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oceans
Pacific Islands Summit Highlights Disproportionate Climate Impacts
U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres stressed that "the region urgently needs substantial finance, capacities, and technology to speed up the transition and to invest in adaptation and resilience."
Aug 26, 2024
As more than 1,500 delegates from over 40 nations gathered in Tonga for the 53rd Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting, climate defenders on Monday urged the world's biggest polluters to do much more to phase out the fossil fuels that are driving a planetary emergency disproportionately affecting low-lying island countries, which are among the world's lowest greenhouse gas emitters.
"Tonga's vision for the 53rd Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting (PIFLM53) is for the Pacific to move beyond policy deliberation to implementation—to achieve transformation by building better now," summit organizers said in a statement affirming the event's mission to "develop collective responses to regional issues and deliver on their vision for a resilient Pacific region of peace, harmony, security, social inclusion, and prosperity."
"We may be small island countries but we are a force to be reckoned with."
Addressing attendees at the summit's opening ceremony in the Tongan capital of Nuku'alofa, Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) Secretary-General Baron Waqa of Nauru called for regional unity to tackle common challenges.
"We may be small island countries but we are a force to be reckoned with," he said. "We are at the center of geostrategic interest, we are at the forefront of a battle against climate change and its impacts."
Speaking at Monday's opening session, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres lamented that "humanity is treating the sea like a sewer. Plastic pollution is choking sea life. Greenhouse gases are causing ocean heating, acidification, and a dramatic and accelerating rise in sea levels."
Guterres—who warned in Samoa last week that low-lying island nations face the threat of climate "annihilation"—said that "Pacific islands are showing the way to protect our climate, our planet, and our ocean: By declaring a climate emergency and pushing for action, and with your declarations on sea-level rise, and aspirations for a just transition to a fossil fuel-free Pacific. But, the region urgently needs substantial finance, capacities, and technology to speed up the transition and to invest in adaptation and resilience."
"The young people of the Pacific have taken the climate crisis all the way to the International Court of Justice," Guterres added. "You have also rightly recognized that this is a security crisis—and taken steps to manage those risks together."
Mahoney Mori, who chairs the Pacific Youth Council and is the PIFLM53 youth representative from the Federated States of Micronesia, called out the international community's failure to adequately fund climate mitigation initiatives like the loss and damage fund—which developing nations say will require an annual investment of at least $400 billion, or nearly 10 times the amount pledged at last year's United Nations Climate Change Conference in Dubai.
"Despite the commendable pledges from the United Nations and world leaders such as the Paris agreement, the existing global finance mechanisms still hindered community-based and youth organizations from accessing critical support," Mori said. "The Pacific's grassroots organizations struggle to meet global standards amidst this crisis and time is running out."
As leaders met for PIFLM53 amid torrential rains, a 6.9-magnitude earthquake rocked Tonga's main island of Tongatapu. While there was no damage reported and no tsunami warning issued, summit attendees said the temblor underscored vulnerabilities faced by low-lying island nations.
Leaders and activists from Pacific island nations took aim at regional giant Australia—which has been perennially ranked as one of the world's worst climate-wreckers in U.N.-backed Sustainable Development reports—for insufficient climate action.
"We recognize Australia's desire to present itself as a climate leader and co-host the COP alongside the Pacific," Pacific Islands Climate Action Network regional director Rufino Varea said in a statement, referring to Australia's bid to help lead the 2026 United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP31.
"However, true leadership must not merely be aspirational; it must be actionable," Varea continued. "To date, Australia has expanded gas production instead of aligning its practices with the urgent needs of the Pacific. This does not reflect the leadership we need."
"If Australia is to demonstrate genuine commitment, it must align its domestic and international climate policies with our goals and advocate earnestly for a fossil fuel-free Pacific," he stressed. "It must also commit to ambitious climate actions, ensure effective climate finance is delivered to Pacific island countries, and contribute substantially to the loss and damage fund."
"If these steps are not taken, we risk witnessing a COP that concedes failure—declaring that critical targets were missed, and that Pacific communities continue to be exploited as mere labor resources for the enrichment of others," Varea added.
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What US Militarism Has to Do With Japan's Quest to Slaughter More Whales
Whaling, it turns out, has very little to do with whaling and much more to with how powerful nations want to dominate the world's oceans.
