Above: Windward Cemetery, Grenada. Image credit: Scott Schill.

“Reefs break waves every day”: I know you’re thinking that’s an obvious statement. But there’s more to it than meets the eye. Reefs break waves — waves that would otherwise crash into and erode coasts on which hundreds of millions of people and trillions of dollars in development sit.

In fact, this wave attenuation by coral reefs is the single most obvious way nature benefits people globally — and it’s a benefit that conservation and science and policymakers need to pay a lot more attention to as climate keeps changing, coral reefs keep dying, and more and more people inhabit and build on the world’s coastlines.

How Have We Missed This?

Most coral reef science and conservation today focuses on (i) the loss of the stunning diversity and productivity of corals and fishes and (ii) what that loss means for the future of coral reefs and the people that rely on their fisheries. But despite the obviousness of my title, there is extraordinarily little science that focuses on the role of reefs as barriers (even on the Great Barrier Reef).

Above: Figure 1: Grenville, the second-largest city in Grenada. This is just a typical day of wind waves. The cottony white lines offshore waves breaking on some of the reef breaks. Copyright: Google Earth.

The importance of reefs as barriers really hit home for me as I gazed on the Caribbean’s Windward Isles from seat 10A on a return flight home to the States from Grenada recently. But you can make these observations right at your desk. Use Google Earth to look first at the eastern edges of the Windward Isles — look for towns and small cities, and then look for the crescent of what may at first seem like clouds ringing those communities (Figure 1, above). These are the waves breaking on the fore-reefs that protect these communities. I know because, as a surfer, I have mind-surfed waves all around the globe this way.

But this is not just about wet dreams on Google Earth; it’s about people’s everyday lives.

The Daily, Global Disaster of Shoreline Erosion

While in Grenada, I met Dexter Miller on Petit Martinique (one of that country’s islands). We met on one of the few flat pieces of land on the island. Almost all his town’s livelihoods and lives happen on that one piece of land. Fishing is their main income, and the ports and docks are right there; boat-building is the second biggest income generator, and they make the boats right on this one strip of land, which also contains the town’s store and gas station; and this area also doubles as the soccer field.

But the shores of his town — this one flat piece of land — have begun to erode rapidly. And even more rapidly in the past few years. This land loss is not about the future of intensifying storms and sea-level rise; nor is it even about past storms like 1999’s Hurricane Lenny (“Wrong Way Lenny”), which everyone on the island still remembers vividly.

The erosion is happening now with no storm in sight — we watched it biting in and taking away part of their shore every day. This is the daily disaster.

What’s behind this increasing erosion? Past sand mining certainly contributed to it — but the residents stopped that mining. What the erosion is likely most about is that the fringing reefs of Petit Martinique are dying.

What few are recognizing — even in the conservation community — is how drastically that fringing-reef breakdown increases the wave energy hitting shores every day. Mere inches of lost fore-reef depth (either because reefs are not growing or sea levels are rising) means substantially greater wave energy transmitted over the reefs and hitting shorelines (Field et al. 2011). This increase in wave energy is an engineering fact, well worked out for artificial breakwaters around the world.

Indeed, just look at Petit Martinique in Figure 2 (below). What’s telling is what you don’t see on the southern side of the fringing reef. You can see the reef below water, but you don’t see the waves breaking there as you do in front of St. Vincent. While the reef of Petit Martinique is still getting protection from bigger storm waves (waves break ~ when Wave Height = Depth of Reef Tops), their fringing reefs are not protecting it from the daily disaster.

Figure 2: Petit Martinique (below) and Petit Saint Vincent (above). Look at what you don’t see on the south side of the fringing reef just east of Petit Martinque that you do to the east of Petit Saint Vincent — breaking waves. Copyright: Google Earth.

Now consider that this daily disaster is playing out just behind Dexter’s town in the village of Windward (see the above photo), where their ancestors’ graves are being washed into the sea (see image above). It’s also happening in coastal towns and villages throughout Grenada and the Grenadines; the windward isles of the eastern Caribbean ecoregion; throughout the Caribbean; throughout the tropical Atlantic; throughout the tropics globally.

These Coral Reefs Are the Wall Between Us and Rising Seas

Conservationists often say that we are going to have to be proactive and smart about how we respond to climate change, because it will be impossible and too expensive to build a wall around whole towns, cities or islands (except, of course, places like New York City).

