Saving Seafood

US, Canada broker agreement to share dwindling cod fishing

September 21, 2016 — PORTLAND, Maine — The United States and Canada have brokered a deal to share what’s left of the dwindling North American cod fishing business in the Atlantic next year.

Both countries fish for cod, an important food fish that has declined in population following overfishing and warming ocean temperatures. The two fisheries overlap in the eastern reaches of Georges Bank, an important fishing area located off of New England.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Washington Times

NEW BEDFORD STANDARD-TIMES: Seamounts didn’t need protection from fishermen

September 20, 2016 — President Barack Obama is certainly sensitive enough to know the difference between, say, Republican Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana and Republican Gov. Charlie Baker of Massachusetts.

So we assume partisan politics had nothing to do with the declaration last week of the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, which leaves us scratching our heads.

Gov. Baker sees the monument designation of nearly 5,000 square miles of ocean as undermining commercial fishermen. We imagine that he, like many of us, wonders why the action came while federal regulators and regional ocean planners were developing a plan that balances environmentalism with impacts on the fisheries.

Commercial fishermen have contributed a remarkably miniscule amount to climate change, yet they understand remarkably clearly “the changes that are taking place that will affect their livelihood.”

The president’s statement seems incongruous according to the actual fishing activity taking place in the canyons and seamounts area, where it takes place relatively high in the water column, not the “pristine underseas.”

Read the full editorial at the New Bedford Standard-Times

Ocean Warming Is Already Affecting Arctic Fish And Birds

September 13, 2016 — Up until a few years ago, mackerel were unknown in Greenland’s cold waters. The small oily fish typically spawned west of the British Isles and then migrated toward the northeast along the Norwegian current to feed for the summer. But in 2007, they began to show up in large numbers in the Irminger Current around Iceland. On the ocean highway, where they once turned right, they now turned left.

By 2011, the mackerel had found their way into Greenlandic waters, prompting the launch of a new fishery. Three years later, the mackerel fishery made up 23 percent of Greenland’s export earning, an “extreme example of how climate change can impact the economy of an entire nation,” Teunis Jansen, a researcher at the Technical University of Denmark, said in a release.

The mackerel aren’t the only species being affected by warmer oceans. Soaring temperatures have pushed entire groups of species toward the poles, caused increases in disease in plants and animals and changed weather patterns, according to a report launched this week by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Marine species are moving northward at a rate roughly five times faster than the migration of land animals.

The report, released during the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Hawaii, highlights the impacts of ocean warming on marine life, from microorganisms to mammals. Eighty scientists from a dozen countries worked on the report, considered to be the most comprehensive collection of research on the planet’s warming oceans.

Truly Staggering

“We were astounded by the scale and extent of ocean warming effects on entire ecosystems made clear by this report,” said Dan Laffoley, an IUCN marine adviser and one of the report’s lead authors.

The world’s oceans have acted as a buffer against climate change. A “staggering 93 percent” of the heat produced by human activities has been absorbed by the world’s oceans, Laffoley said. If the heat had entered the atmosphere instead of the oceans, the Earth would have warmed not by the 1C (1.8F) we have already experienced, but by 36C (64.8F). “Up to now, the ocean has shielded us from the worst impacts of climate change,” the report’s authors write.

Read the full story at the Huffington Post

Hawaii Prepares Plan to Help Coral Recover From Bleaching

September 9, 2016 — KANEOHE, Hawaii — Hawaii officials proposed a series of steps to fight coral bleaching that’s threatening the state’s reefs, including new marine protected areas, limits on fishing and controlling polluted runoff from land.

Hawaii’s ocean temperatures have been rising as greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have increased, forcing corals to expel algae they rely on for food. Vast stretches of reef have turned white over the past two summers, increasing the risk that the coral will get sick and die. Some already have died.

It’s a serious concern for the health of the ocean because coral reefs provide habitat for fish and other marine life, scientists say. Severe or concurrent years of bleaching can kill coral reefs, as has been documented over the past two years in oceans around the world. Scientists expect a third year of bleaching to last through the end of 2016.