Aug 26, 2024
In early August, the crew on Japan’s new whaling factory ship dismembered a male fin whale, the first commercial catch of the species in several decades. A few days earlier, Paul Watson was arrested in Nuuk, Greenland. He sits in a Danish prison, waiting a decision on his extradition to Japan. Given the Japanese courts’ record of 99.9% conviction rate for criminal cases, and issues with Japanese justice system, if extradited, he will probably spend the rest of his life imprisoned.
A few months ago, a paper led by Norwegian government scientists showed that there are around 50,000 fin whales in just one small part of the Southern Ocean. Also in Antarctic waters, the Japanese Institute of Cetacean Research has been running a research program which, as the the Institute states, is the “aimed at the sustainable use of whale resources in the Antarctic Ocean.” A new era of commercial whaling in the Antarctic looms.
Forty years ago, the International Whaling Commission introduced the whaling moratorium—a pause in slaughter, to allow whale populations to recover. At the time, the belief by most in the whale conservation community was that by the time that whale populations finally recovered, those still engaged in whaling would have given up, making the moratorium permanent. That’s not what’s happened. Three nations—Japan, Norway, and Iceland—still engage in commercial whaling.
There are many arguments against whaling: it’s cruel, it has to be subsidized, most people in whaling nations don’t care about it, it’s traditional in very few places in Japan, whales don’t eat all the fish, instead they’re ecosystem engineers that contribute to carbon sequestration. These points have been made for many years, and have never had the slightest impact on the Japanese whaling bureaucracy. They’re not only irrelevant, they’ve proven pointless.
Whaling, it turns out, isn’t about whales at all. Japan’s primary interest in commercial whaling is to maintain their geopolitical clout to exploit other marine wildlife (“living marine resources”) internationally. Tuna, for example. This point’s been made recently in a couple of forums. For the Japanese government, whaling’s a thin-edge-of-the-wedge problem. The moratorium was a big win for marine conservation that couldn’t be repeated with other international fisheries.
Given this framing, the actions of the Japanese whaling industry over the past forty years are rational. Whaling is primarily about asserting dominance in international negotiations over access to marine wildlife, so whether or not Japanese people eat much whale meat is irrelevant. What matters is access to other fisheries by Japan’s pelagic fishing fleets. Subsidizing whaling is a minuscule price to pay. The primary role of Japan’s new floating factory, the Kangei Maru, is as a flagship, a symbol of Japanese hegemony in international maritime negotiations. So its $48 million price tag is trivial. A Ford class US aircraft carrier, with a build cost of around $13 billion and an annual upkeep of $700 million, puts that in perspective. The Kangei Maru’s costs are a rounding error.
Despite Japan leaving the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in late 2018, the Japanese fisheries bureaucracy still controls the activities of the pro-whaling bloc. This September, the IWC meets again. One rumor currently swirling is that the Japanese will rejoin the IWC with a reservation to commercial whaling, one way to demolish the whaling moratorium. Another appeared a couple of weeks ago, when the prestigious scientific journal Nature published an opinion piece calling for the IWC to be dismantled. The article’s first author is a former chair of the IWC, who with his coauthors, argue that the IWC is now a “zombie” organization that has outlived its usefulness and should be dismantled.
Interesting timing.
Once, the threat of US sanctions in response to “diminishing the effectiveness” of the IWC regulated the manner in which the whaling bloc engaged there. That threat—obviously—no longer exists. How have the whalers brought the U.S. to heel on whaling? What’s their lever?
There was a belief in the NGO community that the threat of withholding IWC quotas on U.S. Inuit bowhead whaling was driving U.S. acquiescence. The pro-whaling bloc engaged in brinkmanship on this several times in the past. But the “Aboriginal Subsistence” whaling issues at the IWC have been resolved, removing this threat. Besides, ending the IWC would put bowhead whaling management back entirely with the U.S., internally. It can’t be that.
It’s here the military comes in. The U.S. has around 55,000 military personnel based in Japan. This is, for example, almost the size of the Australia’s active duty defense forces. Their weaponry includes some the most advanced in the U.S. arsenal. Most of those personnel are based in Okinawa, where there were over 6,000 criminal cases involving U.S. military personnel in the 50 years since the island was handed back to Japan in 1972. That’s a couple of crimes a week. And they include reported 134 rapes, or two to three reported rapes per year, including recent charges of the sexual assault of a child. Understandably, there is a vocal anti-US-base movement in Okinawa that regularly engages in mass protest.
These put Paul Watson’s “accomplice to assault” and “ship trespass” charges in context.
