I’m deep in the Charlemagne building at the very heart of the European Commission in Brussels. It’s European Green Week and I was the warm-up act at the oceans session first thing this morning. A circular chamber with huge concentric rings of seats, translation booths, electronic gismos: cameras, fancy screens and microphones that really work. The eclectic audience ranged from senior EU officials to a busload of school kids; “keep it simple and visual” I had been told and duly obliged. The formula seemed to work and I’ve given radio interviews with Portuguese and Latvian stations and a slot with Croatian TV. Ahh, the wonders of Europia!
Yesterday I was in Gothenburg at the European Maritime Day; another presentation, a different topic and a different audience. This was followed by a quick 30 min shuttle flight to Copenhagen and a stampede of the Brusselcrats (not all from the EU) across Copenhagen airport for the connecting flight to Brussels where I got to the hotel at ten thirty to finish my presentation for today. I guess I’ll need an extra coffee after my flight back to Edinburgh tonight!
So what is all the fervour about? Europe really does seem to have discovered its seas. There are two sides to the coin however, and the two sides face in different directions though they depend on the same substance. The maritime side, represented by DG Mare (the Commission Directorate General responsible for marine policy), is focusing on blue growth; ‘sustainable growth’ is the catchphrase though by definition growth cannot be sustained for ever – and right now it’s feeling a bit wobbly. Let’s call it ‘growth from sustainable use of the sea’ (now I’m feeling happier). The other side is environmentalism, represented by DG Environment, largely under the banner of the Water Framework Directive and the Marine Strategy Framework Directive, two pieces of legislation that are transforming management of Europe’s aquatic environment. These two sides of the coin are like Yin and Yang; the softer, more feminine energy of ‘environment’ and the aggressive male energy of ‘maritime’. Like yin and yang, both are mutually dependent and need to seek harmony. No, I haven’t become a hippy; it really is like that; I even noticed that the male/female ratio was different in the two meetings, as was the kind of language employed. But I am digressing now…
The gist of the Maritime Agenda is blue growth and much of the excitement is about renewable energy and the technology needed to exploit it. The numbers flying around are pretty big - €10.4bn annual investment by 2020 - and the whole thing has the feeling of a vaguely orderly Klondike. Marine biotech and aquaculture are clear runners up. I attended a session on blue technology and this, disappointingly, turned out to be dominated by jaded shipbuilders behaving like kids who had their sweets stolen while they were squabbling over who had more. OK, I am being unfair but ships are hardly built in Europe anymore; lower costs and better lines of credit have swept the business to South East Asia and cooperation between builders in Europe is too little and too late. Worse still, given the current situation of international trade, there is a big overcapacity in the global fleet. The construction bubble has burst. Ships are still being delivered and orders so far in 2012 have plummeted to the lowest level on record. There are cash flow problems, risks of seizures by banks and no new lines of credit.
But this is where the blue-green agenda kicks in thanks to some yin mixing with the yang (a yin and tonic maybe?). The entire global fleet is out of date; hopelessly inefficient and pumping out dirty flue gases. This can all be resolved by better designs and modern technology leading to 30-40% less fuel use and, with scrubbers, very low emissions. Opportunities exist for technology development but the roadblock of credit lines remains. Even if the credit starts to flow, it would take 25 years to make the fleet more environmentally friendly.
So there is little cheer from traditional maritime industries, indeed there is a danger that existing knowhow will be lost in Europe. Nevertheless, there was huge optimism but much of this came from the ‘interface’ between the yin of environment and the yang of technology. But the sea is becoming crowded and there are many demands for exclusive access or property rights to sea areas for activities like renewables, aquaculture, fishing, transport, mining, recreation and conservation. There were many discussions about ‘marine spatial planning’ (MSP); the area where I contributed a short presentation based on our work from the EU KnowSeas project and its fellow projects MESMA and ODEMM. The MSP process has only been developed over the last decade; some 20 countries are actively engaged and four of these plus the USA have completed the first plans. Some 80-100 new MSPs are expected in the next decade, mostly in Western Europe, Australia and North America. A lot of new integrated science will be needed over this period.