But consider for a moment that in fact these fringing coral reefs are the wall — the natural infrastructure, sometimes 30, 60 or even hundreds of feet high — that rings villages, cities and whole islands. Think for one moment about the cost of erecting such a wall; and the benefits lost without it.

To save them, we are going to have to act fast and be much more proactive. On Petit Martinique, they are already heavily defending their shores — often house by house — with hastily erected breakwaters and gabions. Each small gray shore defense that goes in increases erosion just a little downshore and requires another gray solution in that spot. In Dexter’s town, they are pushing to get a whole breakwater wall — a project that will cost EC$3.5M at a minimum.

I can appreciate why they need to act now, but all of these fixes will be temporary. As sea levels rise and (far more importantly) if the barrier reefs continue to break down, then ever more wave energy will make their temporary solutions ineffective. These likelihoods are not currently accounted for in the engineering and design models for breakwaters (or it would become clear how unviable they might be).

So, What’s the Answer?

A significant part of the solution is going to have to be revitalizing and rebuilding those reefs. Those tasks will be challenging, but we do have the knowledge to implement them — specifically, how to better manage reefs to reduce sedimentation, pollution and overfishing so that the reefs can grow. We will also need to be more proactive in reef restoration to spur that growth. Increasing ocean temperatures and acidification will add to the challenge and (some would say) make the endeavor hopeless; I think these predictions are overly dire and do not account for resilience or evolution.

Yes, these approaches might seem expensive. But compare their costs against the cost of all of the individual “grey” infrastructure projects such as those being erected on Petit Martinique. And remember that new climate adaptation funds are already starting to flow in the billions of dollars; these small island developing states are primary recipients of those funds, and right now the gray engineers and businesses are selling just one approach.

The recognition that wave attenuation is a globally critical ecosystem service will challenge conservation’s priorities as well. These fringing reefs are rarely the most scenic, beautiful, remote or diverse coral ecosystems. Indeed, it’s that they are directly in front of villages, towns and cities that makes their revitalization such a high priority. We will also likely have to get comfortable with added hardened structures like reef blocks, as they provide substrate for oysters and corals; add quickly to some of the attenuation benefits; and include the industries and engineers who would otherwise promote only sea walls.

This is not exactly the work I signed up for some years back when I became a marine conservationist, but personally I am excited to be part of work that jointly meets conservation and hazard mitigation goals; that’s fulfilling to me.

Further Reading

M. Field, A. Ogston, and C. Storlazzi. 2011. Rising sea level may cause decline of fringing coral reefs. EOS 92:273-274.

M. Johnson et al. 2011. Caribbean Acropora restoration guide. Best practices for propagation and population enhancement. Arlington, VA: The Nature Conservancy.

1. Stop making excuses and ride your bike to work already.  (Treehugger)
2. California fights invasive light-brown apple moths with native stinger-less wasps.  (Los Angeles Times)
3. London’s poor air quality may leave a dark cloud over next summer’s Olympic Games.  (Huffington Post)
4. This invasive plant is cropping up all over New York– and beware, it can cause blisters, scarring and even blindness.  (Associated Press, via Christian Science Monitor)
5. The Bahamas bans shark fishing.  (Green)

The following is a guest essay written by James Byrne, the Conservancy’s South Florida and Caribbean Marine Science Program Manager. Byrne is also a Dive Safety Officer working with researchers in Florida and the Caribbean to ensure scientific diving expeditions are conducted safely.

This is the second in his series about his experience on the Golden Shadow’s expedition to conduct research on coral reefs in the eastern Caribbean islands. You can read part one here.

I couldn’t think of a better way to celebrate World Oceans Day than being 45 feet underwater conducting coral reef research.

For the past several days, I’ve been aboard the Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation’s Golden Shadow, a research vessel anchored off the Caribbean island of St. Kitts. Here, in a partnership between the Living Oceans Foundation and The Nature Conservancy, I’m leading a 12-person scientific diving crew on daily coral reefs surveys.

Today began like the previous five days of the expedition. We awake at 6:30 a.m. and prepare all of our equipment, make sure our scuba tanks are full, and that we have new data sheets, our underwater journals for recording the reefs’ vital signs.

Then it’s up to the ship’s mess for breakfast and a briefing about the day’s research plan. Today, we’re heading to the northeast corner of the island.