Bruce Anderson, the state Division of Aquatic Resources administrator, said addressing polluted runoff is difficult, noting it would cost millions of dollars to create artificial wetlands that would help control runoff. Fishermen in the past have also resisted moves to limit their catch.

But Anderson said the coral bleaching crisis presents an opportunity.

“We are going to have future bleaching events, and the water is going to get warmer. And it’s going to happen again and again,” he said Thursday. “So our challenge is to prevent the impacts of bleaching as much as we can and also to help the reefs recover.”

Read the full story from the Associated Press at ABC News

GEORGE LAPOINTE and TOM TIETENBERG: Reducing Maine’s carbon footprint

September 8, 2016 — We know the threat of climate disruption to Maine is real in part because we are experiencing early warning signs. The science is also clear that the problems will escalate if we do not act to further reduce carbon pollution.

There are now many important examples of how a warming climate threatens Maine, and here is one that strikes close to home for many Mainers: our changing marine environment could spell serious trouble for commercial fishing and all those who rely on it for a living. Consider the following:

• The Gulf of Maine is warming faster than 99 percent of world’s oceans.

• Maine’s shrimp fishery has been closed for several years now, attributed in part to warmer waters.

• Lobstermen and other fishermen are bringing up in new species from warming waters with their catch — presence of new species is not usually a good sign. For example, warming weather contributes to large increases in green crab populations, which ravages Maine clam flats and eelgrass beds.

• Clams and other shellfish face an existential threat: the same carbon pollution that is warming the globe is making ocean water more acidic and that makes it more and more difficult to build a shell.

These problems affect many Mainers, from commercial fishermen to all the households and businesses that they interact with. Commercial fishing is a $2 billion part of Maine’s economy, employing roughly 39,000 people.

Read the full opinion piece at Central Maine

Late-term Obama, GOP clash over monuments

September 6, 2016 — President Obama likely isn’t finished using his authority to unilaterally protect land and water as national monuments.

Environmentalists are hoping that Obama will continue his string of monument designations in his final months in office, following the footsteps of many of his predecessors who used the end of their presidencies for major land protections.

Conservationists hope Obama will set aside a massive area in the Atlantic Ocean off Cape Cod, a large swath of land in Utah that American Indian tribes believe to be sacred, an area upstream of the Grand Canyon that’s been eyed for uranium mining and a mountain range near El Paso, Texas, among other locations.

With Congress gridlocked and unable to pass major legislation regarding public lands, greens, Democrats and local advocates near the proposed monuments are calling on Obama to keep bypassing Congress to protect land and water areas.

But nearly every proposal to protect an area from various types of harm and development carries opposition from some locals and industries whose activities could be curtailed or stopped.

Republicans also want to stop Obama and repeal the 1906 Antiquities Act, which the president has used to protect lands.

They say Obama is stretching the law with his monument designations to take unilateral action when Congress will not help, like he has on immigration and climate change.

Read the full story at The Hill

Obama In Honolulu: ‘No Nation Is Immune To A Changing Climate’

September 1, 2016 — Climate change and cooperation emerged as key themes Wednesday when President Barack Obama addressed Pacific Island government leaders and others at the East-West Center in Honolulu.

“No nation, not even one as powerful as the United States, is immune to a changing climate,” he said, adding that “there’s no conflict between a healthy economy and a healthy planet.”

“While some members of the U.S. Congress still seem to be debating whether climate change is real or not, you are planning for new places for your people to live,” Obama said. “Crops are withering in the Marshall Islands. Kiribati bought land in another country because theirs may someday be submerged. High seas forced villagers from their homes in Fiji.”

The private speech before the Pacific Islands Conference of Leaders, a group of 20 government officials chaired by Papua New Guinea Prime Minister Peter O’Neill, came on the eve of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s 10-day event in Honolulu.

More than 9,000 people from 190 countries are coming to what’s been dubbed the “Olympics of Conservation.” It’s the first time that the IUCN’s World Conservation Congress, created in 1948, will meet in the United States — something Obama highlighted in his speech.