So back to Brussels where the environmental yin was accompanied by a little yang; lots of exhibits from companies offering products and services sporting words such as ‘environmentally-friendly’, ‘low-energy’, and ‘sustainable’. I attended a session on the reform of the Common Fisheries Policy which was predictably boisterous (yin and yang do not always meet in harmony). The fisheries sector speaker, Henrik Svenberg, President of the Swedish Fishermen's Federation, was one of the new generation of fishermen, keen on following an ‘ecosystem approach’ and open to dialogue. The big debate is on subsidies, discards and the regionalisation of fisheries management, enthusiastically supported by most of those present but controversial because it is splitting the EU Member States, roughly across a North-South divide. Watch this space; the debate is only just beginning! There were three of us from Scotland asking lots of questions. “Is there anyone not from Scotland?” said the chairman with a smile.
Friday, 25 May 2012
Friday, 18 May 2012
The great turn on
This seems like a crazy idea at first sight; a lot of public money spent to expose a tennis court-sized piece of the bottom of Ardmucknish Bay to the gas that it responsible for acidifying the oceans and contributing to climate change. But this little patch of sea floor may help to decide whether or not we use ‘Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS)’ as one way of reducing the impact of our carbon dioxide emissions on the Earth’s climate and on our seas.
Carbon capture and storage is a technique to refill depleted oil wells with compressed and liquefied carbon dioxide. The engineering has already been tested and cost/benefit studies made but serious questions remain: How permanent is the storage and what will happen if the storage wells or pipelines begin to leak? Geologists and engineers can work out the risk of failure (we already know this to be rather low) but, as yet, there is no credible evidence of likely ecosystem consequences of a leak. It is really not safe to implement CCS if we don’t have the answer to the question and this is why the UK Natural Environment Research Council, the Crown Estates and others have invested in running this experiment. Over the next few weeks, a lot of scientific ingenuity, mainly from SAMS, the Plymouth Marine Lab, the British Geological Survey and others, will be poured into getting an answer.
Does this mean we are supporters of CCS? The answer is that we are neither supporters nor detractors; we see this as a legitimate test of a potential tool for mitigating the damage we are causing to the planet from our huge carbon dioxide emissions. There are other tools in the box too: renewable energy, nuclear energy, energy efficiency, localism, geo-engineering; all these need dispassionate scrutiny and evaluation from the perspective of costs and benefits including the costs to our stock of natural capital (see my last blog) and the relationship to human values. Some may prove to be unacceptable, some may provide a temporary relief and others may offer longer-term solutions. A careful evaluation that examines ‘hidden’ as well as obvious tangible costs and benefits is bound to provide some surprises and will certainly cause us to question some of the fundamental assumptions of many policymakers regarding the economic model that our society is following.
Perhaps this may sound like scepticism; I hope not - we are focussing on healthy enquiry. A rather positive article about our CCS experiment appeared in the Daily Mail; comments on the online version included the view that the whole thing is a waste of public money because there is no relationship between carbon dioxide emissions and our climate. This illustrates the difference between scepticism and denial. Sceptics have actually been helpful in driving our own inquiry and ensuring scientific rigour. We know more about the influence of solar cycles for example thanks to the insistence of the sceptics that this might be an important factor and we have to thank them for it. As a result, we now know that solar cycles have triggered global-scale events in the past but that their contribution to contemporary warming is far less than humanity’s emissions of greenhouse gases. One would hope that at some point, most of them accept the weight of evidence and we can move on to other pressing questions – because there are so many uncertainties in knowledge that science can help to reduce. But some, occasionally with vested interests, raise the drawbridge and prefer to enter into the obscure realm of denial. Then sometimes, the whole thing gets very nasty indeed.
We should not be afraid of conducting socially and environmentally responsible experiments in the natural environment as well as in laboratory conditions. Lack of evidence from experimental sites is also delaying the development of a meaningful network of marine protected areas. The pace of global change is quickening (and I refer to biodiversity and habitat loss as well as climate change) and we need a short, medium and longer term strategy to deal with it.
Tuesday, 8 May 2012
Banking on marine natural capital
I’m on a train speeding through the green fields of England, not all of which are green because some of the rivers have burst their banks in the recent rain. I seem to spend a lot of my time in trains, partly because my job takes me to meetings all over the place and partly because I want to ‘walk the talk’ of minimising my carbon footprint (not that trains have zero impact). My last blog was written on the sleeper train from Euston to Inverness and I’ll shortly be hopping on the Eurostar to Brussels. ‘Walking the talk’ also involves a lot of video-conferences and Skype calls and this is revolutionising the way we communicate though, in my experience, calls to UK Government Ministries are usually the most difficult as they seem to be years behind with the ‘new’ technology and can sometimes (rather often) only handle ‘face to face’.
