Saving Seafood

CALIFORNIA: Algae bloom fish kills prompt new Bay Area wastewater treatment plant requirements costing $11 billion

March 18, 2024 — Ten years. That’s how much time the Bay Area’s 37 wastewater treatment plants will have to reduce fertilizer and sewage in their water by 40%. The estimated price tag for the facility upgrades is $11 billion.

The San Francisco Regional Water Quality Control Board plans to adopt the change as part of its new discharge permit requirement beginning June 12. Previous permits did not require reductions, according to Lorien Fono, executive director of the Bay Area Clean Water Agencies, which oversees the region’s wastewater treatment plants. She spoke from the Oro Loma Sanitary District in San Lorenzo on Thursday. The facility is considered a model for upgrades.

The regulatory change follows a damaging algae bloom in 2022 and 2023. A brown algae species called Heterosigma akashiwo, which feeds off the nitrogen in wastewater, infected the Bay and damaged aquatic ecosystems.

Read the full article at CBS News

BOEM Approves Controversial Wind Energy Areas off Oregon

February 14, 2024 — After a months-long process of engagement with local fishermen and tribes, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) has designated two final Wind Energy Areas off the Oregon Coast. Despite local opposition and skepticism from fisheries stakeholders, the areas will still go forward in BOEM’s planning process, but will be 11 percent smaller.

BOEM’s initial draft wind areas announced in August 2023 would have allowed the development of about 220,000 acres off Brookings and Coos Bay, with power generation potential of about 2.6 GW. After months of stakeholder meetings, held at the request of the state’s governor and both of its senators, the revised final areas cover about 195,000 acres – about 11 percent smaller than the draft – and have about 2.4 GW of generation potential. The physical locations and distances from shore are comparable to the draft areas.

The final result drew scathing criticism from the local fishing industry. Heather Mann, executive director of the Coos Bay-based Midwater Trawlers Cooperative, called BOEM’s engagement process “a slap in the face to Oregon’s coastal communities.”

“The final wind energy areas are slightly different from the draft wind energy areas produced earlier this year, but certainly not an acceptable or meaningful response to the many concerns including those raised by tribes, fishermen, marine scientists, environmentalists, and state and federal legislators,” said Mann.

Read the full article at the Maritime Executive

CALIFORNIA: Gov. Newsom releases new plan to save California salmon

January 31, 2024 — There’s a newly restored wetland at the edge of Prairie Creek, a stream that crosses ancestral Yurok land in Northern California’s Redwood National Park. The site is humble at first glance: an expanse of mud along the streamside, where starts of native vegetation dot the ground, and quiet pools branch off from the main flow of the creek. But this carefully rebuilt backwater holds an array of rare young fish. On Monday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom stood by as researchers pulled juvenile chinook and coho salmon along with steelhead and cutthroat trout from the water and displayed them in a clear plastic box.

Newsom and his entourage paid a visit to this area to see salmon restoration in action – and to announce a sweeping new plan intended to protect California’s iconic fish. The state’s once-abundant salmon have been devastated by sediment pollution from logging, overfishing and massive habitat loss due to decades of dam construction. As summer temperatures soar and snowpack dwindles due to human-caused climate change, there’s increasingly less of the cold water the remaining salmon need to survive.

Read the full article at High Country News

 

When climate change throws the Pacific off balance, the world’s weather follows

September 20, 2023 — The Pacific Ocean is a juggernaut. It’s the largest ocean on our planet, almost double the size of the Atlantic. Its vast expanse, exposure to trade winds, and range of temperatures makes it incredibly dynamic. All these factors contribute to create the El Niño—Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a climate pattern that affects seasonal precipitation, heat, storms, and more around the world.

ENSO is made up of three stages: El Niño and La Niña, which can both increase the likelihood of extreme weather from the Philippines to Hawaii to Peru—and the neutral phase that we are typically in. El Niño is currently underway and is predicted to go strong until winter. With it come a slew of weather patterns like exacerbated heat waves in the northern US and Canada, increased risk of flooding in the south and southeast US, delayed rainy seasons, and even droughts in countries like Indonesia and the Philippines. And this is for an El Niño period that is predicted to be strong, but not particularly extreme. But as the Pacific warms due to human-driven climate change and temperature gradients across the ocean widen, scientists warn that El Niño and La Niña periods are becoming longer, more extreme, and more frequent.

In one recent study published in the journal Nature Reviews, researchers looked at different climate models to see how ENSO has changed through the past century, and how it may shift in coming years. While El Niño and La Niña ordinarily last nine to 12 months, the vast majority of models predict that we will see them stretch out over multiple years. “In the 20th century you got about one extreme El Niño per 20 years,” says Wenju Cai, chief research scientist at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia and lead author of the Nature Reviews paper. “But in the future, and in the 21st century on average, we will get something like one extreme event per 10 years—so it’s doubling.”

Read the full article at Popular Science