The Nature Conservancy has been working with AusAID, Australia’s overseas aid program, on the International Climate Change Adaptation Initiative (ICCAI), a program that seeks to help communities in Asia Pacific respond to the impacts of climate change. The ICCAI has made possible a vast array of development and conservation projects, which are boosting the resilience of communities throughout Melanesia. Cool Green Science recently spoke to Trish Kas, the Conservancy’s conservation program manager in Papua New Guinea’s Manus Province, about her involvement in the work and how a giant 3D model of the province will help make a huge difference for local people.

CGS: So we know that this project involves a lot of different places throughout the Pacific. Why did Manus Province get involved with the AusAID-supported climate change adaptation project activities?

Trish: Manus is the northern-most province in PNG—it’s a big series of islands and atolls, with Manus Island being the biggest. Manus Island has 50,000 people and the province’s capital, Lorengau, which is the region’s one point of administrative contact. The province covers both land and marine areas and has one of the world’s highest concentrations of biodiversity, but it’s been severely affected by climate change impacts like sea level rise—perhaps more than any other province in PNG. Six of Manus’s smaller atolls have been lost to the sea, and people here are faced with other climate change issues as well, including lack of access to clean water and food as well as hotter temperatures. So local people have to develop adaptation measures that are both culturally and physically appropriate for them. That’s where the Conservancy can help.

CGS: How do you go about figuring out which adaptation measures work best in the local context?

Trish: It’s simple: by talking to the people that live there. I helped facilitate one workshop with local people on potential climate change measures and worked with local leaders to take stock of local resources like freshwater and assess how communities use those resources. I also helped launch the P3D [participatory 3D] modeling process, which took place in Lorengau. Through P3D, communities build a scale model of their region—it reveals not just natural landmarks but how people relate to the environment as well. By building a giant map of Manus, we learned a lot more about how people interact with nature.

CGS: Were people excited about the P3D process? Or did you have to win them over?

Trish: People were very enthusiastic. This was the first time a province-scale model had been created, so it was definitely a new thing for them. The workshop was supposed to last for 10 days, but after starting the process, we quickly realized that building the model alone would take maybe 15 days. As a result, villagers worked nights and weekends to complete the map, which ended up looking great and allowed us to have a successful workshop.

CGS: Wow, that’s incredible.

Trish: Many of the participants were also mothers and fathers from outlying islands, and they spent roughly two weeks away from their families in order to build the model. It really showed how important these adaptation efforts are to these communities.

CGS: What did people take away from the P3D process?

Trish: We realized that mapping must be one of the tools communities use to do management planning for their marine and terrestrial resources. Without a map, it’s impossible to visualize the state of Manus’s resources, which is key to guiding the region toward sustainability and establishing best practices that will ensure the long-term health of local resources. I think they learned that it will take solid plans to establish agriculture, fishery and forestry practices that preserve local resources for future generations.

CGS: So that’s what Manus took away from this. How about the Conservancy?

Trish: This whole process was another really striking example of the good that comes from letting local people take the lead. By facilitating community efforts and helping them to gather traditional knowledge, we can complement their conservation projects with our science and planning expertise, but the impetus for our involvement has to come from them.

The following is a guest post from Dr. Geoff Lipsett-Moore, the Conservancy’s northern Australia program director. Dr. Moore has previously dabbled in cooler climates, including overwintering on Heard Island and an expedition to summit unclimbed peaks on the peninsula. Read more about his adventures.

While on a hike in southwest Tasmania recently, my wife and I stumbled across a young southern elephant seal bull hauled out on a beach. He was a long way north (roughly 1500 km, or 900 miles) of Macquarie Island, his usual haunt. The rich smells and happy farting sounds from the young sleeping bull instantly whisked me back in time and space to the Subantarctic islands and beyond.

When most people think of Antarctica, they think of cold. They conjure up a sheet of ice — a forbidding, impenetrable, icy wasteland where only penguins, seals and a hearty few scientists and explorers and adventurers dare tread.

As someone who’s spent some time in the Subantarctic and Antarctica, however, I can tell you that the western coast of the Antarctic peninsula is considered to be the fastest-warming place on Earth.

