New 'green list' highlights the positives in nature conservation

News about conservation often seems like an endless battle to merely slow the decline of nature.

Each year, lists such as the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) red list and the Unesco list of World Heritage In Danger grow, as more and more plants and animals inch closer to extinction and protected areas are degraded.

But a new list being developed by the IUCN aims to highlight positive steps being taken around the world to protect nature.

“It’s a bit like the flipside to the World Heritage In Danger list,” says University of Queensland’s Marc Hockings – the global lead on the green list for the IUCN.

Hockings says he came up with the idea of a green list about 10 years ago, as a way of setting a standard for how protected areas should be managed. The IUCN green list of protected and conserved areas is meant to celebrate successfully protected areas, and help other protected areas lift their standards by showcasing successful examples.

Since the once-a-decade World Parks Congress in 2004, the international conservation community recognised that while the world was increasing the amount of land and water that was formally protected, there was relatively little data about whether any management practices were in place to actually protect those areas. Read More

Why Hong Kong has the toughest coral in the world

Why Hong Kong has the toughest coral in the world, and how agnès b is on a mission to help save it | South China Morning Post

The French research vessel Tara set sail from Lorient, northern France, in May 2016 and is on an epic two-year oceanographic mission to explore the coral reefs of the Pacific. On its 10-day port call in Hong Kong the 16-person team, known as “Taranauts”, hosted hundreds of visitors, but they were here primarily to study coral.
“Hong Kong is an interesting place to sample coral because of the economic development and its impact on ocean biodiversity; we look at the impact of the pollution,” says scientist Sarah Romac from Roscoff, France, speaking in the vessel’s wet laboratory.
The biggest surprise, the team found, was local coral’s resilience. Read More

Coral Reef Building and Energy Generation Protect Coast Lines

CCell - Turning waves into rock

We use energy from the waves to power underwater electrolysis to form limestone rock around steel mesh placed on the seabed. This technique was pioneered by BioRock to create artificial reefs, accelerating the accretion of limestone from 100s of years to less than 5.

CCell is an innovative technology that moves with the waves to simultaneously harness and dampen energy within the waves.

CCell and BioRock together, form a natural synergy, with an independent renewable energy source that enables large scale application of the BioRock technique. Read More