permaculture

[Lawrence London <lfljvenaura@gmail.com>]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/14/opinion/a-world-without-coral-reefs.html?_r=1
Op-Ed Contributor A World Without Coral Reefs By ROGER BRADBURY Published:
July 13, 2012

Canberra, Australia
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IT’S past time to tell the truth about the state of the world’s coral
reefs, the nurseries of tropical coastal fish stocks. They have become
zombie ecosystems, neither dead nor truly alive in any functional sense,
and on a trajectory to collapse within a human generation. There will be
remnants here and there, but the global coral reef ecosystem — with its
storehouse of biodiversity and fisheries supporting millions of the world’s
poor — will cease to be.

Overfishing, ocean acidification and pollution are pushing coral reefs into
oblivion. Each of those forces alone is fully capable of causing the global
collapse of coral reefs; together, they assure it. The scientific evidence
for this is compelling and unequivocal, but there seems to be a collective
reluctance to accept the logical conclusion — that there is no hope of
saving the global coral reef ecosystem.

What we hear instead is an airbrushed view of the crisis — a view endorsed
by coral reef scientists, amplified by environmentalists and accepted by
governments. Coral reefs, like rain forests, are a symbol of biodiversity.
And, like rain forests, they are portrayed as existentially threatened —
but salvageable. The message is: “There is yet hope.”

Indeed, this view is echoed in the “consensus statement” of the
just-concluded International Coral Reef Symposium <http://www.icrs2012.com/>,
which called “on all governments to ensure the future of coral reefs.” It
was signed by more than 2,000 scientists, officials and conservationists.

This is less a conspiracy than a sort of institutional inertia. Governments
don’t want to be blamed for disasters on their watch, conservationists
apparently value hope over truth, and scientists often don’t see the reefs
for the corals.

But by persisting in the false belief that coral reefs have a future, we
grossly misallocate the funds needed to cope with the fallout from their
collapse. Money isn’t spent to study what to do after the reefs are gone —
on what sort of ecosystems will replace coral reefs and what opportunities
there will be to nudge these into providing people with food and other
useful ecosystem products and services. Nor is money spent to preserve some
of the genetic resources of coral reefs by transferring them into systems
that are not coral reefs. And money isn’t spent to make the economic
structural adjustment that communities and industries that depend on coral
reefs urgently need. We have focused too much on the state of the reefs
rather than the rate of the processes killing them.

Overfishing, ocean acidification and pollution have two features in common.
First, they are accelerating. They are growing broadly in line with global
economic growth, so they can double in size every couple of decades.
Second, they have extreme inertia — there is no real prospect of changing
their trajectories in less than 20 to 50 years. In short, these forces are
unstoppable and irreversible. And it is these two features — acceleration
and inertia — that have blindsided us.

Overfishing can bring down reefs because fish are one of the key functional
groups that hold reefs together. Detailed forensic studies of the global
fish 
catch<http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165783610002754>by
Daniel
Pauly’s lab at the University of British
Columbia<http://www.zoology.ubc.ca/person/%7Epauly>confirm that global
fishing pressure is still accelerating even as the
global fish catch is declining. Overfishing is already damaging reefs
worldwide, and it is set to double and double again over the next few
decades.

Ocean acidification can also bring down reefs because it affects the corals
themselves. Corals can make their calcareous skeletons only within a
special range of temperature and acidity of the surrounding seawater. But
the oceans are acidifying as they absorb increasing amounts of carbon
dioxide from the atmosphere. Research led by Ove
Hoegh-Guldberg<http://www.sciencemag.org/content/318/5857/1737.abstract>
of
the University of Queensland <http://www.gci.uq.edu.au/> shows that corals
will be pushed outside their temperature-acidity envelope in the next 20 to
30 years, absent effective international action on emissions.

We have less of a handle on pollution. We do know that nutrients,
particularly nitrogenous ones, are increasing not only in coastal waters
but also in the open ocean. This change is accelerating. And we know that
coral reefs just can’t survive in nutrient-rich waters. These conditions
only encourage the microbes and jellyfish that will replace coral reefs in
coastal waters. We can say, though, with somewhat less certainty than for
overfishing or ocean acidification that unstoppable pollution will force
reefs beyond their survival envelope by midcentury.

This is not a story that gives me any pleasure to tell. But it needs to be
told urgently and widely because it will be a disaster for the hundreds of
millions of people in poor, tropical countries like Indonesia and the
Philippines who depend on coral reefs for food. It will also threaten the
tourism industry of rich countries with coral reefs, like the United
States, Australia and Japan. Countries like Mexico and Thailand will have
both their food security and tourism industries badly damaged. And, almost
an afterthought, it will be a tragedy for global conservation as hot spots
of biodiversity are destroyed.

What we will be left with is an algal-dominated hard ocean bottom, as the
remains of the limestone reefs slowly break up, with lots of microbial life
soaking up the sun’s energy by photosynthesis, few fish but lots of
jellyfish grazing on the microbes. It will be
slimy<http://www.sciencemag.org/content/307/5716/1725.summary?sid=f6d73c58-81cf-4a59-85aa-a4a394b24ccd>and
look a lot like the ecosystems of the Precambrian era, which ended
more
than 500 million years ago and well before fish evolved.

Coral reefs will be the first, but certainly not the last, major ecosystem
to succumb to the Anthropocene — the new geological epoch now emerging.
That is why we need an enormous reallocation of research, government and
environmental effort to understand what has happened so we can respond the
next time we face a disaster of this magnitude. It will be no bad thing to
learn how to do such ecological engineering now.

Roger 
Bradbury<http://crawford.anu.edu.au/crawford_people/content/staff/rmap/rbradbury.php>,
an ecologist, does research in resource management at Australian National
University.