Forum on the Future of the Oceans

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Terry Hughes
Director, ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies
James Cook University
Townsville, Australia

“There is a lot of work out there that demonstrates that following the destructive impacts of bleaching, or other drivers, reefs are destroyed ………They cease to exist as coral reefs and become something else.”

The response of the world’s coral reefs to climate change is a lot more nuanced than Roger’s statement above. Certainly some reefs have been virtually destroyed – as Charles and Camilo point out. Most of this damage pre-dates the recent impacts of global warming. Camilo’s example is from my own work on muddy reefs damaged by runoff a century ago on the Queensland coast, and Charles’s is also from marginal reefs that are the hottest on the planet.

But a much larger area of reefs globally has not been destroyed out of existence by bleaching or other impacts. For example, reefs across Polynesia have experienced 4-6 bleaching events since the mid-1980s and they have retained about 40% coral cover. Tim McClanahan’s work in the Indian Ocean shows a substantial recovery following the 1998 bleaching event. Some of these reefs lost 80-90% of their corals from the largest bleaching event yet recorded. But their subsequent recovery shows that they were not “destroyed”.

There is some evidence that repeated bleaching is less severe the second time round, and there are interesting changes underway in the composition of zooxanthellae strains with different thermal tolerances. Bleaching is patchy and incredible selective, and so too are regenerative rates of corals. This two-side filter is changing species composition at regional scales. In French Polynesia for example, acroprids are much less abundant now than 30 years ago, pocilloporids and favids have increased, and Porites is about the same. The ecosystem has changed, but it’s still a reef system that supports tourism and fishing.

If it’s all doomed to be dead soon, the logical response is give up. The misguided “canary in the goldmine” metaphor for coral reefs is an invitation to abandon them in favour of saving a less vulnerable alternative. If however, we as scientists present options for the future rather than giving up, the public and politicians can be convinced about adopting appropriate actions. The message that reefs are in trouble has been well established – now we need to focus on what to do about it.

Cheers, Terry

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Ove Hoegh-Guldberg
Professor and Director, Global Change Institute,
University of Queensland, Australia

 

Dear Terry,

Some nuances upon your nuances. A couple of slightly different perspectives:

a.  Coral cover as the only proxy for reef recovery? I think we have to be careful with equating coral cover as proof that reefs have completely recovered. Fast-growing species such as Stylophora have grown across damaged coral reefs in French Polynesia but it is questionable about whether the original community composition has returned, however. I think we need to be careful when we talk about reef recovery.  We also need to be careful about only using examples where reef recovery has occurred, when ignoring the other examples that are quite abundant throughout the world of reefs that have not recovered.  But your point is a good one, that we need to look very carefully at this issue of recovery following these climate impacts.

b. Repeated bleaching makes tougher reefs? The evidence that repeated bleaching results in a less severe result the second time round is equivocal at best. One of the problems is that people have concentrated solely on temperature and not on other contributing factors such as light level.  Without the full set of information on the intensity of a stress event, the conclusion that a second event of the same magnitude has had less impact is hard to prove.  One of the other issues here is that many reefs impacted by thermal stress end up with a community composition biased towards the reduced number of tougher species which is more resistant to mass coral bleaching.  This type of progressive change towards lower diversity communities has to be distinguished from some sort of true physiological acclimation or genetic adaptation that would indicate a change towards reefs that will survive permanent increases in water temperature of 2-3 degrees Celsius.  For me, the latter has not been adequately supported by studies in the literature – in fact, most of the evidence from thermal exposure experiments indicate that a permanent increase of this much will mean that even the tough species will not survive future excursions of sea temperature beyond +2°C above preindustrial.

c.  Different zooxanthellae to the rescue? As for the issue of different zooxanthellae having different thermal tolerances.  The work here indicates that there might be the ability for physiological acclimation in species that host 2 or more genetic varieties. This is a case of pre-existing symbiotic associations within a particular coral up regulating or down regulating according to the external conditions. But like all physiological acclimation, this is limited in terms of adapting to truly novel conditions such as those projected for the mid to late part of this century.  There is no evidence that corals can throw out one variety of zooxanthellae and form a completely new symbiotic association in ecological time.  In fact, all of the evidence suggests that this very complex endosymbiosis takes a long time to evolve (thousands of years at the very least). So the prospect that corals could somehow change their thermal tolerance by switching their zooxanthellae to more heat tolerant varieties is both unsupported and both unlikely given the intracellular nature of the symbiosis. The other problem that exists with the idea that swapping zooxanthellae is only one part of the problem for corals.  There is the abundant evidence that coral hosts also experience thermal stress, and that changing zooxanthellae would only go so far when it comes to adapting to the novel sea temperatures of the future. That is, adapting your zooxanthellae will not make you better able to cope with warmer sea temperatures.