Last week, I spent three days in the University of East Anglia at a NERC-funded Valuing Nature Network meeting. VNN is a big step out of NERC’s usual comfort zone of natural science and into the blurry interdisciplinary interface with economics and other branches of social science. The issue in question is the way we use our natural capital to generate ecosystem services. For those of you who are already losing the plot with this terminology, I should explain that Natural Capital means a stock of natural assets (a forest, fish and their supporting ecosystem, a coral reef system, a wetland, etc) and ‘Services’ refers to the things they supply to humans such as the fish we eat, the landscapes we enjoy, the waste we make them assimilate, the raw materials we use for food, fibre and energy, etc. Up to a point, natural systems can supply services without becoming depleted and ideally, we try to live on the interest from natural capital rather than mining it down. We value the services we enjoy; perhaps explicitly through monetary value; indirectly, because they are used to produce something else that we pay for (or should be paying for); or in a non-monetary way because, for example, they are important to our psychological welfare.
So VNN isn’t just a matter of putting a price tag on everything, though monetary values are extremely important. Last week we were exploring such things as ways and means to devise new kinds of balance sheets to help policymakers to consider all of the kinds of values that natural systems produce without falling into the trap of ‘double accounting’ or rejecting things than cannot be given a short-term price tag. This information is vital in order to ensure the optimal flow of services and not to take more than the system can actually provide. All of this is particularly important for the marine environment because there are so many new demands on it and in some areas there is already plenty of evidence that we are extracting more services than can be provided sustainably. Some systems are already beginning to collapse. We also tend to take some services for granted as ‘free’ particularly when we use marine systems to deal with our effluent. This is more than just ‘spending the family silver’, this is like the old cartoon where someone is sitting, feet dangling, on a tree branch with a saw and cutting it off next to the trunk; the consequence is potentially sudden and just as inevitable.
VNN is also examining how to value marine conservation – including marine protected areas – and rehabilitation. In some ways, this can be seen as a way to invest in natural capital as well as to exploit it. Considering our dependence on ecosystem services and our reliance on natural processes within the diminished stock, it makes sense to invest in the future. We are not doing particularly well in that respect. Ten years ago, at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, most maritime countries agreed on a pact to create a globally coherent network of marine protected areas by 2012. Well, 2012 has arrived and the results don’t look much like a network. To be fair, there are some impressive announcements like the entirety of the Kiribati Archipelago, the smaller islands in the Hawaiian chain and the controversial Chagos Archipelago, but these are exceptional and there are lots of question marks about their management – and management means investment.
Unlike the human economy, we can’t cheat nature with a bit of natural capital ‘quantitative easing’. Not everything we are doing in the environment is toxic to it however. We are altering it in many ways and some of these ways may be creating new opportunities to enhance habitats. Windfarm sites create artificial reefs for example. These new habitats may – or may not – be a good thing. Close to SAMS, we have created Europe’s largest experimental artificial reef to help provide some of the experimental evidence on the implications of these changes. By engaging in big experiments of this kind and in a new genre of interdisciplinary science, we may be able to cast a few pearls of wisdom at a time where they are very badly needed.
Last week, I spent three days in the University of East Anglia at a NERC-funded Valuing Nature Network meeting. VNN is a big step out of NERC’s usual comfort zone of natural science and into the blurry interdisciplinary interface with economics and other branches of social science. The issue in question is the way we use our natural capital to generate ecosystem services. For those of you who are already losing the plot with this terminology, I should explain that Natural Capital means a stock of natural assets (a forest, fish and their supporting ecosystem, a coral reef system, a wetland, etc) and ‘Services’ refers to the things they supply to humans such as the fish we eat, the landscapes we enjoy, the waste we make them assimilate, the raw materials we use for food, fibre and energy, etc. Up to a point, natural systems can supply services without becoming depleted and ideally, we try to live on the interest from natural capital rather than mining it down. We value the services we enjoy; perhaps explicitly through monetary value; indirectly, because they are used to produce something else that we pay for (or should be paying for); or in a non-monetary way because, for example, they are important to our psychological welfare.
So VNN isn’t just a matter of putting a price tag on everything, though monetary values are extremely important. Last week we were exploring such things as ways and means to devise new kinds of balance sheets to help policymakers to consider all of the kinds of values that natural systems produce without falling into the trap of ‘double accounting’ or rejecting things than cannot be given a short-term price tag. This information is vital in order to ensure the optimal flow of services and not to take more than the system can actually provide. All of this is particularly important for the marine environment because there are so many new demands on it and in some areas there is already plenty of evidence that we are extracting more services than can be provided sustainably. Some systems are already beginning to collapse. We also tend to take some services for granted as ‘free’ particularly when we use marine systems to deal with our effluent. This is more than just ‘spending the family silver’, this is like the old cartoon where someone is sitting, feet dangling, on a tree branch with a saw and cutting it off next to the trunk; the consequence is potentially sudden and just as inevitable.
