China’s Appetite for Wood Takes a Heavy Toll on Forests

More than half of the timber now shipped globally is destined for China. But unscrupulous Chinese companies are importing huge amounts of illegally harvested wood, prompting conservation groups to step up boycotts against rapacious timber interests.

In Chinese folklore, a dragon symbolizes strength. It is an apt icon for a nation whose rise as an economic superpower has been nothing short of meteoric.

While China’s stunning economic advances have come at significant environmental cost, the boom has been a plus in a few realms. The country is investing avidly in green technologies, such as solar energy and high-tech car batteries. It has also undertaken an ambitious national reforestation program, while cracking down on illegal forest clearing and logging inside its borders. According to the UN Food and Agricultural Organization, forest cover in China, including large areas of timber plantations, increased from 157 million hectares in 1990 to 197 million hectares in 2005.

Counter-intuitively, the expansion of Chinese forests has occurred at the same time the country has been developing an immense export industry for

In its fervor to secure timber, China is increasingly seen as a predator on the world’s forests.

wood and paper products. China is now the “wood workshop for the world,” according to Forest Trends, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, consuming more than 400 million cubic meters of timber annually to feed both its burgeoning exports and growing domestic demands. Production of paper products has also grown dramatically in China, doubling from 2002 to 2007.

But the rise of the Chinese dragon has a darker side. As much as half of the timber and much of the paper pulp consumed by China is imported, primarily from tropical nations or nearby Siberia. In and of itself, there is nothing wrong with this — China has every right to grow economically and seek the kind of prosperity that industrial nations have long enjoyed. However, in its fervor to secure timber, minerals, and other natural resources, China is increasingly seen as a predator on the world’s forests.

---

China is now overwhelmingly the biggest global consumer of tropical timber, importing around 40 to 45 million cubic meters of timber annually. Today, more than half of all timber being shipped anywhere in the world is destined for China. Many nations in the Asia-Pacific region and Africa export the lion’s share of their timber to China.

China faces three criticisms by those worried about the health and biodiversity of the world’s forests. First, the country and its hundreds of wood-products corporations and middlemen have been remarkably aggressive in pursuing timber supplies globally, while generally being little concerned with social equity or environmental sustainability. For instance, China has helped fund and promote an array of ambitious new road or rail projects that are opening up remote forested regions in the Amazon, Congo Basin, and Asia-Pacific to exploitation. Such frontier roads can unleash a Pandora’s Box of activities — including illegal colonization, hunting, mining, and land speculation — that are often highly destructive to forests.

Vast expanses of Sumatran rainforest are being turned into paper pulp.

China is also a major consumer of wood pulp, which is helping to drive large-scale deforestation in places like Sumatra and Borneo. During a recent visit to Sumatra, I witnessed the felling of large expanses of native rainforests, which are being chopped up and fed into the world’s largest wood-pulp plant, located nearby, and replaced by monocultures of exotic acacia trees.

Second, China, in its relentless pursuit of timber, almost exclusively seeks raw logs. Raw logs are the least economically beneficial way for developing nations to exploit their timber resources, as they provide only limited royalties and little employment, workforce training, and industrial development. As a result, most of the profits from logging are realized by foreign timber-cutters, shippers, and wood-products manufacturers. A cubic meter of the valuable timber merbau (Intsia bijuga), for instance, yields only around $11 to local communities in Indonesian Papua but around $240 when delivered as raw logs to wood-products manufacturers in China, who profit further by converting it into prized wood flooring.

Finally, China has done little to combat the scourge of illegal logging, which is an enormous problem in many developing nations. A 2011 report on illegal logging by Interpol and the World Bank concluded that, among 15 of the major timber-producing countries in the tropics, two-thirds had half or more of their timber harvested illegally. Globally, economic losses and tax and royalty evasion from illegal logging are thought to cost around $15 billion annually — a large economic burden for developing nations. Forest ecosystems suffer serious impacts as well, because illegal loggers frequently ignore environmental controls on cutting operations.

According to a 2010 analysis by Chatham House, a respected UK think tank, illegal logging is slowly declining globally but this is despite, rather than because of, China’s influence. The report concluded that, from 2000 to 2008, China imported 16 to 24 million cubic meters of illegal timber each

One report said that China imports 16 to 24 million cubic meters of illegal timber each year.

year. This is an incredible figure — twice the total amount imported annually by leading industrial nations.

Around a third of Chinese timber imports are ultimately exported, as furniture, plywood, flooring, disposable chopsticks, and other wood products. European countries, the U.S, and Japan are the biggest importers, with consumers there often unaware of the illicit origin of many wood products from China.

When it comes to illegal or predatory logging, it has not been easy to get China’s attention. Stories about illegal logging rarely penetrate the Chinese news media. For example, in 2006 the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation (ATBC), an international scientific organization, held its annual conference in Kunming, China. At the time I was president of the ATBC, and I spoke at length to Chinese journalists about the problem of illegal logging and the risks it posed for Chinese exporters. To my knowledge, not a single story about my concerns was reported in China, even though I emailed the journalists a summary of my comments translated into Mandarin Chinese.

Outside China, the story is different. Awareness of the rapacious nature of Chinese timber interests is growing, especially since a 2005 report by a green group, the Environmental Investigation Agency, that detailed massive illegal logging and timber theft in the Indonesian state of Papua. Smuggled timber from Papua arrived in mainland China via international criminal syndicates involving corrupt Indonesian insiders, Malaysian loggers, and Singaporean shippers. Other groups, such as the World Resources Institute, Forest Trends, WWF, and Greenpeace, have laid similar claims against China. With mainstream organizations such as the World Bank, Interpol, and Chatham House joining in, what began as murmurs of concern is becoming a loud clamor for change.

This is a dangerous situation for Chinese businesses and exporters. Influential environmental organizations in Europe and North America have their eye on China. For example, the Rainforest Action Network (RAN) has waged a campaign urging corporate customers to avoid paper and pulp products originating from two of Indonesia’s largest corporations, Asian

Efforts to combat illicit timber imports are finally beginning to gain some traction in China.

Pulp & Paper (APP) and APRIL, which are felling large expanses of native rainforest for wood pulp. The pulp and paper have been used by Chinese manufacturers to make branded products for scores of well-known companies around the world. Some of those companies — including Gucci, Scholastic, Hachette, and Tiffany & Co. — have switched to recycled and sustainably certified paper products. As of this year, other companies — including Prada, American Greetings, Marc Jacobs, and the Rupert Murdoch-owned HarperCollins publishing — are continuing to use APP or APRIL paper products supplied by Chinese manufacturers, according to RAN.