d. Telling it as it is versus telling rosy stories? I agree that there is a risk that painting a picture of reefs being doomed on our current emission pathway has the potential to turn people away.  However, this is a major conundrum in my opinion which will not be solved by simply telling rosy stories or stories that only get half the picture.  In our present situation, I believe that not relating the true prognosis for coral reefs will lead to a lack of action on a global scale on the core issue, emissions. I think what we need to do is to manage that message and actively communicate that we really are at a fork in the road.  If we deal with the emission problem in the way that it needs to be dealt with, then coral reefs will survive and we will have to spend substantial energy in reducing the other stresses around them in order for them to get through what will be otherwise a very tough century.   This has to be matched with the message associated with the alternative pathway which that failing to take action on the emissions issue will mean that coral reefs are doomed irrespective of whether or not we take care of those other local stresses. I don’t think we have much choice in that regard.

Regards, Ove

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Mark D Spalding
Senior Marine Scientist, Global Marine Team
The Nature Conservancy &
Conservation Science Group, University of Cambridge, UK

Perhaps what I am questioning is the boundary between science and communication more generally – and Ove and Terry have underlined this beautifully – the “nuances on nuances” are science. What I’ve seen (not the report) was communications. The fact that issues aren’t getting through, and that you have “got through” points clearly to the need for more communication like this, not less.

Then there are the recommendations. Again I don’t see much new here, but they still haven’t been adopted and so again need to be stressed again and again.

But do we need some clear ground between the hard, plodding, nerdy language of science ALWAYS to be couched in the language of uncertainty, and the simply dramatic summary language of outwards communications? Al Gore did wonders in raising the climate change issues up the agenda, without being a scientist. He made some science errors, but could get away with it as we all knew he wasn’t a scientist, while his overall message was accurate, and it got to some critical new audiences.

What about us? Can we do science and communications with the same document? Maybe we can, using the punchy communiqués of press releases and exec summaries to twist a more dramatic message out of a more balanced report still heavy with caveats and uncertainty.

The problem is that if “summaries” lose a neutral balance (e.g. emphasise the negative) then they leave the authors open to challenges of bias. At that point scientific objectivity is lost. Again I must emphasize that I’m interested in the generality here, not your specific case – again and again, even with top peer reviewed publications, the press releases seem to tell a different story from the paper. And those who don’t play this game don’t get any press coverage!

I copied yesterday’s messages to a BBC journalist who doesn’t want to get drawn in, but offered the following:

My comments (which you are welcome to circulate, though I won’t get tied up in an extended discussion) would be these:

– decisions on news coverage have a largely random component, depending as much on what side of bed the editor got out as on the intrinsic importance of a story

– often things that people such as x and I think are important get no coverage, because editors do not buy into them, while things we think are relatively trivial get promoted

– issues such as exclusivity do affect editors’ judgements

– the wider conservation community should therefore be happy if and when the overall state of play makes its way onto mainstream outlets, whatever the provenance of that particular report, so long as there is nothing factually wrong in the reporting – because on the next 10 occasions, the story is likely to end up buried beneath a spat over healthcare policy, an aeroplane crash and Ryan Giggs’ latest dalliance.

So maybe you were just lucky! But I still think this debate is needed. How to communicate science? And who should do it? The oceans are in a parlous state and overall the public don’t know enough or care enough. We have to change that.

All best, Mark

(and for the record I still don’t understand how you can claim to be the first expert group to identify the combinatory impacts of multiple stressors on reefs? Terry’s 1994 classic Science paper is basic year-1 undergraduate fodder. Hundreds of references follow from that).

