New funding for marine parks expansion

Computer programmers are designing a smartphone app to allow boaters to assist with enforcement across an expanded network of marine parks.

The proposals, which include dramatically expanding the no-fishing zones around the Cayman Islands, will go through another round of public consultation this year, according to Environment Minister Wayne Panton.

Mr. Panton gave his personal support to the plan, saying Cayman’s current marine parks were “no longer enough” to protect the islands’ natural resources from the threat of overfishing and development.

His comments came as the U.K. based Darwin initiative announced more than $100,000 in new funding to research and address concerns raised in an earlier study.

This includes developing phone and iPad apps that will allow people to report poaching and other marine violations in real time.

Experts at Bangor University in Wales are working on the technology, which will also allow boaters to use the GPS function on their phone to identify if they are in a marine protected area and to check what regulations apply.

Department of Environment officers will also be equipped with tablets that allow them to log in to licensing databases from the field, saving time and paperwork.

Gina Ebanks-Petrie, director of the Department of Environment, said the technology would enable the department to do more with the same resources, enabling them to police a much wider marine protected area without a significant increase in manpower.

Researchers will also look at the impact of lionfish on Cayman’s reefs, including a study to discover if the invasive fish has adapted its behavior to hide from divers. The lionfish research will ultimately impact how culling is managed.

Further work is also being done on aggregation sites, used by various species of fish, most famously the Nassau grouper, for annual spawning events. Scientists believe many different species could be using the same sites year-round, making them “the maternity wards” of the ocean and potentially worthy of additional protection.

They also want to take a closer look at recreational fishing habits in Cayman.

The marine parks plan proposes to include concessionary zones with boat ramps for fisherman at various points adjacent to the no-take areas.

Dr. John Turner, a senior lecturer at Bangor University and Darwin Initiative project partner, said, “When you have a marine protected area, there are going to be more fish, there are going to be larger fish. These concessionary areas would allow people to benefit from the overspill.

“We need to know more about how sustainable this would be. We are very interested in asking what fish people expect to be able to catch in these zones. We need to know what people are fishing now and how they may be impacted by the marine reserve around.”

Cayman was hailed as a world leader in environmental protection when it first introduced marine parks in 1986. The proposal to expand the protected zones, which came from an initial study also funded by the Darwin Initiative, has been discussed for several years, with some protest, particularly from fishermen who fear a threat to their livelihood.

Among the proposals are expanding the no-take zones – from which no marine life can be extracted – from about 15 percent of the narrow marine shelf around the islands to between 40 and 50 percent of the shelf and extending them from shore to a depth of 200 feet, compared to the current depth of 80 feet.

Mr. Panton said he supported an expansion of marine parks. But he said the new government needed the opportunity to consult with the public before going ahead.

The “post-project” phase of the research will be completed by September, at which point Mr. Panton hopes to be able to bring a proposal to the Legislative Assembly.

He added, “The current marine parks have provided benefits but they are no longer enough to counter the growing threats from overfishing, coastal development, invasive species, disease of corals and other marine organisms as well as the impact of climate change.”

He said Cayman Islands’ population had doubled and there had been significant development, as well as an increase in visitors, since the parks were first introduced 28 years ago.

“The legal and regulatory framework is no longer sufficient. It needs to be enhanced, it needs to be improved,” he said. More

 

Pacific islands look for model to combat changes due to global warming

With islands and atolls scattered across the ocean, the small Pacific island states are among those most exposed to the effects of global warming: increasing acidity and rising sea level, more frequent natural disasters and damage to coral reefs.

These micro-states, home to about 10 million people, are already paying for the environmental irresponsibility of the great powers.

"Pacific islands are the victims of industrial countries unable to control their carbon dioxide emissions. The truth of the matter is that we have no option but to accept this and adapt," says Dr Jimmie Rodgers, the head of the Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC), a regional development organisation. At the initiative of France's Research on Development Institute (IRD) and New Caledonia University, 30 or so scientists from the Pacific basin spent a week at the end of April discussing the design of asustainable development model suited to local conditions – in particular, pressure from the climate on ways of life that reach back several millennia.

