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Environment

Ocean oxygen levels drop endangering marine life: Report

The loss of oxygen from the ocean due to climate change and nutrient pollution risks “dire effects” on sea life, fisheries and coastal communities, a global conservation body has warned

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) said on Saturday that about 700 sites had been identified globally with low oxygen levels – up from only 45 in the 1960s.

In the same period, the group warned in the largest peer-reviewed study to date that the volume of anoxic waters – areas totally devoid of oxygen – have quadrupled.

“What we are seeing is a decline of 2 percent in the global oxygen level [in the oceans]. It doesn’t sound like a lot but this small change will have enormous ramifications,” Minna Epps, the IUCN’s global marine and polar programme director, told Al Jazeera.

“Deoxygenation will have an impact on biodiversity, on biomass of commercially important species and on vulnerable rare species. It will also have an impact on habitats. We are seeing species migrating because of this,” she added.

The report found that the loss of oxygen is increasingly threatening fish species such as tuna, marlin and sharks, all particularly sensitive to low levels of the life-giving gas due to their large size and energy demands.

The ocean absorbs about a quarter of all fossil fuel emissions, but as global energy demand continues to grow there are fears that the world’s seas will eventually reach saturation point.

On current trends, oceans are expected to lose 3-4 percent of their oxygen globally by 2100.

However, most of that loss is predicted to be in the upper 1,000 metres (3,281 feet) – the richest part of the ocean for biodiversity.

“With this report, the scale of damage climate change is wreaking upon the ocean comes into stark focus,” Grethel Aguilar, the IUCN’s acting director, said.

“As the warming ocean loses oxygen, the delicate balance of marine life is thrown into disarray.”

The report on ocean oxygen loss concluded that deoxygenation is already altering the balance of marine life to the detriment of species across the food chain. The biomes that support about a fifth of the world’s current fish catch are formed by ocean currents that bring oxygen-poor water to coastlines.

These areas are especially vulnerable to even tiny variations in oxygen levels.

“Impacts here will ultimately ripple out and affect hundreds of millions of people,” the IUCN said.

The group this year issued a landmark assessment of the world’s natural habitats, concluding that human activity was threatening up to one million species with extinction.

Ocean life is already battling warmer temperatures, rampant overfishing and plastic pollution.

The World Meteorological Organization this week said that due to man-made emissions growth, the ocean is now 26 percent more acidic than before the Industrial Revolution.

“Ocean oxygen depletion is menacing marine ecosystems already under stress from ocean warming and acidification,” said Dan Laffoley, a senior marine science adviser at the IUCN.

“To stop the worrying expansion of oxygen-poor areas, we need to decisively curb greenhouse gas emissions as well as nutrient pollution from agriculture and other sources.”

The IUCN report also found that pollution around coastlines was having a significant effect on oxygen levels, with fertiliser and agricultural runoff promoting more algae growth, which in turn depletes oxygen as it decomposes.

World leaders will gather in Marseille in June for the IUCN’s World Conservation Congress.

Policymakers are currently in negotiations at the COP25 climate summit in Madrid charged with ratifying a comprehensive rulebook for the 2015 Paris accord.

“Decisions taken at the ongoing climate conference will determine whether our ocean continues to sustain a rich variety of life, or whether habitable, oxygen-rich marine areas are increasingly and irrevocably lost,” Epps said from the Spanish capital.

December 10, 2019 by News Room Desk

Indigenous no-state people

Nations Agree To “Significantly” Cut Single-Use Plastics Over Next Decade

After marathon talks in Nairobi, countries appeared to have reached a deal over throwaway plastic items such as bags, cups and cutlery to reduce the more than eight million tonnes of plastics entering oceans each year.

NAIROBI: Nations on Friday committed to “significantly reduce” single-use plastics over the next decade, in a series of voluntary pledges that green groups warned fell short of tackling Earth’s pollution crisis.

After marathon talks in Nairobi, countries appeared to have reached a deal over throwaway plastic items such as bags, cups and cutlery to reduce the more than eight million tonnes of plastics entering oceans each year.

The final ministerial statement — issued on a day of youth protests against climate change — made only two references to man-made global warming and none to the fossil fuels that drive it.

It said countries would “address the damage to our ecosystems caused by the unsustainable use and disposal of plastic products, including by significantly reducing single-use plastic products by 2030.”

Sources close to the talks told AFP that several rich nations, led by the United States, were influential in watering down the pledge.

An initial ministerial statement at the beginning of the UN environment assembly this week had proposed a commitment to “phase out single-use plastics… by 2025” — a far stronger promise than the compromise nations appear to have reached.

“It’s hard to find one solution for all member states,” said Siim Kiisler, UN assembly president, told journalists before the final decision.

“The environment is at a turning point. We don’t need verbose documents, we need concrete commitments.”

The world currently produces more than 300 million tonnes of plastics annually, and there are at least five trillion plastic pieces floating in our oceans, scientists have estimated.

