1. The Daily Green asks, Is everything you know about being green wrong? Here’s the scoop: it’s not about what car you drive or whether you eat meat, but the stuff you buy.
2. Marine sponges are getting a better image, no thanks to that Sponge Bob Square Pants guy. A new study shows that sponges gulp huge quantities of ocean carbon and transform it into food for corals, making them integral to the survival of reefs in these warming times.
3. Is an apple that won’t rot for 4 months somehow better for the planet than traditional apples? The Australian scientists behind the new RS103-130 think so. Only in Oz.
4. On the other side of the equator, the Dutch have cooked up their own crazy scheme: a driving tax designed to cut traffic and transportation emissions. The tax would be imposed on a per-mile basis, although steeper fees apply to driving during rush hour and driving a big car.
5. Rising seas, warmer temperatures, increased rainfall… now here’s a new effect of climate change: more wind. Scientists have observed increased wind over Lake Superior as a result of changing water and air temperatures caused by less winter ice.

As UN negotiators from around the world gather in Barcelona this week to continue hammering out a global climate deal, the question of emissions reduction targets has grabbed center stage in the press.

But even if all countries stopped emitting greenhouse gas pollution today, the impacts of climate change will be felt for years to come.

We must reduce emissions to minimize any future impacts. But negotiators must also develop policies and financial mechanisms that will help communities – and the natural resources they rely upon for survival – adapt to and overcome the climate impacts we are already seeing today.

The Nature Conservancy hosted an event here in Barcelona (webcast) last night highlighting adaptation actions we and others are launching around the world. The actions presented are the types that UN negotiators should include in a global agreement to ensure it provides the support needed to protect people and nature from the ravages of climate change.

Mike Beck, senior scientist with the Conservancy’s Global Marine Team, spoke of how sea levels are rising faster than anyone had previously projected, and how coastal communities are struggling to survive.

Mike unveiled an innovate new web tool called Coastal Resilience that shows in detail how sea level rise is hitting Long Island, NY. Users can look up how different sea-level rise scenarios will impact specific areas according to development type (commercial or residential areas); demographics (such as age or economic status); habitat types; and other specific social, economic and environmental classifications.

Residents can even look up their home addresses in Long Island and see how sea-level rise will impact their property.

The tool also allows government agencies to see where hospitals, fire stations and other emergency response organizations are located in connection to the areas that will be worst hit by sea-level rise.

“Most emergency responses to storms and flooding are made at the local level. But most localities don’t have access to this kind of information,” Mike said during the presentation.

Engaging communities in dealing with climate change impacts is crucial in places like Long Island, and even more so in developing countries where vulnerable communities are likely to face some of the greatest impacts. Several countries are now building upon the Coastal Resilience work to develop similar tools for their regions. The Conservancy is working with partners in the Caribbean to develop a similar tool.

“[In the Caribbean] most hotels and the tourist industry are based around these coastlines,” Mike said. “They’re socially and economically critical.”

Also joining the event was Rence Sore, the Solomon Islands‘ permanent secretary of environment, conservation and meteorology, who spoke of how his country is combating rising sea levels. Sore described how many of the islands in his nation are just one meter above sea level and are already dealing with coastal erosion and salt water contamination of crop lands.

“We depend on natural resources,” Sore said. “Climate change is impacting our food and water security.”

He said his government is incorporating the impacts of climate change in their development plans and are focusing on protecting their natural resources, from mangroves and coral reefs and more, to ensure they can continue to provide food and water to local communities.

The Conservancy is working in the Choiseul province of the Solomon Islands, in partnership with the Lauru Land Conference of Tribal Communities, to help plan local coastal land and resource management in response to climate impacts

These examples show how, in developed and developing countries alike, providing information and engaging communities are essential components to dealing with the impacts of climate change.

In Barcelona, our team is advocating that a global climate agreement draw on and strengthen the capacity of indigenous peoples and local communities to monitor, understand, and respond to climate change through effective adaptation measures. Protecting and restoring natural resources are some of the most effective measures for strengthening the resilience of both people and nature.

To learn more and spread the word about a global climate agreement, visit Planet Change.