Such actions could have a big impact on Chinese exports. Boycotts initiated by green groups can have a major influence on consumer preferences and have forced some of the largest retail chains in North America and Europe, such as Walmart and Ikea, to limit products sourced from old-growth forests. Meanwhile, eco-certified timber products accounted for $7.4 billion in sales in the U.S. alone in 2005, and were expected to grow to $38 billion there by 2010. At some point, Chinese companies will buck the trend toward sustainable logging at their peril.

Adding teeth to such consumer actions are tougher laws and initiatives in industrial nations. In particular, new provisions to the Lacey Act in the U.S., and the European Union Timber Action Plan in Europe are increasingly holding corporations that import illicit timber products responsible for their actions.

One senses that efforts to combat illicit timber imports are finally beginning to gain some traction in China. The relevant government agencies are now engaged, and the country has commissioned an analysis of its role as an importer of illegal timber and released draft guidelines to improve sustainability of its timber-importing corporations. It also recently hosted the Asia Forest Partnership Dialogue 2011, in Beijing, designed to assess progress in efforts to combat illegal logging in Asia over the last decade.

However, China still has no national action plan or legislation to prevent the import of illegally sourced timber, and no formal trade arrangements with major timber-producing countries designed to improve enforcement. Despite dominating the global timber market, Chinese wood-products corporations feel little pressure from buyers to improve the legality of their timber products and consider it largely unimportant to their future competitiveness, according to the Chatham House report.

The bottom line: China’s efforts to limit the environmental impacts of its burgeoning timber imports are still mostly lip-service, with little practical impact.

Check the labels when you shop for any wood or paper products. If it says, “Made in China,” be wary of the dragon, and think twice before buying.

World headed for irreversible climate change in five years, IEA warns

Any fossil fuel infrastructure built in the next five years will cause irreversible climate change, according to the IEA. Photograph: Rex Features

The world is likely to build so many fossil-fuelled power stations, energy-guzzling factories and inefficient buildings in the next five years that it will become impossible to hold global warming to safe levels, and the last chance of combating dangerous climate change will be "lost for ever", according to the most thorough analysis yet of world energy infrastructure.
Anything built from now on that produces carbon will do so for decades, and this "lock-in" effect will be the single factor most likely to produce irreversible climate change, the world's foremost authority on energy economics has found. If this is not rapidly changed within the next five years, the results are likely to be disastrous.
"The door is closing," Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency, said. "I am very worried – if we don't change direction now on how we use energy, we will end up beyond what scientists tell us is the minimum [for safety]. The door will be closed forever."
If the world is to stay below 2C of warming, which scientists regard as the limit of safety, then emissions must be held to no more than 450 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; the level is currently around 390ppm. But the world's existing infrastructure is already producing 80% of that "carbon budget", according to the IEA's analysis, published on Wednesday. This gives an ever-narrowing gap in which to reform the global economy on to a low-carbon footing.
If current trends continue, and we go on building high-carbon energy generation, then by 2015 at least 90% of the available "carbon budget" will be swallowed up by our energy and industrial infrastructure. By 2017, there will be no room for manoeuvre at all – the whole of the carbon budget will be spoken for, according to the IEA's calculations.
Birol's warning comes at a crucial moment in international negotiations on climate change, as governments gear up for the next fortnight of talks in Durban, South Africa, from late November. "If we do not have an international agreement, whose effect is put in place by 2017, then the door to [holding temperatures to 2C of warming] will be closed forever," said Birol.
But world governments are preparing to postpone a speedy conclusion to the negotiations again. Originally, the aim was to agree a successor to the 1997 Kyoto protocol, the only binding international agreement on emissions, after its current provisions expire in 2012. But after years of setbacks, an increasing number of countries – including the UK, Japan and Russia – now favour postponing the talks for several years.
Both Russia and Japan have spoken in recent weeks of aiming for an agreement in 2018 or 2020, and the UK has supported this move. Greg Barker, the UK's climate change minister, told a meeting: "We need China, the US especially, the rest of the Basic countries [Brazil, South Africa, India and China] to agree. If we can get this by 2015 we could have an agreement ready to click in by 2020." Birol said this would clearly be too late. "I think it's very important to have a sense of urgency – our analysis shows [what happens] if you do not change investment patterns, which can only happen as a result of an international agreement."
Nor is this a problem of the developing world, as some commentators have sought to frame it. In the UK, Europe and the US, there are multiple plans for new fossil-fuelled power stations that would contribute significantly to global emissions over the coming decades.
The Guardian revealed in May an IEA analysis that found emissions had risen by a record amount in 2010, despite the worst recession for 80 years. Last year, a record 30.6 gigatonnes (Gt) of carbon dioxide poured into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels, a rise of 1.6Gt on the previous year. At the time, Birol told the Guardian that constraining global warming to moderate levels would be "only a nice utopia" unless drastic action was taken.
The new research adds to that finding, by showing in detail how current choices on building new energy and industrial infrastructure are likely to commit the world to much higher emissions for the next few decades, blowing apart hopes of containing the problem to manageable levels. The IEA's data is regarded as the gold standard in emissions and energy, and is widely regarded as one of the most conservative in outlook – making the warning all the more stark. The central problem is that most industrial infrastructure currently in existence – the fossil-fuelled power stations, the emissions-spewing factories, the inefficient transport and buildings – is already contributing to the high level of emissions, and will do so for decades. Carbon dioxide, once released, stays in the atmosphere and continues to have a warming effect for about a century, and industrial infrastructure is built to have a useful life of several decades.
Yet, despite intensifying warnings from scientists over the past two decades, the new infrastructure even now being built is constructed along the same lines as the old, which means that there is a "lock-in" effect – high-carbon infrastructure built today or in the next five years will contribute as much to the stock of emissions in the atmosphere as previous generations.
The "lock-in" effect is the single most important factor increasing the danger of runaway climate change, according to the IEA in its annual World Energy Outlook, published on Wednesday.
Climate scientists estimate that global warming of 2C above pre-industrial levels marks the limit of safety, beyond which climate change becomes catastrophic and irreversible. Though such estimates are necessarily imprecise, warming of as little as 1.5C could cause dangerous rises in sea levels and a higher risk of extreme weather – the limit of 2C is now inscribed in international accords, including the partial agreement signed at Copenhagen in 2009, by which the biggest developed and developing countries for the first time agreed to curb their greenhouse gas output.
Another factor likely to increase emissions is the decision by some governments to abandon nuclear energy, following the Fukushima disaster. "The shift away from nuclear worsens the situation," said Birol. If countries turn away from nuclear energy, the result could be an increase in emissions equivalent to the current emissions of Germany and France combined. Much more investment in renewable energy will be required to make up the gap, but how that would come about is unclear at present.
Birol also warned that China – the world's biggest emitter – would have to take on a much greater role in combating climate change. For years, Chinese officials have argued that the country's emissions per capita were much lower than those of developed countries, it was not required to take such stringent action on emissions. But the IEA's analysis found that within about four years, China's per capita emissions were likely to exceed those of the EU.
In addition, by 2035 at the latest, China's cumulative emissions since 1900 are likely to exceed those of the EU, which will further weaken Beijing's argument that developed countries should take on more of the burden of emissions reduction as they carry more of the responsibility for past emissions.
In a recent interview with the Guardian recently, China's top climate change official, Xie Zhenhua, called on developing countries to take a greater part in the talks, while insisting that developed countries must sign up to a continuation of the Kyoto protocol – something only the European Union is willing to do. His words were greeted cautiously by other participants in the talks.
Continuing its gloomy outlook, the IEA report said: "There are few signs that the urgently needed change in direction in global energy trends is under way. Although the recovery in the world economy since 2009 has been uneven, and future economic prospects remain uncertain, global primary energy demand rebounded by a remarkable 5% in 2010, pushing CO2 emissions to a new high. Subsidies that encourage wasteful consumption of fossil fuels jumped to over $400bn (£250.7bn)."
Meanwhile, an "unacceptably high" number of people – about 1.3bn – still lack access to electricity. If people are to be lifted out of poverty, this must be solved – but providing people with renewable forms of energy generation is still expensive.
Charlie Kronick of Greenpeace said: "The decisions being made by politicians today risk passing a monumental carbon debt to the next generation, one for which they will pay a very heavy price. What's seriously lacking is a global plan and the political leverage to enact it. Governments have a chance to begin to turn this around when they meet in Durban later this month for the next round of global climate talks."
One close observer of the climate talks said the $400bn subsidies devoted to fossil fuels, uncovered by the IEA, were "staggering", and the way in which these subsidies distort the market presented a massive problem in encouraging the move to renewables. He added that Birol's comments, though urgent and timely, were unlikely to galvanise China and the US – the world's two biggest emittters – into action on the international stage.
"The US can't move (owing to Republican opposition) and there's no upside for China domestically in doing so. At least China is moving up the learning curve with its deployment of renewables, but it's doing so in parallel to the hugely damaging coal-fired assets that it is unlikely to ever want (to turn off in order to) to meet climate targets in years to come."
Energy demand Source: IEA Christiana Figueres, the UN climate chief, said the findings underlined the urgency of the climate problem, but stressed the progress made in recent years. "This is not the scenario we wanted," she said. "But making an agreement is not easy. What we are looking at is not an international environment agreement — what we are looking at is nothing other than the biggest industrial and energy revolution that has ever been seen."