In a study published by the journal Nature Climate Change, the SPC and IRD draw attention to the considerable impact of global warming on food security on these islands. Fish stocks, the main source of protein for islanders and the basis for development, will be particularly affected. Currently about 1m tonnes of tuna and tuna-like fishes are caught every year in the region.

For the Kiribati group of islands, fishing accounts for 40% of GDP, whereas on the Marshall Islands fisheries and fish processing represent a quarter of overall revenue. "The rising temperature of surface waters, which is greater in the western part of the ocean basin, will encourage tuna to migrate east towards Polynesia," says Johann Bell, principal fisheries scientist at SPC and one of the authors of the study.

Melanesian countries, such as Papua New Guinea or the Solomon Islands, will suffer most. "PNG has a large canning industry, but in a few decades it will have to import tuna to keep it running," Bell adds. "Fortunately it can count on favourable international agreements to buy [fish] wherever it likes, with low customs duty." But the disappearance of the tuna shoals could mean major financial losses for smaller economies such as Tuvalu or Kiribati.

The effects for coastal fisheries are likely to be even more dramatic, due to damage to the coral reefs. The population density of live reefs is expected to drop from 40% at present, for the Pacific as a whole, to 10% or 20% by 2050, the scientists explain. The decrease in the fish stocks in the lagoons coincides with high population growth, particularly inMelanesia.

With an increase in rainfall, the SPC is advocating the development of fish farms and freshwater fisheries. On Fiji, Vanuatu and Samoa, farms have recently started raising Nile tilapia, an alien species. To reduce pressure on the reefs and allow coastal residents to catch tuna, there are also plans to build floating pontoons to attract the fish.

On land, life must adapt to the changing conditions too. On Fiji, the Centre for Pacific Crops and Trees has set up a department to focus on adapting staple crops.

"Climate change brings new constraints for crops, which are subject to unpredictable ecological pressures such as drought, higher salt concentrations, extreme temperatures and erosion," a representative explains. Thousands of varieties of manioc, taro, sweet potato and banana have been screened in order to offer farmers new, more robust varieties. "We are promoting these seeds," says Henry Puna, prime minister of the Cook Islands (population 12,200), which have been hard-hit by coastal erosion. More

 

Overfishing Threatens Critical Link in the Food Chain - Earth Policy Institute

The fish near the bottom of the aquatic food chain are often overlooked, but they are vital to healthy oceans and estuaries. Collectively known as forage fish, these species—including sardines, anchovies, herrings, and shrimp-like crustaceans called krill—feed on plankton and become food themselves for larger fish, seabirds, and marine mammals.

Krill

Historically, people have eaten many of these fish, too, of course. But as demand for animal protein has soared over the last half-century, more and more forage fish have been caught to feed livestock and farmed fish instead of being eaten by people directly. A growing body of scientific evidence suggests that current fishing levels are dangerously high—both for the forage fish themselves and for the predators and industries that depend on them.

Found from the tropics to the poles, forage fish typically travel in dense schools of thousands or even millions of fish. While this is effective for guarding against ocean predators, it makes them easy prey for modern fishing fleets equipped with purse seine nets that can cinch up an entire school at once. What’s more, forage fish stocks are highly sensitive to environmental change and prone to population crashes, so fishing levels considered safe in good years can be disastrous in bad ones.