Around 7:30 a.m., we load up the support boats with our dive gear, survey equipment, and two scuba tanks for each of the 12 scientific divers. We’re also joined on the boats by a local dive operator and his crew, a deck officer from the Golden Shadow to captain the tender, and the ship’s physician and nurse.

By 8:30 a.m., we’re underwater. On these dives, I serve as both teacher and researcher. Today I’m working with my dive buddy Graeme Browne, a conservation officer from St. Kitts, to teach him how to conduct reef surveys.

I look on as Graeme lays out a 10-meter transect line and records any and all sea life that lays directly beneath the line in 10 cm intervals. I quickly swim along his line, and if I see anything unusual, I point it out. If Graeme’s not sure about any marine life he sees during the survey, he swims over to ask for my help.

Working with local divers like Graeme is just one way The Nature Conservancy is building capacity for conducting these intensive scientific surveys. For St. Kitts, coral reefs are the heart of people’s livelihoods, economy and way of life, so we have a shared interest in helping reefs recover.

For my own research, I lay out another 10-meter transect line. I’m conducting a coral survey, identifying every coral over 4 cm in size within a half meter of the line to measure maximum coral widths, lengths and heights. I also look for any disease or bleaching, and estimate the amount of live tissue and areas of dead coral.

This site has some of the best coral structures we’ve seen so far on the expedition. It’s spectacular to be here to see reefs that have been growing for hundreds of years and are covered with a Technicolor cornucopia of corals, sponges and algae teeming with reef fish.

But, as with the other sites we’ve visited, these reefs have been hit hard by the threats facing reefs throughout the Caribbean: bleaching and disease, both a result of warming ocean temperatures.

We’ve also surveyed sites under siege by one of the region’s most unwanted visitors: lionfish. Lionfish are an invasive species that have been invading waters throughout the Caribbean, devouring anything they can fit into their mouths.

These signs of trouble would more despairing if it weren’t for other signs of hope that we’re finding. Amongst the once great corals are many small young corals or “coral recruits” as we call them. This is a really inspiring indication that if we can work hard to reduce the threats facing coral reefs, there are young corals coming into the system that can regenerate the reefs.

This is our charge on this World Oceans Day: to work hard to alleviate threats like climate change and give the reefs the opportunity to recover.

After about an hour underwater, we wrap up our surveys and begin our ascent to the surface from a depth of 45 feet. We pause at 15 feet for a three-minute safety stop to help our bodies deal with the excess nitrogen we have absorbed breathing compressed air at depth.

As we exit the water, Georgina, the ship’s nurse, and Phil, the ship’s physician, record our dive times and maximum depths. This is important information to plan our dives safely and keep track of everyone’s dive profiles. We spend an hour motoring slowly to our next site and switching over to new dive tanks.

After our afternoon dive surveys, we motor back to the Golden Shadow. Today, like all our days on this expedition, has been exhausting but productive. We now know so much more about the coral reefs of St. Kitts than we did before—and this research will ultimately go a long way toward expanding marine protected areas and better managing coral reefs.

Tomorrow, we’ll be back in the water. World Oceans Day will be over—but our job to dive deep into the Caribbean’s coral reefs continues. With this knowledge, I will sleep well as the Golden Shadow glides through the night.

(Image: James Byrne conducting an underwater survey to assess the health of coral reefs. Courtesy of James Byrne.)

The following is a guest essay written by James Byrne, the Conservancy’s South Florida and Caribbean Marine Science Program Manager. Byrne is also a Dive Safety Officer working with researchers in Florida and the Caribbean to ensure scientific diving expeditions are conducted safely.

Byrne and a scientific diving crew will be conducting the first-ever comprehensive assessment of coral reefs off the eastern Caribbean islands. Learn more about the expedition in this post and in this Q&A with Byrne on nature.org.

Even as a marine scientist, I’ve had to pay my dues sitting behind a desk. But this week, I’m preparing for the kind of work I do best…60 feet underwater.

Along with a team of researchers, my office will be aboard the Golden Shadow, a vessel that hosts oceanographic expeditions around the world.

This is the kind of office marine scientists dream about. When she was launched in 1994, the 67-meter Golden Shadow was the largest yacht built in the USA since 1931. In 2006, she was refitted for the Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation as part of a fleet of vessels studying the world’s coral reefs.