(Image: Researchers in the Solomon Islands. Credit: David Wachenfeld © 2004 Triggerfish Images.)

My husband returns to the same reefs every year in the Bahamas, where he has been teaching a coral reef ecology class for the last 14 years. On his 2008 trip, he noticed that the reef fish were missing. The culprits were quickly identified — and during his 2009 course, he and his students were eating them.

Lionfish.

Lionfish do not belong in the Caribbean. They are native to the South Pacific and Indian Ocean and made their way into the Caribbean through the release (the exact event is unknown) of aquarium fish. Some say they were in a tank that was destroyed in Hurricane Andrew in 1992. Others say it was a release of just 3 or 6 specimens. Whatever the case, lionfish are now spotted as far north as Rhode Island, and are popping up all over the Caribbean, from Colombia to the Virgin Islands to the Bahamas.

The Bahamas‘ marine ecosystem has already been hard hit. The people that know these reefs well are witnessing a rapid decline in reef fish thanks to these voracious predators, which have an appetite for juvenile reef fish. Their method of attack is particularly unique. Instead of an ambush attack or high-speed chase, lionfish make their presence known and confuse their prey by displaying their beautiful fins like a peacock, slowly dancing towards their prey and then rapidly sucking the prey into their mouths like a vacuum. This technique is so effective because no other predator in the Caribbean uses it — so prey are not adapted to avoid it.

Lionfish have no natural predators in Caribbean waters and are thriving on the tasty but already dwindling choice of baby reef fish. Some think that native grouper might have preyed on lionfish — but because grouper are overfished in the Caribbean (and in most parts of the world), the options beyond human predators are few.

As the distribution of lionfish in the Caribbean expands and the severity of this invasion is becoming more apparent, managers are trying to figure out what to do before the adult populations of reef fish are seriously affected. In the Bahamas, they have issued a “kill on sight” directive. The Caribbean Fisheries Management Council has even developed a Most Wanted Poster to encourage removal of these fish.

The best way to get rid of them? Put them on the menu! In Asia, lionfish are a popular menu item. That’s not yet the case in the Caribbean, so folks are working to change the culture of fear that surrounds lionfish (they have toxic spines that really hurt when they touch you) into a culture of desire for a delightful bite of this light and tasty fish. There are even websites that are collecting lionfish recipes — everything from sushi to Bahamian style fritters to smoked lionfish dip (yum!).

The hope is that people will be motivated to hunt and remove these fish, taking advantage of the existing tradition of artisanal fishing in the Caribbean and turning fishers toward this undesirable species and perhaps away from dwindling populations of grouper and snapper.

An additional approach to this problem — and one that would benefit the reef in multiple ways as well — would be to beef up protection of large predators such as grouper and sharks so that they can work to keep this ecosystem in balance and potentially keep the lionfish population in check.

My husband’s students decided to do a small research project to examine the gut contents (i.e., what is in the bellies) of lionfish they found on the Bahamian reefs, and discovered that their bellies were quite full of baby reef fish. The reward for their efforts was a yummy dinner of fried lionfish…and my husband assures me that in terms of flavor and texture, they compete with any flakey white fish you can think of or catch in the Caribbean. So…

This is probably the only time you’ll hear me advocating for people to eat fish. If you want to eat fish, I’d usually refer you to Monterrey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch — a guide that helps diners make decisions about the most sustainable and healthy options for seafood. However, when it comes to lionfish in the Caribbean, I say chow down to your heart’s content!

With so many great photos from our online community this week, it was hard to pick just one… but this curacao scorpionfish by Flickr user DiamondPete has a certain “now you see me, now you don’t” quality that’s just too alluring to pass up.

Check out all The Nature Conservancy’s featured daily nature images, submitted to the Conservancy’s Flickr group by people like you — at my.nature.org.

We are back on the negotiating trail, this time in Bangkok, continuing international discussions that happened in Bonn in June and August. I arrived here late last night wondering what I would wake up to in the morning. So much has been happening recently on climate change, from last week’s “Climate Week” in New York City to Wednesday’s introduction of climate legislation into the Senate committee on environment and public works.