Many of the world’s largest fisheries focus on forage species, including Peruvian anchovy, Atlantic herring, and chub mackerel. Together, forage fish typically account for more than 30 percent of the 80 million tons of fish caught annually in the world’s oceans and estuaries. Roughly 9 of every 10 tons of forage fish hauled in are destined for the “reduction” factory, where they are cooked and pressed to extract the oil; what remains is then dried and milled into fishmeal, a high-protein brownish powder. About 6 million tons of fishmeal and 1 million tons of fish oil are produced each year. Nearly all of the fishmeal is fed to farmed fish, pigs, and poultry. The oil, high in omega-3 fatty acids that are prized for their health benefits, is a popular feed additive and is also used as a nutritional supplement for humans.

Notwithstanding their large contribution to the world fish catch, recent research suggests that forage fish are worth at least twice as much in the ocean as they are on the boat. In 2012 the Lenfest Forage Fish Task Force, an international group of 13 distinguished marine and fisheries scientists, released the results of a three-year study in a report entitled Little Fish, Big Impact. The authors calculated that forage fish generate nearly $17 billion per year in reported catch—$5.6 billion for the small fish themselves and $11.3 billion in landings of the fish that eat them. This does not include the value of ecotourism for watching whales, which eat forage fish; the value of recreational sport fishing where forage fish are used as bait; or the important role of forage fish in keeping plankton under control.

Forage fish have a long history of being targeted for meal and oil. For example, Atlantic menhaden—herring and sardine relatives that migrate along the U.S. Atlantic coast—were first sent to processing factories in New England and the mid-Atlantic region in the mid-1800s to become fertilizer and a cheap substitute for whale oil, which was used in everything from leather tanning to cosmetics. Menhaden meal was later used in animal feed, beginning in the early 1900s. (Around that time, North Europeans started fishing Atlantic herring for the same purpose.) Still used mainly in feed but also in health supplements, Atlantic menhaden are one of the largest U.S. fisheries by weight today.

As more pork and poultry producers in the United States and Europe began using inexpensive fishmeal in feed rations, landings of forage fish grew. When the large-scale Peruvian anchovy fishery was launched in the 1950s and Peru and Chile began to aggressively exploit the productive waters along the western coast of South America, fishmeal use in feed began to spread worldwide. For decades now, the Peruvian anchovy has been not just the world’s largest source of fishmeal, but the world’s largest fishery overall, in some years topping 10 million tons. Peru alone has some 1,200 vessels supplying anchovy to 140 reduction factories, which produce meal and oil worth about $2 billion per year in exports.

While the Peruvian anchovy fishery is indeed lucrative, it is also, like many other forage fisheries, highly dependent on favorable environmental conditions. Especially during El Niño events, warm Pacific Ocean waters—sometimes with overfishing as an accomplice—have over the decades led to numerous anchovy population crashes and devastated harvests. In October 2012, Peru cut the allowed anchovy catch to its lowest level in 25 years after the fish’s population plummeted yet again, likely due to warmer ocean temperatures. With the anchovy supply thus restricted, the world price of fishmeal jumped to a record high by December. (See data.)

A half-century earlier, the young but already massive Peruvian anchovy fishery illustrated the ecological repercussions of heavy forage fishing. Unfavorably warm waters and an anchovy catch averaging 8 million tons per year depleted the food base for cormorants, gannets, and pelicans in the mid-1960s. Severe population declines among these birds ensued. Cormorants, almost entirely reliant on anchovies for food, saw an 89 percent drop from their historical average. Seabird populations in this ecosystem still have not recovered.

Worldwide, three quarters of the 72 marine ecosystems studied by the Lenfest Task Force contain predators dependent on forage fish for at least half their diet. Some predators, including the blue whale, Humboldt penguin, and yellowfin tuna, rely on forage fish for at least 75 percent of their diets. For these animals, plummeting prey populations can mean both impaired breeding and starvation.

The vast majority of the world’s forage fish stocks are either considered fully exploited, with no room for safely increasing the catch, or they are already overfished and in need of rebuilding. Given the climate sensitivity of forage fish and the key ecological role they play, the Lenfest authors recommend that, in general, catches should be half their current levels.