Things are changing for Antarctica. On the continent where, in 1989, scientists recorded the coldest temperature ever — -89° Celsius, or -128° Fahrenheit — things are heating up. That’s worrying news — for science, for wildlife and for people.

There’s proof on the peninsula. Over the past sixty years, mid-winter temperatures here have increased at a rate of roughly one degree Celsius per decade. In some places, temperatures have increased at a rate that’s 10 times greater than the average rate of global warming. Rainfall, which used to be a rarity on the peninsula, is becoming an increasingly frequent phenomenon.

That’s bad news for many penguin populations. Adélie penguins, for example, have largely fled the peninsula: the population there has decreased by more than 80 percent. Meanwhile, gentoo penguins have taken over. Because this species can survive without ice, they’re thriving in areas they would have previously considered to be inhospitable.

In perhaps the most distressing indication of change, a colony of emperor penguins that had been studied since 1948 was locally extirpated. Scientists found that the colony, once located off the peninsula in the Dion islands, disappeared due to a lack of sea ice and predicted that other colonies may meet similar fates.

Warming isn’t unique to western Antarctica. The eastern portion of the continent has also seen major glacial retreat. Over the past decade, the area has lost more than 10 gigatons of ice each year.

The Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets are like the bulb of a thermometer, and the extent of the winter sea ice in both regions is a bit like mercury in the stem of that same thermometer. It allows us to measure global well-being in the same way we measure our own health against a steady core temperature of 37.5° Celsius. The rapid decline in winter sea ice extent and the rapid break-out in summer is symptomatic of the general decline in the health of the planet brought about by our own consumptive activities.

Seeing a young seal bull up on the Tasmanian beach, I’m reminded that the world is rapidly changing. As a Subantarctic beast, the bull seemed perfectly comfortable lying on a the Tasmanian beach. From my past meanderings across glaciers, whether on Subantarctic Heard Island or the Antarctic Peninsula, I suspect many of the crossings which previously required ice axe and crampons now require either a pair of flippers and a dry suit or gum boots.

The positive in this is that the world and climate has always changed and life on earth has always adapted to match it. However, can life as we know it respond to the current rate of change? I guess we’ll see.

[Images courtesy of Geoff Lipsett-Moore/TNC]

Jack Hurd is the director of the Asia-Pacific Forest Program for The Nature Conservancy.

When I arrived in Bangkok in 1988, freshly armed with a bachelor’s degree in economics and what my parents felt was a misguided notion that I might find employment in Southeast Asia, I didn’t know anything about Burma. However, almost immediately, two events sparked my curiosity.

In August of that year, the military government in Burma launched an aggressive crackdown on students and workers demonstrating in the capital city of Rangoon for greater political freedom and enhanced economic opportunity. Over the following months, thousands of people streamed to the border with Thailand seeking safety from the long arm of an oppressive regime, providing new energy to a civil war that had been waged by ethnic minorities since 1948.

Then, in November, massive flooding in southern Thailand put an end to logging the country’s natural forests. Thai businessmen and their enablers in the military began to seek out timber in neighboring countries, and truckloads of ancient Teak trees crossed the border from Burma at unprecedented rates, leaving in their wake a deteriorating natural environment and worsening civil conflict.

While there were plenty of other things going on in the region at this time, the stories that emerged along the Thai-Burma border — both tragic and hopeful — seemed to dominate the news cycle for years. The social, political, economic and environmental dimensions of these issues hooked me as I embarked on a career in sustainable forestry.

Over the following 20-plus years, I read extensively about the country and its culture, its politics and its people, its natural resources and its historical record. I visited the capital on several occasions, traveled around the country a bit and joined Burma-focused events in Bangkok, Washington D.C. and Seattle.

While my engagement with Burmese affairs waxed and waned, a single question remained in my mind, and in the minds of countless others in the region and around the world: when will events conspire to let the country reassert its natural position in the heart of Asia? Interestingly, that time may be now.

The last year has seen rapid changes taking place across the country. Elections were held in 2010 and, while widely condemned as a sham, they signaled willingness on the part of the generals who ruled the country to trade in their khaki uniforms for business suits. First, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was released from the house arrest she had endured on and off since 1989, and her political party, the National League for Democracy, indicated a willingness to re-engage in the political process, having boycotted the 2010 elections.

