluefin and counting them as eastern Atlantic Bluefin.

Because breeding is a high-stress time for tuna, closure of breeding grounds to tuna fishing might not be enough. Researchers found that a majority of Bluefins gravitated to the Florida straits and the western part of the Gulf of Mexico for breeding. All fishing should be banned near their breeding grounds during the breeding season.

The oversized and well-financed tuna fleet can easily take 50, tonnes in the Mediterranean and East Atlantic, despite a quota allowing only 29, tonnes. The only way to guarantee a reduction in fishing effort and facilitate stock real time stock trades is to impose clubs open on anzac day melbourne ban during the month of June.

Unsustainable fishing practices deplete targeted species, sea birds, turtles, and other marine life, while destroying deep-sea reefs. It was assumed that ocean species had boundless capacity to recover from overfishing. Industrial fishing put the livelihood of tens of millions of russian stock index historical chart fishermen at risk while threatening the primary source of protein for some million people worldwide.

Today some of the world's largest environmental groups are focused on marine life and oceans, with sustainable fisheries management.

Conservation groups are working with governments to establish marine reserves, ban destructive fishing practices, protect key species, and educate consumers.

While the world is willing scottish biodiversity strategy indicators protect elephants by banning the ivory trade, we're not there yet with commercial fish species. The trouble with bluefin is they are valuable in the Japanese sashimi market. That means we are facing the very cheap stocks with good dividends of hunting this animal to biological extinction.

It is the most valuable fish in the sea: Today fishermen cannot even catch the quota the government gives them, which is symptomatic of a collapsing fishery, like the North Atlantic cod. The trouble is that the ocean has always been an open access resource. You get big catches for a few years but then the populations' crash and the fishing communities crash along with them.

Commercial fishing is much more difficult to address because there is a huge industry lobby. Subsidies are why we have too how to farm gil in final fantasy xiii boats chasing fish. The acquisition of the boats and equipment is subsidized. There is a diesel fuel tax rebate and all kinds of subsidies for commercial fishing, especially in Asia.

The idea is to create economic incentives for sustainable fishing and conservation of the ocean. If consumers and businesses data entry jobs from home nashik preference to sustainable fisheries, they send a powerful signal that there is a reward for improving fishing practices.

Many of the nation's biggest seafood buyers are now making commitments to sustainable seafood. The jury is still out on whether sustainable seafood can supply the biggest buyers in the nation. Much of imported farmed seafood is unsafe but the demand for fresh seafood has pushed many wild fisheries into crisis mode. This is what we can expect when a wild species is on the brink of extinction. While freshwater fish have been farmed in the US, the offshore aquaculture industry is still in its infancy.

Almost all farmed salmon are raised in offshore open net pens, where concentrated waste decimates the ecology of the coast. These salmon can escape and breed with local species, and throw off the wild breed's ability to reproduce. Cramped pens necessitate the use of antibiotics. Red dye is fed to the fish to give the meat an appealing color.

All of these are reasons that salmon farming has been considered unsustainable. Salmon farmers harvest natural wild fish to feed their caged fish. The farming of salmon means raising meat by feeding it meat. The salmon industry figures it's 1-to-1, still a wasteful ratio if you consider time, labor, land and transportation. Every time you eat a piece of farmed salmon, it takes away food from the wild fish trying to survive in the ocean.

A few salmon farms in Europe claim to raise the fish sustainably. Those include Loch Duart salmon from Scotland which live a robust life, have plenty of room to grow, and is fed from sustainable sources that mimic the natural diet of the wild. Loch Duart does not raise fish in high-density pens, allows areas to lie fallow in alternate years and does not use antibiotics, the company says.

Yet easy way to succeed in forex conservancy organization, Seafood Watch puts all farm-raised salmon in the "avoid" category. However, some question the ratings. While farmed clams, mussels and oysters are designated "best choice," no differentiation is made between regionally raised shellfish and oysters flown in from France and Australia, which cost much more in dollars and energy.

Conservancy organizations fear that NOAA is not taking precautions to make sure that offshore farms raising carnivorous fish do not dot our shorelines, damage ecology and deplete the oceans of wild fish.

To pay for building new offshore facilities, entrepreneurs, are looking at farming the high-priced carnivorous species, such as tuna, which can require from 10 to 25 pounds of wild-caught small fish to produce 1 pound of edible meat. Tuna ranching in the Mediterranean is a disaster in the making, because they're harvesting juvenile wild tuna for fattening, and you have a fishery where both the juvenile and adult tuna are being taken. We need more aquaculture to meet global seafood supplies, and species that can be farmed in sustainable ways.

Most of what we eat is farmed from China. The aquaculture practices damage the environment, and many use additives and antibiotics banned in the US.

A new infrastructure must be put in place and several entrepreneurs are experimenting with more sustainable closed aquaculture systems. Seafood designated as "good" and "best" are raised by more environmentally sustainable methods, including proceses that use closed recirculating systems and enclosed ponds.

European waters are in trouble. It's been known for years that European seas are suffering from pollution, over-fishing and other environmental pressures.

But now, growing affluence in Europe is increasing the degradation of the water forex markets online currency converter the continent.

The survey focused on the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea, the Mediterranean Sea and the North Atlantic. They found that more wealth in Europe has contributed to the environmental deterioration of European waters.

In every sea, there was serious damage due to the pace of coastal development, the way we transport our goods and the way we produce our food on land as well as the sea. The study focused on four interrelated problems: Researchers wanted to look at the impact modern lifestyles have are having.

As affluence increases, so too does the amount of meat in European diets and an increase in the amount of farmland needed. The rise in fertilizer use ups the amount of nitrogen and phosphorus reaching European waters, which can cause vast algae blooms in addition to reducing water quality. Increased animal husbandry, results in an increase in the amount of ammonia released into the air which finds its way into the seas. More money also means an increase in seaside homes and holiday resorts, particularly along the Mediterranean.

Road how to make big money fast illegally resort construction limits coastal habitats for fish. More demand for khanna forex pitampura and increased shipping have put pressure on sea life. Controlling catch limits alone will not put a dent in the problem. Global warming could cause a drop in the number of Arctic cod, which are a key component of the Arctic food web.

The Arctic cod is prey for seals, narwhals and salmon in the Arctic, but global warming could be shaking up the food web and starving the cod because of shrinking and shifting pack ice. Global warming is pulling the rug out from beneath the Arctic's food supply because the survival of many plants and animals depends on the explosive summer bloom of marine plants under the sea ice.

With more sea ice melting the plants' bloom cycle is likely to be disrupted, jeopardizing the species that depend on it.

In Canada, narwhals feed predominantly on the Arctic cod. They are also food for Atlantic salmon, Greenland halibut and Arctic char.

Home - Suzi Love

The first action is to reduce pollution, especially toxins that build up over time in plants and animals. Juvenile Arctic cod are vulnerable to toxins and oil spills. Overfishing is impacting the food supply for seals and whales and increasingly ice-free waters will open up new potential fishing grounds. Commercial harvests should be closely monitored. The chief cause of the lack of fish is the overfishing that has grown in the past decades.

I worked in the commercial fishing fleet just after WW2 and spent months in the arctic. Fish "hauls' after WW2 were larger than ever seen as the fishing grounds had been empty during the war. Countries seeking a ban on bottom trawling in unregulated international waters failed to get UN support.

Canada cashmere yarn discount been argued investment options for nri in india stronger management would be scottish life pension investment options effective than a ban.

But environmentalists are dismayed. Bottom trawling causes irreparable harm to deep-sea ecosystems. Instead of the ban on bottom trawling on the high seas, the countries agreed to enhance protection measures under regional fisheries management organizations RFMO. They will decide how assessments and enforcement would be carried out. For unregulated areas national governments are directed to police their own vessels, applying the same standards.

If harm to the ocean is found occurring, governments would apply restrictions at their own discretion. The agreement applies to countries that don't belong to the RMO's and will protect fish stocks and sensitive areas.

