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"The worst concentration of cumulative impacts of climate change with existing pressures of over-harvest, bottom trawling, invasive species infestations, coastal development and pollution appear to be concentrated in 10-15 per cent of the oceans," says the report.

This 10-15 per cent of the oceans is far higher than had previously been supposed and is "concurrent with today’s most important fishing grounds" including the estimated 7.5 per cent deemed to be the most economically valuable fishing areas of the world, it adds.

The report, the work of UNEP scientists in collaboration with universities and institutes in Europe and the United States, was launched today during UNEP’s Governing Council/Global Ministerial Environment Forum taking place in Monaco.

It is the largest gathering of environment ministers since the climate convention conference in Indonesia just over two months ago where governments agreed the Bali Road Map aimed at delivering a deep and decisive climate regime for post 2012.

Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary General and UNEP Executive Director, said:" The theme of the Governing Council is ‘Mobilizing Finance for the Climate Challenge for trillions of dollars can flow into climate-friendly energies and technologies if government’s can provide the right kind of enabling market mechanisms and fiscal incentives".

"It is sometimes important to remind ourselves why we need to accelerate these transformations towards a Green Economy. In Dead Water has uniquely mapped the impact of several damaging and persistent stresses on fisheries. It also lays on top of these the likely impacts of climate change from dramatic alternations in ocean circulation affecting perhaps a three quarter of key fishing grounds up to the emerging concern of ocean acidification," said Mr Steiner.

"Climate change threatens coastal infrastructure, food and water supplies and the health of people across the world. It is clear from this report and others that it will add significantly to pressures on fish stocks. This is as much a development and economic issue as it is an environmental one. Millions of people including many in developing countries derive their livelihoods from fishing while around 2.6 billion people get their protein from seafood," he said.

The report comes in wake of findings issued last week by a team led by the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis which estimates that over 40 per cent of the world’s oceans have been heavily impacted by humans and that only four per cent remain relatively pristine.

It also comes amid concern that sea bird chicks in the North Sea may be being choked after being fed on a diet of snake pipefish-a very bony species. Over the past five years snake pipefish numbers have boomed a meeting of the Zoological Society in London was told last week.

One reason for their sharp increase in numbers might be changes in ocean currents bringing the fish into North Sea waters, the experts suggest.

The new UNEP report has been compiled by researchers including ones at UNEP’s GRID Arendal centre; UNEP’s World Conservation Monitoring Centre and UNEP’s Division of Early Warning and Assessment.

It draws on a wide range of new and emerging science including the latest assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change-the 2,000 plus panel of scientists established by UNEP and the World Meteorological Organisation.

Other contributions have come from organizations and institutions including the University of Plymouth; the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research; the University of British Columbia; the Institute of Zoology; Princeton University; the University of Barcelona and the Sustainable Europe Research Institute.

In Dead Water Key Findings

– Half the world’s catch is caught along Continental shelves in an area of less than 7.5 per cent of the globe’s seas and oceans.

– An area of 10-15 per cent of the world’s seas and oceans cover most of the commercial fishing grounds.

– 80 per cent to 100 per cent of the world’s coral reefs may suffer annual bleaching events by 2080 under global warming scenarios.

– Those at particular risk are in the Western Pacific; the Indian Ocean; the Persian Gulf; the Middle East and in the Caribbean

– Over 90 per cent of the world’s temperate and tropical coasts will be heavily impacted by 2050. Over 80 per cent of marine pollution comes from the land. Marine areas at particular risk of increased pollution are Southeast and East Asia.

– Increasing concentrations of C02 in the atmosphere are likely to be mirrored by increasing acidification of the marine environment.

– Increasing acidification may reduce the availability of calcium carbonates in sea water, including a key one known as aragonite which is used by a variety of organisms for shell-building.

– Cold-water and deep water corals could be affected by acidification by 2050 and shell-building organisms throughout the Southern Ocean and into the sub-Arctic Pacific Ocean by 2100.

– Climate change may slow down the ocean thermohaline circulation and thus the continental shelf "flushing and cleaning" mechanisms, known as dense shelf water cascading,over the next 100 years. These processes are crucial to water quality and nutrient cycling and deep water production in at least 75 per cent of the world’s major fishing grounds.

– Dead zones, area of de-oxygenated water, are increasing as a result of pollution from urban and agriculture areas. There are an estimated 200 temporary or permanent ‘dead zones’ up from around 150 in 2003.