Reducing demand for fishmeal and oil will largely depend on the aquaculture sector. Twenty-five years ago, pigs and poultry accounted for 80 percent of world fishmeal consumption. By 2000, this share had dropped to 60 percent. But over the next decade, aquaculture production doubled, fishmeal prices rose nearly four-fold, and pig and poultry producers rapidly replaced fishmeal in feed with soybean meal. Today 68 percent of fishmeal goes to fish farms, as does 74 percent of fish oil.

There are some encouraging signs on this front, however. For example, nearly every major type of farmed fish—from salmon to carp—has seen significant reductions in the fishmeal content of feed since the mid-1990s as proteins from plants (particularly soybeans) and livestock and poultry byproducts have increasingly become suitable alternatives. Between 1995 and 2007, the fishmeal content in shrimp feed dropped from 28 percent to 18 percent. The drop was even more dramatic for salmon, from 45 percent to 24 percent. The recent surge in fishmeal prices is forcing even more feed switching.

There has also been a rise in the use of seafood industry byproducts in fish feed. In 2010, one third of fishmeal production came from fish trimmings and other food fish production wastes. On the other hand, finding substitutes for fish oil rich in omega-3s has been more difficult and may prove a bigger obstacle to lowering the forage fish catch in line with scientific advice.

Some scientists and chefs have promoted greater consumption of forage fish directly as food, noting that this is much more efficient—and more accessible to poorer consumers—than eating them indirectly through farm-raised salmon or shrimp. Forage fish already provide an important protein source in many low-income countries around the world, especially in coastal Africa. In fact, they account for over half the supply of food fish in 36 countries, including the Maldives, the Philippines, and Ghana. And direct consumption is on the rise in some countries. For example, Peruvians ate 190,000 tons of anchovies in 2010—19 times as much as in 2006. More

 

Taking Stock: World Fish Catch Falls to 90 Million Tons in 2012

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) projects that the world’s wild fish harvest will fall to 90 million tons in 2012, down 2 percent from 2011. This is close to 4 percent below the all-time peak haul of nearly 94 million tons in 1996.

The wild fish catch per person has dropped even more dramatically, from 17 kilograms (37.5 pounds) per person at its height in 1988 to 13 kilograms in 2012—a 37-year low. While wild fish harvests have flattened out during this time, the output from fish farming has soared from 24 million tons in the mid-1990s to a projected 67 million tons in 2012.

Over the last several decades, as demand for fish and shellfish for food, feed, and other products rose dramatically, fishing operations have used increasingly sophisticated technologies—such as on-vessel refrigeration and processing facilities, spotter planes, and GPS satellites. Industrial fishing fleets initially targeted the northern hemisphere’s coastal fish stocks, then as stocks were depleted they expanded progressively southward on average close to one degree of latitude annually since 1950. The fastest expansion was during the 1980s and early 1990s. Thereafter, the only frontiers remaining were the high seas, the hard-to-reach waters near Antarctica and in the Arctic, and the depths of the oceans.

The escalating pursuit of fish—now with gross revenue exceeding $80 billion per year—has had heavy ecological consequences, including the alteration of marine food webs via a massive reduction in the populations of larger, longer-lived predatory fish such as tunas, cods, and marlins. Unselective fishing gear, including longlines and bottom-scraping trawls, kill large numbers of non-target animals like sea turtles, sharks, and corals.

As of 2009, some 57 percent of the oceanic fish stocks evaluated by FAO are “fully exploited,” with harvest levels at or near what fisheries scientists call maximum sustainable yield (MSY). If we think of a fish stock as a savings account, fishing at MSY is theoretically similar to withdrawing only the accrued interest, avoiding dipping into the principal.

Some 30 percent of stocks are “overexploited”—they have been fished beyond MSY and require strong management intervention in order to rebuild. The share of stocks in this category has tripled since the mid-1970s. A well-known example of this is the Newfoundland cod fishery that collapsed in the early 1990s and has yet to recover.