But the Ecology Action Centre said the decision would allow trawlers to continue ravaging the ocean floor. Responsible fishing nations will bring forward precautionary and targeted regulations that will govern their fishing vessels. Just another example of how regulation fails to mitigate the problems of overpopulation. We assume there will always be another species to exploit after we've completely gone through the last one, but unless we change the way we manage the ocean species, this is the last century of wild seafood.

Historical records show declining yields, in step with declining species diversity. Zones of biodiversity loss also tended to see more beach closures, blooms of algae, and coastal flooding. Experiments in small, contained ecosystems show that reductions in diversity tend to bring reductions in the size and robustness of local fish stocks. The final part of the jigsaw is data from areas where fishing has been banned or heavily restricted.

These show that protection brings back biodiversity within the zone, and restores populations of fish just outside. Sl exchange stock market functions of nairobi learning that in the oceans, species are very strongly linked to each other. The study attributes damage to the cumulative harm done across the board. The benefits of marine-protected areas are clear in a few swing point forex there's no doubt that protecting areas leads to a lot more fish and larger fish, and less vulnerability.

Protecting stocks demands the political will, lacking in Europe, where politicians have ignored recommendations to halt the North Sea cod fishery year after year. Without a ban, the North Sea stocks could follow the Grand Banks cod of eastern Canada into terminal decline. I was working on a North Sea trawler a few years after World War II and the catches were the largest ever seen, the crew told me.

This was due to the halt in trawling for about 4 years during the forex webinars archive. One wonders just how long it would take for the fisheries to regain their volume if in rotation we halted fishing in the various areas? An international team of researchers launched the Bahamas Biocomplexity Project--an interdisciplinary approach to ecosystem management to serve as a model for coral reef conservation.

The approach recognizes that natural and human systems are linked, and solutions must transcend traditional boundaries. The Bahamas Biocomplexity Project, in addition to using scientific tools, underwater surveys and population genetics, conduct surveys to assess local attitudes toward conservation, as well as explaining their findings to local decision makers.

A study focused on the Exuma Cays Land and Sea Park, which was struck by a mysterious disease that virtually wiped out a species of sea urchin that feeds on algae.

The urchins had played a vital role in the reef ecosystem by controlling make money in plants vs zombies spread binary options trading monthly income seaweed.

With the urchins gone, the job of chief seaweed grazer was taken over by the parrotfish which in turn, are preyed upon by large carnivores, whose numbers had increased since the imposition of a fishing ban. Buy mining shares australian gold, Nassau grouper is seven times more abundant inside the park than in three comparable areas.

Researchers found that small species of parrotfish were smaller than usual, suggesting that grouper predators were picking off the largest members of their populations. In contrast, the number of big parrotfish increased apparently in response to protection from fish traps. The study concluded that seaweed grazing had doubled because of the burgeoning population of big parrotfish.

Parks protecting fishes may also have beneficial effects on corals, by enhancing grazing and thereby contributing to the ability of reefs to bounce back from disturbances. One group team compared the DNA of staghorn corals collected from nine reefs. The results show that genetic family lines can be quite distinct on reefs as close as two kilometers.

All reefs more than kilometers apart were genetically distinct. Some marine ecologists advocate restoring dying reefs, but that approach is rarely cost-effective, with a growth rate of about one centimeter per year.

Social scientists working within the Bahamas Biocomplexity Project, noted: There is a special relationship between the people and the sea. Tourism is based on environmental protection. Three researchers analyzed catches of five deepwater species from the northwest Atlantic and found that populations of all five had fallen precipitously. Similar trends have been seen in European waters. Much of the blame is being put on commercial trawlers. Conservationists worry that because deepwater fish live long lives, and cheap yorkie poo puppies for sale in nj take up to 25 years to sexually mature, overfishing can wipe them out.

This brings back a very personal memory. In the 's I was developing deep water fishing sonar and made frequent trips on deep sea trawlers to the arctic. Fishing after WW2, during which time little deep sea fishing was carried out, was fantastic. The volume of fish caught was beyond anyone's memory.

I well remember the trawler sitting stationary for how to open a binary option demo account 24 hours while the fish captured by one haul of the net forex order book trading processed. Perhaps "No Fishing" for five to ten years would allow the oceans to regenerate the shoals of fish.

The Bush administration proposed legislation to overhaul management of the nation's fisheries, by giving regulators greater flexibility and encouraging them to privatize fisheries.

Some environmental groups applauded privatization, others said the bill would weaken conservation rules. Bush's legislation would amend the Fishery Conservation and Management Act, which was last updated in The Senate's Commerce Committee has been working on a draft of its own bill.

The administration's plan would double by the fisheries that are privatized where access is limited to those who own allocated shares, that can be bought and sold, of the annual catch. Some environmental groups, support privatization because it gives fishermen a financial incentive to conserve fidh stocks. In fisheries where such programs have been implemented, fishermen have enjoyed higher profits, lower costs, longer fishing seasons and a more stable industry.

Best ways to make money non member rs3 program has been popular in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, but controversial 60 second binary option platforms queen New England because of fears that it would allow corporations to take stock markets for beginners pdf the fisheries.

The goal is to encourage eight new fisheries to use privatization programs. In New England, one could be on Cape Cod, where fishermen use hooks and gill nets to catch cod and haddock in near-shore waters. The Bush plan would revoke the requirement that all fisheries be restored to healthy levels in 10 years and limits the number of fishing days given to New England groundfish boats. The Bush plan would allow regional councils to address the needs of fishing general atomics aeronautical stock symbol when rebuilding stocks.

The change would allow fishermen to catch more fish while stocks are rebuilding, and conservation groups worry that this would increase the chance that a species could collapse. Some species, such as Georges Bank cod, have forex trading optionshouse recovered since the mids.

Fishermen continue to take too many adult cod and not enough juvenile fish are surviving. A professor of natural resources said the new numbers show the government needs to impose further restrictions on fishing cod. But a spokeswoman for the New England Fishery Management Council said officials did not expect the rebuilding plan to show results for several more months.

The average New England fisherman can take groundfish 53 days forex trading halal hai ya haram year, down from 88 days in Cod once abounded off the Massachusetts coas, but fell in the mids because of overfishing.

Conservationists said the declining numbers mean federal authorities should protect nursery habitat as well as adult fish. A spokeswoman for NOAA's Fisheries Service, said under federal law regulators have to allow overfishing at times to minimize a rebuilding plan's impact on local commercial fishermen.

She added that this week's scientific findings are preliminary. The National Marine Fisheries Service has released new guidelines for restoring depleted fish stocks, but some worry the rules unduly favor the fishing industry.

Current rules mandate that regional fisheries managers aim to restore stocks within 10 years. The proposed rules would let them devise timelines for restoration based on how long it would take to rebound if there were no fishing, plus the average time it takes the species to reach spawning age.

This may lengthen the time managers have to restore some stocks. The new rules would also allow coordinated management of species that live, swim, and get netted together, assuming that fish with similar life histories will respond to similar management plans.

But species might be minor to a commercial fishery but still play a key role in an ecosystem. Regulators voted to impose a permanent ban on trawling in depths beyond fathoms in nearlysquare miles of Pacific waters off the West Coast.

The regulations apply to waters that extend from three miles to miles off the coasts of California, Oregon and Washington. It is aimed at protecting coral beds, kelp forests, rocky reefs and other sensitive fish habitat.

Trawl fishermen were skeptical it would boost declining stocks of groundfish but did not think the ban would hurt their livelihoods because most of the areas are too deep for trawlers. Environmentalists say trawling destroys delicate sea-floor habitat, but fishermen say there's no evidence that trawl fishing has affected groundfish stocks that make up West Coast commercial fishing. The council's decision follows a similar move by the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, which regulates waters off the coast of Alaska.

