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There's a very interesting (and disturbing) website anyone living in the United States should check out. It was first brought to my attention by Deb Castellana, Director of Communications for the Sylvia Earle Alliance-Mission Blue. The website is called Surging Seas and is the brainchild of Climate Central, an organization dedicated to disseminating information about climate change.
Surging Seas is an interactive map-based site that shows the impact of rising sea levels along the U.S. coasts. You can select a coastal city or region and see a map that shows the expansion of sea levels in increments of one feet at a time. If you live on the west or east coast or along the Gulf of Mexico, you can see your neighborhood and what becomes of it as water levels rise.
One might view the map with a sea level rise of one foot and decide, "Well, that's interesting. But that much of a rise in sea level won't happen for many, many years." True, rising sea levels are gradual, but add to that high tides and a storm surge, as we had experienced recently with Hurricane Sandy, and you begin to see the level of exposure we face. Climate change not only impacts sea levels but also the currents and winds that influence the severity of storm conditions.
I tried the map out on my hometown area of Orange County. I was surprised to see popular Balboa and swank Lido Islands, right off of Newport Beach, get swallowed up and nearby Huntington Beach residential communities were inundated with a 4 to 5 foot storm surge.
The Surging Seas website provides lots of background information on how the maps were generated using proven, available data from the U.S. Geological Survey, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and other scientific resources. That's what is disturbing - it's not a wild-eye, scare-your-pants-off fabrication. It's based on hard facts easily available.
What people in coastal metropolitan areas might fear as a possible danger (although already having proven itself to be real in the Gulf and now the Eastern Seaboard), is a daily reality for many island nations dealing with climate change. Countries like the Seychelles, Kiribati and others are already wrestling with the social, political, and economic implications of literally going under permanently at some point in the future.
How do we prepare ourselves now by stemming climate change while also bracing ourselves for the effects it will bring before any reversal of fortune takes effect? With each swell crashing along the shore, the question begs for an answer.
Source: Surging Seas
Source: Climate Central
Human populations have an economic attraction to the water. Whether it be oceans, lakes, or rivers - these bodies of water can prove to be effective points of transportation, and that leads to trade and commerce. Just look at the location of many of the major cities worldwide and you will typically find a water connection.
So, with the slow but study increase in sea level being brought about by climate change, particularly the effects of global warming on the Arctic and Antarctic regions, there are some very serious economic and socio-political issues that will be brought to the forefront in the next couple of decades.
Tropical regions, like the low-lying Maldives, are having to wrestle with the reality of someday being totally submerged - it's people becoming immigrants from a nation that literally no longer exists. But rising seas levels will impact more than a handful of tropical islands. As reported in the May issue of National Geographic, the heavily populated nation of Bangladesh is already feeling the effects of rising sea levels with high tides that are now bringing a foot of water into coastal homes, rising levels of salinity which impact aquifers, and river flooding becoming more destructive (three major rivers come together in Bangladesh to form the Ganges River Delta).
Bangladesh is a country with one of the highest population densities - more than half of its 164 million population live in an area smaller than the US state of Utah. As sea levels continue to rise, where these people are supposed to go and what economic infrastructure can travel with them is a big question. And if they are forced to immigrate, in that particular part of the world, who is prepared to take them in?
But rising sea levels is not an issue confined to lower income or developing nations. Major cities like Miami and New York would also have to contend with this problem. Would they need to prepare themselves, like New Orleans, with dikes and levies? We have seen the impact of walls that fail with the destruction in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. What will it take to protect a city like London when the Thames River overflows its banks, which some have predicted as early as 2025?
Within the scientific community, the vast majority do not dispute the reality of climate change and the impact of global warming. International organizations like the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are wrestling with the social, political, and economic implications. Perhaps it will be those issues, more so than purely environmental implications, that will drive nations to take action. The challenge is that it is an insidious, incremental, and long-term threat. Cities won't be swallowed up whole immediately and, as a species, we seem to react better to immediate threats. But if we wait until water floods Piccadilly or we find ourselves rowing a canoe to work in Times Square, it may very well be too late.