When asked specifically whether the US had played a spoiler role during the week’s negotiations, Kiisler told journalists: “I will not answer that question.”

Geo-engineering dispute

The UN this week released its periodic assessment of the health of our planet.

As much as a quarter of all premature death and disease is caused by manmade pollution, environmental damage and a lack of access to clean sanitation, said the Global Environmental Outlook report.

Joyce Msuya, the UN’s interim environment head, said states had reached consensus on “issues vital to human and planetary health”.

But unlike the UN’s parallel process on climate change, the environmental assembly has no legal means of enforcing what countries promise.

The summit started on a sombre note after several UN staffers perished in the Ethiopian Airlines plane crash on Sunday.

Delegates on Friday held a minute’s silence at the start of the final plenary, and UN staff lit a string of candles along the assembly hall.

Another major bone of contention during negotiations was geo-engineering, the use of untested, large-scale infrastructure projects to mitigate the climate impact of manmade emissions.

A Swiss proposal for greater oversight on these potentially powerful but risky projects was met with “fierce opposition” from the US and Saudi Arabia, one source close to the talks told AFP.

Green groups fear geo-engineering such as carbon-capture and so-called “solar radiation management” — essentially pumping reflective material into the atmosphere to bounce back more of the Sun’s rays — would allow richer nations to burn fossil fuels well into the future while seeming to commit to tackle climate change.

Even if these schemes eased global warming, they would not address the carbon dioxide emissions that are acidifying the oceans, say experts.

“They want to avoid further regulation, governance, and oversight over these technologies and it’s definitely in the interest of the fossil-fuel industry,” said Linda Schneider, senior programme officer of International Climate Policy at Germany’s Heinrich Boell Institute.

Charities gave a lukewarm reception to the commitments due Friday.

“World leaders have agreed some important steps to safeguard the environment,” Harjeet Singh of ActionAid told AFP.

“But we cannot continue to ignore the bigger picture — rising global inequality is driving unsustainable levels of consumption and destroying the world’s natural resources.”COMMENT

Mohamed Adow of Christian Aid said “more was expected from this meeting to tackle the one existential environmental crisis of our times: climate change.”

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

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March 15, 2019 by BrahmaFeed

Environment

China-made degradable plastics promise end to ocean pollution

Chinese scientists have developed a plastic that degrades in seawater and could help curb the increasingly serious plastic pollution in the oceans.

The new polyester composite material can decompose in seawater over a period ranging from a few days to several hundred days, leaving small molecules that cause no pollution, said Wang Gexia, a senior engineer at the Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

“For a long time, people focused on ‘white pollution’ on land. Plastic pollution in the seas only caught people’s attention when more and more reports about marine animals dying from it appeared in recent years,” said Wang.

About 4.8 million to 12.7 million tones of plastic waste goes into the seas very year, accounting for 60 percent to 80 percent of the total solid pollutants in the oceans, according to a conservative estimate by scientists.

Due to human activities and ocean currents, most of the waste gathers in the north and south Pacific, the north and south Atlantic and the central Indian Ocean.

French media reported that a plastic waste concentration in the ocean between California and Hawaii could be as large as 3.5 million square kilometers, or seven times the territory of France – and growing by 80,000 square kilometers a year.

The World Economic Forum has also warned that the total weight of plastic wastes in the oceans would surpass the total weight of marine fish in 2050.

Almost all the types of plastics are found at sea, either floating on the surface or sinking to the bottom, and they cannot decompose for decades or even centuries, said Wang.

The effects of sunlight, salt weathering, ocean currents and organisms turn plastics into tiny fragments under 5 millimeters long, which are a major threat to marine life. Many albatrosses and turtles die from gastrointestinal problems after eating plastics.

A shocking scientific survey showed that over 90 percent of sea birds died from eating plastics.

“We still lack effective methods to cope with the serious plastic pollution,” Wang said.

“We cannot collect and deal with the garbage dispersed in the oceans as we do on land. The most feasible solution is to let the materials degrade and disappear,” she said.

The Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry is one of the leading research institutions in China to develop biodegradable plastics that naturally-occurring microbes can decompose into carbon dioxide and water.

The institute has authorized four Chinese enterprises to use their technology, with three enterprises going into production with a total annual capacity of half the global biodegradable plastics, or 75,000 tones.

Realizing the serious plastic pollution in oceans, the researchers aimed to develop materials degradable in seawater, but they found plastics that decompose quickly on land are unable to degrade easily at sea.

They combined non-enzymic hydrolysis, water dissolution and biodegradation processes to design and invent the new material.

The research was recently selected as one of 30 winning projects at a contest of innovative future technologies in Shenzhen, South China’s Guangdong Province.

The contest encouraged young Chinese scientists to conceive ground-breaking technologies and trigger innovation. China has given top priority to ecological environmental protection, contributing Chinese wisdom to resolving global pollution.

Xinhua

September 7, 2018 by BrahmaFeed