VNN is also examining how to value marine conservation – including marine protected areas – and rehabilitation. In some ways, this can be seen as a way to invest in natural capital as well as to exploit it. Considering our dependence on ecosystem services and our reliance on natural processes within the diminished stock, it makes sense to invest in the future. We are not doing particularly well in that respect. Ten years ago, at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, most maritime countries agreed on a pact to create a globally coherent network of marine protected areas by 2012. Well, 2012 has arrived and the results don’t look much like a network. To be fair, there are some impressive announcements like the entirety of the Kiribati Archipelago, the smaller islands in the Hawaiian chain and the controversial Chagos Archipelago, but these are exceptional and there are lots of question marks about their management – and management means investment.
Unlike the human economy, we can’t cheat nature with a bit of natural capital ‘quantitative easing’. Not everything we are doing in the environment is toxic to it however. We are altering it in many ways and some of these ways may be creating new opportunities to enhance habitats. Windfarm sites create artificial reefs for example. These new habitats may – or may not – be a good thing. Close to SAMS, we have created Europe’s largest experimental artificial reef to help provide some of the experimental evidence on the implications of these changes. By engaging in big experiments of this kind and in a new genre of interdisciplinary science, we may be able to cast a few pearls of wisdom at a time where they are very badly needed.
Thursday, 26 April 2012
Ducking out
So, what does the Director of SAMS really do? I could give you a boringly long list of responsibilities but I don’t want to send you to sleep on the keyboard (I have done that more than once – woke up on page 1013 of a document I was writing and had to delete 998 pages of fghytrkj etc). I start the week with plans; a schedule and a list of Outlook tasks with little red and pink flags plus some notions about longer term aspirations. Then reality happens. As John Lennon put it “Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans”. The email starts pinging in the manner of sonar sounds on WW2 films like The Cruel Sea. A smile, a frown, an OMG, a ‘THIS REALLY IS URGENT’ message from Lorna, my ever-patient PA, and new little red flags appear and old ones get re-prioritised.
Then a whirlwind hits the office. The Cabinet Secretary for Education (Scotland’s Minister of Education), Michael Russell is here with a small entourage. He takes a few sips from the coffee proffered by Lorna, asks some incisive questions (I like his questions because they make you think on your feet) and the whirlwind has gone. Tim (my Research Fellow who does most of the work on KnowSeas) is hovering with a bunch of graphs and a meaningful twinkle and slinks in before I can make excuses. Two minutes of small talk and down to business and he goes away with more work and more unanswered questions. “It’s the UHI grubbledubble committee” says Lorna (there are so many of them that I won’t bother with the real name) and I trail through to our boardroom VC with another bunch of papers and my laptop (a few more emails during lulls). The VC is magical because I can simultaneously see and talk with colleagues from as far away Shetland, Stornaway, Perth, Inverness and Timbuktu (well, I could if it hadn’t have been occupied by rebels). Constructing a university out of disparate colleges in such distant places is an awesome task and it’s hardly surprising that a lot of debate is needed; but it is happening and students are already getting degrees.
Ah, time for lunch; we have good food in SAMS and the best café view in the world; I head for the crowded table with bar chairs to join the random lunchtime conversations that make the whole place tick. Turbulent flow, tunicates, wind farms, babies, kayak trips, rock bands, DIY projects. Lunch over, I’m trying to write a talk for a meeting in Brussels tomorrow but the b***** pinging starts again and there are ‘must do’s’. OK, I’ll finish it at home. Happily, Lorna is already dealing with the routine stuff. Then there is a meeting of the directorate team. We meet once a week to coordinate our frazzled schedules and plan the next meeting of the SAMS Executive (the main engine of our management). My deputy, Ken, is responsible for operations; not easy with such a range of activities and facilities. Mark is the Associate Director for Research, Tracy is AD for Business Development and, until recently, Fran was AD for Finance. It’s great to have such a professional team and we work well together. And it’s all good humoured (otherwise we would be totally mad).
Four forty-five and no bad news emails. The ones about Government budget cuts tend to come late in the day like weary pigeons released from a turret in Whitehall a day earlier. But today is a ‘no news is good news’ day – and the sun is shining. Ben Cruachan has a light glazing of snow like the icing sugar on grandma’s angel buns before the era of profligate cup cakes. Somebody from NASA has sent me an email about their ocean animations and I let the rather large files download while I wander off for a cup of tea, chatting with one of my PhD students en route.