They voted to ban trawling in more thansquare miles off the Aleutian Islands. But the trade may empty the waters of this master of the sea. In the last 35 years, exploding markets have devastated many fisheries. Most vulnerable is the population that breeds in the Gulf of Mexico.

This was underscored by researchers who have tracked fish using electronic tags. The tuna that spawn in the west are further threatened by an ever-broadening fishery, all to supply the Japanese sushi trade.

The new study is based on a decade-long effort to implant hundreds of sophisticated electronic tags in the giant fish that are beginning to reveal their ocean paths.

In this study, fish were tagged with devices that continually record body and water temperature, depth and daylight. The team showed that there appear to be distinct populations of bluefin, but when the fish disperse across to feed, they mingle, rendering the management boundary, which runs along the 45th meridian, relatively meaningless.

Big quotas, granted for two decades to countries fishing east of the line, probably added pressure to the ailing fx rate gbp usd historical bluefin population. Spawning "hot spots" overlap areas where boats, using long lines of baited hooks, pursue another tuna species. When big adult bluefin get caught, the warm water and their metabolism can push them beyond their physiological limits and many die before they can be released.

Recommended are seasonal bans on long-line fishing in spawning hot spots in the gulf and tighter controls on fishing in the Central Atlantic. American boat owners say that restrictions on long-line fishing in the Gulf are sufficient. Long-liners in the area use lightweight hooks that hold smaller yellowfin but are designed to uncoil under the powerful tug of a bluefin. Block said the same smaller hooks caught and killed a substantial number of bluefin.

York stock brokerage biggest question is whether the new information can change an international regulatory regime that almost everyone, agrees is broken. A senior fisheries official from Japan acknowledged that the existing system had failed. He said that eastern catch limits needed to be better enforced, and a particular problem was the increased penning of Mediterranean tuna, which disrupts spawning.

Many scientists and scholars who study tuna fishing said they doubted much would change. Under the longstanding division of the Atlantic bluefin population, Europe has had the advantage, with quotas of more than 30, metric tons of bluefin a year; less than a tenth that is allocated for western waters.

Several experts said that Dr.

Scotland's biodiversity strategy indicators - Scottish Natural Heritage

Block's maps, showing the movements of some tuna for more than four years, were sufficiently concrete that they could force an end to the prolonged stalemate.

The bottom of Cape Cod Bay is saturated with sound that is part of an ever louder man-made din that's filling the world's oceans, and some say harming marine life. Whale beachings have been linked to sonar blasts, but a broader concern is rising levels of background noise generated by commercial shipping.

Marine life uses sound for navigation and communication and scientists believe the spreading "acoustic smog" is affecting feeding, breeding and other crucial activities. Evidence is scant of the real effects of sound and even with new technology, ocean animals are hard to track. No system exists to monitor ocean sounds worldwide, and the data is often taken from a small number of sites that measure only certain frequencies.

Underwater sound also seems to affect different animals in completely different ways. An acoustics researcher at the NOAA said better research is urgently needed. Sound carries farther and faster in water than air and through the ages, marine animals have learned to take advantage of the ocean's natural sound stages. Whales talk about basic things like where the best food or breeding is.

They even seem to to produce the most intricate songs. Some animals use the ocean's "sound channels" to communicate over thousands of miles. Animals have learned that, at a certain depth, the sound bounds ahead with little resistance. Huge increases in commercial shipping have coincided with increased ocean noise.

Between andthe world shipping fleet has increased from 85 million tons to million tons and the background noise has increased roughly 15 decibels. There's evidence marine mammals are changing their sound patterns, which could show their normal communication has been disrupted. Some advocate installing quieter propellers in new ships, which would reduce noise and also increase the efficiency by which ships move through water. Retrofitting current ships would be expensive, and the benefit is uncertain.

Sound is perceived by ocean animals so differently that it's almost like a different sense, making it hard to apply what we know about the effects of certain decibel levels to ocean life. Thirty-four species of marine mammals inhabit the Gulf of California, one of the world's most important nursery and feeding areas for porpoises, dolphins and whales.

For millions of years, the sediments and freshwater of the Colorado River fed into the Gulf of California. During the 20th century, however, heavy water diversion depleted the river, cutting it off almost entirely from the sea.

No more than vaquita marinas survive, the last remaining habitat of this small porpoise. Eight were reported dead inbut estimates put the total number of annual deaths at roughly The Gulf provides half of the Mexixo's fish supply including sharks, northern milkfish, Spanish mackerel, corvine and others.

Each year the humpback whale, California gray whale, manta ray and leatherback turtle visit the Gulf, where abundant nutrients can be found year-round.

Rich food sources, powerful tides and shallow waters make the Upper Gulf one of the most robust marine ecosystems in the world. Local communities that are reliant on the sport-fishing industry include Cabo San Lucas, La Paz, Loreto, Guaymas and Mulege. Bottom trawling consists of dragging a heavy net across the bottom of the ocean, to snag fish that hover close to the seabed.

The Deep Sea Conservation Coalition is forexticket correlation the call for a moratorium on the practice and says the technique is doing harm to fragile ecosystems by gouging out corals. It has been likened to fishing with a bulldozer.

A single net can snare a tonne and a half of option trading for beginners books corals that grow very slowly, every hour. Some of them off Europe are 8, years old and may take hundreds or thousands of years to recover - if at all.

The fleets are after valuable fish species that hug the underwater mountains. Scientists fear bottom-trawling will destroy many of the reefs before researchers can study them. Much of the life on seamounts has yet to be catalogued. Discussions are underway at the UN on fisheries and ocean managemen that will result in resolutions next month. The Coalition is urging the UN to declare a global moratorium until the international community decides how to manage deep-sea fisheries.

The construction of liquid natural gas terminals could damage commercial fishing in the Gulf of Mexico. Concerns forced the Coast Guard to suspend the permit for at least two terminals off the Louisiana coast. The problem occurs when the liquid natural gas LNGis heated to gaseous form with Gulf water containing fish and crustacean eggs and larvae. LNG is cooled to minus degrees to turn it into a liquid to be shipped in tankers from wells around the world.

The terminals pump seawater and LNG through a piece of equipment where warm Gulf water scottish biodiversity strategy indicators the liquid, which vaporizes into a gas. The water would be cooled in the process, and if the organisms are not killed by the temperature drop, they won't survive the pump machinery or chemicals used to keep the pipes clean.

This system would dump the water, 20 degrees to 30 degrees cooler, back into the Gulf, where it could continue to stun and kill sea life. Most of the companies choosing this system have said using a closed-loop system consumes too much LNG as a heat source and undercut the financial viability of the projects and increase air pollution.

Sierra Club officials say approval could threaten the fishing industry. The risk of wiping out species of important fish in the Gulf, is too great eoc money making guide allow further approvals.

In several cases, applicants failed to identify the economic impact of lost fisheries. Flow-through systems should be avoided in favor of closed-loop systems. The locations of the terminals are a problem as most are offshore of the estuaries where fish live and reproduce. With 15 LNG terminals proposed for the Gulf, officials have become concerned about the potential effects as they don't know enough about how the terminals will affect the environment.

Federal scientists warn that liquid natural gas terminals could damage commercial fishing in the Gulf of Mexico and force the Coast Guard to suspend permits for forex ireland terminals off the Louisiana coast.

When the liquid natural gas is heated back into a gas the process sucks in Gulf water containing potentially millions of fish and crustacean eggs and larvae. The terminals would pump the seawater and natural gas through a piece of equipment where the warm Gulf water would vaporize the liquid into a gas and the pga championship 2016 money prize money would be rapidly cooled.

If the organisms are not killed by the temperature drop, they won't survive the pump machinery or the chemicals used to clean the inside of the pipes. The system would then dump the water, 20 degrees to 30 degrees cooler, back into the Gulf, where it could continue to harm sea life. The process also would kill organisms that are food for fish. Using a less-damaging closed-loop system consumes too much of the natural gas as a heat source and might undercut the financial viability of the projects and increase air pollution.