Climate change causing massive movement of tree species across the West

ScienceDaily (Nov. 3, 2011) — A huge "migration" of trees has begun across much of the West due to global warming, insect attack, diseases and fire, and many tree species are projected to decline or die out in regions where they have been present for centuries, while others move in and replace them.

In an enormous display of survival of the fittest, the forests of the future are taking a new shape.
In a new report, scientists outline the impact that a changing climate will have on which tree species can survive, and where. The study suggests that many species that were once able to survive and thrive are losing their competitive footholds, and opportunistic newcomers will eventually push them out.
In some cases, once-common species such as lodgepole pine will be replaced by other trees, perhaps a range expansion of ponderosa pine or Douglas-fir. Other areas may shift completely out of forest into grass savannah or sagebrush desert. In central California, researchers concluded that more than half of the species now present would not be expected to persist in the climate conditions of the future.
"Some of these changes are already happening, pretty fast and in some huge areas," said Richard Waring, professor emeritus at Oregon State University and lead author of the study. "In some cases the mechanism of change is fire or insect attack, in others it's simply drought.
"We can't predict exactly which tree (species) will die or which one will take its place, but we can see the long-term trends and probabilities," Waring said. "The forests of our future are going to look quite different."
Waring said tree species that are native to a local area or region are there because they can most effectively compete with other species given the specific conditions of temperature, precipitation, drought, cold-tolerance and many other factors that favor one species over another in that location.
As those climatic conditions change, species that have been established for centuries or millennia will lose their competitive edge, Waring said, and slowly but surely decline or disappear.
This survey, done with remote sensing of large areas over a four-year period, compared 15 coniferous tree species that are found widely across much of the West in Canada and the United States. The research explored impacts on 34 different "eco-regions" ranging from the Columbia Plateau to the Sierra Nevada, Snake River Plain and Yukon Highlands.
It projected which tree species would be at highest risk of disturbance in a future that's generally expected to be 5-9 degrees Fahrenheit warmer by 2080, with perhaps somewhat more precipitation in the winter and spring, and less during the summer.
Among the findings:

• Some of the greatest shifts in tree species are expected to occur in both the northern and southern extremes of this area, such as British Columbia, Alberta, and California.
• Large declines are expected in lodgepole pine and Engelmann spruce, and more temperate species such as Douglas-fir and western hemlock may expand their ranges.
• Many wilderness areas are among those at risk of the greatest changes, and will probably be the first to experience major shifts in tree species.
• Some of the mild, wetter areas of western Oregon and Washington will face less overall species change than areas of the West with a harsher climate.
• More than half of the evergreen species are experiencing a significant decrease in their competitiveness in six eco-regions.
• Conditions have become more favorable for outbreaks of diseases and insects.
• Warming will encourage growth at higher elevations and latitudes, and increased drought at the other extremes. Fire frequency will continue to increase across the West, and any tree species lacking drought resistance will face special challenges.

"Ecosystems are always changing at the landscape level, but normally the rate of change is too slow for humans to notice," said Steven Running, the University of Montana Regents Professor and a co-author of the study. "Now the rate of change is fast enough we can see it."
Even though the rate of change has increased, these processes will take time, the scientists said. A greater stability of forest composition will not be attained anytime soon, perhaps for centuries.
"There's not a lot we can do to really control these changes," Waring said. "For instance, to keep old trees alive during drought or insect attacks that they are no longer able to deal with, you might have to thin the forest and remove up to half the trees. These are very powerful forces at work."
One of the best approaches to plan for an uncertain future, the researchers said, is to maintain "connective corridors" as much as possible so that trees can naturally migrate to new areas in a changing future and not be stopped by artificial boundaries.
Also collaborating on the research was Nicholas Coops at the University of British Columbia. The work has been supported by NASA, and the study is being published in two professional journals, Ecological Modelling and Remote Sensing of Environment.

