Echoes of Atlantis?

In Europe, ‘Atlantic ‘ usually conveys  the notion of a cold and hostile sea typified by the stories of the wartime Atlantic Convoys with their unsung heroes and tragic deaths. This was not in my mind though when I plunged into the 7°C waters at Hallsands last Saturday clad in a dry suit for a brief but exhilarating scuba dive: I was chilling out (literally) after a busy week that had taken me to Cork in Ireland and onwards to London. And all of this on business related to the future development of the Atlantic region.

But let me begin by telling you something about Hallsands because it is a parable for the kind of short-sighted thinking that we often witness today. Hallsands is a little hamlet of a few well maintained houses perched on a Devon cliff in a hinterland of rolling hills dotted with sheep and expensive holiday homes. But it didn’t used to be like that. The 1891 census showed it to be a bustling little fishing village of 159 people with 37 houses and a pub. But in a fateful storm on 26 January 1917, the entire village tumbled into the sea just after the residents had scrambled to safety. Villages that have existed for centuries don’t simply vanish without reason; the storm was a harsh but not unusual one. What precipitated the disaster was the dredging and removal of huge quantities of gravel from the underwater banks off Hallsands in the 1890s for construction material to be used for expanding the port of Plymouth. Local people had protested and the dredging was halted in 1902 … but it was too late, the natural resilience of the coastline had been fatally weakened.

Modern coasts and seas are also losing resilience and this too is largely a result of decisions made in the past. It could be argued that the destruction of a major part of Atlantic City, New Jersey, by Hurricane Sandy on October 29, 2012 was partly a product of short-termist energy policies - that trade off their longer term consequences - and excessive risk-taking during construction. We already know, for example, that sea level rise will be continuing by at least half a centimetre a year – and faster still with projected fossil fuel consumption – so we are willingly trading off future coastal habitats (human and non-human) against immediate needs. ‘Discounting’ is not a word solely reserved for supermarkets. When exploiting the environment, we discount future benefits of sustainable use against more attractive short term gains: “It’s the economy, stupid!”

This brings me back to my travel to the lovely city of Cork in Ireland. It’s the turn of the Irish Government to be President of the European Union and they organised a workshop - the last of five - to design an Atlantic Strategy. This is part of a wider maritime strategy by the EU’s Directorate-General for Maritime Affairs and Fisheries (DG-MARE). My part in the meeting was a five minute slot (argh yes, just five minutes!) to discuss the Ecosystem Approach and the grand research challenges it presents.

The Director General of DG-MARE, Lowri Evans, was bullish about the future of the Atlantic region. The strategy is clearly about growth and jobs. There are currently about 5.4 million marine and maritime related jobs in the Atlantic region of Spain, Portugal, France, the UK and Ireland, and the Commission is setting a target for this to grow to 7 million by 2020 and a GVA (gross value added) rising from the current €500bn to a massive €600bn over the same period. This is a big ask from a region strapped for cash for investment. Ms Evans has also made it clear that "a safeguard for future generations is non-negotiable" (her words).

So where will the growth come from? According to the Commission, there are five areas for investment being pursued in the proposed strategy:

1. ‘Blue Energy’ (marine renewable energy), with emphasis on wave and tidal energy and a focus on reduction of technology costs and improvement in transmission capacity
2. Aquaculture, focusing on reducing the current dependency on imported fish meal to feed farmed fish and on resolving planning issues
3. Tourism, with investment in new skills and capacity in cruise and adventure tourism, recreational fishing and ‘cultural tourism'
4. Marine mineral resources, finding ways to extract minerals from the deep sea while minimising impacts
5. Marine biotechnology, described as a ‘wildcard’ to future prosperity, requiring a major investment in new research

Ms Evans was careful to qualify these ambitions. More scientific effort will be needed on ocean observations, mapping and forecasting and there is a clear transatlantic dimension to this work with huge benefits to be gained from cooperation between Europe and North America. Cooperation and greater use of technology are seen as a way of achieving better outcomes for lower costs. There will be improved synergy between the development and research agendas too. Hopefully the new EU ‘Horizons 2020’ research programme (see link below) will allow sufficient headroom for the research that can provide checks and balances against unexpected consequences of the dash for growth.

And that takes me back to the Ecosystem Approach. Our KnowSeas project has defined it as “a resource planning and management approach that integrates the connections between land, air and water and all living things, including people, their activities and institutions.” In other words, it is insufficient to consider human activities in isolation from the limits of natural systems and, in the words of the American ecologist Eugene Odum, we need to see the world through a macroscope as well as a microscope.