Next week, in a partnership between The Nature Conservancy and the Living Oceans Foundation, I will lead a nine-person scientific diving crew to conduct the first-ever comprehensive assessment of coral reefs off the eastern Caribbean islands of St. Kitts and Nevis.

My team’s scientific diving surveys will take us into a living laboratory—the quiet underwater world of coral reefs. For St. Kitts and Nevis, marine resources are vital to people’s livelihoods, economy and way of life. The ocean provides fish to eat, the foundation for a thriving tourism industry and the heart of the region’s culture.

But coral reefs are in trouble. The impacts of climate change—rising sea levels and water temperatures—are taking their toll on coral reefs, especially in the Caribbean. The Golden Shadow expedition will go a long way toward developing management strategies that help coral reefs to be more resilient.

In addition to my role as a scientist, I’m also the Conservancy’s Dive Safety Officer for south Florida and the Caribbean, so it’s my job to make sure our nine-person science team is safe during our daily dive surveys. We’re usually underwater for up to an hour at a time and are diving up to 60-feet deep to identify coral species, take measurements, and determine if the coral has been bleached or shows signs of disease.

With her vast diving locker and recompression chamber for treating decompression sickness, or “the bends,” the Golden Shadow will be the perfect platform for our underwater research.

The ship sails with a multi-national support crew. She has her own seaplane—the Golden Eye, a Cessna 208 that can land on water and carry 11 passengers. She carries a variety of speedboats, from small inflatables to a racing boat. She has two satellite telephones, as well as a worldwide internet connection.

With such state of art equipment and amenities, I am honored to have been invited on board. My participation is also a testament to the Conservancy’s completion this past year of a comprehensive Multiple-Use Marine Spatial Design for St. Kitts and Nevis. This U.S. Agency for International Development-funded project involved the St. Kitts and Nevis government, fishers and many other stakeholders to map the values of the region’s fishing areas.

The Golden Shadow expedition will allow us to refine this zoning design, expand marine protected areas, and ultimately better manage coral reefs and the fish populations they support.

I hope the people of St. Kitts and Nevis also take pride in having the Golden Shadow in their waters. The governments had a hand in making this expedition happen, and local fishers have been critical voices in the discussion. This is a special ship with a special purpose.

There’s a palpable feeling of excitement here in St. Croix, USVI, where I’ve been very busy with all of the last-minute planning details for the expedition: selecting coral reef sites to survey, preparing our equipment, and training the science team so we’re ready to hit the water swimming.

Before we launch, my team will spend some time aboard the Golden Shadow getting acquainted with her dive facilities and procedures. Stay tuned…during our voyage next week, I will be posting again to report on the expedition’s progress and life aboard the Golden Shadow.

(First image: James Byrne, underwater. First image credit: The Nature Conservancy. Second image: The Golden Shadow. Second image credit: Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation.)

I started my conservation career working in the U.S. Virgin Islands and have a clear memory of my orientation tour of St. Croix. One of our last stops was the Frederiksted pier, where we lept into the clear blue water to cool off — something that a bunch of local kids were doing that day as well.

After climbing out of the water, I noticed two young boys fishing off the rocks. I went over to see their catch. I was shocked to see that they had a beautiful and tiny reef fish (maybe 4 inches long). Commonly known as the cow fish or box fish, this fish actually doesn’t even have much flesh on it, is pretty boney and doesn’t get bigger than 18 inches (I’ve never seen one that big though!).

It is a curious creature and one of my favorite finds when snorkeling — definitely not something I expected to see being fished. I figured that perhaps it was a local delicacy so I inquired further. “What are you going to do with this fish?” I asked.  The young boy answered simply “pot fish.”

Since I was new to the island, I got some clarification. It turns out that pot fish is a favorite local food — basically a fish stew of sorts, and this little guy was going to be used to give it a fishy flavor. I had always thought of those wild looking critters as a treat to find, but not a treat to eat.

This experience blew me away and was the first of many realizations I had while living there about the state of the fisheries in general, and how much people relied on the sea for their food.

Make your own connection between food and conservation this Earth Day and throw a Picnic for the Planet. Join all the others who are putting their dot on the map and taking the Earth to lunch.

What I learned in my years living and working in the Virgin Islands was that pretty much any fish is fair game, no matter the size, just as long as it was not considered toxic, and even then some folks chose to take their chances.

