Oceans Past: A Guide to Oceans Future (original) (raw)

The future of the oceans past : toward a global marine historical research initiative

Plos One, 2014

Historical research is playing an increasingly important role in marine sciences. Historical data are also used in policy making and marine resource management, and have helped to address the issue of shifting baselines for numerous species and ecosystems. Although many important research questions still remain unanswered, tremendous developments in conceptual and methodological approaches are expected to contribute to a comprehensive understanding of the global history of human interactions with life in the seas. Based on our experiences and knowledge from the ''History of Marine Animal Populations'' project, this paper identifies the emerging research topics for future historical marine research. It elaborates on concepts and tools which are expected to play a major role in answering these questions, and identifies geographical regions which deserve future attention from marine environmental historians and historical ecologists.

The Future of the Oceans Past: Towards a Global Marine Historical Research Initiative

The Future of Oceans Past: Towards a Global Marine Historical Research Initiative

PLoS ONE 9 2014, 2014

Perspectives on Oceans Past: A Handbook of Marine Environmental History

2016

Marine environmental history analyses the changing relationships between human societies and marine natural resources over time. This is the first book which deals in a systematic way with the theoretical backgrounds of this discipline. Major theories and methods are introduced by leading scholars of the field. The book seeks to encapsulate some of the major novelties of this fascinating new discipline and its contribution to the management, conservation and restoration of marine and coastal ecosystems as well as the cultural heritages of coastal communities in different parts of the world.

Multidisciplinary perspectives on the history of human interactions with life in the ocean

ICES Journal of Marine Science: Journal du Conseil, 2016

There is an essentially circular interaction between the human social system and the marine ecosystem. The Oceans Past V Conference “Multidisciplinary perspectives on the history of human interactions with life in the ocean” held in Tallinn, Estonia, in May 2015 was an opportunity for the presentation and discussion of papers on a diverse array of topics that examined this socio-ecological system from a historical perspective. Here we provide background to the disciplines participating in the conference and to the conference itself. We summarize the conference papers that appear in this special volume of the ICES JMS and highlight issues which arose during general discussion. We make two conclusions. First, to have greater impact and ensure more efficient use of knowledge gained from marine historical ecology (MHE) and marine environmental history (MEH) in ecosystem-based management and related policy development, practitioners need to work more routinely with population and ecologi...

The Promise of Ocean History for Environmental History

Journal of American History, 2013

Paul Sutter closes his essay on the state of the field of environmental history by calling attention to the relatively short time during which humans have transformed the planeta point that certainly applies to the ocean. Anthropogenically induced global climate change is affecting ocean temperature and acidity. Overfishing has not only decimated marine populations but has emptied entire levels of the marine food web. Bottom trawling has scarred virtually all the commercially reachable seafloor. Attention to marine environmental issues has lagged behind similar attention to land by a century or more; only since the 1990s has the ocean's environmental status gripped the attention of mainstream media and ordinary people. 1 Although the ocean seems remote, marine environmental activists and ocean boosters rightly note the many ways that all people are tightly connected to it. The seas provide food, energy, communication, and transportation of the goods and raw materials that fuel the global economy. Threats to oceans and the uses made of ocean space and ocean resources have prompted the formation of international legal regimes and agreements. The majority of the world's population lives along coasts-and the proportion of coastal dwellers is on the increase-therefore even more people will be involved in the challenges associated with sea-level rise and the increasing frequency and intensity of storms. 2 Such interactions between people and ocean are grist for historical scholarship. Sutter acknowledges environmental history's terrestrial bias and notes the small but growing body of literature that recognizes the ocean's place in history. This notice has happened at an auspicious time, because environmental history's embrace of hybridity opens a space for the sea and other environments like it. Like land, the ocean is a natural environment that is-perhaps to a greater degree even than terra firma-knowable through cultural lenses. Technology necessarily mediates understanding of the vast depths of the ocean and even

