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Research Matters

As I See It: Futures for the Ocean can Begin at Home

 
 

Many assessments of the future for the environment are negative, so much so that a report calling for action barely merits attention in the news. Recently, however, the results of an international workshop in Oxford ¹ had global press coverage. What the report conveyed was a sense of ocean experts coming together from across the globe to share experiences and yet all having the same message: things are as bad as the ’worst-case’ scenario and many of the individual impacts, like climate change and overfishing, are acting together to produce even more negative outcomes.

Jeremy Jackson, a professor at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in California, coined the phrase the ’rise of slime’ to help explain the changes in the ocean. In the predicted slimy future, large fish and habitats like seagrass beds and coral reefs are absent from the seas, replaced by decaying mats of algae and jellyfish.

The global nature of some of the threats to the ocean can induce a sense of helplessness but a recent article suggests that we can address some of the issues locally. Writing in the journal Science ², Kelly and co-authors point out that ocean acidification can be affected by quite local processes. For example, run-off from the land, sewage outflows, changes in land use and a number of other processes can all affect the pH of coastal waters. In many cases, the solutions to these problems are already known, such as to improve and conserve wetlands that act to buffer nutrient flows. In other cases a little creative thinking is required, for example to reuse shell waste from aquaculture to buffer the pH in coastal sediments. What is encouraging is that the policy and legislative background are often already in existence to facilitate solutions. For example, the Water Framework Directive links processes in freshwater catchments with the state of coastal waters.

Of course, few communities or regions can rally around a piece of legislation. Progress on finding solutions at the regional scale to some of the challenges facing us requires means of engagement with individuals. This has been recognized even in such apparently clumsy and bureaucratic structures as the Common Fishery Policy (CFP). The CFP is widely held to fail everyone as politicians cut deals over quotas, fishers face uncertainty and a top-down direction of their business, fish are wasted as discards and stock assessments continue to report examples of fish being overexploited. Reform of the CFP is looking to involve fishing communities more closely in co-management of stocks. A recent review ³ gives an interesting overview of what makes co-management work. The most important factor is leadership: strong, respected individuals, with entrepreneurial skills who make personal commitments to the fishery. Also important is social cohesion, based on shared values and trust.  The authors conclude that investments should be made to identify (and train) leaders and to build social capital.

I find the reduction of some of the issues to a local level reassuring. Research on what seem fairly local aspects of social and environmental issues may yield solutions that can be applied at the right scale to make a difference.

Author: Professor Mark Johnson, Ryan Institute

 

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