Following the short hop across the Irish Sea to London, on Wednesday I joined a meeting with the British Minister of the Environment, Richard Benyon.  He is clearly proud of the UK’s role in the reform of the Common Fisheries Policy (see my last blog) but also emphasises the urgency of creating jobs, promoting exports and increasing prosperity. Just like most political leaders in Atlantic seaboard countries he is clearly a politician under pressure to produce economic growth. It is times like this where there is a huge temptation to look for easy wins and leave the long-term consequences to someone else in the future. Let’s hope this doesn’t happen with the Atlantic strategy and that our politicians will take the longer view by carefully balancing measures for conservation with use.

Perhaps this was still on my mind as I cast my eyes over the cold but unusually limpid sea at Hallsands looking for traces of the ruined village.  If we do not improve our understanding of the resilience of marine systems and the thresholds beyond which their integrity cannot be maintained, it will be difficult to manage their exploitation properly.  We need to look after our natural capital if we want to make the best use of it.


Useful links:

• DG-MARE
• Horizon 2020 Framework Programme
• KnowSeas project

The 'elephant in the room' for European fisheries reform

February 6th will be long remembered as a good day for European fisheries as a series of major reforms to the Common Fisheries Policy were voted through the European Parliament by a massive 502 to 157 majority. The Bill covers key issues such as a progressive ban on discarding non-target caught fish, on tighter regulation of fisheries to ensure Maximum Sustainable Yield, on eco-labelling and, most importantly, on the regionalisation of fisheries management. This is a key round in a long battle for sustainable fishing and even though the battle is far from over (negotiations must continue with fisheries ministers and the European Commission), those who have worked for years to convince legislators and the fishing industry have good reason to celebrate. But, as I am about to explain, there is still an ‘elephant in the room’...

In the steamy heat of the Indian Ocean, far away from the warren of committee rooms and offices in the European Parliament and well outside its legislative influence, a fisheries dispute was unfolding that is typical of many around the world.  I was attending a conference at India’s National Institute of Oceanography and wondered why some of the famous Goan fish curries were missing from the menu until I picked up a copy of the previous day’s Navhind Times: “Protest against hike in diesel price. Fishing trawlers to go on indefinite strike from Jan 29”.  Some 1,200 vessels had already been tied up for three days by the All Goa Fishing Trawler Owners Federation in protest at a 22% diesel price hike by the Indian Government. The Government doesn’t determine crude oil prices of course but regulates the cost of diesel to different sectors through taxation and subsidies. According to the 29th January Navhind Times, the government had reclassified the trawler owners as ‘commercial customers’ rather than ‘retail customers’, implying the removal of a subsidy equivalent to about US 10 cents per litre. That doesn’t sound much – an extra cost of US$20 per day for the average trawler, but it was enough to trigger a major strike and tells something about the tiny profit margins and unsustainability of this industry. By 30 January, the Government had changed its mind and trawler owners were reassured that they could purchase diesel from commercial forecourts and would have the subsidy reimbursed and that bulk buying arrangements would be renegotiated. Fish markets reopened on 31 January; the Goa Herald had reported a 250% increase in the price of small mackerel during the strike, a huge pressure on consumers.

The subsidies conflict in India is trivial compared to that brewing in the European Union.  For many years, most European fisheries have been heavily subsidised. Perhaps ‘heavily’ is an understatement; a report published 18 months ago by the NGO Oceana (you can link to it at the end of the entry) claimed that, in 2009, subsidies totalled a staggering €3.3 billion and that in 13 countries, subsidies were greater than the value of the catch! Research led by my colleague Sheila (JJ) Heymans (also linked to below) demonstrated that, in the case of North Sea fisheries, removal of the subsidies would increase the overall profitability of the fishery and the total biomass of commercially important species, despite reducing total catch and revenue. I discussed this issue last week with Struan Stevenson, Senior Vice-Chairman of the European Parliament Fisheries Commission. He explained how subsidies had been misused by some countries in the past by using funds designed to improve the efficiency and safety of vessels in order to strip them down to their bare hulls and rebuild them with hugely superior catching capability. He also noted that the issue of subsidies has not been part of the current bill and would be dealt with later this year. This is the ‘elephant in the room’ that I mentioned earlier.

Back in the negotiating rooms of Brussels, there is still a feeling of unease about the fate of the Common Fisheries Policy Reform approved by the European Parliament. The next step in the process will be the so-called ‘trialogue’; negotiations between the three powers determining the direction of the CFP. These are the European Commission with overall administrative power, the Fisheries Commission (consisting of Member State Ministers) who represent the executive power of governments, and the European Parliament with EU-level legislative power. The huge vote supporting reforms will make it difficult for the Fisheries Council to ‘water down’ the parliamentary proposals… but they will probably try. And there are many key details to be resolved such as what to do with all the smaller size fish that will be landed. Opinions are divided between supplying it to poorer people and selling it and creating a conservation fund with 50% of the profits, the remainder going to fishermen to cover fuel costs.