World in Transition. Governing the Marine Heritage

2013

Rethinking the oceans For a long time humanity thought of the sea as some- thing inexhaustible. Given the sheer size of the oceans, it seemed inconceivable that humans might be able to exert any appreciable influence on the ‘blue continent’. Changes caused by humans take place gradually, and even today they are very difficult to detect or measure. It therefore took a long time before it was discovered that the impact of humankind on the sea grew ever stronger as our society became more industrialized, finally reach- ing disturbing dimensions: marine fish stocks are in a poor state due to overfishing, so that almost two-thirds of stocks need time to recover; a fifth of the species-rich coral reefs have already disappeared and three-quarters are at risk; and not least, our societies use the oceans as a rubbish dump, threatening species and ecosystems with nutrients, toxins and plastic. Man-made hazards also include CO2 emissions from fossil fuels, which are increasingly acidifying the oceans and thus endangering marine ecosystems. The acid concentration has already risen by almost a third since industrialization began, and this can have considerable effects on marine ecosystems and fishery. Further examples of humanity’s huge impact include cases of large-scale pollution (like after the disastrous accident involving the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in April 2010), the sudden collapse in the early 1990s of the once seemingly inexhaustible stocks of cod off Newfound- land, and the rising temperature of the world’s oceans, which has already led to a dramatic reduction in the size of the Arctic sea ice. Overall, the oceans are in an unsat- isfactory state. This largely still undiscovered ‘blue con- tinent’ is proving to be fragile, and in parts it is already irreversibly damaged. For these reasons, the oceans – their treasures and the threats they face – repeatedly find themselves at the focus of public attention. Human influence grows with technological develop- ment. Today, new ways of using the seas promise great opportunities, but they can also put new pressure on the oceans and their ecosystems. Using the huge potential of offshore wind power can contribute to a climate-friendly energy supply. On the other hand, unprecedented and unquantifiable risks are involved in the extraction of fossil oil and gas resources from the deep sea and the Arctic, and in mining methane hydrates – all of which are now becoming technically feasible. Similarly, the increas- ingly effective methods being used to detect and catch fish in remote areas of the high seas and at ever-greater depths are increasing pressure on fish stocks and marine ecosystems. Humankind is dependent on the seas, their ecosys- tem services and their biological diversity – for food, energy generation, medical products, tourism, climate- regulating functions and the oceans’ absorption of CO2. Against the background of humanity’s influence on the seas – which is already big today and could potentially become much larger in the future – and in view of the seas’ key importance for our societies, the WBGU asks how humanity might best go about the task of develop- ing a sustainable stewardship of the oceans. What condition will the oceans be in when we hand them over to coming generations in the middle of this century? Are we now going to take on responsibility and embark on the path of sustainability in the real world and not merely on paper? Much will depend on how marine conservation and ocean uses are organized, in other words on ocean governance. This report there- fore focuses on the global, regional and national rules governing the conservation and sustainable use of the oceans, and above all on how we can ensure that these rules are implemented, which has been a huge problem in the past. The WBGU puts the debate on the seas into the context of the ‘Great Transformation’ towards a low-carbon, sustainable society – the subject of its 2011 flagship report ‘A Social Contract for Sustainability’. Here,the WBGU argued that if greenhouse-gas emissions continued growing unabated, the Earth system would breach planetary guard rails within a few decades and enter domains that would be incompatible with sustainable development. The WBGU is convinced that nothing short of a new industrial revolution can prevent this. For that to happen, the world will have to phase out not only fossil power generation, but also energy-intensive urbanization and emissions-intensive land use within the next few decades. The WBGU believes the seas should be fully incorporated into this transformation towards a low-carbon, sustainable society, in particular because of the irreversibility of some of the processes involved. The oceans have the potential to give the transformation massive support; in turn, the transformation is necessary for the long-term conservation of the marine ecosystems. The WBGU already focused on the seas in its 2006 special report ‘The Future Oceans – Warming Up, Rising High, Turning Sour’. In particular it took a closer look at the interface between greenhouse-gas emissions and the oceans (e.g. warming, sea-level rise, ocean acidi- fication). In the present report the WBGU examines the examples of food and energy, which were already at the centre of its 2011 flagship report on transfor- mation. It studies the sustainable management of fish stocks, sustainable aquaculture and the development of marine renewable-energy systems. It also shows how the oceans can make a substantial contribution to the transformation. At the same time, the seas and their ecosystems are threatened by the effects of climate change and ocean acidification. The WBGU shows that the conservation and sustain- able use of the oceans are urgently necessary, that a transformation towards low-carbon, sustainable devel- opment is possible including the oceans, and that it can yield substantial advantages worldwide for sustainable energy supplies and food security.