When I return, I run the ‘Perpetual Oceans’ and the Gulf Stream. It is mesmerising. In just a few minutes, it is possible to visualise the entire surface circulation of the world’s oceans and there is a fantastic animation of the North Atlantic Current showing the heat flow. The myriad eddies disperse heat as the current drifts across the Atlantic, eventually warming the northern European shores. I learned about this in primary school, secondary school and doing my degree in oceanography but the full impact only hits me now when the whole thing is so graphic. And my admiration for our glider team who manage to navigate our slow moving glider through this incredibly complex system in real time. Well worth spending time on this; the ‘wow’ factor is inevitable so invite some friends round with a bottle of wine…
And as a postscript, the tekkies tell me that I could change the email pings for something less intrusive. I did the same on my iPhone by changing the ring tone to quacking ducks. Last year when I was out sailing, I woke up early in the morning desperately searching for my phone. But they were real ducks…
Then a whirlwind hits the office. The Cabinet Secretary for Education (Scotland’s Minister of Education), Michael Russell is here with a small entourage. He takes a few sips from the coffee proffered by Lorna, asks some incisive questions (I like his questions because they make you think on your feet) and the whirlwind has gone. Tim (my Research Fellow who does most of the work on KnowSeas) is hovering with a bunch of graphs and a meaningful twinkle and slinks in before I can make excuses. Two minutes of small talk and down to business and he goes away with more work and more unanswered questions. “It’s the UHI grubbledubble committee” says Lorna (there are so many of them that I won’t bother with the real name) and I trail through to our boardroom VC with another bunch of papers and my laptop (a few more emails during lulls). The VC is magical because I can simultaneously see and talk with colleagues from as far away Shetland, Stornaway, Perth, Inverness and Timbuktu (well, I could if it hadn’t have been occupied by rebels). Constructing a university out of disparate colleges in such distant places is an awesome task and it’s hardly surprising that a lot of debate is needed; but it is happening and students are already getting degrees.
Ah, time for lunch; we have good food in SAMS and the best café view in the world; I head for the crowded table with bar chairs to join the random lunchtime conversations that make the whole place tick. Turbulent flow, tunicates, wind farms, babies, kayak trips, rock bands, DIY projects. Lunch over, I’m trying to write a talk for a meeting in Brussels tomorrow but the b***** pinging starts again and there are ‘must do’s’. OK, I’ll finish it at home. Happily, Lorna is already dealing with the routine stuff. Then there is a meeting of the directorate team. We meet once a week to coordinate our frazzled schedules and plan the next meeting of the SAMS Executive (the main engine of our management). My deputy, Ken, is responsible for operations; not easy with such a range of activities and facilities. Mark is the Associate Director for Research, Tracy is AD for Business Development and, until recently, Fran was AD for Finance. It’s great to have such a professional team and we work well together. And it’s all good humoured (otherwise we would be totally mad).
Four forty-five and no bad news emails. The ones about Government budget cuts tend to come late in the day like weary pigeons released from a turret in Whitehall a day earlier. But today is a ‘no news is good news’ day – and the sun is shining. Ben Cruachan has a light glazing of snow like the icing sugar on grandma’s angel buns before the era of profligate cup cakes. Somebody from NASA has sent me an email about their ocean animations and I let the rather large files download while I wander off for a cup of tea, chatting with one of my PhD students en route.
When I return, I run the ‘Perpetual Oceans’ and the Gulf Stream. It is mesmerising. In just a few minutes, it is possible to visualise the entire surface circulation of the world’s oceans and there is a fantastic animation of the North Atlantic Current showing the heat flow. The myriad eddies disperse heat as the current drifts across the Atlantic, eventually warming the northern European shores. I learned about this in primary school, secondary school and doing my degree in oceanography but the full impact only hits me now when the whole thing is so graphic. And my admiration for our glider team who manage to navigate our slow moving glider through this incredibly complex system in real time. Well worth spending time on this; the ‘wow’ factor is inevitable so invite some friends round with a bottle of wine…
And as a postscript, the tekkies tell me that I could change the email pings for something less intrusive. I did the same on my iPhone by changing the ring tone to quacking ducks. Last year when I was out sailing, I woke up early in the morning desperately searching for my phone. But they were real ducks…
Wednesday, 11 April 2012
Diving in the Red Sea
This comes from Dahab on the Red Sea coast of Egypt. OK, it’s a holiday but in my business – and by the sea – you are never far from your vocation. It’s 37C when it's hot and a little less when it's cold and a few clouds drifted through the sky yesterday. I remember when I worked in Mexico and we had a cloudy morning one day and then the sun broke through ‘ruining a beautiful day’ in the words of a local.