With Deaths of Forests, a Loss of Key Climate Protectors

WISE RIVER, Mont. — The trees spanning many of the mountainsides of western Montana glow an earthy red, like a broadleaf forest at the beginning of autumn.
But these trees are not supposed to turn red. They are evergreens, falling victim to beetles that used to be controlled in part by bitterly cold winters. As the climate warms, scientists say, that control is no longer happening.
Across millions of acres, the pines of the northern and central Rockies are dying, just one among many types of forests that are showing signs of distress these days.
From the mountainous Southwest deep into Texas, wildfires raced across parched landscapes this summer, burning millions more acres. In Colorado, at least 15 percent of that state’s spectacular aspen forests have gone into decline because of a lack of water.
The devastation extends worldwide. The great euphorbia trees of southern Africa are succumbing to heat and water stress. So are the Atlas cedars of northern Algeria. Fires fed by hot, dry weather are killing enormous stretches of Siberian forest. Eucalyptus trees are succumbing on a large scale to a heat blast in Australia, and the Amazon recently suffered two “once a century” droughts just five years apart, killing many large trees.
Experts are scrambling to understand the situation, and to predict how serious it may become.
Scientists say the future habitability of the Earth might well depend on the answer. For, while a majority of the world’s people now live in cities, they depend more than ever on forests, in a way that few of them understand.
Scientists have figured out — with the precise numbers deduced only recently — that forests have been absorbing more than a quarter of the carbon dioxide that people are putting into the air by burning fossil fuels and other activities. It is an amount so large that trees are effectively absorbing the emissions from all the world’s cars and trucks.
Without that disposal service, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be rising faster. The gas traps heat from the sun, and human emissions are causing the planet to warm.
Yet the forests have only been able to restrain the increase, not halt it. And some scientists are increasingly worried that as the warming accelerates, trees themselves could become climate-change victims on a massive scale.
“At the same time that we’re recognizing the potential great value of trees and forests in helping us deal with the excess carbon we’re generating, we’re starting to lose forests,” said Thomas W. Swetnam, an expert on forest history at the University of Arizona.
While some of the forests that died recently are expected to grow back, scientists say others are not, because of climate change.
If forests were to die on a sufficient scale, they would not only stop absorbing carbon dioxide, they might also start to burn up or decay at such a rate that they would spew huge amounts of the gas back into the air — as is already happening in some regions. That, in turn, could speed the warming of the planet, unlocking yet more carbon stored in once-cold places like the Arctic.
Scientists are not sure how likely this feedback loop is, and they are not eager to find out the hard way.
“It would be a very different world than the world we’re in,” said Christopher B. Field, an ecologist at the Carnegie Institution for Science.
It is clear that the point of no return has not been reached yet — and it may never be. Despite the troubles of recent years, forests continue to take up a large amount of carbon, with some regions, including the Eastern United States, being especially important as global carbon absorbers.
“I think we have a situation where both the ‘forces of growth’ and the ‘forces of death’ are strengthening, and have been for some time,” said Oliver L. Phillips, a prominent tropical forest researcher with the University of Leeds in England. “The latter are more eye-catching, but the former have in fact been more important so far.”
Scientists acknowledge that their attempts to use computers to project the future of forests are still crude. Some of those forecasts warn that climate change could cause potentially widespread forest death in places like the Amazon, while others show forests remaining robust carbon sponges throughout the 21st century.
“We’re not completely blind, but we’re not in good shape,” said William R. L. Anderegg, a researcher at Stanford University.
Many scientists say that ensuring the health of the world’s forests requires slowing human emissions of greenhouse gases. Most nations committed to doing so in a global environmental treaty in 1992, yet two decades of negotiations have yielded scant progress.
In the near term, experts say, more modest steps could be taken to protect forests. One promising plan calls for wealthy countries to pay those in the tropics to halt the destruction of their immense forests for agriculture and logging.
But now even that plan is at risk, for lack of money. Other strategies, like thinning overgrown forests in the American West to make them more resistant to fire and insect damage, are also going begging in straitened times. With growing economic problems and a Congress skeptical of both climate science and new spending, chances for additional funding appear remote.
So, even as potential solutions to forest problems languish, signs of trouble build.
more here

Ecological Debt- The alarming rate of resource depletion

The most dominant species in Earth's history, in other words, is living beyond the planet's threshold of sustainability, trashing the house it lives in.
At its current pace of consumption humankind will need, by 2030, a second globe to satisfy its voracious appetites and absorb all its waste, the report calculated.
Earth's seven billion denizens -- nine billion by mid-century -- are using more water, cutting down more forests and eating more fish than Nature can replace, it said.
At the same time, we are disgorging more CO2, pollutants and chemical fertilizers than the atmosphere, soil and oceans can soak up without severely disrupting the ecosystems that have made our planet such a comfortable place for homo sapiens to live.
Counting down from January 1, the date when human activity exceeds its budget -- dubbed "Earth Overshoot Day" -- had receded by about three days each year since 2001.
The tipping point into non-sustainability happened sometime in the 1970s, said the Oakland, California-based Global Footprint Network, which issued the report.
This year, researchers estimate that the equivalent of Earth's resource quota will be depleted on September 27.
"That's like spending your annual salary three months before the year is over, and eating into savings year after year," Global Footprint Network President Mathis Wackernagel said in a statement.
"Pretty soon, you run out of savings."
Even as Earth's capacity to host our ever-expanding species diminishes, the demands on "ecosystem services" -- the term scientists use to describe Nature's bounty -- continues to grow.
"From soaring food prices to the crippling effects of climate change, our economies are now confronting the reality of years of spending beyond our means," Wackernagel said.
UN chief Ban Ki-moon earlier this month said sustainable development now tops the global agenda of issues demanding urgent action.
"Overshoot" is driven by three factors: how much we consume, the global population, and how much Nature can produce.
Technology has vastly boosted productivity of edible plants and animals, but that expansion has barely kept pace with the rate at which demand has increased, the report said.
As critical, it has not taken into account all the collateral damage inflicted on the environment.
The United States is the biggest ecological deficit spender, according to an earlier calculation by the same group.
If all people adopted the American lifestyle -- big house, two cars, huge per-capita energy consumption -- the world's population would need about five "Earths" to meet its needs.
By contrast, if everyone on Earth matched the average footprint of someone in India today, humanity would be using less than half the planet's biocapacity.
But as India, China and other emerging giants continue to grow their economies at breakneck pace -- fuelled in large part by the desire for a "Western" lifestyle -- that per-capita footprint will become much larger, scientists warn.
Already today, for example, China is the top emitter of greenhouse gases and the top producer of automobiles.

The New Normal : The world’s climate has already changed. Now what?