At the same time, the U.S. is reconstituting its forces in Japan, a buildup in response to the perceived threat to U.S. hegemony now posed by China. The Japanese government has leverage. Getting its way on whaling is Japan’s price for U.S. bases.
What could happen? Possibilities include Japan rejoining the IWC with a reservation that allows it to conduct commercial whaling wherever it wants. Perhaps the IWC will collapse. The recent Nature article shows that destroying the IWC is being considered. Returning the management of whaling to whaling nations? We know how that worked. And allowing Japan’s return to the IWC with a reservation will return the IWC’s role to that of a toothless body overseeing mass slaughter.
The huge U.S. military presence in Japan matters to the national security apparatus of the United States. The bureaucracy has worked with the Japanese government to see commercial whaling return. The return of commercial whaling is the U.S. military's quid pro quo for its regional dominance in the Pacific—not to mention its rapists in Okinawa.
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Highest Ocean Heat in 400 Years Poses 'Existential Threat' to Great Barrier Reef
"In the absence of rapid, coordinated, and ambitious global action to combat climate change, we will likely be witness to the demise of one of Earth's great natural wonders," the authors of a study in Science wrote.
Aug 08, 2024
The Great Barrier Reef recently experienced the highest ocean temperatures in at least four centuries and faces an "existential threat" due to repeated mass coral bleaching episodes, a study published Wednesday in Science found.
The network of coral reefs off of Australia—the world's largest living structure—has faced five of the six hottest three-month periods of average surface temperature ever recorded just since 2016, each of which was accompanied by devastating coral bleaching.
Ocean temperatures around the reef reached a record-breaking extreme from January to March this year, with the three-month mean temperature 1.73°C higher than the pre-1900 average, according to the study, authored by researchers based in Australia.
The study includes climate modeling that attributes the temperatures to fossil fuel-driven carbon emissions, and concludes that urgent climate action is needed.
"This attribution, together with the recent ocean temperature extremes, post-1900 warming trend, and observed mass coral bleaching, shows that the existential threat to the Great Barrier Reef ecosystem from anthropogenic climate change is now realized," the study says.
"In the absence of rapid, coordinated, and ambitious global action to combat climate change, we will likely be witness to the demise of one of Earth's great natural wonders," the authors also wrote.
The Great Barrier Reef is under critical pressure, with warming sea temperatures and mass coral bleaching events threatening to destroy the remarkable ecology, biodiversity, and beauty of the world’s largest coral reef, according to research in @nature. https://t.co/67bXgmfTEn
— Robin Hicks (@RobinHicks_) August 8, 2024
The researchers estimated the surface temperatures for 1618-1899 by using a reconstruction method based on drilling into coral skeletons and analyzing the chemical makeup. For the period from 1900 to 1995, they used both the reconstruction method and measurements by modern instruments, and for the last 30 years they used instrumental data.
They found that temperatures were relatively stable until 1900 but have climbed steadily since, especially since 1960.
The trend has culminated in a series of bleaching events, in which stressed corals expel the microscopic algae in their tissues and become transparent or white. Without the helpful algae, which live inside them symbiotically, corals are at risk of disease and death.
In interviews with journalists, the study authors spoke about the severity of the threat to the Great Barrier Reef and the urgent need for climate action.
"The heat extremes are occurring too often for those corals to effectively adapt and evolve," Ben Henley, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Melbourne and lead author of the study, toldThe New York Times. "If we don't divert from our current course, our generation will likely witness the demise of one of Earth's great natural wonders, the Great Barrier Reef."
Henley said he snorkeled with his father on the Great Barrier Reef as a child.
"You can't even take in the diversity," he said. "It's a kaleidoscope of color, it's absolutely spectacular."
He said he worries that his own 2-year-old daughter may not be able to enjoy the same experience.
"In her childhood years the reef is likely to see immense destruction," he said.
He called for strong global action so that his daughter and members of her generation could "marvel at the reef in their lifetimes."
Helen McGregor, a scientist at the University of Wollongong and study co-author, told the BBC the new research "could send a huge signal to the world about how grave the problem is."
"We know what we need to do," she added. "We have international agreements in place [to limit global temperature rise]."
Scientists not involved in the study agreed about the importance of the research, not just for the Great Barrier Reef but for coral reefs more generally.
"It's a stunningly important summary of the history of the world's largest reef system," Stephen Palumbi, a marine biologist at Stanford University, told the Times. "The paper lays out the danger that corals all around the world face from this heat."
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