Historical Overfishing and the Recent Collapse of Coastal Ecosystems

Science, 2001

Ecological extinction caused by overfishing precedes all other pervasive human disturbance to coastal ecosystems, including pollution, degradation of water quality, and anthropogenic climate change. Historical abundances of large consumer species were fantastically large in comparison with recent observations. Paleoecological, archaeological, and historical data show that time lags of decades to centuries occurred between the onset of overfishing and consequent changes in ecological communities, because unfished species of similar trophic level assumed the ecological roles of overfished species until they too were overfished or died of epidemic diseases related to overcrowding. Retrospective data not only help to clarify underlying causes and rates of ecological change, but they also demonstrate achievable goals for restoration and management of coastal ecosystems that could not even be contemplated based on the limited perspective of recent observations alone.

So long, and thanks for all the fish: the Sea Around Us, 1999-2014 - a fifteen-year retrospective

2014

And Wikipedia sayeth: "So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish is the fourth book of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy written by Douglas Adams. Its title is the message left by the dolphins when they departed Planet Earth just before it was demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass." Top accomplishments in the first 10 years of the Sea Around Us 1. Created the first database in the world that maps catch and derived information, such as catch values onto to the Exclusive Economic Zones of specific countries, and Large Marine Ecosystems (see p. 39). This work has made the Sea Around Us website (www.seaaroundus.org) the key source of spatialized fisheries information for the international scientific and environmental communities, used by thousands of users every month; 2. Using the catch maps in (1) to establish that China, by over-reporting its catches, had masked a global decline of fisheries catches that started in the late 1980s. These results, published in the journal Nature, and later tacitly endorsed by FAO, provided the background for discussions about the global crisis of fisheries; 3. Debunked, via reports presented at meetings of the International Whaling Commission and a 'policy forum' article in Science (Gerber et al., 2009), the assertion promoted by the pro-whaling community that marine mammals and fisheries globally compete for fish, and thus that the culling of whales would make more fish available to fisheries; 4. Estimated the extent of subsidies to the fishing industry on a global basis and by subsidy type (see p. 49). Dr. Rashid Sumaila, in collaboration with Oceana, an environmental NGO, was able to introduce these findings into WTO negotiations aimed at eliminating capacity-enhancing subsidies to fisheries; 5. Produced a series of papers investigating the successes and limitations of consumer awareness campaigns. This work, led by then Ph.D. student Jennifer Jacquet, was among the first to question the effectiveness of consumer awareness campaigns on the seafood industry, and highlighted obstacles to these efforts, such as product mislabeling, and lack of metrics for measuring campaign effectiveness; 6. Developed and applied a methodology for 'reconstructing' catch statistics from coastal countries (see p. 15), which generally yielded catch estimates much higher than those reported by the FAO (see pp. 109 & 113). Catch reconstructions, led by Dr. Dirk Zeller, have been completed for over 250 countries (or parts of countries, see p. 113). Results typically show that 'small-scale' fisheries contribute far more to the food security of developing countries than previously assumed, highlighting the need for a reassessment of policies that conventionally marginalize such fisheries; 7. Simulated, for the first time, the effect of climate change on fisheries and marine ecosystems on a global scale (see p. 63). Led by Dr. William Cheung, this initiative demonstrated in a continuing series of papers how increases in ocean temperatures may lead to massive shifts in marine biodiversity and estimated 'catch potentials' of coastal countries; 8. Developed, using Ecopath with Ecosim and associated software, a technique for integrating global ecological and fisheries datasets (see p. 71). The development of this "database-driven construction of ecosystem models", led by Dr. Villy Christensen, may represent the most data-intensive integration in marine ecology today; 9. Supported its principal investigator and main spokesperson, Dr. Daniel Pauly, as he became recognized as a leading voice for ocean conservation, as evidenced by his being awarded, e.g., the International Cosmos Prize

Oceans Past: A Guide to Oceans Future (original) (raw)

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