FEATURE: SEVEN ISSUES, SEVEN EXPERTS – OCEANS

FEATURE: SEVEN ISSUES, SEVEN EXPERTS – OCEANS
New York, Jun 13 2012 4:10PM
World leaders, along with thousands of participants from governments, the private sector, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and other groups will come together next week in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to take part in the UN Sustainable Development Conference (Rio+20).

The Conference aims to shape how countries and their citizens can reduce poverty, advance social equity and ensure environmental protection to achieve long-term growth. </p>

Seven key areas have been identified by the UN as needing urgent attention: creation of jobs, access to energy, building sustainable cities, ensuring food security and sustainable agriculture, access to water, managements of oceans and disaster readiness.</p>

But what do each of them entail and how can people contribute to a sustainable future?</p>

In our <em>Seven Issues, Seven Experts</em> series, UN officials tell us more about each area and how we can contribute to make our planet more sustainable.</p>

In the first installment, the UN News Centre spoke with Andrew Hudson, the head of the Water & Ocean Governance Programme of the UN Development Programme (UNDP), about the importance of regulating the shipping industry, choosing fish in the supermarket, and why microscopic plankton may be the most important organism on Earth.</p>

<strong>UN News Centre:</strong> How do oceans fit into the sustainable development picture?</p>

<strong>Andrew Hudson:</strong> Well, every time you take a breath, you should know that half of the oxygen is produced in the oceans – it is actually produced by the plankton. Many people don't realize that. At the moment, the oceans are facing a number of very serious challenges and those challenges not only affect the environment. They also affect and threaten economic services that depend on oceans, and that, of course, ultimately threatens people's livelihoods and their security, food security, job security and so forth. So, having oceans part of Rio is a really fundamental aspect of the conference.</p>

<strong>UN News Centre:</strong> What are the most pressing issues that governments need to act on regarding oceans?</p>

<strong>Andrew Hudson:</strong> The key challenges the oceans face are numerous, but some of the most important are: overfishing, pollution – in particular the so-called nutrient pollution which comes from untreated waste water – invasive species that move from one part of the ocean to another through the ballast water of ships, and ocean and coastal habitat loss such as mangroves, sea grasses, and coral reefs which are declining every year.</p>

Lastly, and this is a new aspect of the climate change issue, there's ocean acidification, which occurs when carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere dissolves in seawater making it slightly acidic. As we build up the CO2 in the atmosphere, the oceans absorb about 30 percent of it, and over time we are already seeing that oceans are getting more and more acidic; and if we don't change our pathway, this could actually start to affect certain organisms in quite serious ways.</p>

<div id="EmbedPhotoLeft" style="width:190px;"><"/News/dh/photos/large/2012/April/04-26-2012marinelife.jpg" class="lightbox" title="Marine life. Photo: UNESCO" rel="gallery-default"><img class="Embed" src="/News/dh/photos/large/2012/April/04-26-2012marinelife.jpg" style="width:180px; height:120px;">
<p class="phtocaption2">Marine life. Photo: UNESCO</p>
</div>

<strong>UN News Centre:</strong> What impact does ocean acidification have on other ecosystems?</p>

<strong>Andrew Hudson:</strong> Well, quite a bit actually. The organisms that fix calcium carbonate – which are a large fraction of the organisms in the oceans such as shells and shellfish, but also microscopic organisms which are the basis of the food chain in the oceans – might face increasing acidification. If the acidity gets too high, they can no longer fix the calcium carbonate into their shells, they will literally dissolve, and then the potential impacts on ocean ecosystems are quite worrying, because the plankton are the foundation in which the rest of the ecosystem is built – the lowest level in the ecosystem, and if they're not surviving and prospering everything above them will suffer as well.</p>

<strong>UN News Centre:</strong> Are there any activities underway which help ensure that oceans are managed in a sustainable way?</p>

<strong>Andrew Hudson:</strong> It isn't all gloom and doom. There are some success stories, which is very important because that gives us hope and promise for replicating things that work to address these issues at a larger scale.</p>

A very good example where something is working is in the issue of invasive species, which are microscopic organisms that are pumped into ships' ballast water when it is unloading cargo at a port, and then the ship may travel halfway around the world, say from Shanghai to New York, carrying that ballast water. When it unloads new cargo at a new port, it will also unload that water.</p>

It may be a long journey and most of the organisms are trapped in the dark in very bad conditions and will not survive the journey. But every once in a while, an organism survives and it's not a native organism so it can actually establish itself and, in a few cases, overwhelm the ecosystem they've been introduced to. This happened in the Black Sea with Comb Jellyfish.</p>

Invasive species can cause billions of dollars in damage and completely impact the ecosystem. So the shipping industry, working with the UN, the International Maritime Organization, UNDP [UN Development Programme] and others have taken quite serious steps on this issue by adopting the global convention on ship ballast water in 2004, and calling for very specific management and treatment measures to ensure that that ballast water is no longer going to be transporting these invasive species. As that process ensues in the next few years, it will actually have a significant impact in reducing risks to oceans by reducing this transfer of these invasive species. That's a very positive step in the right direction.</p>

Another example has to do with pollution issues and nutrients. One of the world's most significant hotspots for this issue of excess nutrients into the oceans was also the Black Sea. In the late 1980s, mainly due to the huge build up in the green revolution application of fertilizers, growth in livestock farms, etc. the Danube River was transporting massive quantities of these nutrients into the Black Sea and this leads to an issue called hypoxiam – which is basically when the system gets so overwhelmed with production that bacteria consume that excess production and in doing so consumes the oxygen of the water, and the water can become either oxygen-free or with very low oxygen, and that's not good for most of the organisms there.</p>

The Black Sea entered a serious period of hypoxia where thousands of square kilometres of the northwest portion were hypoxic.</p>

So what we did over a 15 year period was work with the 17 nations around the Black Sea – the two commissions that were merging for the Danube River in the Black Sea, the UN system, the World Bank, the European Union and many other partners – to help the countries put together a plan and a long-term vision and programme to begin to reduce these pollution impacts. And what we found over time is that by changing agricultural practices, by investing more in waste water treatment, by implementing certain industrial reforms, we have now seen a start in meaningful reductions in the amount of pollution that's reaching the Black Sea, and the good news is that the hypoxic zone has la
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