From my perspective, it is the nature and level of subsidies that will ultimately determine the shape of global fisheries and the effectiveness of measures to regulate them. In Scotland’s North Sea fishery for example, subsidies have been severely reduced and 60% of the fleet scrapped (with considerable pain for the industry) but the industry has proven resilient and profitable and is setting new standards for others to follow. Struan Stevenson told me that the European Union has until Jan 14, 2014 to set its own reformed rules for subsidies. The new European Maritime and Fisheries Fund will have a total budget of some €6.9 billion for a 6 year period and this has to cover all maritime activities, including marine planning. If the several thousand individual amendments tabled to proposals cannot be resolved by then, there will be a ‘fisheries fiscal cliff’ with no legal basis for further spending.  The fisheries reform story has a long way to run and it is no time for triumphalism; only a smile and a thank you to our European legislators and the fishing industry for their confidence in taking the first decisive steps.



Links:

• Oceana report: The European Union & Fishing Subsidies 
• PLOS ONE: The Impact of Subsidies on the Ecological Sustainability and Future Profits for North Sea Fisheries

Breathless in Bombay

Slum housing along the perimeter fence of Mumbai Airport

Most people would associate marine science with the bracing sea air and sound of the wind and sea. It is getting increasingly hard to find anywhere remote from the imprint of humanity and when an attractive place is ‘discovered’ and gets into a travel guide, the visitors soon begin to roll in. So much effort is placed on the ‘remote’ or ‘pristine’ that it is easy to ignore the other end of the spectrum; the coastal megacities where a quarter of a billion people live. Recently, I was sharply reminded of this when my plane landed in Mumbai on a hazy day and I felt my lungs filling with the acrid air of this city of over 18 million people. India’s increasing prosperity, like China’s, is putting a lot of pressure on the environment.

Last month, I was part of a group of 17 co-authors of a paper examining this issue and titled Megacities and Large Urban Agglomerations in the Coastal Zone: Interactions Between Atmosphere, Land, and Marine Ecosystems. My interest in mega-cities was a very practical one because I spent some years living in them. In 1987 I did a routine medical when I left Mexico City after living there for about three years. The doctor showed me the striations on my chest x-ray that were typical of a heavy smoker. “But I don’t smoke” I protested. “I know, but I do,” he said with a sheepish smile. “Imagine what mine look like!”  Six years later, I moved to Istanbul at a time when massive amounts of lignite were burned to keep the apartment blocks and houses warm in the winter. The air was full of yellow fumes made worse by the heavy traffic and there were few days when I didn’t wake up with a headache. But then the city switched to gas and things dramatically improved and serious efforts began to curb the millions of tons of raw sewage discharged to the Bosporus, the vital connection between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.

But the issues of such dense human agglomerations go far beyond the problems that can be fixed by means of simple engineering. As we demonstrate in our paper, the cities act as heat islands and change the flow of air between land and sea, transporting pollution for tens to hundreds of kilometres over the ocean. They have strong influences over overfishing, harmful algal blooms, eutrophication (the over-fertilisation of the sea) and cause feedbacks to the atmosphere via marine emissions. So far, as scientists we have been unable to keep pace with the rapidly developing and complex array of problems. Our paper suggests a strategy for how some of the poorly researched issues can be tackled and hopefully serves as wake-up call. Already 16% of the world’s population lives in cities of more than 5 million people (the population of Norway or Scotland) and they place a huge resource demand on surrounding areas, also separating people from their natural environment and making it more difficult to instil a caring attitude towards it from an early age. Reconnecting people with their environment is a huge task that parallels the need to study and solve the problems technologically, for if there is no willingness to pay the costs, nothing will change.




Further information
Roland von Glasgow et al (2013) Megacities and Large Urban Agglomerations in Coastal Zones: Interactions Between Atmosphere, Land, and Marine Ecosystems. AMBIO 42: 13-28 http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13280-012-0343-9

Sad time of reflection at SAMS

Two tragic deaths have stunned the staff and students at SAMS. Just a week after we were trying to come to terms with the loss of one of our bright PhD students, Christopher Bell, we received the news of another loss, the researcher in Physics, Sea Ice and Technology, Dr Tim Boyd. Chris and three other friends were killed by an avalanche in the Glencoe Mountains and Tim by a lightning strike while walking his dog on a coastal boardwalk.  These were freak events, both Chris and Tim were very competent and experienced outdoors people and the deaths were an awful coincidence.