– Up to 80 per cent of the world’s primary fish catch species are exploited beyond or close to their harvesting capacity. Advances in technology, alongside subsidies, means the world’s fishing capacity is 2.5 times bigger that that needed to sustainably harvest fisheries.

– Bottom trawling is among the most damaging and unsustainable fishing practices at the scales often seen today

– Alien invasive species, which can out-compete and dislodge native ones, are increasingly associated with the polluted, overharvested and damaged fishing grounds. The report shows that the concentration of ‘aliens’ matches with some precision the world’s major shipping routes.

Christian Nellemann, who headed up the rapid response team that compiled the report, said: "We are already seeing evidence from a number of studies that increasing sea temperatures are causing changes in the distribution of marine life".

Some of these changes are being found from the Continuous Plankton Recorder survey of the Northeast Atlantic.

Warmer water copepod species or crustaceans have moved northward by around 1,000km during the later half of the 20th century with the patterns continuing into the 21st century.

"Further evidence of this warming signal is seen in the appearance of a Pacific planktonic plant in the Northwest Atlantic for this first time in 800,000 years by transfer across the top of Canada due to the rapid melting of the Arctic in 1998," said Dr. Nellemann. "We are getting more and more alarming signals of dramatic changes in the oceans. It is like turning a big tanker around. Our ability to change course and reduce emissions in the near future will be paramount to success".

The link between healthy and productive fishing grounds and ocean circulation or ‘dense shelf water cascading’ is in some ways only now emerging.

Three years ago the Hotspot Ecosystem Research on the Margins of European Seas of which UNEP is part, documented such a phenomenon in the Gulf of Lions in the north-western Mediterranean.

A quantity of water equal to two years-worth of the river discharge from all rivers flowing into the Mediterranean is, in four months, transported from the Gulf of Lions to the deep Western Mediterranean via the Cap de Creyus canyon.

It has a critical impact on the population of the heavily harvested deep sea shrimp Aristeus antennatus, the crevette rouge, by bringing food that in turn triggers a sharp increase in young shrimp resulting in plentiful catches three to five years after the ‘cascading’ event.

"Imagine what will happen if climate change slows down or stops these natural food transport and "flushing" effects in waters that are often already polluted, heavily fished, damaged and stressed", said Dr. Nellemann. "We are gambling with our food supply".

Stefan Hain of UNEP’s World Conservation Monitoring Centre, said it was critical that existing stresses were also addressed too in order to conserve fish stocks and coral reefs in a climate constrained world.

He said there was growing evidence that coral reefs recover from bleaching better in cleaner, less polluted waters.

Dr Hain cited monitoring of corals around the main Seychelles island of Mahé which were among corals world-wide that suffered from the high sea surface temperatures of the late 1990s. Here coral reefs recovery rates have varied between five to 70 per cent.

"Coral reefs recovering faster are generally those living in Marine Protected Areas and coastal waters where the levels of pollution, dredging and other kinds of human-induced disturbance are considered low," he said.

Australia’s contribution is so significant because it is home to over 20,000 species, about 10 per cent of the world’s total, and contains one in seven globally-threatened species.

The 1000th Australian sample was the rare Acacia Pubescens, known as downy or hairy-stemmed wattle, a plant native to western Sydney which has been threatened by the city’s expansion since World War II.

The scientists do not take just one seed from the Acacia Pubescens and other plants like it.
The average is 32,000 seeds per collection.

They are dried and frozen and stored in a nuclear-proof vault bigger than a football pitch 200m beneath the Sussex countryside, 50 km south of London.

The acacia samples will join seeds from 23,000 other species collected so far from 126 countries in the project administered by the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew.

"We don’t just lock the door and forget about them," Dr Smith said.

"We test them regularly for viability. Some seeds could last for thousands of years, but others aren’t so fortunate."

Among the less robust are many of Australia’s rainforest plants.

"Nearly 2000 of our rainforest species have seeds that are sensitive to drying out," said Dr Tim Entwistle, executive director of Sydney’s Botanic Gardens Trust, which now has one-third of NSW flora in its seed bank.

"We will have to examine other ways of preserving them, such as cryo-storage."

Like other banks, investors in the Millennium Seed Bank might sometimes make withdrawals.