Not long ago, construction on the massive and massively controversial Myitsone Dam in the northern state of Kachin — which was being built by Chinese-backed firms in order to provide electricity to that country’s Yunnan Province — was suspended in the wake of significant national and international protest.

Additionally, a series of high-ranking officials from Europe and North America visited the country to hold talks with the new leaders. That group included Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the highest-ranked U.S. official to visit in more than 50 years.

And finally, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) — a 10-country club to which Myanmar (as Burma is now known) belonged but was not universally welcomed — expressed its support for Myanmar to assume the association’s rotating presidency in 2014. These are all significant developments that pave the way for greater engagement with international businesses, UN Specialized Agencies, international financial institutions like the World Bank, and NGOs.

Significant international attention for Myanmar has been a long time coming, and it remains unclear if this is yet another false summit. But, if outside support for Myanmar is prolonged, it could reshape the future for a long-suffering people, a stagnant economy and the country’s abundant natural resources. More about that soon.

(Image: Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon, Burma. Source: WikiMedia Commons.)

Note: the following post is the last in a series chronicling the ongoing expedition to the Raja Ampat Islands. Read more here.

As Jo and I sit on the top deck of the Putiraja watching Misool’s karst islands disappear behind us, we finally have time to reflect on the last 15 days.

Each of the expedition’s ten participants have gone on 40 dives. Between the two teams, we’ve covered 80 sites in some of the most diverse coral reefs on the planet. We have so much data that will help us better understand the health of the reefs and that can be used to complete the zoning plan for the MPA. We also have data that will help predict Misool’s potential resilience to future climate change impacts.

So did the expedition live up to our expectations? I think we came away from the expedition with mixed feelings. Misool is without question stunning, both above and below the water — there were dives we did that kept us buzzing for hours after we returned to the surface. The network of limestone karst with hidden channels and lagoons is like a maze that you want to just get lost in and explore!

But even in this remote corner of the ocean, there were also clear signs of overexploitation as well as reefs damaged by past bomb fishing. The lack of sharks on most of our dives was profoundly disturbing for the team, as it is clear that overfishing is pushing local populations to extinction.

But there are strong positive signs too. The coral communities are healthy and virtually free of disease and we found plenty of sea turtles, productive fish populations within the MPA’s only no-take zone and vibrant fish nurseries for groupers and parrotfish.

The positives extend to people, as well. The local community members who joined our expedition were once illegal fishermen and now are active conservationists. Plus, the arrangement between Misool Eco Resort and local villages to protect and manage large areas of reef while improving livelihoods is a great success.

We are currently supporting the local government to develop management plans for all the marine protected areas in Raja Ampat. This will give local communities their first opportunity to voice their opinions on how their own local resources should be managed and who should have access to them.

By combining scientific information we’re collecting with the communities’ local knowledge of the area and their resources, we can make decisions that help stop any further declines and give the reefs a chance to recover. There is hope!

Explore further coverage of this expedition on nature.org and learn more about the Conservancy’s involvement in the game-changing Coral Triangle Initiative on Coral Reefs, Fisheries and Food Security.

(First image: Sunset at Jef Pele. First image credit: TNC. Second image: Local family from Jef Pele. Second image credit: TNC. Third image: Sangeeta and Jo. Third image credit: TNC.)

Note: the following post from Sangeeta Mangubhai (@smangubhai) is the latest in a series chronicling the ongoing expedition to the Raja Ampat Islands. Read more here.

We have been diving near Daram Island, in the far southeastern corner of the Misool MPA, for the last two days. This area is so remote that the local communities rarely come to this area to fish.

If only the same were true of illegal fishers. Daram’s remoteness attracts illegal fishing operations here from other parts of Indonesia. Our resource-use monitoring here has recorded shark finning boats as well as fishers targeting vulnerable grouper populations.

Shark finning is one of the cruelest practices around. It involves cutting the fins and tail off a shark before discarding the rest of its body, leaving the animal to die a slow and painful death.