Chris was a second year PhD student working on the physics of narrow tidal straits and how they contribute to larger scale ocean processes in western Scotland. In particular, he had been working on the infamous Corryvreckan and its extraordinary tidal race. He had already made major advances in his studies. Chris also made a big contribution to the social life of SAMS and the Oban region, particularly in his prowess as a mountain biker, climber and runner and for his practical encouragement of his peers in these activities.

Tim was a physical oceanographer who came to SAMS from Oregon State University with a long track record in Arctic science. He had been at SAMS for a year when I joined and was quick to catch up with me (almost literally, he was on his bike) to make sure that I knew about his endeavour to purchase an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) for SAMS. His friendly persistence worked! Tim used the same gentle persuasion to encourage the US and UK navies and others to continue to measure sea ice thickness from their submarines and to cooperate in Arctic oceanography. Tim was a popular lecturer and a great team worker and will be sorely missed.

This double tragedy was stunning for the SAMS community as students and staff struggled to comprehend the disappearance of two popular and respected colleagues from the same Physics, Sea Ice and Technology Department under such awful circumstances. There was particular compassion for Chris and Tim’s families whose lives have been instantly changed. As a caring and supportive community, my colleagues in SAMS neither hid their grief nor shied away from comforting those closest to them. Over fifty student and staff travelled to Blackburn to attend Chris’s funeral and there will be a memorial service for Tim in Oban on Thursday Feb 7th. A book of tributes was opened for Chris and website has been set up to gather tributes for Tim. To contribute, please go to http://tim-boyd.tumblr.com/.

Grief should not be confused with despair. As Chris and Tim are mourned, their close colleagues have appreciated how much their lives were enriched by them and feel the need to celebrate their work and friendship. The pain and solemnity of loss is accompanied by the feeling that their work and enthusiasm should continue and we will certainly do our utmost to make that possible.

Into the kingdom of the ice bear

It’s twenty below in wakening Churchill and the light from the low sun has replaced the snow-laden grey sky, adding sparkle to the taiga landscape. The flat white wilderness in the few miles between the airfield and the ice-covered shore of Hudson’s Bay is penetrated by knee-high patches of willow and dotted with ‘flag trees’, stunted conifers with branches that the icy gales only allow to grow towards the south-east except for their bushy undergrowth that is hidden beneath the snow. It’s too dangerous to go far on foot here so our little group is ushered onto a ‘tundra buggy’ with four big tractor wheels, a cabin and an observation deck. We are in the ‘kingdom of the ice bear’ where hungry polar bears have gathered near the shore, waiting for the ice to be thick enough for them to begin their seal hunt in a few days from now. We were almost too late, but a storm surge dumped a lot of water onto the ice a few days ago and the normally unsociable bears returned to their sparring matches in the willows.

I didn’t come up here to see polar bears - this is a bonus – I have been in Winnipeg attending the annual rectors’ meeting of the University of the Arctic, a consortium of nearly 200 universities and colleges operating in the circumpolar region. The UoA has been operating for over a decade now and has coordinated distance learning modules in Circumpolar Studies which are attracting good numbers of students and it has established 25 thematic networks. It is beginning a new planning cycle and this provides a good opportunity to shape its future on the basis of improving experience and knowledge. The University of the Highlands and Islands is the only UK partner and its Principal and Vice Chancellor, James Fraser, has asked me to represent him. Over the past few days, I have had the opportunity to meet up with colleagues from Scandinavia, Canada, the USA, Greenland and Russia and to exchange ideas and learn more about Arctic issues from people who are key to shaping its future social reality. My visit to Churchill has helped to put this in perspective as I will explain later.

There is no doubt that Arctic social-ecological systems are undergoing unprecedented change. Speaker after speaker told of the threats and opportunities posed by rapid climate change, the surge in mining, the development of new shipping routes, fishing grounds and increased tourism.  The circumpolar Arctic region covers somewhere between 15 and 20% of the surface of the earth but has only 4 million inhabitants and this figure would be lower if it wasn’t for some Russian cities. Only 55,000 people live in the whole of Greenland. Furthermore, the more sparsely populated areas have a high proportion of aboriginal people, many of whom are socially disadvantaged from the perspective of our modern globalised society that has imposed its culture without sharing many of its economic opportunities. Modern generations of northerners are beginning to appreciate the rough deal that settlers often gave native peoples through crooked land deals, denial of rights and even forcible removal of their children for ‘re-education’ (the latter resulting in a recent apology from the Canadian premier for example).