I’ve been scuba diving for four days now, doing some of the familiar sites like ‘The canyon’ with the vertical descent into a great fissure, guarded by moray eels, down to a sandy floor at 32 metres. This was followed by ‘The Bells’, another vertical descent headfirst down a chimney, emerging through an archway at 26 metres onto a phenomenal 200m sheer drop-off in the open blue Red Sea. The geology, oceanography and biology of the Red Sea are extraordinary and its coral reefs remain relatively intact and apparently undamaged by the extraordinary warm years of late (in contrast there were huge losses in other parts of the planet). After emerging from the underwater archway at ‘The Bells’, we gradually worked our way up the coral encrusted drop-off, fleetingly escorted by trumpet fish, over a coral garden saddle into the ‘Blue Hole’. The Blue Hole is a like a circular Olympic-sized pool, over 100m deep, that natural processes have carved into the reef table. Apart from the 6m deep saddle, it has an archway connecting it to the sea at 58m. That’s far too deep for a recreational diver like me and some people have tried it at their peril (the monuments stand around the shore of the pool). Anyway, we were not going to do any of that dangerous stuff! The coral garden on the saddle is an amazing array of colourful corals with myriad coloured fish, coral boulders hiding puffer fish or poison-barbed lion fish, and pastel anemones shielding families of clown fish. We skirted the stark walls of the Blue Hole with a little flotilla of Russian tourists overhead, sploshing along with rented fins, masks and snorkels. Another dive completed and a Bedouin lunch with my Egyptian and Palestinian dive companions for the day.
At this point, I must tell you that I am not a hugely experienced professional diver. We have a whole team of them at SAMS and they are in another league. As an oceanographer, I spent most of my life at the surface, lowering stuff into the sea, or more likely in the office working on reports and admin. No, I learned to dive at the un-tender age of 59, in a dry suit in the cold waters of a Scottish sound. I did my advanced open water training here in the Red Sea half a year later and have never regretted it. And this trip to the Red Sea is really special because my 12-year old daughter Annie has completed her Padi Open Water course and today we had our first dive together.
Beyond the excitement of seeing the world I have talked about most of my professional life, there are more troubling aspects that present quite a dilemma. One of the reasons that people do not hold protection of the marine environment high on their ‘must do’ list is that they rarely experience it in person and it does not connect with their value system. The recreational diving experience should change that (certainly Annie doesn’t want to eat the groupers on sale in almost every restaurant here). But there are dozens of dive centres here and hundreds more along the entire Red Sea coast of Egypt (and not only Egypt). Diving does have an impact, not only through molestation of sea life but by direct contact with fragile corals, exposure of corals to the toxins in sun cream, effluent from hotels and other installations and removal of fish (legally and illegally) to feed tourists. And then there are the droves of untrained snorkellers and even people who scrunch their way over fragile reef tables with neoprene boots or even flip-flops because they can’t be bothered to swim. PADI training makes a strong point of avoiding coral contact and good buoyancy control but this skill isn’t easily learned and there are accidents, at least at first. So it’s hardly surprising that I can feel a palpable increase in the quality of the reef as I swim further and further away from entry points.
Last time I was here, I visited the Gabr-El-Bint reserve, inaccessible from the land, except by camel trail. Our boat was moored very carefully with lines to the shore and we completed an awe inspiring drift dive through an underwater landscape with some 85% coral cover and a big resident shoal of ‘milk fish’ (‘tourist sharks’ said one Egyptian colleague with a wry smile). I haven’t been able to return this time around but a local guide warned me that the site has already been noticeably damaged; anchor damage where increasing numbers of operators are mooring and ‘someone harpooned the milk fish’. OK, the site is still supposed to be fantastically beautiful but it is changing quickly (my last visit was less than two years ago). I am unconvinced that the word ‘reserve’ is offering the kind of protection that was envisaged when most maritime countries in the world signed up to the Johannesburg Declaration (2002) to create a globally representative network of marine protected areas by 2012 (no need to be smug, we haven’t achieved it in the UK yet either). Egypt does however, try to enforce CITES regulations strictly (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora); take diving trophies at your peril!