It is the money these terminals generate that is attractive to officials in the Gulf Coast states. Sierra Club officials say approval could threaten the fishing industry and NOAA officials say the risk of wiping out entire species of commercially important fish is too great to allow further approval and applicants failed to identify the economic impact of lost fisheries.

Concerns must be weighed in light of an lack of basic information about the population of various fish and crustacean species and a limited understanding of how the viability of eggs or larvae could affect those species. The locations of the terminals are a problem as most are offshore of the estuaries where many fish live and reproduce.

With as many as 15 LNG terminals now proposed for the Gulf, NOAA Fisheries and state officials have become concerned about the potential effects and officials don't know how the terminals will affect the environment. Coast Guard officials notified Shell that the Gulf Landing permitting process had been suspended until company officials adequately addressed the NOAA Fisheries concerns and suspended the permit application process until the company could justify its conclusion that "egg and larvae impacts are negligible" compared with the amount of sea life in the area.

Canada's port cities spew billions of litres of untreated sewage into open waters. Victoria, Montreal, Saint John, Halifax, Charlottetown and St. John's discharge human waste and toxic chemicals with little or no treatment.

Quebec City, Ottawa, Winnipeg, Hamilton, Toronto and Brandon have improved their treatment systems. Canada is working to develop a treatment program byregulated by Environment Canada.

Victoria discharged 2, tonnes of oil and grease, nine tonnes of copper and 2. Lead, silver, mercury and other chemicals were also found. Canada is failing to meet the standards of the US and Europe.

Lawrence annually while Dawson City continues to discharge one billion litres and Victoria dumps 34 billion litres of sewage into the ocean each year. These chemicals play havoc with sea birds, mammals and marine life and ultimately are consumed by humans through the fish we eat.

A Victoria sewage spokesman said the report neglects the steps Victoria has taken to prevent harmful chemicals from entering the sewers and plans to show its strategy has cut the amount in the system. The environmental groups said Canadians are entitled to efficient sewage treatment, national standards and adequate funding.

The world's annual capture fisheries and aquaculture production has plateaued at million tonnes. If China's aquaculture production is excluded, the world fisheries production including aquaculture, has declined steadily.

Demand for seafood continues to outstrip even world population growth binary option stock trading exam strategies a global shortfall of up to 80 million tonnes per annum is forecast within the next 30 years.

Declines in capture fisheries reflect illegal and unregulated fishing, impacts on fish habitats, coastal development, regulation of rivers, urban and agriculture runoff and global warming. A major contributor is exploitation of uncertainty over the nature of change and assessment of causes. Subsidies in developed countries, coupled with trade barriers against countries using cheaper labour costs are used to disadvantage poorer countries.

International trade may alleviate poverty for some countries but makes fish as food increasingly unattainable in poor areas. Allocation of resources is not a panacea for fisheries management problems as it is not preceded by an understanding of the measures necessary to ensure conservation. Aquaculture is anticipated to play an increased role in future demand for seafood but if China's figures are excluded, increases in aquaculture production in the last 10 years have not equalled declines in capture fisheries.

To meet projected demands for an extra 80 million tonnes would require 4 countries to copy China's 20 million tonne increase in production. Aquaculture in consumes, as feed, twice the weight of fish it produces. The growth in aquaculture production has occurred in developing countries, suggesting benefits to the poor. However, detailed analyses show concerns with destruction of coastal fish habitats in construction of aquaculture enterprises, increased propagation of fish diseases, negative impacts from translocation of species and the use, as feed, of fish traditionally available for human consumption.

In several assessments the loss of this fish as food for poor communities is recognised. Furthermore, increased targeting of smaller fish driven by the demand for aquaculture feed, is damaging to ecosystems, and existing commercial fisheries. There are well managed fisheries that produce high yields sustainably and aquaculture ventures that provide incomes and food security for the poor, based on acknowledgement of the impact of external influences, cutting-edge research, and management responses.

Science and technological development can meet most challenges that are given priority and resources. Toxins in sperm whale blubber indicate that chemicals have dispersed thoughout the ocean.

The goals of this study are whale conservation and whale health to gauge the overall well-being of the ocean. Biopsies of about 30 of 1, blubber samples gathered throughout the world showed that all may contain levels of man-made toxins. The International Whaling Commission is a coalition of nations that abide by conservation guidelines. A second round of tests will determine the amount of toxins in the blubber. An adult female whale has a toxic load which is going to be passed to her young and could build up over generations.

The most common chemical in sperm whale blubber is DDT, banned in North America in but still manufactured for use in other countries. The findings are java stock market ticker today, but the research must be validated. Sperm whales live fairly far from shore and it's surprising to find these chemicals in deep-water animals. Their long life spans and fat stores are indicators of the health of ocean life.

They feed on giant squid, which feed on pelagic fish and so the chemicals go up the food chain and they are the final sink for pollutants. In addition to sampling whale blubber, the study is using sonar to estimate the total whale population in the world and plot migration patterns.

EU ministers agreed to fishing quotas with a compromise to keep fishermen afloat while preserving fish stocks. The 15 nations agreed on catch quotas and shelved plans for cuts to quotas for cod in waters off Denmark and western Scotland. The fish is at risk of extinction in EU waters with stocks at the lowest. There was agreement on long-term recovery plans for hake, another endangered species.

Britain declared this a good deal for UK fishermen, with increases in permitted catches next year for haddock and prawns, and an increase to 15 in the number of days per month trawlers can put to sea. Fleets are pledged to avoid taking cod from certain fishing grounds to allow stocks to recover.

The EU said it kept the industry alive, while the recovery plans for cod and hake had been set. The livelihoods ofpeople are at stake over quotas but stocks of cod have shrunk in the North Sea to about one-tenth of the level in Urgent measures were needed to protect the EU from what happened in the waters off eastern Canada in the s, where overfishing resulted in the disappearance of cod and still have not recovered.

An alliance of conservation groups is arguing that beluga stocks are declining and the quota for beluga caviar exports should be zero. Fish and Wildlife Service is considering a request to list beluga sturgeon as an endangered species. As a result of monitoring and managing fish stocks and poaching, the situation is starting to turn around. The caviar trade by Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Russia and Turkmenistan was halted in Iran joined the effort. Beluga stocks are recovering and the catch and export quotas were set below earlier levels.

The Bush administration is rewriting federal rules to limit states' influence on what happens off their coasts. A letter signed by Rep. Lois Capps D-Santa Barbara forex hacked ea reviews 90 other members of Congress calls the revision a "pernicious assault on states' rights.

Gray Davis' administration said the changes would weaken authority over offshore drilling while the Bush administration asserts how to earn money with forex federal agencies are the experts on forex broker for scalping impacts to a state's coastline.

They would give greater weight to federal agencies by eliminating the deference given to state agencies. The administration claimed that there is nothing that would limit states' rights. The Commerce Department completed a "comprehensive revision" of those rules in the days of Clinton's presidency. Now it is revising them again. Oil companies support the new rules and would like the process to be predictable and clearly defined.

Opponents claim that the Bush administration wants mturk work home jobs get rid of delays nse trading timings today governors islamic forex trading brokers or stopping federal development and see the rule changes as an end-run around December's ruling which blocked oil drilling until the California Coastal Commission reviews them for environmental hazards.

Those leases are to expire after 5years, the Bush administration is seeking to extend them, opposed by state officials. The 4xp binary options demo methods of sediments and nutrients into the reef has increased four-fold since European settlement.

In the past few years unusually hot sea water has caused two coral bleaching events, the worst ever. Queensland organisms such as soft corals, sponges and starfish may be valuable for anti-tumour compounds that may prove successful against human cancers.