Right now, New Mexico is warmer than it was a decade ago. Since the 1960s, the growing season has lengthened. More than half of the state’s native plants and animals have already been affected by climate change; some bird populations have shifted; some flowers bloom earlier. Sand dunes are spreading as vegetation dies. Conifer forests, weakened by drought and susceptible to bark beetles (whose numbers soared thanks to warmer temperatures) are suffering die-offs. Day to day, we have low river flows, dry soils and wildfires. Already this fiscal year, 1,242 square miles of New Mexico have burned. Worldwide, scientists are watching their models and predictions play out—and we’re all experiencing symptoms no one expected.

McCarthy is The Nature Conservancy’s director of conservation programs and also director of the Conservancy’s Southwest Climate Change Initiative. He has authored a number of reports detailing changes already occurring, predictions and adaptive management. He also works on what used to be called “ecological management” and is now known as “transformation ecology.” As one of the first places hit by human-caused climate change in New Mexico, the Jemez Mountains have become a laboratory. (The only place in the state that has warmed more in recent years is southwestern New Mexico’s boot heel.) “We’re moving beyond denial to acceptance that we can’t restore these forests anymore—because the forest of 50, 100 years ago wouldn’t survive in 2050,” McCarthy says. “So the question becomes: What is an ecosystem that’s sustainable in 20 or 50 years?”

Climate Change Causing Massive Changes In European Fisheries

There may be nothing new under the sun, but beneath the sea is a different story. Scientists studying 28 years of data from the Atlantic Ocean have found that climate change is causing drastic changes in fish populations off the European coast--and that's bad news for cold-loving species like cod, which have fed generations of Northern Europeans.
The North Sea, a cold wind-swept patch of the Atlantic stretching from Scandinavia to the U.K., is warming four times faster than the global average.  During the last 30 years, the roughly 2°F increase in mean annual temperature (the North Sea swings between 63°F and 43°F during the summer and winter) has had a profound influence on fish growth and survival, egg maturation, and the plankton supporting food webs and commercial fisheries.
British scientists analyzed 11 surveys, covering at least a million square kilometers of the European continental shelf, and more than 100 million fish, "to get the 'big picture' of how warming is affecting fish communities," according to Stephen Simpson of the University of Bristol, whose research appears in a recent issue of Current Biology. They found that 72% of common fish species had responded to rising sea temperatures. Most species--three out of four--were growing more abundant, and hake and dab had doubled, while catches of cold-loving species, including haddock and cod, dropped by half.
"We see many more southerly, warm-water species faring well on the European shelf than more northerly, cold-adapted species," said Simpson in a statement. "This means more small-bodied, faster-growing species with shorter generation times, and potentially more diversity." In other words, cod may be replaced by new species adapted to the warmth such as red mullet and John dory.
The findings, while new, were not wholly unexpected. Previous research predicted massive shifts in the world's fisheries as the oceans warmed slowly under the influence of climate change. And in 2009, Princeton University and British researchers estimated that fish distribution was likely to shift at least 40 km each decade as southern species overtook ranges of cold-water species. While Nordic countries such as Norway might see catches rise, developing countries in the tropics would suffer the most and some polar species could face extinction. Fish and chips, get ready to meet your maker.

Everest's ice is retreating as climate change grips the Himalaya

Climate change is altering the face of the Himalayas but research seeking to confirm this is yet to catch up with the mountain communities sounding the alarm. After an 18-day trek with scientists, Suzanne Goldenberg finds the warning signs hard to ignore


The climb to Everest base camp is a journey into a monochrome world, a landscape reduced to rock, ice and grey sky. The only spots of colour are the bright, domed tents of the few climbing teams willing to attempt the summit in the off-season.
There are no birds, no trees, just the occasional chunks of glacier splashing into pools of pale green meltwater like ice cubes in some giant exotic drink. The stillness suggests nothing has changed for decades, but Tshering Tenzing Sherpa, who has been in charge of rubbish collection at base camp for the past few years, remains uneasy. "Everything is changing with the glaciers. All these crevasses have appeared in the ice. Before, base camp was flat, and it was easy to walk," he said.
Climbers had reported that they barely needed crampons for the climb, there was so much bare rock, Tenzing said. That's not how it was in Edmund Hillary's day. Tenzing pointed towards the Khumbu ice fall – the start of the climb, and part of a 16km stretch of ice that forms the largest glacier in Nepal. "Before, when you looked out, it was totally blue ice, and now it is black rock on top," he said. He's convinced the changes have occurred in months – not years, or even decades, but during the brief interval of the summer monsoon. "This year it's totally changed," he said.
This much is known: climate change exists, it is man-made, and it is causing many glaciers to melt across the Himalayas. Beyond that, however, much is unclear or downright confusing.

Rampant consumerism must be checked, Speth says

By Neale McDevitt

James Gustave Speth called for people to re-devote themselves to improving the "art of living."

Flu season may be just around the corner, but environmental activist James Gustave Speth says we have a new scourge to watch for: “afluenza,” a virulent strain of consumerism that, if left unchecked, may prove fatal to our planet.
Delivering his 2008 Beatty Memorial Lecture to a full house at the Centre Mount Royal Auditorium on Oct. 18, the Dean of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University said rampant capitalism is the chief culprit behind the degradation of the environment to the point where the planet’s ability to sustain life has been seriously undermined.
But the wheels of capitalism don’t churn by themselves. Speth listed a variety of accomplices to this ongoing environmental crime: Powerful corporate entities whose overriding objective is to grow profits regardless of the effect on the natural world; continual investment in technologies originally designed with little or no thought to the environment; markets that systematically fail to recognize environmental costs unless they are legislated to do so by government; governments that are subservient to corporate entities; and run-away consumerism spurred by sophisticated advertising and marketing –  all have had a hand in ramping up capitalism and consumption to frenzied, and dangerous, levels.
“It took all of history to grow the $7-trillion world economy that we had when I was a little boy in 1950,” he said. “But how long does it take to add another $7-trillion to world economic activity today? Less than a decade.
“We have created a huge economic machine that is profoundly committed to profits and growth and almost totally indifferent to nature and society,” he continued. “Left unchecked it is both ruthless and rapacious.”
But, according to Speth, to cage the ruthless beast will require nothing short of a revolution. First, he said, people must challenge the “growth fetish.” The heedless accumulation of goods and property must be tempered by newly conceived markets in which prices are driven upward to reflect the true environmental impact of products. “Polluters must pay,” Speth said.
Second, we must move toward a kinder, gentler “post-growth life” of improved health care for everyone, better education, shorter work weeks and longer vacations. Citing philosopher John Stuart Mill, Speth said we must go back to the future and re-devote ourselves to “improve the art of living.”
“Materialism is toxic to happiness,” he said. “We must look forward to the day we can get off the treadmill of this hyperventilating lifestyle.”
While Speth was quick to admit he doesn’t have the answers to the question how do we get from here to there, he did suggest it would probably take a series of events to serve as a catalyst for change. We will need a powerful grassroots movement or a proliferation of mold-breaking movements that would galvanize people. We will need a crisis or the semblance of an imminent crisis, and we will need leaders who aren’t afraid to talk about sacrifice and giving up luxuries, leaders who are able to “articulate a new story.” When asked if such a leader exists, Speth tipped his electoral hand and said: “Wait ’til November.”
“Our best hope for real change is a fusion of those concerned about the environment, of those concerned about justice and fairness, and those concerned about building strong political democracy,” he said. “The fusion of these things will create one powerful, progressive force. We’ve got to remember that we are all in a community of shared faith. We are all in the same boat and we will rise or fall together.”
At the end of his lecture Speth spoke directly to the students in the audience to step forward and take action.
“This is your world. Get active before it is too late. If there is a period to look for guidance, it is the 1960s and the Civil Rights movement. People struggled, people took risks and after 40 years I think it is time we followed in the footsteps of Dr. King.
“There is too much at stake to sit on the sidelines.”