Contextual recognition of these social realities is important but our meeting was not intended as a history lesson; there are pressing issues to be dealt with in the short and long term and education is at the heart of the problem … and the solution. Major interest in the region by mining companies is one of them. Mining interest isn’t new of course; remember the gold rush that swept over Alaska and the Yukon, or the mining city of Norilsk in Russia that is the biggest single source of nickel in the world. But recently there has been renewed fervour for mining and transnational companies (including major Chinese interests) are moving in fast. Providing that the scar on the environment can be limited, this could inject some funding into local communities and provide much-needed jobs in places where employment is low and there is a sense of hopelessness in younger people (64% of the population is under 19 in the Canadian north). It could also go very badly.

In some of the mining development areas, there is 60% unemployment but mining companies are bringing in their own workers because of lack of skills in the local population. As one young person explained “one day we were poor and unemployed and suddenly there were 5000 jobs on the horizon”. The same issue was voiced from Greenland with the Government poised to give the go-ahead to a mine that will be staffed by 5000 Chinese workers; a major social force in a national population of 55,000, desperately trying to assert its identity. The MP for Winnipeg South, Rod Bruinooge, who is from a First Nation family himself, described the low achievement that plagues indigenous communities and the difficulty of getting kids beyond primary education. In the vast territory of Nunavut in Canada’s far North and in the North-West Territories, there are genuine attempts to foster self determination.  Further South in Cree territories and the northern Manitoba township of Flin Flon, an innovative mining academy has been established to fast track students with the target of 30 ready for employment by next spring. There is no time for the slow and bureaucratic process of conventional FE college courses and a transformative ‘quadruple helix’ has been established between Government, educators, industry and communities and incorporating modern teaching technology.

Mining wasn’t the only force of change considered. There is excitement about the opportunities that climate change is providing. Listening to some of the presentations, a mental image was emerging of major shipping routes and offshore oil wells distributing prosperity to new northern ports that were also becoming the home to prosperous fishing fleets. But a sharp sense of realism soon took me out of this dangerous dream. There are sovereignty issues, ice will prevent ports from opening all year, insurance companies will be reluctant to insure vessels for the North-West Passage, and as ice increasingly breaks up, the risk of wind-driven ice jams suddenly occurring may go up and not down, at least for a few years. Sooner or later opening up will happen however and investors are already making medium term bets.

But there are ethical issues that are being ignored in the excitement. I asked the question: “In a world heading towards a cliff edge of dangerous climate change but with governments urging us to help develop safer technology to exploit new Arctic oil supplies ; what do we tell our students?” “A very good point,” the speaker responded; “it has been troubling me for some time now.” And as the northern climate warms up, there will be many unpleasant surprises such as trees and even villages sinking into the ground as the permafrost melts (already happening in Alaska and Russia), a northward movement of diseases like the West Nile Virus (already happening in Canada) and unpredicted switches in meteorological conditions (such as those seen in England this summer). As academics, it is up to us to take the longer view and try to become beacons of light to help our fellow humans avoid the headlong rush from one opportunistic mirage to another.

But back to the reason for me being here. The UHI was the first partner of the University of the Arctic from beyond the big eight circumpolar countries. It is true that Scotland has a little slice of the Arctic marine region defined by the EU but thanks to the Gulf Stream we don’t have the same climate as Churchill or even the plus and minus forty five extremes of hot and cold in Winnipeg at a latitude far south of Scotland.  We do have Arctic interests however, particularly in SAMS and the Mountain Studies Centre in Perth and a lot more to offer in areas of health, language and cultural studies. Beyond these specific interests, it is the model of distributed learning centres in a sparsely populated region that is particularly relevant because UHI has been a pioneer and this is recognised by the entire pan-Arctic consortium.  UHI’s digital learning provides particularly valuable lessons. We too are pursuing the quadruple helix and learning, sometimes painfully, as we do. And we need to learn more from others as they learn from us. So on my return from Canada, I will be discussing ways to increase cooperation and get more from our membership of this extraordinary club. This time around, I was particularly pleased to see Tara Morrison, one of UHI’s mature postgrad students, actively involved in the group of students engaged in their own meeting. Hopefully, she’ll write her own blog (hint).

One of the most important ways to maintain identity and culture is by conserving living languages and the narratives and artistic expression that they hold. There is a great diversity of languages in the Arctic, most under pressure or in decline. It isn’t easy to maintain linguistic diversity; there are around seven variants of the Sami language for example, covering about 70,000 people in Norway, Russia, Sweden and Finland. Intervention to help only one variant could speed the decline of the others so the work of the academic carries huge ethical responsibility. UHI has great linguistic expertise through Sabhal Mòr Ostaig its Gaelic college and it was good to hear from Jelena Porsanger, Director  of the Sami University College, that strong cooperation already exists between the two colleges and that SMO and BBC Alba are highly regarded throughout the circumpolar world.