This leaves just 13 percent of oceanic fish stocks in the “non-fully exploited” category, down from 40 percent in 1974. Unfortunately, these remaining stocks tend to have very limited potential for safely increasing the catch.

These FAO figures describe 395 fisheries that account for some 70 percent of the global catch. Included are the small minority that have undergone the time-consuming and expensive process of formal scientific stock assessment, with the remainder being "unassessed" fisheries. There are thousands more unassessed fisheries, however, that are absent from the FAO analysis. In a 2012 Science article, Christopher Costello and colleagues published the first attempt to characterize all of the world’s unassessed fisheries. The authors report that 64 percent of them were overexploited as of 2009.

The top 10 fished species represent roughly one quarter of the world catch. Nearly all of the stocks of these species are considered fully exploited (most of these fish have more than one geographically distinct stock), including both of the major stocks of Peruvian anchovy, the world's leading wild-caught fish. Stocks that are overexploited and in need of rebuilding include largehead hairtail—a ribbon-like predator caught mainly by Chinese ships—in its main fishing grounds in the Northwest Pacific. (See data.)

Despite the unsustainable nature of current harvest levels, countries continue to subsidize fishing fleets in ways that encourage even higher catches. Governments around the world spend an estimated $16 billion annually on increasing fleet size and fish-catching ability, including $4 billion for fuel subsidies. Industrial countries spend some $10 billion of that total. More than $2 billion is spent by China, whose 15-million-ton catch is nearly triple that of the next closest country, Indonesia. More

 

SIS Officials Discuss Climate Change and the Pacific Plan

Senior officials from the Smaller Island States (SIS) within the Pacific Islands Forum will discuss a regional technical support mechanism for SIS to access and manage the expected increased flows of climate change resources.

This is one of the issues being discussed at the one-day 2012 SIS Officials Meeting held at the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat, Suva, Fiji today. The meeting is one of a series of Forum officials meetings which will be held at the Secretariat this week in preparation for the 43rd Pacific Islands Forum Leaders' meeting which will be held in the Cook Islands 27 - 31 August. SIS countries include the Cook Islands, Kiribati, Nauru, Niue, Palau, Federated States of Micronesia and Tuvalu.

In his opening remarks at the meeting, Secretary General of the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat, Tuiloma Neroni Slade said: "Climate change remains the single greatest threat to the livelihoods, security and well-being of SIS."

"SIS Leaders emphasised the need to address the significance of current impacts of climate change on the SIS as urgent, requiring immediate resourcing and support. As you know, CROP agencies are developing a regional technical support mechanism for SIS to effectively access and manage the expected increased flows of climate change resources," said Mr Slade

The ongoing work on climate change finance (CCF) is being undertaken in line with the Forum Compact, as part of a region-wide effort to strengthen coordination and better use of development resources.

Forum Secretary General Mr Slade also reaffirmed the Pacific Plan as the master strategy for strengthening regional cooperation and integration for the region including the special needs of the SIS.

Mr Slade said: "The affirmation of sustainable development at the Rio +20 conference reinforces our Leaders' Vision in the Pacific Plan. Of particular importance to this meeting is the recognition of the 'special case' of Small Island Developing States which echoes our Leaders own due recognition of the special place of SIS as the most vulnerable amongst out Pacific community."

He told delegates at the meeting that as an integral part of the Pacific Plan process, the review of the Pacific Plan will be conducted in 2013. More

 

Looting the Pacific: ICIJ investigation on BBC World News

Produced by London-based tve for BBC World News, "Looting the Pacific" features an International Consortium of Investigative Journalists' probe into the plundering of one of the world's last great fish stocks. Read the full investigation here: www.iwatchnews.org BBC World News will broadcast "Looting the Pacific" at the following times (all times GMT): Saturday April 21 at 9:30 am and 9:30 pm Sunday, April 22 at 2:30 am and 3:30 pm