Back to this week. Yesterday, while Annie was doing her last Open Water dives with her instructor, we did a couple of dives in Moray Gardens, just South of Dahab. The second dive was a little challenging because of the strong downwelling cross-current below 15 metres, surprising my local dive guide. We had a very hard slog back and at one point had to pull ourselves up a boulder slope, hand over hand. But the great moment in the dive is when we saw a very large octopus, with a body almost the size of my head that made no attempt to hide. It changed colour a few times and then spectacularly altered its body form, imitating a rock with its skin transformed from the familiar smooth texture to a rough form covered with little ‘spikes’ – awesome!
I’ve been scuba diving for four days now, doing some of the familiar sites like ‘The canyon’ with the vertical descent into a great fissure, guarded by moray eels, down to a sandy floor at 32 metres. This was followed by ‘The Bells’, another vertical descent headfirst down a chimney, emerging through an archway at 26 metres onto a phenomenal 200m sheer drop-off in the open blue Red Sea. The geology, oceanography and biology of the Red Sea are extraordinary and its coral reefs remain relatively intact and apparently undamaged by the extraordinary warm years of late (in contrast there were huge losses in other parts of the planet). After emerging from the underwater archway at ‘The Bells’, we gradually worked our way up the coral encrusted drop-off, fleetingly escorted by trumpet fish, over a coral garden saddle into the ‘Blue Hole’. The Blue Hole is a like a circular Olympic-sized pool, over 100m deep, that natural processes have carved into the reef table. Apart from the 6m deep saddle, it has an archway connecting it to the sea at 58m. That’s far too deep for a recreational diver like me and some people have tried it at their peril (the monuments stand around the shore of the pool). Anyway, we were not going to do any of that dangerous stuff! The coral garden on the saddle is an amazing array of colourful corals with myriad coloured fish, coral boulders hiding puffer fish or poison-barbed lion fish, and pastel anemones shielding families of clown fish. We skirted the stark walls of the Blue Hole with a little flotilla of Russian tourists overhead, sploshing along with rented fins, masks and snorkels. Another dive completed and a Bedouin lunch with my Egyptian and Palestinian dive companions for the day.
At this point, I must tell you that I am not a hugely experienced professional diver. We have a whole team of them at SAMS and they are in another league. As an oceanographer, I spent most of my life at the surface, lowering stuff into the sea, or more likely in the office working on reports and admin. No, I learned to dive at the un-tender age of 59, in a dry suit in the cold waters of a Scottish sound. I did my advanced open water training here in the Red Sea half a year later and have never regretted it. And this trip to the Red Sea is really special because my 12-year old daughter Annie has completed her Padi Open Water course and today we had our first dive together.
Beyond the excitement of seeing the world I have talked about most of my professional life, there are more troubling aspects that present quite a dilemma. One of the reasons that people do not hold protection of the marine environment high on their ‘must do’ list is that they rarely experience it in person and it does not connect with their value system. The recreational diving experience should change that (certainly Annie doesn’t want to eat the groupers on sale in almost every restaurant here). But there are dozens of dive centres here and hundreds more along the entire Red Sea coast of Egypt (and not only Egypt). Diving does have an impact, not only through molestation of sea life but by direct contact with fragile corals, exposure of corals to the toxins in sun cream, effluent from hotels and other installations and removal of fish (legally and illegally) to feed tourists. And then there are the droves of untrained snorkellers and even people who scrunch their way over fragile reef tables with neoprene boots or even flip-flops because they can’t be bothered to swim. PADI training makes a strong point of avoiding coral contact and good buoyancy control but this skill isn’t easily learned and there are accidents, at least at first. So it’s hardly surprising that I can feel a palpable increase in the quality of the reef as I swim further and further away from entry points.
Last time I was here, I visited the Gabr-El-Bint reserve, inaccessible from the land, except by camel trail. Our boat was moored very carefully with lines to the shore and we completed an awe inspiring drift dive through an underwater landscape with some 85% coral cover and a big resident shoal of ‘milk fish’ (‘tourist sharks’ said one Egyptian colleague with a wry smile). I haven’t been able to return this time around but a local guide warned me that the site has already been noticeably damaged; anchor damage where increasing numbers of operators are mooring and ‘someone harpooned the milk fish’. OK, the site is still supposed to be fantastically beautiful but it is changing quickly (my last visit was less than two years ago). I am unconvinced that the word ‘reserve’ is offering the kind of protection that was envisaged when most maritime countries in the world signed up to the Johannesburg Declaration (2002) to create a globally representative network of marine protected areas by 2012 (no need to be smug, we haven’t achieved it in the UK yet either). Egypt does however, try to enforce CITES regulations strictly (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora); take diving trophies at your peril!