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Ove Hoegh-Guldberg
Professor and Director, Global Change Institute,
University of Queensland, Australia

Some good points, Mark. I guess my perspective on promoting science is to try and link it as much to issues that people are concerned about.  And more than often, we don’t know what those are or how to link them.  Often linkages that we think are straightforward and have been in the scientific literature for what seems like millions of years are unknown outside our immediate communities (which are the majority).  Announcing the obvious here but I am forever struck by the fact that I meet people who don’t understand how threatened coral reefs are when it comes to local and global factors – especially after having banged on about it for decades (since the early 90s). Sometimes, I wonder if this is due to the fact that we are preoccupied with presenting the precise history of science while failing to help people wake up to these critical issues that often fly (unjustifiably in our minds) under the radar.  This may mean representing the best peer-reviewed science in forums such as IPSO.  With your caveats, I don’t see why this is a bad idea, especially given we are not making much progress in so many other venues.

However depressing, I think your comments from the BBC journalist are very informative.  Thanks again.

Regards, Ove

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Alex Rogers
Professor in Conservation Biology
University of Oxford, UK
(Report co-leader and co-author)

Hi All,

I cannot add anything to Ove’s comments to Terry’s email – I was about to reply along similar lines but Ove hit the nails on the heads. I would say this with regards to messages and action. The audience to this report, everyone from the public to policy makers are not stupid. They are sophisticated in their use of media and, especially the younger people, increasingly aware of the issues we discuss. I think it unlikely that they will respond in a “what’s the point of doing anything” way and we have to be very careful that we are not delivering a message watered down to a level that we think will be accepted because it’s mostly harmless and simple to fix. That is not in the nature of the challenge we face on Earth now and we are at a critical point in time, the fork in the road as Ove puts it. We also need to think in terms of “what if”. What if we cannot alter the current trajectories of emissions and resource depletion? What scientific challenges does that future Earth hold for us and how will we meet them. What is “plan B”? That is not a debate we can have if we ignore the big issues and it is not an issue the policy makers will tackle unless we communicate the gravity of the situation to them and to the public who vote for them.

Mark, I agree with much of that and the words of the reporter are only too true. Barry Gardiner eloquently pointed some of this out to a very disturbed audience at the meeting.

Cheers – Alex

PS – the report was not just about reefs but the oceans in a general sense.

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Chris Yesson
Institute of Zoology
Zoological Society of London
(Report co-author)

Hi all,

Picking up on the issue of how to present the message to the public.

One of the criticisms of the workshop has been why so many non-scientists were present.  I felt one of the most useful aspects of the workshop was how it brought together a group of scientists discussing science alongside a number of non-scientists (a journalist, MP, lawyer, etc).  We debated the message at length and I think having the variety of input from people outside science really helped boil it down.  Now it may have been just luck that got the press coverage, but I’d be willing to bet that if it was just a meeting of the docs and profs then we wouldn’t be having this debate.

Following the point about prioritisation, I thought this anecdote from the workshop was pertinent.

Barry Gardiner was trying to get across just how low on the average MP’s priority list the issue of climate change really is, by suggesting that a local constituent’s complaints about parking tickets always get priority.  I think many of us felt pretty frustrated by this.  The following break out session had a group of us discussing some issue of oceanography or chemistry (I forget the details), now we had a limited time for discussion of each topic and we really needed to clear something up but the particular expert who could do this for us couldn’t be found.  It turns out that he skipped out of the session because he was about to get a parking ticket.

Regards, Chris

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John F. Bruno
Associate Professor
Department of Biology
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA

Thanks so much everyone for the really fascinating comments and perspectives on this!  So many of Mark Spalding’s points resonate with me too.

Like Ove, it continually blows my mind how unaware “the public” is about things like coral bleaching and reef loss, when to us, it seems like there is tons of media coverage on the topic. This leads me to think any media coverage, however imperfect, on the plight of the oceans is good.

Yet on the other hand, opposition to conservation via policy and regulation has evolved substantially in the last few years.  Ove and I and some of you have been fighting this growing cabal in the trenches of the blogosphere and MSM at places like ClimateShifts.org, SkepticalScience.com, HuffPost, the Yale Forum, etc.  This environmental opposition is largely united by an extreme free market ideology (see merchantsofdoubt.org) and goes directly after perceived flaws – some real – in the science of climate change, species extinctions, reef decline, etc.  They read and pick apart the details of reports, eg, see this example of a “skeptic” analysis of the IPSO.

Our primary papers, our synthetic articles and NGO / working group reports like RAR and IPSO are being carefully scrutinized (as they should be) by smart people with a big audience.

Some of you might scoff at a blog-based critique, but far more people will read that than will read the original paper or report!   eg,

http://rrresearch.blogspot.com/2010/12/arsenic-associated-bacteria-nasas.html

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2010/12/10/arsenic-bacteria-a-post-mortem-a-review-and-some-navel-gazing/

One bad piece of science or exaggerated projections and the coverage that follows, can easily nullify a lot of good science and effective communication about realistic threats.