Going Green but Getting Nowhere

YOU reduce, reuse and recycle. You turn down plastic and paper. You avoid out-of-season grapes. You do all the right things.
Good.
Just know that it won’t save the tuna, protect the rain forest or stop global warming. The changes necessary are so large and profound that they are beyond the reach of individual action.
You refuse the plastic bag at the register, believing this one gesture somehow makes a difference, and then carry your takeout meal back to your car for a carbon-emitting trip home.
Say you’re willing to make real sacrifices. Sell your car. Forsake your air-conditioner in the summer, turn down the heat in the winter. Try to become no-impact man. You would, in fact, have no impact on the planet. Americans would continue to emit an average of 20 tons of carbon dioxide a year; Europeans, about 10 tons.
What about going bigger? You are the pope with a billion followers, and let’s say all of them take your advice to heart. If all Catholics decreased their emissions to zero overnight, the planet would surely notice, but pollution would still be rising. Of course, a billion people, whether they’re Catholic or adherents of any other religion or creed, will do no such thing. Two weeks of silence in a Buddhist yoga retreat in the Himalayas with your BlackBerry checked at the door? Sure. An entire life voluntarily lived off the grid? No thanks.
And that focuses only on those who can decrease their emissions. When your average is 20 tons per year, going down to 18 tons is as easy as taking a staycation. But if you are among the four billion on the planet who each emit one ton a year, you have nowhere to go but up.
Leading scientific groups and most climate scientists say we need to decrease global annual greenhouse gas emissions by at least half of current levels by 2050 and much further by the end of the century. And that will still mean rising temperatures and sea levels for generations.
So why bother recycling or riding your bike to the store? Because we all want to do something, anything. Call it “action bias.” But, sadly, individual action does not work. It distracts us from the need for collective action, and it doesn’t add up to enough. Self-interest, not self-sacrifice, is what induces noticeable change. Only the right economic policies will enable us as individuals to be guided by self-interest and still do the right thing for the planet.
Every ton of carbon dioxide pollution causes around $20 of damage to economies, ecosystems and human health. That sum times 20 implies $400 worth of damage per American per year. That’s not damage you’re going to do in the distant future; that’s damage each of us is doing right now. Who pays for it?
We pay as a society. My cross-country flight adds fractions of a penny to everyone else’s cost. That knowledge leads some of us to voluntarily chip in a few bucks to “offset” our emissions. But none of these payments motivate anyone to fly less. It doesn’t lead airlines to switch to more fuel-efficient planes or routes. If anything, airlines by now use voluntary offsets as a marketing ploy to make green-conscious passengers feel better. The result is planetary socialism at its worst: we all pay the price because individuals don’t.
It won’t change until a regulatory system compels us to pay our fair share to limit pollution accordingly. Limit, of course, is code for “cap and trade,” the system that helped phase out lead in gasoline in the 1980s, slashed acid rain pollution in the 1990s and is now bringing entire fisheries back from the brink. “Cap and trade” for carbon is beginning to decrease carbon pollution in Europe, and similar models are slated to do the same from California to China.
Alas, this approach has been declared dead in Washington, ironically by self-styled free-marketers. Another solution, a carbon tax, is also off the table because, well, it’s a tax.
Never mind that markets are truly free only when everyone pays the full price for his or her actions. Anything else is socialism. The reality is that we cannot overcome the global threats posed by greenhouse gases without speaking the ultimate inconvenient truth: getting people excited about making individual environmental sacrifices is doomed to fail.
High school science tells us that global warming is real. And economics teaches us that humanity must have the right incentives if it is to stop this terrible trend.
Don’t stop recycling. Don’t stop buying local. But add mastering some basic economics to your to-do list. Our future will be largely determined by our ability to admit the need to end planetary socialism. That’s the most fundamental of economics lessons and one any serious environmentalist ought to heed.

Gernot Wagner is an economist at the Environmental Defense Fund and the author of the forthcoming “But Will the Planet Notice?”

Rethinking Climate Change: The Past 150 Years and the Next 100 Years

Fresh water supplies are going to run out, so what can we do to make the taps keep running?