I haven’t said much about scientific research so far. There is a great sense of urgency in the need to study the rapidly changing Arctic system and to bolster this work by training new scientists. Canada is building a state of the art high Arctic research station in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, scheduled to open in 2017 and a new icebreaker will be ready at the same time. Denmark will build a station in northern Greenland at 81°36'N 16°40'W, about 574 miles from the geographic North Pole and a major research partnership has been established between Canada, Greenland and Denmark and this will lead to a series of joint expeditions. Russia is also accelerating its own research and encouraging cooperation with the West. UHI, through SAMS, offers the only UK degree in Marine Science with Arctic Studies, thanks to our partnership with UNIS, the Norwegian University Centre in Svalbard. SAMS’ is also a partner in the Kings Bay Marine Station in Ny-Ålesund on Svalbard. Our expertise ininstrumentation and autonomous vehicles is internationally recognised and we have led many of the major UK expeditions to the Arctic on the research vessel James Clarke Ross in recent years. It is clear however that UK Arctic science is seen as a poor cousin to its neighbours and unless there are game changing investments, we will really be missing the boat and the potential to reap the rewards of being in the leadership of a knowledge-based economy.

As our ‘tundra buggy’ lurches slowly towards the coast, I have the opportunity to gather more viewpoints on the realities of the Canadian north. The first cargo ship to dock in Churchill arrived in 1929 and the port is open for a short 4-5 month season every year, handling about half a million tons of grain exports and fertiliser imports. It has grown very little despite being Canada’s main northern port and is in a rather shabby state. The township of Churchill has less than nine hundred inhabitants and the two hour flight to Winnipeg is extremely expensive (C$1,300 return; more than a transatlantic flight) and this makes the place very isolated. During the seven week ‘polar bear season’ there is an increasing traffic of specialist tourists, so much so that the Government has had to introduce a strict code of practice and limit the ‘tundra buggy’ fleet to 18. I couldn’t help feeling that these large vehicles must have some implications for behaviour of the bears but this is gut feeling without any basis of evidence.  Some bears get overly accustomed to human settlements and are found wandering through Churchill where they are ‘jailed’ and returned to more remote places!

Our buggy comes to a halt near the shore and we step outside into the cold air on its platform to look for bears. It is exciting to spot the first ones sparring in a distant patch of willows and I begin to regret not having one of the big telephoto lens cameras that are appearing around me. The Hudson’s Bay population, one of 19 around the Arctic, numbers around 900 and are thought to have declined by about 20% in the past decade, probably due to poor ice conditions. It is rare to see more than a half dozen in a single day.  From time to time, our guide moves the buggy to new sites and we are lucky to see a total of eight bears. Most of them appear to ignore us as they pad around at a distance or rest in the snow. Finally though, we are approached by a large curious male, scarred from a fight over a female and with blood dripping from its muzzle and claws after a recent kill, maybe a muskrat snack, and perhaps seeing us as potential tinned food. So here is a chance encounter, up front and personal, very close and just above the range of claws and teeth; I didn’t use a zoom for the photo posted at the top...

On turbulent times

Turbulence appears rather often in the press these days. Most people would associate it with stock markets or the BBC but right now I’m sitting in an Air Canada flight heading over the Atlantic towards Ottawa. The crew have just scuttled their trollies away and strapped themselves in as we bounce up and down crossing the Atlantic shelf near the Porcupine Bank and buffeted by the famed Jet Stream. I’m waiting for a lull and the “ping” that releases the air crew and stops my empty food tray from bouts of levitation but it’s quite a rough ride.

Unlike the food (“Would you like chicken sir?” – “Oh, is there a choice?” – “No, it's chicken or nuffen”), I like the maps that appear on the little screen before my eyes because they include oceanographic features as well as the usual coastlines and random settlements. That’s why I know I’m over the Porcupine Bank and I can spot the neatly labelled Wyville Thomson Ridge and the Faroes-Iceland Ridge, the Maury Sea Channel, the Biscay Plain and the Charlie-Gibbs Fracture Zone. Down below, 150 years ago, the ‘highly strung’ Edinburgh professor, Charles Wyville Thomson had taken the first abyssal samples of marine life from the HMS Porcupine. That’s why the Bank got such a strange name (but doesn’t explain the prickly name for the ship!). He later went on to persuade the Government to fund the follow-up Challenger Expedition, the biggest milestone in 19th century marine science, but following its huge success, suffered total mental exhaustion and died a broken man.