There are countless recent examples were minor mistakes in the science of doom and gloom get all the attention, causing a backlash that overwhelms the original message. This clearly affects the credibility of scientists, NGOs and environmental reporters and some of the latter that I talk with have become wary of the science (I’ll bcc a few of them in case they want to chime in). And as we all know, flaws and exaggeration in the science of doom and gloom is fueling a backlash even in the scientific community, as evidenced by our recent forum on fisheries and even a backlash to the backlash, eg here.

My broad point is that I do think more communication about the oceans is good, but it really has to be based on sound, bulletproof science.  I’m not arguing that the IPSO doesn’t meet this criterion—as Mark reminds us, we haven’t seen it.  I only hope it uses solid references from the peer reviewed literature to back up its findings (both major and minor, as these endeavors often get tripped up by poorly referenced minor points).

Finally, I wanted to echo Terry Hughes’ message about not only propagating bad news. Our goal at SeaMonster is to communicate some of the wonder and awesomeness of the oceans, even in their current highly degraded state, while explaining the science about biodiversity loss, threats to ocean ecosystems, etc.  I think people have to hear the unvarnished truth as Ove says and also that there is still something out there very much worth saving.

Ciao, John

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Steve Palumbi
Director, Hopkins Marine Station
Professor of Biological Sciences
Stanford University, USA

All – I’ve been watching the conversation with great interest because it is characteristic of the great climate debate everywhere – is there a conflict between the bad news about the environment and the need to find solutions? Does focusing on one damage the other?

And the answer is, of course not. But some of the back and forth in this forum of forums makes it seem that way. The easy analogy is that every cancer patient ends a physician visit wanting to know what they can do about their condition. A doctor who could only tell them they were sick would not be acceptable. A doctor who did not tell them how serious the problem was would not be fair to them.

For marine ecosystems like coral reefs, all signs point to big trouble ahead – bleaching severity, storms, pH decreases in growth rate, overgrowth by algae, sea level rise, run off, etc. Listing the problems is an important part of the diagnosis. And it should not be a surprise that most people don’t know this already (do you know how the ice machine in your freezer works until it breaks?). But it is a critical part of our job to take the next step and lay out what can be done – even if what can be done only delays the damage. Can a local Fijian village change the trajectory of CO2 emissions? No, but they can change where they put their pig farm and how that damages their reef. And they can set aside an area as a fish preserve to up the number of herbivores. And they can work with their neighboring villages to create coral gardens all along their coastline that might last a bit longer into the 21st century than they would otherwise.

HIV has never been cured. Our current strategy of triple drug therapy delays the disease and thwarts its evolutionary potential. But that delay has extended the lives of millions of people and given us some breathing room. What we need is a triple drug therapy for the oceans – and an eventual cure for CO2 addiction.

Steve

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John F. Bruno
Associate Professor
Department of Biology
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA

Thanks Steve.  I really like your comment and medical analogy.  However, I just re-read the email chain and I couldn’t find where someone suggested there is a conflict between communicating bad news and finding (and communicating) solutions.  Obviously, we can do both at once.  But maybe you perceived something in the discussion that I didn’t catch.

I also think your ice machine analogy misses the mark: I would notice if it wasn’t working (no mojitos!) even if I didn’t know how it operates. Nobody is arguing the public needs to know how a complex marine ecosystem works (we barely know).  A few of us in this exchange have simply expressed surprise that they don’t seem to know the oceans are broken, despite all of our collective raving about it for decades.

JB

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Alex Rogers
Professor in Conservation Biology
University of Oxford, UK
(Report co-leader and co-author)

Hi Steve,

Many thanks for your comments. I agree that we need a quick follow up on solutions. We will be looking towards doing this with IPSO and I will talk to the meeting organisers tomorrow about how best to do this.

Best Wishes, Alex

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Camilo Mora
Assistant Professor
Department of Geography,
University of Hawaii Manoa, USA

It seems that we all agree that the solution to environmental issues needs to involve the understanding of the general public about the problem and their willingness to act. I consider that there are two fundamental parts to this aim. Firsts is the type of message we have deliver and second where is delivered.