Coral reefs continue to face challenges and occasional glimmers of hope. But they lead a perilous existence, with these important tropical marine ecosystems living on the edge of collapse. As remnants of geological island movements, coral reefs form important barriers to island erosion and other weather- and ocean-related conditions (storms, currents, etc.) while also providing a home for countless numbers of marine species.
Bad News: Toxic Algae Acts Quickly
On the down side, researchers are discovering that algae can not only crowd out corals when their growth explodes due to nitrate-rich pollution (as previously studied worldwide), but algae blooms can also prove to be toxic by reducing oxygen and sunlight. And it can happen with remarkable speed.
Recently, in the Gulf of Oman, scientists were conducting a coral reef study and upon returning to their research area three weeks after an algae bloom, they found the corals seriously impacted. Several species of hard corals, including cauliflower and tabletop hard corals, were completely destroyed.
"We were surprised at the extent and speed at which changes to the coral reef communities were affected," said marine ecologist Andrew Bauman in the BBC News. Scientists have known that climate change in the form of warmer waters can adversely affect the coral, causing "coral bleaching" whereby the coral is severely and often fatally weakened from the loss of the symbiotic zooxanthellae algae that literally lives in the coral tissue.
While warmer temperatures can stress the corals to the extant that coral bleaching occurs, the scientists in the Gulf of Oman now have dramatic evidence of the impact of algae blooms in open water, literally choking the life from the coral - not to mention the impact on other sealife including fish, whose gills can be become clogged with algae particulates.
Good News: Island Nations Work Together
On the more positive side, tropical island nations are becoming more proactive in their efforts to protect their national treasures - the coral reefs. In 2007, the governments of Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Timor Leste, Papua New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands formed the Coral Triangle Initiative to establish policies to protect their marine reef ecosystems. Realizing the importance of the reef ecosystem not only as a component of a healthy ocean but also of economic importance as a source of food and tourism for developing nations, the Coral Triangle Initiative is a government-led program supported by leading conservation organizations like Conservation International.
In the Indian Ocean, the Maldives - a nation of over 1,100 coral islands - recognizes the economic power of conserving its surrounding coral reefs. The reefs are the lure to worldwide scuba divers, snorkelers, and swimmers, making tourism a major component of the nation's economy. In addition, the need to protect its ecology - in fact, that of the world - is of critical importance to the Maldives. The islands are, at most, just under five feet above sea level. With sea levels rising due to global warming, scientists estimate that the Maldives will be uninhabitable by 2100.
The government has taken steps to both protect its citizens and the environment by instituting a variety of eco-friendly policies including installation of wind turbines, rooftop solar arrays, and phasing out fossil fuel-burning boats and cars. In July, 2010, they also outlawed shark fishing and the sale or export of shark fins. But the government is also reluctantly prudent and developing plans for the relocation of its entire population of 400,000 as sea levels rise.
Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed warned, “Climate change is a global emergency. The world is in danger of going into cardiac arrest, yet we behave as if we've caught a common cold. Today, the Maldives has announced plans to become the world's most eco-friendly country. I can only hope other nations follow suit.”Read about toxic algae in the BBC Earth News.
Read about the Coral Triangle Initiative at Conservation International.
Read about the Maldives at Mother Nature Network.
As a quick follow up to my Tuesday posting on climate change, the U.K. online paper, The Guardian, ran an interesting article that outlines one of the real political dilemmas from rising sea levels in some island regions: the development of "ghost states."
If your an island state that must face the real possibly of finding yourself underwater, what becomes of your nation? What of the nationality of your people who must now relocate? Are they immigrants from a nation that no longer exists? Do they renounce citizenship? And what of the nation's financial assets and infrastructure?
"As independent nations they receive certain rights and privileges that they will not want to lose. Instead they could become like ghost states," he said. "This is a pressing issue for small island states, but in the case of physical disappearance there is a void in international law," says Francois Gemenne of the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations.The Guardian reported, "'Industrialised countries have a duty to provide adaptation funding to make sure the costs of migration do not have to be met by the countries where the migration will happen,' Gemmene said. Such migrants should not be considered "resourceless victims" and financial assistance needed to go beyond basic humanitarian aid and pay for infrastructure such as schools and hospitals. Up to a billion people could eventually be made to move because of climate change."
Read entire Guardian Article.