There have been some other things happening on climate change too. We’ve been seeing the impacts of climate change first hand – from 500 year floods in Georgia to more intense and frequent fires in southern California. We’ve seen reports on how some ecosystems like coral reefs need urgent action to keep them from their tipping point. And we’re seeing again, with typhoons in the Phillipines and Vietnam, the vulnerability of people in developing countries around the world. All sad reminders of how important it is that we are here.

So, my question when I woke up today: has any of this created some movement in efforts here to reach a global climate agreement in December?

Here’s what I’ve found so far:

In the negotiations, we’ve come into Bangkok with hundreds of pages of text, with hopes of narrowing to 30 – 40 pages by December. Parties are working towards structuring the text into something that is negotiable — combining and consolidating where similar ideas are appearing in multiple places. From this work, it’s hopeful that we will see some new texts by Saturday, which will enable parties to do some real negotiating next week.

Meanwhile, some hot issues seem to have been taken up more vigorously than in the past. Earlier in the week, one of the central tensions in this negotiation came to the fore, regarding who is responsible for doing what. Developed countries want to push for actions that all countries will undertake, including major developing countries like China and India whose emissions are likely to grow significantly in the future. Those countries, however, want to keep the focus on what developed countries will do, since developed countries are historically responsible for the majority of global emissions to date. Although this issue wasn’t fully resolved, the general feeling is getting these perspectives out on the table is leading to more frank discussions between parties.

And still, everyone is waiting on the United States to put some hard numbers on the table in terms of its own actions. What the US can do globally will be shaped by what it does nationally in climate legislation back home.

I think many people, here in Bangkok and back home in the States, don’t quite recognize how crucial and urgent it is that the Senate move on a climate bill by December. Today, Duncan Marsh, our director of international climate policy, moderated a press conference about the Senate bill, to provide this perspective to reporters here. One reporter asked, if so much is dependent upon what happens in the US Senate, then aren’t negotiators here wasting their time?

Not true, was Duncan’s response. While there is rightfully a lot of focus on the “big numbers” (i.e., emissions reductions targets and financing for developing countries), he said, those numbers are unlikely to become clear until the final days of Copenhagen when a political deal is agreed. Meanwhile, very important work can be done here and now to create a framework for a new agreement, into which those numbers can be slotted. If parties hold off and wait for the numbers, there will be no foundation to hold up the urgency and tension that is expected in Copenhagen.

So what is clear right now is that negotiators here in Bangkok and legislators back in Washington must all focus and move forward towards the end goal of keeping global warming to below 2 degrees C.

To add your support for global and US action, visit our Planet Change site at nature.org/change.

(image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/koolgary/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

I should start out by reminding readers that I am a coral reef optimist, as previously stated in my first Cool Green Science blog post.

However, the news this week for coral reefs – and the ocean in general – is alarming and my optimism may quickly disappear if the global community doesn’t take appropriate action in short order.

What’s bringing me down? Scientists around the world have jointly issued a cry for help for the world’s coral reefs, citing new evidence that climate change has already pushed coral reefs to their breaking point.

Trying to better understand these latest developments, I had an interesting discussion this past week with my Conservancy colleague, Mark Spalding, who participated in an emergency coral reef meeting this past summer — assembled by the Royal Society in London — to sort out what should be done to save the world’s coral reefs.

From Mark’s perspective, the message from this summer gathering is bleak and I couldn’t agree more. The outcome of the meeting was a realization by global experts that we can’t just aim to reduce the rates of CO2 emissions in order to save coral reefs. We have to actually freeze the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere as soon as possible. In fact, we have to reduce the current CO2 levels in order for coral reefs and much of life in the ocean to survive.

The meeting outcomes have been published as a series of statements and recommendations this week in an expert journal, the Marine Pollution Bulletin. Along side this publication is a supportive document signed by many of the big guns in the field, including Sir David Attenborough, James Lovelock, and perhaps more ominously, the heads of several coral reef societies (these are the big guns, intellectually speaking, that don’t sign up to things unless the science is watertight).  For more on what was discussed at this meeting, check out a fascinating presentation given by Charlie Veron, the world’s foremost authority on coral.

