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Reflections from SeaWeb President Dawn Martin

A Rising Tide

As this International Year of the Reef begins and the International Polar Year continues, the impacts of declining ocean health and global warming may indeed seem overwhelming: melting ice caps, rising sea levels, increased acidification and pollution of our ocean, and critically endangered coral reefs and ocean wildlife. But tides change. A sense of renewal, a feeling that much is possible, has begun to swell and wash across the nation. As we look at the year ahead, SeaWeb is prepared to face these ocean conservation challenges head on and ride this surging tide.

On January 23, SeaWeb launched its Too Precious to Wear program with representatives of the fashion and design industry in New York City. With the leadership of The Tiffany & Co. Foundation and new spokespeople, SeaWeb has begun to reach out to a wide audience, educating companies and consumers as to why corals are indeed too precious to be converted into jewelry, home décor or objects d’art.

Reefs in Papua New Guinea are bountiful but not isolated from human impacts.

Corals serve as nurseries for young fish and are the homes and feeding grounds for a vast array of marine life. These rainforests of the sea are some of the most diverse ecosystems on the planet. For islands and coastal communities, coral reefs serve as important barriers to protect against storm surges and violent ocean waves. The key to maintaining healthy tropical reefs is to ensure the diversity of life within them—no small challenge when they are under seige from a barrage of threats. Deep-sea corals in cold waters are feared to be next on the list of climate change casualties. A recent study reports if current trends continue and governments don’t act together to curb excess carbon dioxide emissions, 98 percent of corals will disappear by 2050. Those from the Papua New Guinea atoll known as the Cateret Islands are are all too aware of changes in their climate during the past two decades. Encroaching seawater submerged their homes and vegetable gardens and the government was forced to relocate these “climate refugees” off the islands.

Papua New Guinea villagers welcomed hundreds of attendees to the Conference on Nature Conservation and Protected Areas.

During my first visit to Alotau on the southern tip of Papua New Guinea, I was able to witness firsthand how the island and its coral reefs have been impacted. Along with a group of SeaWeb’s staff from the Asia Pacific we attended the 8th Pacific Island Conference on Nature Conservation and Protected Areas. SeaWeb’s fellowship program was also able to sponsor more than a dozen journalists from the Pacific Islands to join us. In the days that followed, they interviewed international scientists, spoke with regional experts, attended briefings and joined in round-table discussions about marine conservation.

SeaWeb’s Liz Neeley helped lead discussions on ocean conservation issues for more than a dozen media fellows.

Our two-week visit could only give us a sample of its people’s generosity and the island’s majesty. With no hotels in Alotau large enough to accommodate the hundreds of conference participants, the residents opened both their arms and homes to us—some even built huts along the coast for us and potential eco-tourists. Yet, we also experienced the many obstacles reporters from the region must overcome to get their stories out. Some have all the technologies of modern newsrooms; others have limited ways to reach the outside world: outdated recording equipment to conduct radio interviews, newspapers in a country with more than 100 dialects and extremely unreliable access to the Internet. We experienced some of their other challenges as an unusually heavy rainstorm interrupted our electricity, Internet connection and access to running water for days. These minor, temporary inconveniences were quickly overshadowed by flash floods and a mudslide that blanketed a nearby village, killing a young child and hospitalizing his mother.

Heavy storms, such as this one that caused a mudslide, may be a taste of what is in store for islands as our climate continues to change.

Such turbulent weather may be a taste of what is in store for other islands as our climate continues to change and the journalists struggle to overcome major challenges in generating interest at home around this global threat. I am, however, certain that they will succeed. Several of these fellows had no background in environmental issues prior to this trip, but through connections they made during their fellowship are now some of the most passionate reporters I have come to know. As a result of their participation in the conference and SeaWeb’s training program, they filed more than a 70 stories (See the December 2007 Ocean Voice for a profile of broadcast journalist Justin Kili.)

To truly submerse them in marine issues, we took the journalists snorkeling through the island’s coral reefs. Peku Pilimbo of the Sunday Chronicle lives in the mountain highlands and had never even seen the ocean—so it was quite the adventure! Donning masks and flippers, they saw creatures they never knew existed. Earlier in the day when I went scuba diving further from shore, I was saddened to see corals crushed or broken from destructive fishing practices and some smothered in silt, run-off from land because of increased deforestation. Algae blooms covered the surface of the murky waters that just days before were described as pristine. But our Tawali dive guide relayed some hope: Corals in several of the areas that had been bleached from increased ocean temperatures have shown signs of returning to their former vibrancy and the blooms seemed to be lessening!

Villagers reported that some reefs that had bleached have since rebounded.

As the sun began to set, we boarded the boat to head back toward to where our bus was waiting. Suddenly, a small school of dolphins appeared on each side of the boat. They broke through the waves and then dove under again over and over, gracefully escorting us on our journey back. We were in awe and as I looked around the boat, tears of joy filled the eyes of my new friends. The journalists saw the dolphins’ actions as a sign that the planet was supporting their newly defined mission, that they were being called upon to cover more environmental issues and keep an ever-closer watch on our ocean world. Their lives had been forever changed. As our boat began to pull up to the dock, one of the student journalists, Julianna Waeda, ran up to me and shouted: “Wait! I left something behind.” Startled, I asked, “What?” She smiled, hugged me and replied, “My heart. I left it in the ocean.”

I know how she feels. In the year to come, SeaWeb will be looking at the plight of coral reefs and how you can help us help them. Each one of us can make a difference, whether through our own informed consumer choices or by spreading the word to others. We have seen the wonders of these magical underwater forests, and we can’t bear to think of a world without them.

See the International Year of the Reef 2008 Web site at www.iyor.org/, the International Polar Year Web site at www.ipy.org/, The Aspen Institute www.aspeninstitute.org and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change www.ipcc.ch for additional information.

Photos by Dawn Martin.

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