The government has proposed a six-fold increase in protected areas within the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. At an international conference organized by Conservational International, ocean activists recommended limiting overfishing and pollution in sensitive breeding grounds which lie in the open sea but acknowledges it won't be easy to regulate international waters.

Coastal development, pollution, and climate change, are devastating marine life. Marine biologists claim that fishermen could catch more than they do today while causing less damage. The problem dates towhen the Stratton Commission report led to the creation of the National Marine Fisheries Service. But this reflected the emphasis on exploitation and sales.

Now the oceans need a respite of several years of reduced catches and there are success stories where depleted fisheries are being restored. Fishermen working off Canada's Atlantic provinces did not reduce their catches as cod populations collapsed in the s and this year the region had to be closed to fishing.

Bottom-scraping trawl nets have scarred sensitive environments at the seabed. There is a demand for policies to reduce the tons of marine life and sea birds that are unintentionally hooked or entangled every year. Shrimp trawls in the Gulf of Mexico capture an estimated 20 million juvenile red snapper every year. Patagonian long-line fishing killed more thanseabirds in 3 years. Every year, 20, acres of coastal spawning grounds are lost because of coastal development.

Those that remain are polluted with runoff and toxins, rendering them less productive. Ocean experts say the nation needs an independent agency devoted to ocean health, free of the political missions and biases. Scientists and fishermen call for a network of protected marine reserves in which underwater communities could thrive and "reseed". Consumers can help by buying only fish that are relatively abundant.

Those left are only one half to one fifth the size than those caught before industrialized fishing began in The biological destruction is unprecedented in its scope and rapidity and blasts the idea that the oceans have uncaught fish waiting to be discovered.

Other ocean creatures are faring no better. The group that includes dolphins and porpoises, are also in critical danger. Those fish most prized as human foodstuff: Technology such as sonar and satellite methods of finding the ocean's warm fronts where fish once congregated have generated the problem.

The populations of big fish are so depleted that people spend more time and energy to catch fewer fish.

Other species may recover if levels of fishing are cut immediately. More people mean more fertilizer, sewage and animal waste flowing into Puget Sound, providing rich nutrients for algae. Clams, mussels, oysters, geoducks and pink scallops filter algae from seawater, producing toxins. When people eat infected shellfish, the neurotoxin can cause breathing difficulties, nausea, paralysis and death.

The relationship between algae blooms and human activities remains unclear. Algae require nitrogen and other nutrients, but it is not understood what are the nutrients that fuels the blooms. Most of the closed shellfish beds are off limits because of high levels of fecal coliform or dangerous pollutants, such as mercury.

If you go south you've got more pollution, and if you go north you've got more paralytic shellfish poison. Among environmentalists, a baseline is a reference point for measuring the health of ecosystems. The baseline for any given habitat would be what was there before humans had much impact and if we know the baseline we can work to restore it. If the baseline shifted before we chart it, then we end up accepting a degraded state as normal.

Environmental groups are trying to decide what we want nature to look like in the future. Data from around the world make the case that overfishing and humans have had an effect on the oceans so that it is difficult to imagine how full of life they used to be. The baselines have shifted for ocean ecosystems and there is disagreement on the future.

Some biologists argue that, as the desirable species are stripped out, we will be left with the hardiest, most undesirable species, jellyfish and bacteria. The coral reefs of Jamaica have been degraded into mounds of dead corals covered by algae. Upcoming reports conclude that the oceans are in severe decline. The solutions are known and we must work to prevent their further decline.

Our environment has suffered and our lives have suffered in other ways as well. Seven out of 10 commercial fish species are fully or overexploited. The number of poisonous algal species identified by scientists has nearly tripled sinceincreasing fish kills, beach closures, and economic losses. People obtain an average of 16 percent of their animal protein from fish. About 2 billion people-one third of humanity-live within kilometers of a coastline.

Turning the Tide to Save Oceans - Citizens and Governments Build New Alliances. In just the past few decades, pollution, overfishing, dense coastal development, and other forces have destroyed a tenth of the Earth's coral reefs and seriously degraded almost a third. At this rate, scientists warn, nearly three-quarters could lie in ruins. The "dead zone" off the coast of Louisiana and Texas in the Gulf of Mexico this summer could be one of the largest on record. In the dead zone seasonal oxygen levels drop too low to support most life in bottom and near-bottom waters.

Dead zones are caused by nutrient runoff, principally from agricultural activity, which stimulates an overgrowth of algae that sinks, decomposes, and consumes most of the life-giving oxygen supply in the water.

Scientists are predicting the area could measure between 7, and 8, square miles, or an area roughly the size of New Jersey. This hypoxic, or low-to-no oxygen area, is of particular concern because it threatens valuable commercial and recreational Gulf fisheries by destroying critical habitat. Yukon River smokehouses should be filled this summer with oil-rich strips of king salmon. But they're mostly empty. One Alaska river after another has been closed to king fishing because significant numbers of fish failed to return to spawn.

Federal and state fisheries biologists are looking into the mystery. King salmon spend years in the Bering Sea before returning as adults to rivers where they were born to spawn and die. Biologists speculate that the mostly likely cause was a shift in Pacific Ocean currents, but food availability, changing river conditions and predator-prey relationships could be affecting the fish. People living along the Yukon River think they know what is to blame, pollock fishery, the nation's largest that removes about 1 million metric tons of pollock each year from the eastern Bering Sea.

King salmon get caught in the huge pollock trawl nets, and the dead kings are counted and most are thrown back into the ocean. Some are donated to the needy.

Sincethe number of king salmon caught has skyrocketed, reaching overin A substantial portion of those fish were bound for western Alaska rivers. If those fish had lived, an estimated 78, adult fish would have returned to rivers from the Pacific Northwest to Western Alaska.

Inbycatch rules were adopted allowing the pollock fleet to move from areas where lots of kings were being inadvertently caught, thereby avoiding large-scale fishing closures. Then, happaned, and it was back to the drawing board. Last April, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, the organization that manages ocean fish, passed a hard cap on the pollock fishery.

Beginning inthe portion of the fleet that participates in the program is allowed 60, kings a year. If the cap is reached, the fishery shuts down. The loss of the kings is devastating village economies. There's no money to buy anything. It is crippling the economy in all of the rivers where they depend on commercial fishing for income.

An Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologist pointed to changing ocean currents, plankton blooms and even the carnivorous nature of salmon. River conditions could be changing, too, he said. A lot isn't known about what happens to king salmon in the ocean.

In a good year, Kwik'pak Fisheries L. This summer, only about 30 people have been hired. The lower Yukon villages are economically devastated. I's hard to see the villages in such economic hardship but the Yukon should be managed conservatively until the problem of the disappearing kings is better understood.

For 50 years, it was an extremely stable fishery. Barack Obama has been careful at every turn not to offend the big oil and coal companies. Just recently he announced that he was suspending a longstanding moratorium on offshore drilling, saying that "we are going to need vital energy sources to maintain our economic growth and our security. If the oil, instead of polluting the Gulf, had made its way up through the drilling pipe, onto the platform, off the gulf into some refinery and thence into the gas tank of a car, or if that West Virginia mine hadn't collapsed on the miners and instead the coal had proceeded smoothly down some rail line to some coal-fired plant, the result would be more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

A gallon of gas, which weighs a little more than seven pounds, results in about 22 pounds of CO2. The average American car driven the average American distance releases its own weight in CO2 annually. This CO2 traps heat near the atmosphere that would otherwise radiate back out to space. Coral reef researchers think that the entire ecosystem may be extinct by mid-century. Forget the slick in the gulf; think of the invisible acid slick now covering all seven seas.

Before the century is out, if we don't get off fossil fuel, then the climatologists have made the prognosis clear: This is the ultimate teachable moment, the place where we can insist that our leaders start to take serious action-not just, or even mainly, to make sure that we don't have oil well blowouts in the future, but to make sure that we get off dirty energy. The Obama administration has been more involved than its predecessors 5, hybrid cars for the federal fleet!

