Tuesday, 20th December 2011
Islands and overseas entitites’ contribution to biodiversity and the fight against climate change
I am delighted to have been invited to make an opening statement at this important event by my good friends and colleagues Maurice Ponga and Spyros Danellis - co-chairs of the 'Islands & Overseas Entities' working group of the Intergroup on Climate Change, Biodiversity & Sustainable Development, that I chair.
As all of us here today know, our 34 overseas entities, belonging to the UK, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and Denmark, are a vital host to some of the planet’s most important landscapes, ecosystems and species.
Firstly, let me say something about funding. The EU’s LIFE+ Regulation will be discussed soon in the environment Committee. LIFE+ is the EU’s only dedicated environment budget instrument and yet currently it doesn’t envisage applications for projects from islands and overseas entities like the British Overseas Territories which embrace more biodiversity than the whole of mainland UK, including whales, humming birds and some of the world’s largest coral atolls.
I think it is vitally important to open LIFE+ to the islands and overseas entities, so that they can benefit from this funding source. For example, although not formally part of the EU, the British Territories are linked firmly to the EU through the Overseas Association agreement, which calls for action to implement the EU’s biodiversity strategy. So this is a message that we must transmit from today’s conference.
In the Fisheries Committee this morning, we had a workshop on regime shifts in marine ecosystems, looking at how overfishing and climate change can provoke sudden ecosystem changes. Leading experts told us that if we overfish a top predator, such as cod, this leads to a growth in the stock of a secondary predator that cod would normally eat. The increased stock of the secondary predator then leads to excessive predation on the larvae of cod, further reducing the stock of the top predator, quickly leading to a collapse of the stock. This is a simple but effective illustration of how quickly ecosystems can be disrupted by man-made intervention.
The experts used the example of cod in the Baltic Sea. Cod is a top predator. The main source of food for cod in the Baltic Sea is sprat. The collapse of cod stocks in the 1990s due to over-fishing, led to a huge increase in sprat stocks, also encouraged by rising surface water temperatures. Sprat feeds on cod eggs, further reducing cod stocks. However, sprat also feeds on zooplankton, the reduction of which impacts on herring stocks. So you have a vicious circle and what is called a trophic cascade….a system change which affects several trophic levels in the food web.
So fishing is a structuring factor affecting not only fish stocks, but also the whole ecosystem. We need to understand better the regime shifts so that we can develop early-warning indicators and adapt management policies to long-term regimes.
Human emissions of nutrients, like nitrogen and phosphorous, cause de-oxygenation of the sea, which, combined with rising surface water temperatures and decreasing salinity due to climate change and over-fishing, create the perfect foundation for a major impact on the ecosystem.
I use this example as an illustration of how easily we can cause negative impacts on ecosystems. In areas of great fragility, such as the islands and overseas entities, negative ecosystem impacts can happen more rapidly and have more devastating impacts.
Three years ago I was privileged to attend an IUCN conference in Ile de la Reunion where we discussed these issues. I attended a session on the impact of climate change on marine ecosystems. We were told how even slight increases in sea temperature can cause fish to spawn and start migration patterns at the wrong times, leading to massive impacts on the ecosystem.
We were told that because of global warming, many species in the world’s oceans are now at their thermal limits and that ecosystem responses to such changes are not linear, especially in the warmer waters of the tropics. There are no gradual warning signs. No amber lights! Things can go from normal to ‘dead’ virtually overnight! Corals are damaged irreparably by rising temperatures and when corals are allowed to die and crumble the natural defences are swept away and increased coastal erosion results.
We were also told how basic chemistry demonstrates that if you add CO2 to water you form an acid and the high amounts of CO2 now in our oceans is gradually turning them into a chemical soup. This in turn kills off corals and wrecks fragile ecosystems. The doomsday clock is ticking towards midnight and our window of opportunity to take decisive action is fast disappearing. But still we dicker and dither.
While we argue about costly new untested technologies to capture and store carbon in depleted undersea oil and gas wells, we crazily destroy vast swathes of global rainforest every year, cutting down and burning nature’s own carbon capture and storage system. 21.5% of all CO2 emissions annually come directly from deforestation. The only greater culprit as far as CO2 is concerned is power plants at 26.6% annual emissions. By contrast, all international transport by sea and air, only accounts for 2.4% of annual emissions.
It was a rather poignant that this conference was held in La Reunion. Man first set foot on that island only 360 years ago. During that time, 22 species of birds, three species of reptile and three species of bat, were trapped and hunted to extinction…. lost forever to the world. Alien species of plants have devastated the forests and natural habitats. If man had been there even longer, the rich biodiversity of Reunion Island would have been totally destroyed. It was a salutary lesson.
It brought home to me with a jolt how even a lush, tropical paradise like Ile de La Réunion, part of our global heritage, can be ruined through mankind’s greed and stupidity. That is why we need to think again.
Struan Stevenson, MEP
Struan Stevenson is a Conservative Euro MP representing Scotland. He is Senior Vice President of the fisheries Committee & President of the Climate Change, Biodiversity & Sustainable Development Intergroup.