Environmental advocates had wanted Obama to speak at the opening ceremony Thursday morning at Blaisdell Center, hoping that’s where he would announce the fourfold expansion of Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument around the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.

Instead, the president signed the proclamation for the expansion last week.

Read the full story at the Honolulu Civil Beat

Above the waves, Connecticut fishermen struggle to hang on

August 30, 2016 — STONINGTON, Conn. — Gambardella Wholesale Fish on the docks here is all but empty on an early afternoon, eerily quiet save for the rhythmic clack, clack of cardboard boxes being stapled together.

“We used to start at seven in the morning,” said Mike Gambardella, whose grandfather started the family’s original fish market more than a century ago. “And when we used to have the whiting boats coming in here, sometimes we wouldn’t get out of here ‘til two o’clock in the morning. Now if I open one day a week, I’ll be happy.”

The problem isn’t the fish. There are plenty of fish – but they’re the wrong fish.

Warming water and other shifting ocean conditions, probably caused by climate change and its cascading impact on the entire marine ecosystem, have pushed the longtime mainstays of Connecticut fishing, like winter flounder and most notably lobster, north to deeper and colder waters.

In their places are species that had been more common further south, also moving north in search of more hospitable conditions. But the way the fish management and quota systems work on the East Coast, fishermen in New England can’t catch many of those fish.

Instead, trawlers from North Carolina are traveling all the way to the ocean waters in Connecticut’s backyard and catching what used to be off their own coast – summer flounder, scup and the very valuable black sea bass – while Connecticut fishermen can only watch; throwback tons of fish – most of which will die; or risk a costly, difficult and long trip to where the fish they are allowed to catch in larger numbers are now.

The situation has resulted in an emotional dispute over how the U.S. fishing system operates, with Connecticut fishermen and politicians calling, if not downright begging, for immediate changes to fish allocations to save the state’s fishing industry from what many believe is its inevitable ruin. But others in the scientific and environmental communities are saying – maybe not so fast.

Read the full story at the Connecticut Mirror

Hillary Clinton Reveals Her Ocean Policies

August 30, 2016 — In response to a letter sent by 115 ocean leaders to the leading presidential candidates, Secretary Clinton has released a two-page response on what she will do to protect our coast and ocean. With just over two months until the election this marks the first time in the campaign where a candidate has fully addressed the daunting issues confronting America’s public seas.

In her letter on August 27 she lays out a range of solutions she says she will act on if elected including growing the “Blue Economy,” supporting coastal adaptation to climate change, ending international pirate fishing, expanding sustainable and transparent U.S. fishing and seafood practices and ratifying the Law of the Seas Convention that has been held up by the U.S. Senate for over 20 years.

Read the full story and letter at Blue Frontier

CONNECTICUT: Beneath the waves, climate change puts marine life on the move

August 29, 2016 — There was a hefty irony to the announcement by Connecticut’s two U.S. senators earlier this summer that they were joining the sponsorship for a National Lobster Day next month.

The iconic symbol of the state’s fishing industry for years, Long Island Sound was once flush with lobster, traps and people who made their livings from them.

But no more.

Connecticut’s lobster landings topped 3.7 million pounds a year, worth $12 million, in the late 1990s, but by 2014 had diminished to about 127,000 pounds worth a little more than $600,000.

Instead of the picture of fishing success, lobster has become the face of climate change in New England: a sentinel of warming water, ocean acidification and other man-made impacts that have sent them and dozens of other marine animals scurrying in search of a more hospitable environment.

“We’ve found quite dramatic shifts in where species are found,” said Malin Pinsky, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist with the Rutgers University Department of Ecology, Evolution and Natural Resources who researches how climate change affects fish and fisheries. He has used data collected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to create OceanAdapt, which includes animations that regionally show how dozens of marine species have moved in the last 50 years. “Especially here in the Northeast you have something like American lobster about 200 miles further north than they used to be, and other species shifting similar amounts.”

Read the full story at the Connecticut Mirror