The Sussex vault, for example, contains six extinct species from Africa which can be reintroduced.
Dr Smith said land use remained the biggest threat to the diversity of plants.

"Clearing of natural vegetation accounts for 20 per cent of carbon emissions – more than the world’s transport emissions – yet we still do it," he said.

"It’s a political problem – it’s something we could stop tomorrow.

"I think a moratorium on deforestation is something the next climate change convention may well look for."

Dr Entwistle said plants affected every aspect of life.

"The air we breathe, the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the furniture we sit on, there’s no part of your life unaffected by plants," he said.

"Each one is a Mona Lisa, a unique product of evolution that has taken effectively 3.8 billion years to produce, and if you lose it you may not get it back again.

"Human beings have been here such a short time, and it’s very courageous tinkering we are involved in.

"We don’t yet understand what uses we may have for many plants.

"Why cut off our options?

Dr Smith is also on a drive for funding to resource the next decade of his seed project to 2020.
He is, in effect, looking for seed money, with long term growth assured.

ALL new Woolworths supermarkets will conform to stringent environmental standards and most old stores will be upgraded after the success of the company’s pioneer "green supermarket" in Rouse Hill, Sydney.

Chronic leaking of potent greenhouse gas from supermarket fridges, as well as high energy consumption, led to the changes, Woolworths has confirmed.

The Natural Refrigerants Transition Board, which has received government funding to examine ways of reducing greenhouse emissions from refrigerants, estimated that leaks from fridges in Woolworths stores nationally would be equivalent to the annual emissions of 240,000 cars.

Other supermarket chains had similar leakage levels, the board said, but these could be greatly reduced by switching gases.

Keeping produce cool accounts for 48 per cent of Woolworths’ total carbon emissions, lighting for 21 per cent and air-conditioning 19 per cent, the company said.

Changes included in new supermarkets will include "cascade" cooling systems for fridges, in which some of the most harmful gases are replaced by the safer carbon dioxide, while better fans and lights would be installed.

Ben Cubby

From The Economist

The sea is becoming more acidic. That is not good news if you live in it

EVERY silver lining has its cloud. At the moment, the world’s oceans absorb a million tonnes of carbon dioxide an hour. Admittedly that is only a third of the rate at which humanity dumps the stuff into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels, but it certainly helps to slow down global warming. However, what is a blessing for the atmosphere turns out to be a curse for the oceans. When carbon dioxide dissolves in water it forms carbonic acid. At the moment, seawater is naturally alkaline—but it is becoming less so all the time.

The biological significance of this acidification was a topic of debate at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Boston. Many species of invertebrate have shells or skeletons made of calcium carbonate. It is these, fossilised, that form rocks such as chalk and limestone. And, as anyone who has studied chemistry at school knows, if you drop chalk into acid it fizzes away to nothing. Many marine biologists therefore worry that some species will soon be unable to make their protective homes. According to Andrew Knoll, of Harvard University, many of the species most at risk are corals.

The acid test

Dr Knoll drew this conclusion by studying the fossil record. The end of the Permian period, 252m years ago, was marked by the biggest extinction of life known to have happened on Earth. At least part of the cause of this extinction seems to have been huge volcanic eruptions that poured carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But some groups of animals became more extinct than others. Sponges, corals and brachiopods (a once-widespread group that look a bit like bivalve molluscs) were particularly badly hit.

Rather than counting individual species of fossils, which vary over time, palaeontologists who study extinction usually count entire groups of related species, called genera. More than 90% of Permian genera of sponges, corals and brachiopods vanished in the extinction. By contrast, only half of the genera of molluscs (the real ones) and arthropods disappeared.

Dr Knoll reckons this is because molluscs and arthropods are able to buffer the chemistry of the internal fluids from which they create their shells. This keeps the acidity of those fluids constant. Sponges, corals and brachiopods, however, cannot do this.

The situation at the moment is not as bad as it was at the end of the Permian. Nevertheless, calculations suggest that if today’s trends continue, the alkalinity of the ocean will have fallen by half a pH unit by 2100. That would make some places, such as the Southern Ocean, uninhabitable for corals. Since corals provide habitat and food sources for many other denizens of the deep, this could have a profound effect on the marine food web.