For those human neighbors of coral reefs, we must also be implementing the best management we can muster since the evidence continues to demonstrate that healthy reefs are more likely to resist the impacts of climate change, buying us time to deal with the problem of increasing carbon emissions.

So what is the big deal about CO2 and the oceans? If you’ve been reading my posts, you’ll be familiar with the problem of coral bleaching and how when the climate warms, so do the oceans, and coral reefs really can’t tolerate warming oceans very well.

Well, the problem is actually bigger than just warming seas and associated coral bleaching. About 1/3 of the world’s CO2 is taken up by the oceans. This changes the ocean’s chemistry, making it more acidic.

With the increasing load of CO2 on the oceans, a phenomenon called ‘ocean acidification’ is occurring. Basically, as the ocean becomes even very slightly more acid, some of the stuff that dissolves in the ocean no longer stays dissolved. That “stuff” includes the carbonate minerals that corals, and a host of other plants and animals, need in order to build skeletons and shells.

At first the impacts are going to be very subtle – things just won’t be able to grow as fast as before. But it’s is expected to become more difficult as the ocean’s acidity continues to increase and will likely affect the entire ocean food web.

In fact, an important component of the very base of the ocean food chain is tiny animals that live in calcium carbonate shells. That is a big ‘uh oh’ for the rest of the ocean to say the least. This raises serious concerns for the ability of the ocean to support marine life in the not too distant future.

So where’s the space for an optimist in all this? First off, it’s reassuring that The Nature Conservancy is doing it right.  Our reef resilience work is pretty much all we can do at the local scale, and it does help – we just need to do more of it.

Meanwhile, the Conservancy is working at another scale trying to bring leaders to the table and shore up the arguments for something very big in Copenhagen.

What’s all this about Copenhagen anyway? The news is abuzz at the moment with talk about the next chance to sort out on climate change. December’s United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen is being touted by many experts as our last best chance. If we don’t “seal the deal” on a “fair, ambitious and binding” agreement between ALL nations the future indeed looks very bleak.

What’s struck me is that now, at 5 minutes to ecological midnight, the message has really sunk in. And not just among academics, or NGOs, or westerners.

Witness the Global Wake-Up Call (video above) that took place last Monday, with over 2,500 mini “flash mob” street-theatre demonstrations in 135 countries. 135 countries! I don’t think I could even name 135 countries. People taking part were as far afield as the Seychelles, Kiribati, Fiji, Jamaica and St. Lucia. It is inspiring to see so many people challenging their leaders to take action — I encourage you to take a peek.

As the clock counts down to Copenhagen, I am sending all my good vibes to our talented policy team and hoping that others will be inspired to speak out and encourage our world leaders to take action. Coral reefs, our oceanic planet, and the people that depend on it are counting on those at the Copenhagen meeting to make wise decisions and hold each other accountable.

To send a personal message to world leaders about climate change, check out The Nature Conservancy’s Planet Change initiative.

Editor’s Note: Alison Green, senior marine scientist for The Nature Conservancy, recently traveled to Papua New Guinea to see cutting-edge marine work by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the Coral Triangle, the most biodiverse marine region on Earth. Also read her  posts from Papua New Guinea on sea-surface monitoring and climate change in the Coral Triangle and new ways to count cryptic coral reef organisms.

Have you ever noticed the cacophony of sounds on a coral reef? It’s a combination from many species such as snapping shrimp, reef fish, whales and dolphins that use sound to communicate. (The links take you to sounds of these animals.)

A few years ago, NOAA and the University of Hawaii developed an underwater listening device called an Ecological Acoustic Recorder (EAR), which records sounds on and near coral reefs.

Preliminary evidence suggests that these EARs may provide an exciting new technology for monitoring coral reefs around the clock and throughout the year. Do healthy reefs sound different than stressed reefs? If so, we may be able to use these devices to monitor coral reefs using sound to augment less frequent underwater visual censuses by divers.   