We have discussed the former part already but not the later. We are surprised of the ignorance of the general public about environmental problems. But in reality it’s what we expect. We consider as major successes when our articles get featured online in CNN or BBC. I get most of my news from web-pages but on TV from CNN (and in my early days as a politically ignorant Colombian just arrived in the US, I also watched Fox News; please do not hold that against me). On all those years, I never saw a news story about an environmental issue. So on the big scheme of things, our message is not reaching enough people and sadly the great majority that prefer to be informed by TV only.

For some of the biggest problems faced by humanity like lung cancer caused by smoking and HIV, I can perfectly recall TV commercials about them. Perhaps our ability as a species to significantly prevent those problems lay in those media campaigns and where they were delivered? The key here is how to gain access to that media outlet and in prime time? Perhaps I am asking to much?

Another thing, I am certain there have to be experts (e.g. marketers, media communicators, publicists, etc) that study how to persuade people, just as much as we study biodiversity. Among the several editors in this group, perhaps it will be good to invite some of these experts, perhaps teaming up with a panel of marine ecologists, to write a short review outlining the science behind communicating messages to people? It seems that this piece of info will be very useful.

Best, Camilo

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Mark D Spalding
Senior Marine Scientist, Global Marine Team
The Nature Conservancy &
Conservation Science Group, University of Cambridge, UK

If you have 3 minutes watch this video: Love not Loss.

It seems to be saying the opposite of what we are talking about (the IPSO press releases seem to be exaggerating the gloominess by ignoring caveats or positive stories), but maybe there’s something in it.

A solutions follow-on would be good. You can see a quick and rough list we compiled in the following paper here.

With the full paper here:

Jacquet, J., Boyd, I., Carlton, J. T., Fox, H. E., Johnson, A. E., Mee, L., Roman, J., Spalding, M., and Sutherland, W., 2011, Scanning the Oceans for Solutions: Solutions, v. 2, no. 1, p. 46-55.

But of course examples are going to be much more powerful and Nancy Knowlton has been a great leader of “beyond the obituaries” thinking (and I know is on this list of weary copyees!)

Mark

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Emmett Duffy
Glucksman Professor of Marine Science
Virginia Institute of Marine Science
The College of William and Mary, USA

Dear colleagues,

Thank you all for your insights and contributions to this important discussion. The exchange has been fantastic—far exceeding my expectations!

Despite the range in opinions and perspectives among participants so far, the one clear unifying message I hear is the urgency all of us feel about getting the message out about the troubled state of the oceans, its importance to global society, and the critical need to act now. Alex and other contributors to the IPSO report should be commended for taking the initiative to craft and deliver that message, as should those before them—including many on this list, some of whom we’ve heard from and other not—who’ve also lifted their heads above the parapet (to use Alex’s phrase) and exposed themselves to critics.

It can sometimes seem incredible that the general public appears clueless about the ocean when so many people have worked so hard to get the message out. But as several have noted the challenge we face is much more one of psychology and marketing than of simply communicating the “facts” that we know. This is not at all to gloss over the scientific uncertainties, which are real, nor to justify overgeneralizations and cherry picking, which end up being counterproductive. But these don’t negate the point that we do know with considerable certainty that the ocean is sick – and focusing on the uncertain details at the frontier, which is our job as scientists, can end up being a distraction in situations (like the IPSO report) where the primary goal is educating the public and policy makers and inspiring them into action.

The modern world of 24/7 information overload creates a formidable distraction level in trying to communicate (like the whales struggling to make their way through the underwater noise field), and the signal has to be that much more compelling and innovative to get through and reach the target. It also has to evolve constantly to maintain currency in a world of short attention span. This is a central theme of many of the contributions to this forum. Beyond that, to inspire action, the message has to walk the fine ridge between being factually accurate on one hand, and reaching people on the emotional level were they actually live on a daily basis, since that’s where motivation to action comes from. Andrew Hoffmann has recently written cogently about this in the context of climate change  (see here).

The best conclusion to this forum for me would be the beginning, or expansion, of a broad-based, continuing collaboration among scientists, policy makers, conservation practitioners, legal scholars, journalists, and importantly (as Camilo noted) advertising or marketing people (a few fabulously wealthy benefactors wouldn’t hurt either) toward a common goal of (1) crafting the most compelling possible explanation of the plight of the ocean and why it is important to small-town families in Iowa or Mongolia or wherever; and (2) applying the same ingenuity to developing a long-term strategy for keeping up a constant drumbeat on this that can counteract compassion fatigue, panic-induced paralysis, boredom, short attention spans, and competition with Lady Gaga’s twitter feed (or maybe she could be recruited to the effort–or maybe Beyonce??).