Long gone are the days of plentiful grouper and snapper that steam on the grill with sweet goodness all around. Today, those fleshy fish are few and far between and now folks rely on fish you would expect to see in your fish tank, not on your dinner plate. Overfishing has become a major problem for coral reefs. For a coral reef ecosystem to function properly, it depends on the presence of the wild diversity that it attracts and is home to.

From the predator to the grazer (herbivore) to the very picky eaters (specialists), each fish plays an important part in the coral reef ‘city.’ What has happened in the Caribbean and in many other parts of the world is that people have essentially fished down the food chain so that the reef city is out of balance and in some cases, basic functions come to a screeching halt. Think New York City with no garbage pick-up in the summertime – a big stinking mess!

In the case of coral reefs, the fish that are now landing on the dinner plate, the grazers, are extremely important for keeping coral competitors in check (namely, seaweed). If the seaweed doesn’t get mowed down by herbivores like queen parrotfish or spiny urchins, they overgrow the corals and the corals disappear. Fish need corals too, so this becomes a vicious cycle if something isn’t done to help fish populations recover.

There are many ways to address this problem, and we are working locally all over the globe to help communities manage their coral reef and fishery resources so that they benefit long term from the sea’s bounty.

In this case, everyone is part of the solution, including you. Make sure that you choose sustainable seafood. There are great guides that help you determine whether the seafood is free of toxic metals, how harmful the fishing method is on ocean habitats and the condition of the particular fish population you are considering for dinner (i.e., in decline, recovering, or healthy).

The latest recommendations change frequently to reflect the latest guidance thanks to proactive programs like Blue Ocean Institute’s FishPhone and Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch.

These guides are simple, color-coded and have gone from providing wallet cards to smart phone apps, making your decision process easier.

These guides require you to know where your fish comes from because this can make all the difference in terms of how it was farmed or caught. If the menu or market isn’t labeling their fish, just ask. These days, most places will be able to tell you where their fish is from. If they don’t know, don’t buy it.

Now with your new tools in hand, and grilling season on the horizon — be sure to take a few extra steps to make sure your seafood isn’t harming the reefs and the people that depend on them.

(Photo Credit: Flickr User missmeng via a Creative Commons license.)

1. Students, parents are protesting planned solar panels at a California middle school. (LA Times)
2. Primitive tools suggest humans left Africa earlier, and in a different direction. (NPR)
3. See amazing pictures of the damage invasive boas inflict on native birds in Aruba. (Dot Earth)
4. A controversial Brazilian mega-dam on a tributary of the Amazon clears another major hurdle. (Green)
5. Your ski and snowboard wax could be seriously harmful to you and wildlife. (Treehugger)

1. What we could probably all use about now: a volunteer eco-vacation in a nice, warm climate.  (Treehugger)
2. When it comes to climate change, birds have it exceptionally rough.  (Green)
3. Obama called for clean energy, high-speed rail in last night’s State of the Union address.  (Grist)
4. Four enviro documentaries are up for an Oscar this year.  (The Daily Green)
5. A new study says that natural gas might not be all that cleaner than other fossil fuels.  (YaleE360)

To the naked eye, expectations are low for the United Nation’s annual climate change conference beginning today in Cancún, Mexico. There is little question that last year’s Copenhagen meeting left behind a bruised UN process, which was exacerbated by the subsequent failure of the U.S. Congress to pass climate legislation.

So let’s be clear – this year is about getting a few base hits to restore confidence in the international negotiating process on climate change, rather than swinging for the bleachers.

We do still want a comprehensive international agreement on climate that will limit warming below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), but that is not on offer this year. Instead, we are looking for a “balanced package” of decisions on the lowest hanging fruit, including:

1. A decision that addresses forest loss and establishes the parameters of the international system called REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation)
2. A decision that explicitly recognizes the contribution of ecosystem-based approaches to climate adaptation
3. A financing decision that starts a process to create the “Green Fund” envisioned by the Copenhagen Accord
4. A forest-sector decision that closes the loopholes in forest carbon accounting under the Kyoto rules
5. A process decision that extends the mandate of the negotiating process so we can eventually get to a comprehensive, legally binding agreement

These are the “building blocks” for success in the official process in Cancún. Each of those individual elements is within reach, but we will have to watch out for the spoilers, who will seek to hold back movement on individual elements simply to block overall progress or to gain leverage on specific, unrelated issues. So, there are no “done deals” yet.