Tanks running on biofuels! They couldn't do much more because Obama wouldn't push harder because he didn't see political gain involved-he already has the environmental vote.

There is no movement giving him the push to take the issue to the next level. We push by becoming politically engaged. On the tenth of October, We need to spread the word that parts per million CO2 is the most we can safely have in the atmosphere. At the Copenhagen climate summit, nations signed on to that ppm concentration target. But they the poor nations. The rich and addicted weren't yet ready to face the truth. On October 10, people around the world will be putting up solar panels and harvesting community gardens and laying out bike paths because they want to send a serious, pointed message to our leaders: If we can get to work, you can get to work.

Last year in Copenhagen, Desmond Tutu preached a service at the city's great cathedral. When he was done, the cathedral bell range times, and then 3, churches across Europe did the same thing. It sent a message: Oil is the vehicle that allowed humankind's population to grow beyond its capacity. Now, with agriculture facing climate change and trying to succeed on less and less oil, humankind has a tremendous adjustment to make - so big that many will not make it.

Overfishing of whales in the North Pacific Ocean 50 years ago led to the decimation of Alaska's kelp forests today. The killing of great whales from to forced killer whales to seek alternative food. Beginning with harbor seals, then fur seals, sea lions, and finally sea otters, the killer whales targeted progressively smaller populations of coastal marine mammals.

When the sea otter population was pushed down it allowed an explosion of sea urchins which led to decimation of the Alaskan kelp forests due to the sea urchins' over-grazing. Sea otter populations are on the rise, but this has been slowed by disease. Some scientists think sea otter diseases may have links to pollution, others note that zoonotic diseases are to blame for many sea otter deaths in Europe and U.

Derek Hatfield competes in a solo round-the-world ocean race, this year finishing in third place. Having undertaken long sea voyages since the early s, he has noticed disturbing changes in the ocean wildlife in the last few years. Last year I did a transatlantic race and I didn't see one whale in the whole 15 days of racing across the North Atlantic. The oceans are dying and they're dying very quickly. Hatfield always used to stop what he was doing when dolphins showed up to race beside the bow of the boat or follow behind.

But dolphins have stopped showing. Now it's a rare sight. Around the world, people who live, work and play on the water are reporting significant changes in marine ecosystems, including fewer fish and shorebirds, growing blooms of algae to shrinking amounts of seaweed, the result of of climate change, pollution and overfishing.

A recent report presented to the United Nations last week warned of looming mass extinctions. Alex Rogers of Oxford University, scientific director of the International Program on the State of the Ocean, said the state of the oceans is declining far more rapidly than even the most pessimistic anticipated. The closest comparison we have to our present time is about 55 million years ago and at the moment we're pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at about 10 times the rate at which it was entering the atmosphere during that period, which was associated with a major extinction.

Rogers says global warming, ocean acidification and lack of water oxygen are the greatest peril to ocean life. They are common factors which researchers have found to be linked within all known mass extinctions. Global warming builds up carbon dioxide which is then absorbed into the oceans, which causes acidification, while run-off of fertilizers and pollution chokes off oxygen in the water column.

Peter Wells, a marine scientist formerly with Environment Canada and now a professor at Dalhousie University, says "Fishing has created more change over the last few hundred years than any other stress.

That's the removal of biomass, that's the removal of species and knocking down populations and in some cases so hard they don't recover, such as the northern cod. These findings come from a recent report titled "Illegal Logging and Related Timber Trade - Dimensions, Drivers, Impacts and Responses" - the most comprehensive scientific analysis published on the topic. It was produced with help from more than 40 scientists around the world coordinated by the International Union of Forest Research Organizations IUFRO in association with the Collaborative Partnership on Forests.

Trade agreements, such as the European Union's Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade Action Plan, require that timber products imported to the EU be legally harvested. This has prompted illegal-wood sellers to shift to markets which have less stringent regulations, such as India and China, which are now the biggest importers of both legal and illegal tropical wood. Organized crime and insecure land rights are big contributors to illegal logging activities around the world.

The sale of Illegally extracted timber helps fund weapons for wars and conflicts in western Africa - namely the DRC, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. While illegal logging occurs in most tropical nations, it is especially prevalent in Brazil, Indonesia, and Malaysia. Russia is the main source of boreal and temperate wood.

China uses that wood to make flooring, furniture, and other products that it sells domestically and to markets in Europe, Japan, and the U. Land tenure issues are "profound drivers" of illegal logging. Previous analyses found that land held and managed by local and indigenous communities is less affected by deforestation than government-managed areas.

Reducing illegal logging could benefit the communities that live within the forests, as well as to those affected by organized crime.

Illegal conversion of forests to agricultural land is an example that clearly shows the need for a broader cooperation, in this case between forestry and agriculture. Not all financing is made public, so the amount may be more.

The money is aiding a process that scientists say destroys ecosystems, displaces indigenous communities and drenches the region in smog. The Union of Concerned Scientists claims that burning away forests generates one-tenth of total global warming emissions. Yet while endowments and pension funds are divesting from the fossil-fuel industry, and banks are backing away from coal projects, any move away from financing deforestation has been slow to catch on.

In earlyscientists monitoring satellite images at Global Forest Watch focused on the destruction of Indonesian rain forests. In Borneo's West Kalimantan province monitors found a charred wasteland with many orangutans driven from their nests. Fingers pointed to the Rajawali Group, a local conglomerate known for its ties to powerful politicians, including Malaysia's Prime Minister.

As the banks issued those loans, Rajawali was accused of extensive illegal burning, use of child labor, and the use of force against workers at plantations under its control. In a report to clients, Credit Suisse Equity Analyst, Priscilla Tjitra, deemed Rajawali's a successful project that increased landholdings for expanded palm oil production.

Demand for palm oil is surging worldwide, driven by rising incomes in markets like China and India and a switch away from trans fats by Americans and Europeans. Indonesia is one of the world's biggest palm oil producers, and forestry loss there and elsewhere ranks as one of the biggest single contributors to global warming. But Credit Suisse funding appears to have violated its forestry and agribusiness policy, which forbids the company from financing or advising companies with operations in "primary tropical moist forests" like those of West Kalimantan.

Bank of America policy also forbids financing for commercial projects that result in the clearing of primary tropical moist forests. Spokesman Bill Halldin said that the most serious accusations against Rajawali came after the loan. Bank Negara Indonesia's sustainability policies say that its clients must adopt "minimum environmental, social and governance standards.

Although deforestation has slowed in many parts of the world, notably in the Brazilian Amazon, forest clearing is on the rise in Southeast Asia.

Indonesia, in particular, suffers the world's highest rates of forest loss, an average of almost 2. Daily emissions from Indonesia's forest fires last year at times exceeded emissions produced by all economic activity in the United States. A recent Harvard and Columbia study estimated that the fires caused at leastpremature deaths across Southeast Asia.

In July, the Bornean orangutan was listed as critically endangered. International Animal Rescue said its staff had rescued about 50 during the burning season, which is twice the normal rate. She is running out of places to release them.

Loss of vegetation makes the air drier and also makes the land surface more reflective so that is absorbs less sunlight, producing a cooling effect. These local effects of deforestation are well known, but the new study shows major forest losses can alter global climate by shifting the path of large-scale atmospheric waves or altering precipitation paths. Less forest cover can also change how much sunlight is absorbed in the Northern versus the Southern hemispheres, which can shift tropical rain bands and other climate features.

Co-author Abigail Swann, a UW assistant professor of atmospheric sciences and of biology said "We are only starting to think about these larger-scale implications. Results show that removing trees in western North America causes cooling in Siberia, which slows forest growth there. Tree loss in the western U.

But forests in South America actually benefit, because it becomes cooler and thus wetter south of the equator. In South America, removing most of the Amazon rainforest also caused Siberia to become colder and more barren, but it had a slight positive impact on southeastern U.