Last year, Raja Ampat’s government issued a letter banning shark harvesting in its waters. The Nature Conservancy, Conservation International, Misool Eco Resort, SharkSavers, and Coral Alliance are now working together with the Raja Ampat government to prepare a parliamentary law that will add legal weight to the shark harvesting ban.

During our dives in Daram, we have sadly seen few sharks, but we feel recovery is still possible. This area is being proposed as a large no-take zone, and Misool Eco Resort has begun patrolling this area.

The reefs here are healthy and diverse in terms of both fish and corals. We were pleasantly surprised to see sizable fish populations, especially around the smaller karst islands. On each of our dives, we have encountered groupers, including species that are highly targeted by the live reef fish trade.

Another thing that has surprised us is the number of sea turtles we are observing in the water. We are spotting hawksbill and/or green turtles on every dive! The turtles are often seen feeding on the diverse, colorful sponges of Misool’s reefs.

When these turtles are feeding, they often let divers come in close, provided you approach very slowly. We also found fresh turtle tracks on Daram Island yesterday, suggesting its beach may be an important nesting area. Our data provides further evidence that Misool is a regionally important breeding area for hawksbill turtles, as well as more justification for protecting this area.

So, despite gray skies and heavy downpour of rain the last two days, we thoroughly enjoyed our surveys in Daram.

Explore further coverage of this expedition on nature.org and learn more about the Conservancy’s involvement in the game-changing Coral Triangle Initiative on Coral Reefs, Fisheries and Food Security.

(First image: Grey reef shark at Warakareket. First image credit: Purwanto/TNC. Second image: Hawksbill turtle at Warakareket South. Second image credit: Purwanto/TNC.)

Note: the following post is the latest in a series chronicling the ongoing expedition to the Raja Ampat Islands. Read more here.

Today we’re at Daram Island, located in the southeast corner of the Misool MPA — about as remote as you can get in Indonesia. We’re anchored off a small island smothered in tropical rainforest all the way down to a perfectly white sandy beach.

During the day we listen to the calls of tropical birds, which give way to the cries of bats in the evening. And yet, I can hear the strains of Bollywood music coming from a crew member’s mobile phone — strangely surreal!

Working in remote places is both wonderful and challenging, and it requires a lot of preparation. We have to bring lots of spares of everything we need. Often, people are curious as to what we need in order to work in places like Raja Ampat. To stay underwater for an hour and record all our observations, we require fairly simple — albeit specialized — gear. And some of the items we take along on expeditions like this may surprise you…

Three times a day, we load our equipment onto speedboats and head out to the sites we’ve chosen to survey. To find those sites, we use GPS units — small handheld devices not much bigger than a mobile phone. Once we’ve reached a site, we get into our wetsuits and SCUBA gear. We have enough air to stay underwater for about 60 minutes, so we have to work quickly to collect all our data! We collect data over a defined area that we measure out using five 50m tapes laid out on the reef.

While underwater laptops haven’t yet been invented (I’m sure that’s not far away!), we do use wrist-mounted dive computers that calculate safe dive times based on how deep and how long we’ve been diving.

We use underwater paper — plastic-coated paper we can write on with a normal pencil — to record our observations of fish or corals. The paper, pencils and anything else we need are firmly strapped or tied to our slates, because dropping something underwater means you may never find it again!

And, of course, we always dive with our cameras — safe and dry in underwater housings — so we can document this fabulous underwater world.

There are also a few somewhat odd things we can’t live without:

• Innertubes: Taken from car tires. Turns out, these are the best “rubber bands” for keeping our papers attached to the slates.
• Dive hoods: While we’re only a couple degrees south of the equator and the water temperature is 30°C (86°F), we still get cold because we spend around three hours a day underwater.
• Toothpaste: Not just for brushing our teeth! Toothpaste is great for cleaning the insides of our face masks, and stops them from fogging up.

Explore further coverage of this expedition on nature.org and learn more about the Conservancy’s involvement in the game-changing Coral Triangle Initiative on Coral Reefs, Fisheries and Food Security.

(First image: Community monitoring assistant Naftali gets ready to dive into a site. First image credit: TNC. Second image: Community monitoring assistant Ali takes note of a sea cucumber on his slate. Second image credit: TNC.)