Just as important to the formal negotiations now are the parallel processes that have emerged since Copenhagen. Given the frustration with the multilateral process involving 190 countries, smaller, opt-in processes have sprung up where we think there are opportunities to make significant progress to advance our key issues. We’ll be paying equal attention to those as well.

“Fast-Start Finance” is one of the critical areas for success in Cancún. Developing countries are looking for evidence that donor countries are meeting their Copenhagen commitments. Those funds are not channeled under the convention; they were intended as a financial bridge until the next international agreement is in place. The Nature Conservancy has done an analysis showing that about $12 billion of the promised $30 billion is now in the disbursement pipeline.

We are also closely tracking the “REDD+ Partnership,” encouraging it to evolve into an effective coalition for furthering REDD readiness and pilot-project implementation in developing countries as well as a forum for sharing lessons about REDD implementation and finance.

And we are supporting the development of a similar partnership on adaptation to accelerate implementation and lesson-learning.

And, of course, we are encouraging countries and others to make unilateral announcements for action on the ground. This is where having the COP in a country where The Nature Conservancy has a strong presence makes a huge difference. Our Mexico team is lining up two major announcements.

The first is the announcement of a “Regional Climate Change Plan” between the three state governments of the Yucatan Peninsula, which will include the commitment to develop a regional REDD program. The second is the announcement of a “Declaration for Conservation and Climate Change Adaptation” along the MesoAmerican Reef involving the governments of Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras.

These events underscore an important message: while progress is still possible – albeit lamentably slow – in the official UN process, there are plenty of innovative things happening. Leaders aren’t waiting for an international agreement and The Nature Conservancy is actively facilitating real work on the ground and in the water.

So, if you happen to be standing in Cancún looking out at the ocean, the evidence would be right in front of you – in the form of the conservation and adaptation partnership being formed by the four coastal countries – and right behind you – in the form of the REDD+ partnership being formed by the three governors.

The Nature Conservancy’s delegation will be here in Cancún for the next two weeks working closely within and outside the negotiations. (Cancun is not going to be a vacation by any means, though waiting in long UN security lines in the tropical warmth will be a vast improvement over the last two Decembers we spent freezing in Poznan, Poland and Copenhagen, Denmark.)

We will have an ample collection of reports on everything from forests to adaptation to finance to conservation to the negotiations themselves posted at Nature.org and our blogs Cool Green Science and Planet Change. Stay tuned …

(Image: Cancunmesse´s gate, one of the official venues of the COP16. Image Credit: Courtesy of UN COP16 photo pool.)

Early Saturday morning in Nagoya, Japan, nature got a much needed ‘win.’

Almost a year after the bruising struggle of the Climate Change convention’s COP15, the Convention on Biological Diversity reached all three of its stated goals at its 10th Conference of Parties – an achievement that was uncertain right up to the end.

This negotiation was a quite different in tone from Copenhagen. Nagoya was not marked by any of the high drama and theatrics of Copenhagen, nor did it have heads of state flying in from all around the world. Rather, it was a much more business-like affair of diplomats and environment ministers rolling up their sleeves and working out compromises.

The three major outputs from the COP are:

1. The Nagoya Protocol
   After six years of negotiation, the Convention adopted the Nagoya Protocol on “access and benefit sharing” (ABS) of genetic resources. To make a complicated set of issues as simple as possible, this protocol is intended to define the rules of the game to cover the use of genetic resources taken from one place and transformed and commercialized somewhere else (so, imagine a Swiss pharmaceutical company taking a native plant root from a national park in Brazil and synthesizing a cure for cancer in a laboratory in Basel and then making a trillion dollars). The Protocol sets out the framework by which countries grant access to their genetic resources, regulate and license “bio-prospecting” and export of genetic materials, and revenue-sharing from potential commercialization of products derived from those genetic resources that someone is bothering to conserve. The idea is that clarifying the rules of the game will create additional incentives for countries to conserve nature’s treasure trove of potential cures for whatever ails us.
2. The Strategic Plan
   The conference also adopted a new “Strategic Plan” with a global goal of halting the loss of biodiversity by 2020 to ensure that ecosystems are resilient and able to continue to provide essential benefits and services for people. This represents a significant reframing of the biodiversity agenda around both climate change – noting the role of nature in both climate mitigation and adaptation – and the role of nature in poverty reduction. The 20 headline targets of the plan include:
   • Reduce the rate of all natural habitat loss by half by 2020.
   • All commercial fish stocks, forests and agricultural lands should be sustainably managed by 2020.
   • Prevent the extinction of known species by 2020.
   • By 2020, 17% of all terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems (we are currently at 12%) and 10% of all marine and coastal ecosystems (we are currently at only 1%) should be effectively managed in legally designated protected areas.
3. The Resource Mobilization Strategy
   Another reason for guarded optimism this time around is that the Biodiversity Convention also adopted a “resource mobilization strategy,” recognizing that we can’t achieve the goal and supporting targets without a substantial increase in funding for conservation. The Convention was also clever enough to look at financing from “all sources” recognizing the need for both public and private resources for conservation, as well as both domestic and foreign aid funding in developing countries. Earlier this year, the donor countries replenished the Global Environment Facility, the multilateral trust fund established to finance the climate and biodiversity conventions, to the tune of $4.25 Billion for the period 2010-2014, a 37% increase over the previous four-year period. And at the Conference, France announced an additional 4 Billion euros for conservation over the next decade.  We’ll come back in two years and have another round of talks on more specific funding targets once countries have assessed how much it will cost to achieve the targets (and hopefully when the world economy is a little healthier.)

Emergent Themes

Aside from the official negotiations, a couple of key themes emerged that will likely shape the discourse on conservation over the next few years. First, there was an undercurrent of recognition of the increasingly interrelated nature of biodiversity conservation, climate change and development. Second, there was a lot more focus on the economics of biodiversity. The headline for this was the launch of the TEEB (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity), which basically summarized the state of the art on the valuation of ecosystem services, and scolded mainstream economics for ignoring the economic benefits of nature as well as ignoring the costs of ecosystem degradation and pollution.

Nature Conservancy Initiatives

Finally, let me highlight a bit of the Conservancy business that got done on the margins of the Conference.  Obviously, these conferences are important for the formal negotiations, but they are also the biggest trade fair of the year on biodiversity, attracting donors and partners and researchers and the media – which is where the real excitement is.

• Forever Costa Rica – We and our partners announced again the completion of the Forever Costa Rica project, whereby we collectively raised some $57 million to help Costa Rica complete its protected areas commitments under the Biodiversity Convention. The project was highlighted at a high level dinner celebrating the LifeWeb Initiative, which mobilized over $120 Million for conservation - Forever Costa Rica accounted for almost half of that.
• Tri-National Initiative – The Conservancy has been promoting a three-country protected areas initiative in Latin America, involving the governments of Colombia, Peru and Ecuador. Our savvy policy team there managed to get ministers from all three countries on the stage at an event to profile the developing project, with the right donor partners in the audience to witness the political commitment coming from the countries.
• Caribbean Challenge – We also had the occasion to highlight our Caribbean Challenge project as an innovative conservation finance scheme. The project aims to establish a $40 million trust fund to provide permanent funding for conservation in eight Caribbean countries, as well as matching contributions from each of the eight countries.
• West Indian Ocean Partnership – We also secured the commitment from the government of the Seychelles to work with a half dozen or more countries of the Indian Ocean and East African coast to develop a series of conservation commitments over the next year or so, modeled on the Micronesia and Carribean Challenges.
• We also launched two important reports on the status of the world’s Marine Protected Areas and on the state of financing of the protected areas networks of Latin America. The recommendations of the former directly influenced the marine outcomes of the negotiations, while the latter directly contributed to the finance outcome, providing a model for the national cost analyses that countries should undertake over the next two years.

Finally, I am more optimistic today than I was when the international community adopted a vague target in 2002 to halt the loss of biodiversity by 2010. This time around, we have a much clearer description of what success looks like, and what the path and guideposts are to get there. That’s significant, even if we are not 100% successful by 2020.

Lastly, let me just conclude by saying that we had a stellar (if now exhausted) and highly diverse Conservancy delegation in Nagoya, working the corridors, presiding at side events, and supporting the country delegations. Over the course of the two weeks, we had something like 12 nationalities represented, speaking over 10 languages, with a team that was never much bigger than 15 people. The Nature Conservancy truly looks and acts like an international organization on the world stage.

(Image: Cheetah in the Serengeti, Tanzania, Africa. Image credit: © Kenneth K. Coe)

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.)