This may seem like a surprising statement, but the world's supply of fresh water is finite. As global population rises, the demand for food – and the water that produces it – grows inexorably. Globally, farming accounts for 70 per cent of our withdrawals from this fixed "bank account", this in the face of ever-greater domestic and industrial usage.
Water tables are falling in many parts of the world. Himalayan glaciers will shrink massively in the next century, reducing natural water storage in the mountains. The shortfalls will have to come from groundwater and surface storage. Many great rivers have drastically diminished flows.
Bangladesh is suffering from the diversion of Ganges River water and increased salinisation. Underground aquifers in many places are shrinking so rapidly that NASA satellites are detecting changes in the Earth's gravity. The Water Resources Group has estimated that India may face a 50 per cent lag in water availability relative to demand by 2030 and that global availability may lag demand by as much as 40 per cent; the statistics have been questioned. Sixty years ago, the world's population was about 1.25 billion people; few people, even in arid lands, worried about water supplies. Then came the Green Revolution, with its new, high-yielding crops, which depend on fertilisers and a great deal more irrigated farming. Global populations skyrocketed to nearly seven billion by 2009, with a projected nine billion by 2050. By the same year, the five hundred million people living in areas chronically short of water in the year 2000 will have grown by 45 per cent to four billion. A billion of us currently go hungry because there is not enough water to grow food. Much of the world's water is still unpriced, but it is now the most valuable commodity in the world. To compound the problem, 60 per cent of the world's people live in crowded river basins shared by several countries, often with daggers drawn.
The problems are acute, especially in arid areas with growing populations, where boreholes and aquifers are thought to be the answer. Seemingly a miraculous solution, but not if the drawdown exceeds the replenishment rate, as is the case with the ground water beneath a now-sinking Mexico City's 20 million inhabitants and with Bangkok, Buenos Aires and Jakarta, where pollution and rising salt levels combine with overdrafting.
In China, deep groundwater levels have dropped as much as 295ft (90m) in places. We have perforated the Earth's surface with boreholes to deplete a resource that we all, ultimately, hold in common. Now we stand at the threshold of what I call a third stage in our relationship with water; one where, apparently, cataclysm looms on every side. Vivid Doomsday scenarios espoused by numerous writers have Phoenix imploding as its water supplies fail, the Nile drying up, tens of thousands of people crossing national boundaries to find water.
Futurist after futurist warns that water wars are a certainty in coming centuries. Alas, at least some of these cataclysms could descend upon us if we persist in denying the seriousness of the water crisis and deluding ourselves into thinking that uncontrolled growth and more dams are the solution. They are not.
Yes, there will be shortfalls, people will go thirsty and die, but in the end, as has happened so many times in the past, human ingenuity, quite apart from technology, will find solutions. And in the process, we will develop new, much more respectful relationships with water, even if they do not necessarily have the profound spiritual intertwinings of earlier times.
In the short term, there are four potential ways of improving the situation, but none of them will solve the problem of chronic overdrawing. One lies in spending large sums on systematic improvements to storage and delivery, to the infrastructure behind water supplies. Underground reservoirs have potential. So do simple things like replacing leaking pipes, lining earth-bottomed canals and irrigating plants at their roots with just the right amount of water, among many others. A second solution also makes sense: make farming less thirsty, by using drought-resistant, higher-yielding, even genetically-modified crops. This is much easier said than done, for significant technological breakthroughs lie a long way in the future. Also, we should not forget that planting more crops means more use of water, since each plant transpires vapour into the atmosphere through photosynthesis. One possible solution may lie in developing plants that can grow using saline water but, again, this development is in the future. Then there's another seemingly attractive option: desalinisation. Surprisingly, this has been around a long time. Aristotle remarked that "salt water, when it turns to steam, becomes sweet and the steam does not form salt water when it condenses". Julius Caesar's legions drank fresh water condensed from sea water during his siege of Alexandria in 48-47 BCE. As self-appointed visionaries keep reminding us, desalinisation seems like the answer to all our problems but, in spite of improvements in efficiency, there remain significant environmental and technical problems. Desalinisation, which involves creating and recondensing steam, consumes prodigious amounts of energy, even in its most efficient iterations, so it is currently confined to nations where oil is cheap and abundant.
Nearly half the existing desalinisation plants are in the Arabian Peninsula and along the Persian Gulf, especially in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. In most other places, the cost of desalinisation is three or four times that of conventional water sources.
The cost of oil is rising, so the alternatives are either coal or nuclear power, both of which have their own environmental consequences and political baggage. Desalinisation plants operate along sea coasts; many of the most water-hungry areas are far inland, thereby adding huge transport costs to the already high price of a gallon of desalinised water. What, also, are we to do with the brine resulting from desalinisation, which has to be disposed of? Once again, breakthroughs lie in the long-term future. At present, desalinisation is no panacea, for it contributes only about 0.4 per cent of global water supplies.
Finally, there's conservation, which involves both profound changes in our mindsets and completely new attitudes toward water as a marketable commodity. Water is scarce, but it is also a complicated thing to market. It is difficult to move, hard to measure accurately in large quantities and complex to price and charge for. Most people resent paying for water, for they think it should be free or very cheap. Even in dry parts of the world where every drop is precious, the price of water seldom reflects its true scarcity. However, we are entering an era of potentially ferocious trading in water rights and a time when water could cost more than oil, as managing demand becomes an international priority. It's no coincidence that privately owned companies are quietly and aggressively purchasing water rights in many countries. Increasingly, municipal and other authorities are pricing water according to usage. Judging from experience in Australia, Los Angeles and other water markets, the strategy leads to reduced water use, especially when combined with measures to save water, such as reduced-flow toilets and strict timetables for watering. Like oil, water is a commodity that will be the subject of market forces, with price mechanisms that will bring supply and demand into balance. Once water is priced properly, the economics of international trade may encourage water-rich countries to produce water-intensive goods and arid ones to make those that are water-light. Mindsets are notoriously difficult to change, especially in societies accustomed to abundance and seemingly unlimited water supplies.
Using the forces of the marketplace and stricter allocations will not be strategies of first choice, especially in urban settings with high levels of poverty. Nor will conservation in the form of another commonly proposed measure, yet more dam construction, prove effective. History from the near and remote past tells us that dams are no panacea, for they silt up and silt has to be removed or the dam becomes shallower and ever less useful. And, even more important, where is the water to fill them going to come from? No dam ever creates water; it merely captures what is a finite supply. How can new dams provide more water in the era of prolonged global drought that lies ahead? Besides, there's adequate dam capacity in the American West to store any water that will come from the smaller snowpacks of future decades. Short of creating more water, more efficient allocation, extensive water recycling for landscaping and other purposes, drastic reductions in agribusiness water subsidies and miserly use of current supplies are some viable strategies for the future. And this kind of conservation, on scales small and large, is the responsibility of us all. Our survival depends upon it. We have much to learn about water conservation from the experience of our ancestors. Humans have managed water successfully for thousands of years in ways that are often far from the historical radar screen. We learn from their experiences that it is the simple and ingenious that often works best – local water schemes, decisions about sharing and management made by kin, family and small communities. These experiences also teach us that self-sustainability is attainable.
Such ingenuity comes in many forms. It may be a simple idea in the field or, in this day and age, more likely the inspiration for a social and political initiative that changes the way people think. We are moving into an entirely new water future, where equity of use, sustainability to protect future generations and affordability for everyone are major components.
A new paradigm for water management, based on well-defined priorities in which all stakeholders have a voice, will have to govern our future water use. Our salvation lies in long-term thinking, indecisive political leadership and in a reordering of financial priorities for, after all, investing heavily in water management will alleviate much disease and poverty automatically. Above all, the future will need a shift in our relationship with water to one that equates, at least approximately, with that of those who went before us – characterised by a studied caring and reverence.
Elixir: A Human History of Water by Brian Fagan is published by Bloomsbury (£20). To order a copy for the special price of £17 (free P&P) call Independent Books Direct on 08430 600 030.  

Oceans on brink of catastrophe

Marine life facing mass extinction 'within one human generation' / State of seas 'much worse than we thought', says global panel of scientists

The world's oceans are faced with an unprecedented loss of species comparable to the great mass extinctions of prehistory, a major report suggests today. The seas are degenerating far faster than anyone has predicted, the report says, because of the cumulative impact of a number of severe individual stresses, ranging from climate warming and sea-water acidification, to widespread chemical pollution and gross overfishing.