Gretchen Hofmann of the University of California, Santa Barbara, has brought some experimental evidence to bear on the question. She is investigating the effects of changing acidity and temperature in the sea on a creature called the purple sea urchin. This animal is a scientists’ favourite for embryological experiments, and has thus had its genome sequenced (in part by Dr Hofmann, as it happens), so it is well understood. Dr Hofmann’s work suggests that a combination of heat and acidity is more deadly than either alone. When she and her team reproduced the conditions which are predicted to prevail in 2100 if carbon-dioxide emissions are not curbed, they found that the genes of larval sea urchins had to work up to three times harder than normal to form the animals’ skeletons. On top of that, those skeletons were often deformed.

No corals, no sea urchins and no who-knows-what-else would be bad news indeed for the sea. Those who blithely factor oceanic uptake into the equations of what people can get away with when it comes to greenhouse-gas pollution should, perhaps, have second thoughts.

A new report from Green.biz reviews the state of the environment in the global economy. You can download the report from them , but here is a lightning summary of the ten top stories of 2007.

1. Corporate Climate Commitments – Major companies are making public commitments about their strategies to address climate change in record numbers.
2. Automotive Industry Finally Gets It – Major carmakers are bringing us more fuel-efficient and hybrid vehicles, with plans to launch plug-in hybrids soon.
3. Planes, Trains, Trucks, and Ships are Going Green Too – Other players in the transportation sector are also implementing eco-efficient tech to reduce their environmental impact.
4. Green Marketing/Greenwashing – Just as companies are increasingly catering to the "green consumer," mainstream consumers are increasingly skeptical of such claims.
5. Toxic Product Reduction – Manufacturers and retailers faced a public backlash this year concerning toxic materials in their products. As such, they are making amends to reduce or eliminate them in future production.
6. E-waste – The computing industry got serious this year about energy use and disposal problems associated with technology. 
7. Big Companies Get Real about Sustainability – More Fortune 500 businesses announced plans to incorporate company-wide initiatives to engender smarter resource use.
8. Green Buildings Skyrocket – Green buildings become the norm in major urban centers across the nation.
9. Banks Pull Out of "Dirty Investments" – Shareholder activism pressure large banks to invest in clean energy production instead.
10. "Zero" is Where It’s At – "Zero-waste," "zero-carbon," and "zero-emissions," are the rallying cries from the new initiatives emerging from the corporate sector.

This ambitious effort to analyze green business trends provides a much-needed perspective on the field.

The overall results?

Major businesses have made commendable strides towards streamlining their business strategies with an environmentally sustainable focus over the last year. However, it remains to be seen whether, in fact, these approaches are making a difference to the environment. Insufficient data exists as of yet to make conclusive claims about the efficacy of these programs in the aggregate.

This leads to a mixed verdict, "Companies are getting cleaner and more efficient, but only incrementally, and many of the gains are offset by the ever-growing economy."

The report looks at more sector-specific trends over the next week, we will shed light on some of the factors hindering further "conscious capitalism" evolution.

With the likely introduction of Site Waste Management Plans as a regulatory requirement in England this year, coupled with annual increases in Landfill Tax, more recycled materials will be available to incorporate into building products. Provision of reliable data on composition will therefore assist project teams deliver materials efficiency through more accurately informed product substitution.

Developed in conjunction with BRE, product manufacturers and their trade associations, this publication takes into account the 2007 European Commission guidance on the classification of wastes, co-products and by-products and sets out the rules by which materials can be classed as recycled. It contains examples from several major product types of how the recycled content percentage has been determined and directs the reader to further information sources to help evaluate and increase recycled content.

Mark Collinson at WRAP was involved in commissioning the research; he explains: “We recognise that if clients and their project teams are going to be able to respond to environmental policy targets and accurately assess contributions to the recycled content of a building project, information is needed on the recycled content of products. More specifically, recycled content data are required on a brand by brand basis to enable the cost-effective, informed substitution of one brand for another of the same product within the chosen design specification.”

Steve Hunt, Project Manager, British Board of Agrément (BBA) comments further on the guide’s relevance for industry: "At the BBA, we are aware of the increasing drive for product manufacturers to identify and promote the recycled content of their products through their BBA Certificates. The Rules of Thumb Guide to Recycled Content in Construction Products is based on the European Commission’s by-product guidance and decision tree, that lays down guidance on what constitutes recycled content for manufacturers and suppliers, and provides the beginnings of a framework for us to validate the content."