How can we translate the talk into meaningful action? It’s very heartening to see the conversation turning to suggestions for concrete action, and as we move toward closure of the forum I’d like to highlight the following:

Kristina Gjerde: “Scientists may also participate in this Rio+20 preparatory process. If I can suggest a way forward that might constructively use the time and talent of the many eminent scientists on this email list, perhaps you could join together in a letter or report to governments, calling for a renewed commitment  to safeguarding the global ocean.  You could highlight the  evidence for a changing ocean and indicate the potential consequences of not taking any action.”

Alex Rogers: “moving beyond this something I will throw out there is that if we think this was a useful process that moved us forward then perhaps IPSO can organise another meeting next year if we can get the funding and if you can lend us your time . . . agree that we need a quick follow up on solutions. We will be looking towards doing this with IPSO and I will talk to the meeting organisers tomorrow about how best to do this.”

Mark Spalding: “A solutions follow-on would be good.”

Do we hear others?

Emmett

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Kelly Rigg
Executive Director
Global Campaign for Climate Action
(Report co-author)

Hi everyone — thanks for including me in this interesting discussion. I attended the Oxford workshop in my capacity as a climate campaigner and communicator, but also as a long-term oceans advocate (I coordinated the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition for several years, amongst other things).

As others have pointed out, the conversation about how to get the public to wake up is happening in parallel in the climate community. In fact, that it’s happening in parallel is the main reason I came to Oxford — I think it’s a problem that oceans and climate issues are largely addressed in separate silos, when they are clearly inseparable. We need the oceans community (both scientific and advocacy) to weigh in more vocally on the need for reducing CO2 and rapidly developing renewable energy, and we need the climate community to use the reality of what’s happening in the oceans to advocate not only for action on CO2 but also for increasing the resilience of ocean ecosystems.

As for communicating these issues to the public, there’s quite a lot of good research about how to communicate with different segments of the population, in terms of their values, beliefs, political persuasion, and nationality etc. With regard to whether people are motivated more by positive or negative messages, the general rule of thumb is that you need to make people care by explaining the reality of what’s happening and what’s at stake, but you need to give them a reason to take action — a reasonable solution that they can take as individuals that will make a difference. Otherwise they will just go stick their heads in the sand.

My organization, the GCCA (an alliance of about 290 organizations), is developing a rapid response initiative which aims at distributing messages (backed by science and other high-quality documentation) through influencer networks. It would be great to have ocean experts involved. If you’re interested in hearing more, let me know.

Best wishes, Kelly

Alex Rogers
Professor in Conservation Biology
University of Oxford, UK
(Report co-leader and co-author)

Hi Denise and all,

This is a really valuable point and one that we have first-hand experience of with the fishing industry and, for example, deep-water mining. One is complaining that management measures they are expected to take do not apply to the other. It is something we will see more and more of as human use of the oceans widens to include a wider breadth of industries and more stakeholders. Fully supportive of many of the comments from Tony, Matt, Mark and Nancy.

Best Wishes, Alex

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Matthew Gianni
Political and Policy Advisor
Deep Sea Conservation Coalition
Netherlands
(Report co-author)

Hello all,

This is a very good discussion and I would like to add a few comments on the interaction between policy and science. The release of the IPSO report last week coincided with the annual meeting (20-24 June) of the United Nations Informal Consultative Process on Oceans and the Law of the Sea (UNICPOLOS) in New York. UNICPOLOS is essentially an informal meeting of the UN General Assembly to discuss oceans related issues open to civil society participation as well as all States members of the UN.  The topic of this year’s UNICPOLOS was an assessment of progress and gaps in meeting the oceans related targets and goals adopted by previous UN Summits and “addressing new and emerging challenges” in preparation for the UN Conference on Sustainable Development which will take place in Rio de Janeiro in June 2012. This upcoming UN Conference, often referred to as Rio+20, will mark the 20^th anniversary of the 1992 Earth Summit (UN Conference on Environment and Development).  You may recall that a number of important new treaties and international initiatives were associated one way or another with the 1992 Earth Summit, including the Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Convention on Biological Diversity and the UN Fish Stocks Agreement. The results of the Rio+20 conference next year may not be as ambitious but nonetheless it does provide an important opportunity for major new global initiatives.