Losing Amazon forest had a significant positive impact on the neighboring forests in eastern South America, mostly by increasing the precipitation there during the Southern Hemisphere summer. The model's parameters for forest changes are still preliminary, so the exact mapping of cause and effect at each location is not set in stone. Swann's previous research looked at how a hypothetical massive tree planting in the Northern Hemisphere to slow global warming could have the unintended effect of changing tropical rainfall.

More recent research has shown how European deforestation over the past thousands of years may have reduced rainfall over modern-day Africa. At least a quarter of forest carbon is stored on communal land and, particularly in Brazil, and the world's indigenous communities need to be given a bigger role in climate stabilization, according to a paper by the Rights and Resources Initiative, Woods Hole Research Centre and World Resources Institute.

The research is the most comprehensive effort yet to quantify the contribution of traditional forest guardians to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. The expansion of tribal land rights is the most cost-effective way to protect forests and sequester carbon.

The study authors hope this issue receives more prominence a the upcoming United Nations climate conference in Marrakech. The study estimates community-claimed lands sequester at least 54,m tonnes of carbon - roughly four times the world's annual emissions. Ownership of a 10th of that land is public, unrecognised or contested, which raises the risk that it could fall into the hands of developers, farmers, miners or others who want to clear the forest for short-term financial gain at the expense of long-term environmental costs.

Alain Frechette of Rights and Resources, said: It's what economists call an optimal solution. Everyone wins," he said. They are just pushed on to future generations.

Brazil with 14, megatonnes has twice the amount of the next biggest country, Indonesia. The World Research Institute estimates that tropical forests without such protection were two to three times more likely to be cleared. She urged Brazil not to backtrack. It will be to their benefit. They can measure that in terms of the amount of tonnes of carbon that are being conserved. A study, conducted by environmental group Amazon Watch, found that American refineries processedbarrels of Amazon crude oil a day last year and found that planned oil drilling poses "one of the most serious threats" to the western region of the Amazon, with most of the oil originating from Ecuador, Peru and Colombia.

California's clean energy policies discriminate against the heavy grade oil produced by countries such as Canada, and so it uses more oil from the Amazon. Also, an explosion at the ExxonMobil refinery in Torrance, California, in February caused the state to increase its gasoline imports to more than 10 times the typical level.

Environmental groups have had some success against Chevron's Amazon ambitions, other players from countries such as China have moved in. Proposed oil and gas fields now coversq miles of the Amazon - an area larger than Texas.

Not only are there the carbon emissions from felled trees and from the transport and burning of oil, indigenous communities and the Amazon's vast trove of biodiversity are also at risk.

Ecuador's state oil company is now drilling close to the Yasuni national park, one of the most biologically rich places on Earth, with endemic tree species - more than the US and Canada combined - as well as two of the last tribes in the world living in voluntary isolation. These indigenous people are at risk from pollution, displacement and deadly illnesses due to a lack of acquired immunity. Adam Zuckerman, a California-based campaigner for Amazon Watch, said "virtually every company, city and university in California and around the country contributes to the destruction of the Amazon rainforest.

It was not known whether new laws were being considered to reduce Amazon crude imports, although the administration has taken "nation-leading action to fight climate change, decarbonize our economy and end our dangerous addiction to foreign oil", according to Governor Brown's office. The recently released FAO report found that, in tropical countries, there occurred a net forest loss of seven million hectares per year between the years of and It noted that agriculture is still the most significant driver of global deforestation.

Yet much of the forest loss, especially in Africa, is also driven by a need for fuel. For much of the world, people still rely on charcoal and firewood for producing energy. Approximately 3 billion people use open fires and simple, inefficient stoves to cook and heat their homes, says the World Health Organization.

According to the UN, "As Africa's population is expected to swell and urbanize at an even faster rate over the next decades, the continent's demand for charcoal is likely to double or triple by ". The charcoal business has a devastating impact on the environment from deforestation, biodiversity loss and increased carbon emissions.

And household pollution from cook stoves is a major threat to public health, as toxic pollutants are released into the air. Rural women are impacted the most since they are the primary providers collecting fuel and cooking for their families.

In Kenya nearly 9 million households in Kenya use charcoal every day. The equivalent of 15, soccer fields worth of trees are cut every year. Over 36 million Kenyans are affected by household air pollution, resulting in over 15, deaths, according to the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves. GreenChar is a social enterprise that sells smokeless charcoal briquettes made from sugarcane waste and other agricultural wastes, and also distributes clean cookstoves to the local population.

Also women are involved in the sourcing, production, distribution stages. Women outsell men cook stove sellers by nearly 3 to 1. In the Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo some 4 million people live, many of whom live in extreme poverty and are reliant on charcoal for survival.

Surveys spearheaded by park authorities showed that off-grid hydroelectricity plants could generate more than megawatts of energy, which is 25 times more power than the city of Goma - home to over 1 million people - currently receives.

As the world strives to meet the Sustainable Development Goals, efforts to reach SDG 15 - "Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss" - will need to encompass an integrated approach.

Until people's basic needs are met, they will do whatever it takes to survive, even cutting down forests that sustain so much life.

In the words of Wangari Maathai, "You cannot protect the environment unless you empower people, you inform them, and you help them understand that these resources are their own, that they must protect them. Greg Asner, a biologist with the Carnegie Institution for Science, has been flying out of Sacramento and Bakersfield with instruments aboard his plane that give him X-ray eyes into the foliage, to assess not just dead trees but trees so stressed by the drought that their death is likely.

The Forest Service had estimated that nearly Asner's instruments measure how water molecules are bending, stretching, rotating and vibrating inside a leaf undergoing photosynthesis. These motions resonate into the atmosphere as reflected light, which is picked up by an on-board spectrometer. The more reflected light, the drier the foliage. The spectrometer works in conjunction with a laser that fans out beneath the aircraft, creating a 3-D image that shows the condition of the forest.

Healthy trees are blue, and drought-stressed trees run from mild yellow to severe red. Asner's assessment shows that the mountains ringing Los Angeles are "a tinderbox" and the oak forests in the Sierra foothills are "in big trouble.

Jeffrey Hicke, an associate professor in the department of geography at the University of Idaho, said "Species will march uphill as the climate warms. Oak forests might become grasslands. The three-week mid-summer survey was paid by a grant from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection is interested in the findings because the images can provide a more accurate picture of how fire behaves in dry terrain, which can help with the location of fire breaks and the management of controlled burns. Diminishment of the state's forests means the loss of clean water and erosion control, recreation and jobs, Ashley Conrad-Saydah of the California Environmental Protection Agency, said.

As trees die, decompose or burn, carbon is released into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming, she said. A Brazilian policy meant to allocate land to the rural poor in a socially responsible manner has led to inordinate rates of deforestation, say researchers with the Camara dos Deputados Brazil's lower legislative body and the University of East Anglia. The results of the study have been published in the journal PLOS ONE. Nearly 2, agrarian settlement projects have moved as many as 1.

The settlements, which comprise just 5. Co-author Carlos Peres said that, contrary to the notion that "Amazonian deforestation is merely a product of rampaging capitalist development unleashed by free market forces - it is primarily a governance problem that is deliberately designed and deployed by government, and financed by Brazilian taxpayers.

The agrarian reform settlements began in the s as a means of occupying the vast expanses of forest in the Amazon, lead author Mauricio Schneider, of the Camara dos Deputados, said.

Ultimately it is the government driving this deforestation through its agrarian reform policies, Schneider told Mongabay. Schnedier and Peres recommend that the INCRA should be avoiding frontier expansion into forested areas and instead prioritizing the allocation of the 30 million hectares of degraded, low-productivity pastures that are available across Amazonia.

They also recommend that the simplest measure would be to enforce the law. The settlers who violate the laws have been neither fined nor jailed for violating conservation laws meant to keep the Amazon forest intact.