Wyville Thomson knew a lot about ‘turbulence’, though the word hadn’t been coined in the way it is used today. Apart from the physicality of a heaving deck, he knew about the difficulty of getting projects funded in times of great financial change. The apocryphal image of studious high-collared and bearded academics in teak paneled laboratories betrays the realities of the cut and thrust struggle for funding that they were facing and the backstabbing rivalry conveyed in neatly penned but occasionally venomous letters.

Have things changed much? Perhaps it is far easier now to dash off a nasty (and often regretted) email rather than brooding over pen and ink… But scientists continue to face a struggle to gain funding. Have you ever seen the track taken by the Challenger? It would be easy to imagine the crisscrossings of the oceans as a product of sails in trade winds but that was not the case. There were two other factors at stake: commercial interests and geopolitics. The expedition was at the beginning of the 19th century communication revolution where cables were being laid to connect outposts of the empire and major business partners … and this needed information about the sea floor in key places. And there were other political interests to pursue in the Southern Ocean. It seems ironic that today’s marine scientists are asked to prove the economic impact of their research if their funding is to continue; the same thing happened to Wyville Thomson. Today’s research leader has to be every bit as canny as his or her counterpart of 150 years ago.

And so I have to turn to the events of the past few weeks. Rarely has the politics of oceanography and polar science found so much space in the press and parliament as the debate over the proposed merger of BAS and NOC was tossed to and fro. Science, good management and economics became intermingled with nostalgic patriotism of the kind normally reserved for the last night of the proms (which I still enjoy watching by the way). The big difference of course is that this debate was not just about fanfares and pith helmets but touched on people’s careers, long-term aspirations and loyalties. It is easy to miss the big picture though; the British economy is in dire straits, fuel prices are skyrocketing and the UK science budget is declining at the current rate of inflation (which thankfully is still relatively low but gradually bleeds away the real budget of publicly funded institutes). With the political prerogative of maintaining UK Antarctic bases and the obligation to demonstrate short term economic impact, long term observations are under close scrutiny, there is little spare change for blue skies research and even less headroom space required for the innovation needed to keep our science on the cutting edge. Something had to be done but there was no simple and obvious solution. On the one hand, there was economic logic in streamlining fleets and services and breaking down sclerotic silos but on the other there was huge value in maintaining prestigious brands (particularly BAS), team spirit and keeping management structures close to the coalface. This was never going to be an easy debate and not everyone breathed a sigh of relief when the plan for merger was shelved.

The big question remains though; how will the underlying problem be tackled? Without a profound and long term solution, this story will simply rumble on and the ‘can’ will be kicked down the political street, or worse, into the long grass. For the naïve triumphalist, this could be a pyrrhic victory. Part of the answer has to be in the way we value our science and join up the dots between discovery and societal benefit. We haven’t been very good at doing that or even framing the questions that will allow us to make meaningful valuations. Take the much talked about BAS discovery of the ozone hole nearly three decades ago. There is little doubt that this, followed by the Montreal Protocol, saved human lives. For Britain, this could be conceived as a remarkable piece of altruism of immense value … but not for the treasury of course. On the other hand, it triggered the rapid development of non-ozone depleting CFC substitutes by the British chemical industry, so there was a major financial reward as well. And nobody was expecting an ozone hole. 

It would be interesting to do an economic assessment of the Challenger Expedition; perhaps we owe one to Wyville Thomson. His successor and SAMS’ founder John Murray was much more entrepreneurial; ‘assertive’ would be an understatement. When the Government refused his request for funding for the Challenger reports, he browbeat them into submission by threatening to fund publication himself … and keep the profit. I don’t think we would get away with that today!

Meantime, this side of the Atlantic the turbulence has subsided. Just before the Grand Banks, we flew over the Gloria Ridge. Therein rests another tale. Gloria was the pioneer long range sonar device developed by the Institute of Oceanographic Sciences, the predecessor of NOC. It was a pig to deploy but made a huge contribution to mapping the seafloor. I wonder what unforeseen economic benefits that investment has triggered...

Sloshed in Bangkok: No way to save the planet

I’m in Bangkok and, outside the concrete wall of the UN conference centre, the monsoon is in full fury with bolts of lightening and water sloshing down. I arrived on Sunday and joined rarely seen colleagues from my former UN life in a café by the Chao Phraya River, returning to our hotel by tuk-tuk through the bustling streets, just before the deluge began again. But the monsoon is a regular event, essential for the food production and hydrology of south-east Asia, so I shouldn’t be complaining … or should I?