This is one of our favorite DIY projects of the season. The Nature Conservancy’s Laura Bracis spent $5.48 on all materials, including buying used books to upcycle, and made a gorgeous holiday wreath. We loved it so much we asked her to share her secrets. Find out how she did it and learn how you can make one for your front door.

Note: the following post is the latest in a series chronicling the ongoing expedition to the Raja Ampat Islands. Read more here.

The world’s oceans are getting warmer. But what does that mean for coral reefs?

After all, coral reefs grow in tropical oceans so they’re used to warm water, right? Well, this is true, partly, but when temperatures get hotter than normal and stay that way, corals begin to “bleach.” Climatic events like La Niñas cause ocean temperatures to rise above normal. In 2010, a La Niña event caused coral bleaching in reefs around the world, including many in Indonesia.

Temperature is also important to reefs on a day-to-day basis. Seasonal temperature cycles are a cue for reproduction in dozens of reef species — including corals — and they affect growth rates in everything from bacteria to fish. Cool water patches can be caused by local “upwelling” — a phenomenon in which cool, nutrient-rich water rises to the surface, creating a source of food and attracting an amazing amount of marine life.

So, to better understand local patterns of ocean temperatures in Misool, Purwanto and Muhajir have been putting out underwater temperature loggers in seven Misool reefs since 2009. The loggers are around the size of a small flashlight and record temperature readings every 30 minutes for an entire year.

On this expedition, we’ve been retrieving and downloading the loggers and comparing their data to temperature records from previous years. Interestingly, 2010 not only saw higher-than-usual summer temperatures; winter temperatures were also warmer than normal. It seems that 2011 has been a more normal year for ocean temperatures, which is good news for coral reefs. This year, we’ve seen a return to the usual annual pattern where temperatures drop to around 26°C (79°F) in July and August, coinciding with the south monsoon season.

We’re now approaching the warmest months of the year for Misool and temperatures are already warm — around 29.5°C (85°F). So far, we’ve seen a few coral colonies that are pale or slightly bleached, indicating that they are a little stressed by warm temperatures. As long as temperatures don’t get too high, we expect these corals to recover. However, this just goes to show how sensitive these reefs are to even small increases in temperature — even in “normal” conditions, they are already living pretty close to the highest temperatures they can tolerate.

The data we’re collecting on this expedition will help us understand differences between reefs and between coral species so we can see which types are most sensitive to increased temperatures. We can then use this information to identify reefs and species that may be more “resilient.” By protecting these resilient reefs from local threats like overfishing or anchor damage, we can hopefully help reefs survive climate change.

Explore further coverage of this expedition on nature.org and learn more about the Conservancy’s involvement in the game-changing Coral Triangle Initiative on Coral Reefs, Fisheries and Food Security.

(First image: The deck of the Putiraja, the expedition’s dive vessel. First image credit: TNC. Second image: Muhajir collecting data from a temperature logger. Second image credit: TNC.)

Note: the following post from Sangeeta Mangubhai (@smangubhai) is the latest in a series chronicling the ongoing expedition to the Raja Ampat Islands. Read more here.

For the last four days, the team has been diving in a 425-square-kilometer no-take zone that was established by Misool Eco Resort and local communities through a marine conservation (or lease) agreement 6 years ago. In this no-take zone, removing fish, sharks, shells, turtles or turtle eggs is prohibited.

Local Conservancy staff members Purwanto and Muhajir have been collecting data from reefs inside and outside the no-take zone for two years now. The reefs were healthy when the no-take zone was first established, and data Muhajir has collected shows that the reef communities have remained healthy and stable, with no decline in coral cover.

Purwanto is a mega fish geek, and you cannot wipe the smile off his face today. He surveyed a potential grouper spawning aggregation in the morning where he recorded 40 male coral trout that appeared to have recently spawned. At lunch, when he took the team to an isolated submerged pinnacle that had not previously been surveyed, his smile was even bigger. We dived with swarms of fish, including oceanic triggerfish, fusiliers, surgeonfish, snappers, trevallies and barracuda. On the top of the pinnacle we saw triton triggerfish guarding nests with pink eggs and cleaner stations where Napoleon wrasses were getting their gills cleaned!