As a result of the press and media generated by the release of the IPSO report, the Co-Chairs of UNICPOLOS invited Alex Rogers to make a formal presentation to the meeting last week. The group of people in New York last week was an important audience of policy-makers and included a mix of UN based diplomats, legal and technical experts and regulators from national capitals, and representatives from NGOs and intergovernmental organizations. This was an extremely valuable opportunity to get a message directly to decision-makers at a high level that, from a scientific perspective, urgent action is required.

Equally important are the recommendations from the report, given that the Oxford workshop consisted of policy experts as well as scientists. One of the key recommendations is the Global Oceans Compliance Commission which addresses an issue that is very much in play in the context of oceans related negations at the UN General Assembly at the moment. A large number of countries including the G.77 group of developing countries and the European Union have recently, jointly proposed that a new treaty (an ‘implementing agreement’ of the Law of the Sea Convention) for the conservation of biodiversity on the high be negotiated that would, among other things, provide for the establishment of representative networks of marine protected areas and require environmental impact assessments for any activity with the potential to adversely impact biodiversity on the high seas.

This relates to the fact that there is a widespread recognition that although international oceans law contains many provisions which, were they effectively implemented, would go a long way to addressing the problems raised by the Oxford workshop participants and others, there are both gaps in the international regime for the management of activities on the high seas as well as serious issues with lack of State compliance with existing obligations under international law. For example, both the Law of the Sea Convention and the UN Fish Stocks Agreement contain general and detailed obligations to protect marine biodiversity and the marine environment, apply the precautionary approach, conserve fish stocks, conduct environmental impact assessments for fisheries and other activities, and to require flag States to exercise effective control over their vessels including penalizing vessels in breach of international legal obligations such that the penalties should serve as a deterrent to any future illegal activities.  However, these obligations are not being complied with, or only partially complied with, by many States. Part of the problem is that the Law of the Sea Convention lacks the institutional infrastructure to monitor and oversee compliance, hold States accountable for their actions, and promote the use of sanctions for gross violations or repeat offenders, e.g. failed fag States – a particularly pernicious problem in relation to the management of fisheries for straddling fish stocks, highly migratory fish stocks and high seas fish stocks and the impacts of these fisheries on associated species. Thus the IPSO recommendation for a Global Oceans Compliance Commission (granted the name could be catchier) is germane to the current debate on this issue at the UN.

This is not to say that there haven’t been important successes in global cooperation for the conservation and protection of the oceans over the past few years. The London Convention agreement to ban the disposal of radioactive and hazardous waste into the oceans is one; another is the ongoing restriction of deep-sea fishing on the high seas in response to a series of UN General Assembly resolutions adopted since 2004 although this is still very much a work in progress and much more needs to be done to comply with the resolutions (the UN will review the actions taken, or not taken, by States, and regional fisheries treaty organizations in September of this year).

Not surprisingly, a number of the other panelists at the UNICPOLOS meeting last week – amongst them Jackie Alder (UNEP), Rashid Sumaila (UBC), Maria Teresa Mesquita Pessoa (Brazilian Mission to the UN and head of the Brazilian delegation to UNICPOLOS), Babajide Alo (University of Lagos), Tulio Scovazzi (University of Milan) and Phil Weaver (EU Hermione Project) – touched on many of the same problems, and in some cases others, as those in the IPSO report. (For those of you interested, the UNICPOLOS presentations can be found on the UN website at http://www.un.org/Depts/los/consultative_process/ICP12_chart_of_presentations.pdf)

Regarding the broader discussion of how best to communicate the results of scientific research, I recall a very lively discussion on the subject of science and advocacy at a Pew Fellows Meeting in Bonaire in 2002, based on presentations by Ray Hilborn, Charles Peterson and, I believe, Carl Walters. There are clearly a range of views amongst scientists as reflected in the previous messages to this list; nonetheless, as a conservation advocate, I appreciate the view expressed by Jeremy Jackson in his 2008 PNAS paper, Ecological extinction and evolution in the brave new ocean:

“Predicting the future is, at best, a highly uncertain enterprise. Nevertheless, I believe we have a sufficient basic understanding of the ecological processes involved to make meaningful qualitative predictions about what will happen in the oceans if humans fail to restrain their style of exploitation and consumption…Some may say that it is irresponsible to make such predictions pending further detailed study to be sure of every point. However, we will never be certain about every detail, and it would be irresponsible to remain silent in the face of what we already know.”

Matthew Gianni