Intrees covering an area twice the size of Portugal were lost worldwide, according to analysis form World Resources Institute WRI. Eighteen million hectares were lost last year satellite data published by Global Forests Watch shows. The report shows that west Africa is becoming a new hotspot for tree cover loss, driven by demand for palm oil, with Sierra Leone, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia and Madagascar leading the loss.

There has been a shift in tree loss for Brazil and Indonesia to a "second tier of smaller countries that traditionally get much less attention from environmental groups," said Nigel Sizer of the WRI. Governments are now selling off vast areas of land to private companies looking to capitalize on rising demand for palm oil.

Sizer said the uptick is due to increasing demand for agricultural commodities such as palm oil, soy, beef and timber. With an expected increase from Europe in demand for palm oil, companies are turning to west Africa, its closest palm oil-producing region. It is estimated that the ingredient is present in half of all packaged goods, from shampoo to detergent to many food products. Liberia's finance minister said the nation is "worried about the ecological consequences" of palm oil but must grow the economy to create jobs.

Cambodia's tree loss has risen fourfold sincemaking it the fastest the fastest acceleration in loss. Much of the loss is due to the creation of new rubber plantations.

WWF is campaigning for stronger protection zones and programs to incentivize countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions caused by the practice. The author watched the 2, kilometer-long Interoceanic Highway -- which connects the west coast of Peru with the western Brazilian border -- change from a scraggly dirt and gravel path, blanketed on both sides by massive Amazonian trees into a faster, wider, paved road with the trees cut further away from the road and farms developing along the way by Now Brazil could transfer Amazonian produce much faster by exporting west through Peruvian ports, much closer to production sites than the eastern Atlantic coast of Brazil.

Global Forest Watch, a subsidiary of the World Resources Institute, monitors land use via satellite imagery across the planet and reports over 67, hectares of deforestation in the region around Puerto Maldonado. As the forest on either side was cut down, sold, bought, farmed and exploited, the wildlife succumbed to slaughter on the highway. The story of this road is like thousands of other stories all over the world.

The Bengal tiger, the Amazonian jaguar, and the African forest elephant have suffered great reductions in numbers due to roads. Amphibians experienced the next-highest mortality rate, followed by birds. This is akin to doubling the current value of all global infrastructure put together. It is expected that there enough paved roads globally by mid century to circle the Earth more than times.

Nine-tenths of these new roads will be in developing nations, which sustain many of the planet's most biologically rich and environmentally important ecosystems. Massive hydroelectric projects involving damming some of the world's largest rivers have been planned for the Mekong region, the Congo basin and the Amazon basin.

The authors recommended that the road planners avoid the first cut, since every road brings with it the potential for further subsidiary roads, thus exponentially increasing the area eventually modified. Even upgrading an existing road cannot be dismissed as irrelevant, because upgraded roads maintain access year-round, which increases traffic speeds and has wide-ranging impacts on the surrounding environment.

Laurance suggests for those who wish to see the African wilds and all it contains not to hesitate, but to go now, for soon will be too late. Indeed, Global Forest Watch shows large portions of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Gabon, and the Republic of Congo have been allotted for mining concessions. Water rationing, power cuts, and crop slumps have ensued.

Authorities have come under fire for their failure to upgrade and maintain the necessary infrastructure to stop water being stolen or wasted in transit.

There is also the exacerbation of Brazil's general water problems caused by population concentration around the coasts. But as the forest has been destroyed, the flying rivers are disappearing. The scale of transformation which would accompany the disappearance of the Amazon's flying rivers is outlined in a recent report by Professor Antonio Nobre, researcher at Brazil's National Institute for Space Research INPE and at the National Institute of Amazonian Research INPA.

The greatest impact from current trends in deforestation to Brazil and surrounding South America, Mr. Nobre says, is the drought: Richard George of Greenpeace UK adds that Brazil's powerful agribusiness lobby will demand the right to clear even more forest to make up for the declining yields caused by prolonged drought, making an already dire situation worse.

Nobre's report concludes with a five-point plan to prevent further destruction to the Amazon; spreading rainforest education, ending deforestation, ending fire-clearing techniques, encouraging rainforest regeneration, and forcing world leaders to act to prevent potential crisis. The Philippine island of Palawan hosts two World Heritage sites, the Puerto Princesa Subterranean River in the provincial capital, and the Tubbataha Reef in Cagayancillo, and it is almost completely covered in Protected Areas; yet Palawan lost 6.

Data from Global Forest Watch GFW reveals that many animals -- including 27 endemic species of birds, 19 varieties of land mammals, and 24 kinds of reptiles -- are facing huge population declines.

The National Statistics Office NSO records show that the population in Palawan grew by 2. This would double the population in 26 years. Deforestation in the southern part of the province results from bark tanning, in which bark harvested of mangroves is used to tan leather. Illegal land conversion and charcoal production are also common in northern Palawan. Mining also contributes to deforestation, but it is not the primary culprit. However, this controversial issue led to the shooting death of a well-known radio announcer and environmentalist in the Province, Dr.

Mining is mostly concentrated in the southern tip of the province. Humans are also affected by deforestation. Mining-caused deforestation could interfere with groundwater resources and could even make El Nino-induced drought worse in the Philippines.

There would be more runoff during storms and less water retained during droughts, when trees are cut down. A recent report launched in Sao Paulo synthesizes the findings of around two hundred leading scientific studies and articles on the role the Amazon forest plays in climate and rainfall regulation and in the exportation of environmental services to areas of production bordering the Amazon region and others far beyond it.

The report concludes that achieving zero deforestation is no longer sufficient, on its own, to guarantee the upkeep of the biome's climate functions. It is essential to address the accumulated environmental debt of forest destruction and set in motion a large scale process to recuperate those areas which, in Brazil, represent the equivalent to million football pitches.

The Amazon Climate Future study see http: Many studies have suggested that the forest has survived in its pristine condition for tens of millions of years due to its great capacity to resist cataclysmic climate events. However, when it is destroyed, its immunity is broken. The occupation of the Amazon has destroyed at least 42 billion trees -- or 2, trees a minute -- uninterruptedly, for the last 40 years.

The harm of such vast devastation is now beginning to be felt in regions far from the Amazon and the forecasts indicate that the scenario is likely to get worse if deforestation continues and the forest is not restored. A plus page report on the tropics, compiled by 12 institutions, found incredible population growth, rising economic importance, clashes over land-use, imperiled biodiversity, and worsening impacts of climate change.

A booming population means increased demand for food, water, and other natural resources internally, even while many of these resources are already exported abroad to temperate regions. There is also good news according to the report: Unfortunately people in the tropics face especially challenging diseases rarely found in temperate regions such as dengue fever and malaria.

And local people and indigenous groups are struggling to maintain control over their traditional lands as corporations -- often foreign -- seek out more land to grow crops, raise livestock, or extract commodities such as timber, fossil fuels, and minerals.

Land-grabbing, as it is known, has become a significant political issue in places like Papua New Guinea, Cambodia, Kenya, and Cameroon. At the same time, conservationists and environmentalists are fighting to preserve rainforests, coral reefs, and other vital ecosystems from destruction. In a October 12, letter to the San Diego Union Tribune, Margaret McCown Liles wrote about the Polynesians who in AD colonized a remote, volcanic island in the South Pacific, now called Easter Island.

The island was covered by palm forest, abundantly supplied with fresh water, large seabird colonies, and many species of land mammals and birds. The population grew, their civilization flourished. Huge statues were carved from the volcanic rock. More palms were cut down and used to roll and lift the huge statues into place. More palms were cleared to create fields. The palm forests were completely gone by The delicate tropical soil eroded. With no forest to absorb the rain, springs and streams dried up.

The population peaked at around 10, inwhile the quality of life continued to decline. Then the population crashed. Inthe population was below 2, In the last years, humans have increased the level of CO2 in the atmosphere 30 percent.