Slides from the presentation made by Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, Professor of Marine Studies and the inaugural director of the Global Change Institute, University of Queensland.
August 2, 2011
A recent mini-symposium at the World Bank, A Healthy Ocean: Why it Matters to Our Mission, highlighted the essential ecosystem goods and services that coastal and marine ecosystems provide for hundreds of millions of people. A panel discussed the costs to society from the loss of ocean services related to pollution absorption, changes in ocean productivity, and climate regulation as a result of rapidly increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations and more local human pressures.
Ove Hoegh-Guldberg
Glenn-Marie Lange
Linwood Pendleton
The panelists were Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, Professor of Marine Studies and the inaugural director of the Global Change Institute, University of Queensland in Australia, Glenn-Marie Lange, leader of the World Bank Environment Department’s Policy & Economics unit and Linwood Pendleton, Duke University and Acting Chief Economist, US National Oceans and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
The ocean ecosystem is not a kitchen sink
Seventy percent of all marine pollution comes from land in the form of industrial waste, human sewage, livestock and agricultural runoff. The notion that the ocean is a vast, limitless sink, capable of absorbing hundreds of billions of tons of wastewater each year is now being dispelled by regular reports of red tides and dead zones around the mouths of major rivers. A dramatic example lies off the Mississippi Delta in the Gulf of Mexico. Each summer, this “dead zone”, fed by nutrients draining one of the world’s largest river basins, grows to an area of approximately 18,000 square kilometers.
Heat can also wreak havoc on ecosystems that have evolved in a relatively stable thermal environment over millennia. Tropical reef-building corals are highly adapted to a narrow range of temperatures and ocean conditions, and function best near the upper limit of their temperature tolerance. As the ocean heats up and sea surface temperatures spike during El Nino events, stressed corals bleach—expelling the microscopic algae living within their tissue, which give them their brilliant color and supplement their nutrition through photosynthesis—revealing the bony white skeleton within. Bleached corals may recover their symbiotic algae if conditions improve, but they are weakened and susceptible to disease as a result.
As the ocean absorbs more heat and CO2, its ability to provide key ecosystem services, including a vital role as the earth’s climate regulator, is compromised. Currently, the ocean absorbs about one third of CO2 emissions from anthropogenic activity. But there are signs already that the buffering capacity of the ocean to absorb growing levels of CO2 without altering ocean chemistry is limited. This is manifested in the increasing acidity of surface waters as CO2 molecules dissolve in water, releasing positive hydrogen ions which preferentially bind with negatively charged ions in the water column essential for calcification. This reaction makes these minerals unavailable to shell-bearing and reef-forming organisms. Given that many of the microscopic plankton species at the base of the food chain are shell bearing, and that the vast coral reefs that are visible from space are made from the bony skeletons of tiny polyps, that have calcified over hundreds of thousands of years, the acidifying trends in the ocean are worrying.
During the discussion, Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg warned: “Disruptions in the food chain from plankton to predators and in the exquisitely complex food webs and species interactions supported by coral reefs, would be disastrous for food security and biodiversity—with tremendous consequences for society.”
We cannot manage what we cannot measure
WAVES FOCUS
• Incorporate natural capital accounts in policy analysis and development planning
• Contribute to methodology for ecosystem accounting for the UN’s System of Environmental and Economic Accounting (SEEA)
• Promote adoption of natural capital accounting beyond the pilot countries
Whatever the resource, it is impossible to evolve a plan to manage and grow the resource without understanding the value of natural capital.
Long-term growth depends on the wealth of a nation, including natural capital. The Global Partnership for Wealth Accounting and Valuation of Ecosystem Services (WAVES) which the World Bank leads, aims to bring natural capital into national systems of accounts. This will help show the link between natural capital, long-term growth, and sustainable development. Panelists highlighted that the challenge was to engage ministries of finance, central banks, and planning agencies, and help them identify the natural capital in their ocean ecosystems. The focus of such an exercise ought to highlight the incentives for local communities, the chief being poverty reduction and sustainable livelihoods.
Blue carbon ahead
Coastal ecosystems such as seagrass meadows, tidal salt marshes, and mangroves generate and sequester massive amounts of carbon in their biomass and substrates. This so-called Blue Carbon needs to be accounted for and the natural coastal carbon sinks which produce it, protected. Unfortunately, economic pressures have resulted in the conversion of coastal wetlands that harbor and release large amounts of blue carbon when disturbed--for agriculture, aquaculture and infrastructure associated with rapid coastal development.
World Bank Sr Coastal and Marine Specialist Marea Hatziolos said: “The importance of protecting these habitats is tied not only to their services as carbon sinks, but to the tremendous emissions of CO2 that occur when these carbon sinks are disturbed.”
Like REDD+ for forests, Linwood Pendleton described a potential equivalent incentive system for Blue Carbon in REFORM+ (Reducing Emissions From Ocean Restoration and Management). Key takeaways from the panel discussions included ideas to assess the economic value of blue carbon, making polluters pay for protection and restoration, and most importantly the notion that value of protection is greater than the value of restoration.
Some slides from the presentation made by Linwood Pendleton, Duke University and Acting Chief Economist, US National Oceans and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Challenges and next steps
DID YOU KNOW?
A destroyed mangrove forest releases 200 times the normal amount of nitrogen dioxide (an atmospheric pollutant) released by a living mangrove? Or, that a degraded mangrove releases 21 times the methane (a potent greenhouse gas) released by a living mangrove? || See Example
Clearly, the future lies in recognizing the value of ocean ecosystems in supporting human welfare and economic growth (a Blue Economy), and the costs to society associated with the loss of these services. Assessing development tradeoffs which fully incorporate these values, making polluters pay, and creating the economic incentives for coastal stakeholders to become stewards of ocean health to create and sustain wealth is a fundamental step toward reversing the behaviors that have led to rapid declines in ocean health in the last century.
Contributed by Jonathan Davidar, Web Editor, Sustainable Development with inputs from Marea Hatziolos, Senior Coastal and Marine Specialist, Environment Department, The World Bank
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