The coming together of these factors is now threatening the marine environment with a catastrophe "unprecedented in human history", according to the report, from a panel of leading marine scientists brought together in Oxford earlier this year by the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

The stark suggestion made by the panel is that the potential extinction of species, from large fish at one end of the scale to tiny corals at the other, is directly comparable to the five great mass extinctions in the geological record, during each of which much of the world's life died out. They range from the Ordovician-Silurian "event" of 450 million years ago, to the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction of 65 million years ago, which is believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs. The worst of them, the event at the end of the Permian period, 251 million years ago, is thought to have eliminated 70 per cent of species on land and 96 per cent of all species in the sea.

Related articles

• Sylvia Earle: If the sea is in trouble, we are all in trouble
• Jean-Luc Solandt: The oceans may have already passed breaking point

The panel of 27 scientists, who considered the latest research from all areas of marine science, concluded that a "combination of stressors is creating the conditions associated with every previous major extinction of species in Earth's history". They also concluded:

* The speed and rate of degeneration of the oceans is far faster than anyone has predicted;

* Many of the negative impacts identified are greater than the worst predictions;

* The first steps to globally significant extinction may have already begun.

"The findings are shocking," said Dr Alex Rogers, professor of conservation biology at Oxford University and IPSO's scientific director. "As we considered the cumulative effect of what humankind does to the oceans, the implications became far worse than we had individually realised.

"This is a very serious situation demanding unequivocal action at every level. We are looking at consequences for humankind that will impact in our lifetime, and worse, in the lifetime of our children and generations beyond that." Reviewing recent research, the panel of experts "found firm evidence" that the effects of climate change, coupled with other human-induced impacts such as overfishing and nutrient run-off from farming, have already caused a dramatic decline in ocean health.

Not only are there severe declines in many fish species, to the point of commercial extinction in some cases, and an "unparalleled" rate of regional extinction of some habitat types, such as mangrove and seagrass meadows, but some whole marine ecosystems, such as coral reefs, may be gone within a generation.

The report says: "Increasing hypoxia [low oxygen levels] and anoxia [absence of oxygen, known as ocean dead zones], combined with warming of the ocean and acidification, are the three factors which have been present in every mass extinction event in Earth's history.

"There is strong scientific evidence that these three factors are combining in the ocean again, exacerbated by multiple severe stressors. The scientific panel concluded that a new extinction event was inevitable if the current trajectory of damage continues."

The panel pointed to a number of indicators showing how serious the situation is. It said, for example, that a single mass coral bleaching event in 1998 killed 16 per cent of all the world's coral reefs, and pointed out that overfishing has reduced some commercial fish stocks and populations of "bycatch" (unintentionally caught) species by more than 90 per cent.

It disclosed that new scientific research suggests that pollutants, including flame-retardant chemicals and synthetic musks found in detergents, are being traced in the polar seas, and that these chemicals can be absorbed by tiny plastic particles in the ocean which are in turn ingested by marine creatures such as bottom-feeding fish.

Plastic particles also assist the transport of algae from place to place, increasing the occurrence of toxic algal blooms – which are also caused by the influx of nutrient-rich pollution from agricultural land.

The experts agreed that when these and other threats are added together, the ocean and the ecosystems within it are unable to recover, being constantly bombarded with multiple attacks.

The report sets out a series of recommendations and calls on states, regional bodies and the United Nations to enact measures that would better conserve ocean ecosystems, and in particular demands the urgent adoption of better governance of the largely unprotected high seas.

"The world's leading experts on oceans are surprised by the rate and magnitude of changes we are seeing," said Dan Laffoley, the IUCN's senior adviser on marine science and conservation. "The challenges for the future of the ocean are vast, but, unlike previous generations, we know now what needs to happen. The time to protect the blue heart of our planet is now, today and urgent."

The report's conclusions will be presented at the UN in New York this week, when delegates begin discussions on reforming governance of the oceans.

The five great extinctions

The Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction (the End Cretaceous or K-T extinction) 65.5 Mya (million years ago)

Plankton, which lies at the bottom of the ocean food chain took a hard hit in an event that also saw the demise of the last of the non-avian dinosaurs. The giant mosasaurs and plesiosaurs also vacated the seas. An asteroid or volcano eruptions are thought to be to blame.

The Triassic–Jurassic extinction (End Triassic) – 205 Mya

Having a profound affect on sea and land, this period saw 20 per cent of all marine families disappear. In total, half the species known to be living on Earth at that time went extinct. Gradual climate change, fluctuating sea-levels and volcanic eruptions are among the reasons cited for the disappearing species.

The Permian–Triassic extinction (End Permian) 251 Mya

A period known as the "great dying" was the most severe of the earth's extinction events, when 96 per cent of marine species were lost, as well as almost three-quarters of terrestrial species. The planet took a long time to recover from what has also been called "the mother of all mass extinctions".

The late Devonian extinction 360–375 Mya

Three-quarters of all species on Earth died out in a period that may have spanned several million years. The shallow seas were the worst affected and reefs would not recover for another 100 million years. Changes in sea level and climate change were among the suspected causes.

The Ordovician–Silurian extinction (End Ordovician or O-S) – 440–450 Mya

The third largest extinction in Earth's history had two peak dying times. During the Ordovician, most life was in the sea, so it was sea creatures such as trilobites, brachiopods and graptolites that were drastically reduced. In all, some 85 per cent of sea species were wiped out.

Waves of destruction

Case Study One in the panel's report assesses the "deadly trio" of factors – global warming, ocean acidification and anoxia (absence of oxygen). Most if not all of the five global mass extinctions in prehistory carry the fingerprints of these "carbon perturbations", the report says, and the "deadly trio" are present in the ocean today.

Case Study Two looks at coral reefs, and the fact that these "rainforests of the sea" (so-called for their species richness) are now facing multiple threats. The panel concluded that these threats acting together (pollution, acidification, warming, overfishing) will have a greater impact than if they were occurring on their own, and so estimates of how coral reefs will respond to global warming will have to be revised.

Case Study Three examines pollution, which is an old problem, but may be presenting new threats, as a wide range of novel chemicals is now being found in marine ecosystems, from pharmaceuticals to flame retardants, and some are known to be endocrine disrupters or can damage immune systems. Marine litter, especially, plastics, is a huge concern.

Case Study Four looks at over-fishing: it focuses on the Chinese bahaba, a giant fish which was first described by scientists only in the 1930s, but is now critically endangered: it has gone from discovery to near-disappearance in less than 70 years. A recent study showed that 63 per cent of the assessed fish stocks worldwide are over-exploited or depleted.