Our surveys are clearly showing an increased biomass of fish in sites where there are strong currents. This is particularly evident within the snapper and grouper populations. Prior to the establishment of the no-take zone, the larger individuals were fished out; now, the population’s age range is more balanced, including juveniles through to mature adults.

The no-take zone is also the only area so far in the marine protected area where we have seen sharks. It’s thrilling to see the reef shark populations rebound, especially here in Indonesia, which has the largest shark fishery in the world. According to Andy Miners from Misool Eco Resort, “It’s also quite common these days to see numerous baby sharks cruising around shallow lagoons, sometimes in groups of 15 to 20 individuals.”

We also had the opportunity today to meet with Jainudin Bahale and Rajak Tamher, who are part of the local team that patrols the no-take area. These guys are literally on watch 24 hours a day and do not hesitate to jump in their boat if they see there are boats in the no-take zone.

The local rangers also patrol for other types of destructive activities, like reef bombing, long lining and cyanide fishing. Meeting the rangers was a unique opportunity to share some of our preliminary findings from the no-take zone and to thank the ranger team for their commitment to patrolling the area.

As I reflect on today, I cannot help but feel a little more positive and lighter inside. Yes, the sad reality is that there are very few no-take zones working in Indonesia, or even globally, for that matter. But today was one of those inspiring moments for me, Joanne and the team.

We were reminded that we can turn the tide of change — that marine protected areas, if designed correctly, can help reefs recover and become productive again and that there are innovative ways to do conservation beyond what governments and NGOs have historically done. Here in Misool we have an example of how partnerships between private sector and community can result in win-win situations for local fisheries and conserving biodiversity.

Explore further coverage of this expedition on nature.org and learn more about the Conservancy’s involvement in the game-changing Coral Triangle Initiative on Coral Reefs, Fisheries and Food Security.

(First image: Snappers swimming in the no-take zone. First image credit: TNC. Second image: Sangeeta, Wahab and Ali meet the Misool Ecoresort ranger team. Second image credit: TNC.)

Note: the following post from Sangeeta Mangubhai (@smangubhai) is the latest in a series chronicling the ongoing expedition to the Raja Ampat Islands. Read more here.

Growing up in Fiji instilled me with a profound love of the ocean and, in particular, coral reefs. Corals fascinate me: they are anatomically very simple animals, but they show remarkable complexity in growth form, reproduction and life history.

Did you know that coral taxonomy is based on their fine skeletal structure? And that it takes three large books weighing 8kg (!!!) to provide detailed descriptions and photographs of most known species?

Corals are notoriously difficult to identify underwater because a species can sometimes have very different outward appearances depending on the habitat where a given specimen is located. For example, a certain species of coral may grow lots of branches when it lives on shallow reef flats, but this very same species may become flat and plate-like in deeper reefs. To make things more confusing, some corals can hybridize like plants.

One of the challenges of working in the global center of marine biodiversity is that there are more than 550 coral species living in Raja Ampat alone! For our surveys, we only have to identify the corals to genus level, but even that has its challenges when some groups look very similar to each other. Have a look at a coral up close if you have the chance — you will be surprised at how intricate corals are in terms of their skeletal architecture and how much they can vary in appearance.

Rizya Ardiwijaya, a Conservancy diver who assists monitoring staff at all our sites in Indonesia, is currently helping me with the coral resilience assessments. He and I spend most of our dives with our noses 30cm above the reef, identifying and counting corals.

Sometimes we have lively debates underwater (via our waterproof slates, of course) about the genus of coral we are observing. In the evenings, we spend up to two hours looking through the coral books to make sure we have our identifications correct and in synchrony with each other. So far, we have found 54 genera of coral in Misool and we are expecting this number to go up as the expedition continues!

Explore further coverage of this expedition on nature.org and learn more about the Conservancy’s involvement in the game-changing Coral Triangle Initiative on Coral Reefs, Fisheries and Food Security.
 
(First image: Acropora coral. First image credit: TNC. Second image: From left to right, cynarina, physogyra, euphyllia ancora and lobophyllia coral. Second image credit: TNC.)