A few weeks ago, I helped install an EAR in Kimbe Bay, Papua New Guinea (see photo above). This is the first of these instruments to be deployed in the Coral Triangle. Together with other EARs deployed in many other locations around the world, the results should help us determine whether these instruments will provide an effective monitoring method for coral reefs in the future.

(Photo: An EAR on the reef in Kimbe Bay. Credit: Mark Eakin, NOAA.)

Editor’s Note: Alison Green, senior marine scientist for The Nature Conservancy, recently traveled to Papua New Guinea to see cutting-edge marine work by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the Coral Triangle, the most biodiverse marine region on Earth. Also read her first post from Papua New Guinea on sea-surface monitoring and climate change in the Coral Triangle.

There are many ways to monitor coral reefs. The traditional way is to count corals and reef fishes that are easy to see. But this method only accounts for a small proportion of the 1 million to 9 million species estimated to occur on coral reefs.

So NOAA recently developed instruments for monitoring cryptic coral reef organisms as part of the international Census of Marine Life. These instruments (called Autonomous Reef Monitoring Structures or ARMS) provide habitat for an extraordinarily diverse range of cryptic reef organisms such as sponges, sea squirts, sea stars, worms, shrimps and crabs, sea snails and octopus.

When deployed on coral reefs for up to two years, ARMS provide information on the biodiversity of cryptic reef organisms that you can’t normally see, and preliminary results from Hawaii and Australia suggest that they will lead to the discovery of an outrageous number of new coral reef species.

The ARMS  are also expected to provide valuable information on changes in biodiversity associated with climate change and ocean acidification. To date, almost 400 ARMS have been deployed at 40 locations in the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic Oceans.

This week, we installed nine ARMS on coral reefs in Kimbe Bay, Papua New Guinea. These are the first of these instruments to be deployed in the Coral Triangle, the center of marine biodiversity. If these devices are discovering unknown biodiversity in other regions, imagine what they will find in the Coral Triangle!

(Image: (1) Dive master from Walindi Plantation Resort helps NOAA install ARMS in Kimbe Bay, Papua New Guinea. Credit: Mark Eakin, NOAA. (2) ARMS deployed on the reef in Kimbe Bay. Image: Mark Eakin, NOAA.)

What can a buoy in the ocean do in the fight against the effects of climate change? A lot, as I found out last week in the Coral Triangle — the most biodiverse marine region in the world.

I visited Kimbe Bay in Papua New Guinea with three scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: Dr. Mark Eakin, who leads their Coral Reef Watch Program; Dr. Rusty Brainard, who leads their Coral Reef Ecosystem Division (CRED); and Danny Merritt, who is an ocean engineer (also with CRED).

NOAA is a world leader in monitoring climate change and its impacts on coral reefs, and we were there to include Kimbe Bay in their global monitoring program through the deployment of buoys equipped with sea-surface temperature sensing equipment.

In particular, NOAA monitors global sea-surface temperatures using satellite-derived data and uses this information to predict coral bleaching, which occurs when ocean temperatures are higher than normal in coral reef areas.

Sea-surface temperature (SST) buoys measure the actual water temperature at a site and beam the information back to NOAA via satellite. This information is used to calibrate and validate the accuracy of their satellite-derived data.

About 30 SST buoys have been deployed on coral reefs in the Caribbean and across the Pacific Ocean, and this week we installed the first SST buoy in the Coral Triangle (see photo below).

Once the SST buoy is fully operational, the information it provides will help NOAA refine their satellite monitoring system and provide us with a near real-time record of SST in Kimbe Bay.

Since the SST buoy only measures the water temperature at the surface, we also deployed nine subsurface temperature recorders (STRs) on coral reefs at a range of sites and depths. Together with STRs already deployed by the Australian Research Council Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (ARC CoE for Coral Reef Studies), we now have an array of 22 instruments in place at six sites and six depths (0 to 35m) to monitor sea temperatures in Kimbe Bay.

These instruments, in conjunction with monitoring of corals and reef fishes by the ARC CoE for Coral Reef Studies, will help us understand the conditions that cause coral bleaching — and the response by corals and reef fishes – in the bay.