The Thai Minister of Science Dr. Prodprasob Surasawadi had a very clear message about the nature of recent monsoons. Thailand has changed from a country where the main concern was water supply to one where flooding dominates the agenda. “I told everyone, we need a paradigm shift” he said “from how to store water to how to drain water”. Last year’s monsoon was deemed a 1 in a 100 year event and flooded 63,000 km2 of land, leaving 600 people dead, the majority from short-circuiting as they struggled with inadequate pumps. The economic damage was vast and estimated by the World Bank as US$ 45.7 Bn. The minister doesn’t see this as a one off event however. He reminded us that eight thousand years ago, Bangkok was 6.4 metre below sea level: “It will come back for sure”. It isn’t just an issue of increased rainfall though; sea levels are rising at least as fast as they did during the Holocene and sea water is beginning to intrude into rivers and aquifers.

But what to do? The Thai government is facing hard choices. Bangkok is the beating heart of the Thai economy, an Asian tiger that has been unleashed in a globalised world. That new world that we all inhabit has extraordinary economic interconnections due to globalisation and supply chains that work on very short timescales. Some 25% of the world’s hard disks are made in Bangkok as are key automobile components and a sudden flood can shut down production of computers or cars in remote parts of the planet. According to Minister Surasawadi, the choice is to construct massive flood defences or to move the 9 million inhabitants somewhere else; but where? “I don’t know how to do it”. He estimated that it will cost at least US$10Bn to change water management in Thailand and US$20Bn to construct levees, dams and sea walls. “I don’t believe we have much time” he says. “This will happen not only in Thailand but in other parts of the world”. And he threw scientists and engineers a challenge: “We need an answer from you: more practical, more focussed”.

All of this brings me to the reason why I am here in Bangkok, adding 3.18 tons of CO₂ to the planetary burden despite my economy class flight. I’m at a meeting of the Global Environment Facility, created in 1992 and the biggest funding mechanism in human history for dealing with shared environmental problems. The GEF has three main areas of interest: climate change, biodiversity and international waters. The international waters focal area covers all waters that cross national boundaries: aquifers, rivers, lakes and the oceans and, since 1992, US$ 2 Bn it has spent in this area that has ‘leveraged’ (World Bank speak for persuaded people to cost share) a total of around US$ 7 Bn. That sounds like a huge amount of money but bear in mind the US$ 30 Bn bill for a temporary fix to Bangkok’s problems alone. Need I say much more?  The GEF can help trigger action, but it won’t ‘save the planet’. And the planet doesn’t need saving anyway; it is human society that’s high up on the risk register but we’re far too twee to talk about it in those terms.

I have a bit of a history with the GEF as I convinced them to hand over US$ 11.7 m to fund the first marine international waters project – on the Black Sea – in 1992. Yesterday, a former colleague reminded me how I had presented my case to a ‘brown bag lunch’ of senior World Bank officials in Washington. The Black Sea is now in a much better state than it was then but, to be fair, this is much more to do with the reduction of polluting activities due to economic decline than my five years of efforts. Only time will tell if we left a legacy. We did, however, learn a lot through our failures as well as our successes and we helped develop an ‘adaptive management’ approach that is being applied worldwide. So almost 20 years later, I was invited to chair an international panel of practitioners with the remit of looking how we can improve the science behind international waters projects of every kind. Sheila Heymans from SAMS also worked alongside the group to help bring together the information from projects all over the world through a GEF project financed through the UN University (who coordinated the overall study). The report Science-Policy Bridges Over Troubled Waters that I co-authored with Adeel Zafar, Head of the UNU Institute for Water, Environment and Health, was published last week and shows how systems thinking can be used to make the best use of science in future GEF International Waters interventions. My attendance at the conference was to explain the findings and join in with the discussions on future application of science in the GEF strategy. The GEF is operating in almost every developing-country shared waterbody on the planet and it has the potential to exert enormous influence on the way these systems are managed.

One source of personal amusement was the press conference following the launch of our report. Earlier press releases had been picked up by a few agencies including Reuters and I had done a Skype interview with the Financial Times. We had foregone our coffee break and were set up for a Q & A session with local correspondents. In the event, nobody showed up. The entire press pack had gone off in pursuit of the Science Minister. What do you expect when you have talked about uprooting 9 million people? At least it was an environmental news story. I remember doing a long piece on fishing for the BBC a few years ago. They dispatched a crew to do a seven minute news slot from a fish market. Just as it was about to be aired, Paul McCartney announced his engagement to Heather Mills and the editor cut seven minutes to one so I had a 15 second sound byte. “Overfishing is a serious problem that damages our economy” CUT!