In my next post from Kimbe Bay,  I’ll talk about how NOAA is now monitoring cryptic coral reef organisms there that you can’t normally see — and why that’s important for climate change science and coral reef health.

(Images: SST buoy on dock (above) and deployed in Kimbe Bay (below). Credit: Alison Green/TNC.)

Having lived in the hurricane zone for most of the last decade, I have developed a bit of an addiction to The Weather Channel this time of year. Until recently, the general feeling around hurricane coverage and anticipation of hurricane season in the United States has been a fear of “the big one.”  Now, and especially this summer, I am surprised to find I am hoping for a hurricane. Not a big one, of course. But as far as the health of coral reefs is concerned, a few minor ones would do the trick.

It may surprise you to know that, given the warming trends in the ocean and the fact that El Niño seems to be setting up for this winter, a hurricane is just what coral reefs need to avoid a mass bleaching event.

Don’t get me wrong: Big hurricanes can cause serious damage to coral reefs. But generally, storms are something they have adapted to and as long as they are in good health, will be able to recover from.

But why are hurricanes good for coral reefs?

The combination of still hot water and radiation stress from cloud-free summer days is a deadly duo for corals. But with hurricanes, you get lots and lots of wind, and the ocean gets all stirred up. The clouds come in and darken the sky and cool things off with lots of rainfall. This is just what a reef needs to keep from bleaching when they have been cooking in the sun, getting stressed from the heat.

Here’s why: When corals are stressed, they expel the tiny algae cells that live in their tissues, turning the corals white. This bleaching (the appearance of “whitened” coral where there was once-colorful coral) is a symptom of stress in corals and other reef animals with symbiotic algae. These tiny algae are known as zooxanthellae and are present in most healthy reef-building corals. Zooxanthellae provide nutrients and oxygen to the coral through photosynthetic activities, allowing their host to direct more energy toward growth and constructing its calcium carbonate skeleton.

The host coral polyp in return provides zooxanthellae with a protected environment and a constant supply of carbon dioxide needed for photosynthesis.  When sea temperatures become too warm (above 28 C), the photosythetic system of the zooxanthellae can not effectively process incoming light. This results in production of “superoxides,” such as hydrogen peroxide, toxic by-products of this process. These toxins contribute to coral stress reactions, which lead to bleaching.  In extreme cases of bleaching, corals die.

I tend to think about the hurricane season in terms of the alphabet – if we are in August and have gotten past the letter “G,” it usually means a pretty active year. Remember the hurricane season of 2005, when we used up all the letters and started using greek letters?

Now, here at the height of this year’s hurricane season, we’ve barely reached “E,” with only one hurricane in the bunch. With Hurricane Bill avoiding the Caribbean pretty much, we can only hope to see a few small storms this month that would cool things off in the Lesser Antilles and Northern Caribbean. That’s good news, because NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch Program has predicted these areas will be hit the hardest by mass bleaching, based on the current sea surface temperature models derived from satellite data.

Right now, Florida reefs are under watch for bleaching due to persistent warm water that doesn’t seem to be going away. This isn’t good news — but unfortunately, it gets worse. Because it is the beginning of an El Niño year that is typically characterized by warming seas, we can expect to see even more extreme conditions for Caribbean reefs next year.

Scientists have identified a trend that usually goes something like this: The first part of the El Niño cycle brings some bleaching to the Caribbean, and then in the later part of the El Niño cycle the sustained sea warming trend makes Caribbean reefs even more likely to experience mass bleaching. So, we may get a teaser now that will hopefully prepare coral reef managers for what is to come next summer.

One of the tools The Nature Conservancy and partners such as NOAA are encouraging reef managers to develop and use is a bleaching response plan.  These plans help managers to be prepared for the impending event by:

• Making decisions about bleaching monitoring protocols;
• Coordinating monitoring teams among many different agencies;
• Communicating about the event; and
• Discussing how to implement management interventions.

As we work to raise the alert level and help managers develop and implement their bleaching response plans, we will continue to hope that we see a change in the weather. We could really use some stirring up right about now.

(Image: Coral bleaching in the Lower Florida Keys. Credit: Craig Quirolo/Reef Relief.)