Back to this week. Yesterday, while Annie was doing her last Open Water dives with her instructor, we did a couple of dives in Moray Gardens, just South of Dahab. The second dive was a little challenging because of the strong downwelling cross-current below 15 metres, surprising my local dive guide. We had a very hard slog back and at one point had to pull ourselves up a boulder slope, hand over hand. But the great moment in the dive is when we saw a very large octopus, with a body almost the size of my head that made no attempt to hide. It changed colour a few times and then spectacularly altered its body form, imitating a rock with its skin transformed from the familiar smooth texture to a rough form covered with little ‘spikes’ – awesome!
Friday, 23 March 2012
Singing from the same song sheet
Today I attended the introductory seminar of our new artist in residence Andy Crabb. Andy is an accomplished film maker and his project “Òrain na Mara/ Songs of the Scottish Sea” will extend over a period of two years. He will be working with musicians Chris Stout & Catriona McKay to produce four short films and a number of more technical documentaries. The work will involve collaboration with SAMS’ scientists and local schools and is supported by investment from Creative Scotland.
Forty lengths of the pool put me in the right mood for a long day today but I left the seminar with an even bigger internal buzz. Andy showed us some of his earlier work including the films that were the backdrop to the band Suede at some of its biggest concerts. This is an exciting project; not at the periphery of SAMS’ activities but right at the core of what we stand for.
The latest progress report from Marine Scotland (the branch of Government that is responsible for the marine environment) highlights the public opinion surveys that we conducted as part of the EU project KnowSeas that I coordinate. These surveys, conducted by a major professional polling company in seven European countries, have given us unprecedented insights into the knowledge about the sea of working age citizens and their views on who is best able to manage the problems it is facing. We demonstrated that people were poorly informed about the sea and very sceptical about current EU and national institutions.
Sadly, younger people often seemed less informed and motivated than older generations. On the other hand, the older ‘baby boomer’ generation (to which I belong) is far more sceptical of institutions; a pathetic 8% of UK interviewees felt that the EU was competent to manage the marine environment. With 12%, the Government didn’t fare much better! Confidence in scientists was much higher though, well over 50% thought they were competent to manage the marine environment. All of this is ironic of course because, for the most part, scientists would have no wish to be managers and prefer to give their advice to the Government and the EU!
Clearly though, apart from the ‘democratic deficit’ there is a serious knowledge gap and difficulty to form values about the marine environment. After all, only a lucky few of us ever get to see below the surface. Interestingly, when we asked what aspect of the marine environment was most important, UK respondents uniquely highlighted marine landscapes whereas most others pointed to the climate and weather. So people do value the attractiveness of our seas and coasts but have little understanding of the submarine world.
Many of the scientists in SAMS are happy to engage in the work of informing the public through innovative and classical means despite being very hard worked, especially in the current economic climate. The second Festival of the Sea is about to begin and this provides a focal point for these activities and we appreciate the help of our sponsors and local people in this work. Soon we will also be inaugurating the Scottish Ocean Explorer Centre to help bring our science to the wider public but more about that later.
So that takes me back to Andy’s project. Here is an opportunity to help form new values by helping people to connect with ‘the great unseen’. Unlike classic documentary makers who use a carefully crafted narrative to guide the viewers, Andy’s artistic work is entirely based on the medium of images accentuated by music. In a world that is crowded with messaging, sales pitches and, dare I say it, propaganda, this art form opens the mind and stimulates the formation of values by not telling people what to think; no risk of feeling patronised by silence. And, as we saw in the recent Oscar triumph of the silent film “The Artist”, Hollywoodesque dogmas are being overthrown by people hungry for something ‘new’. I look forward to our first contribution to this genre and the reaction it provokes.
Tuesday, 6 March 2012
Is UK marine research on a slippery slope?
Last week I was part of an international team invited by the Dutch institute Deltares to conduct an audit of part of their science and technology. Deltares is a huge institution with some 900 staff working alongside the public sector facilitating applied science and knowledge transfer. It incorporated the former Delft Hydraulics with its mind blowing array of hydraulic test facilities, up to almost football pitch scale and a new flume that will be 5m wide and ten deep. It was good to see an emphasis on social science and policy advice; almost 90 people working in this sector alone. The Netherlands, like many other European countries, are seeing public sectors squeezed very hard and the economic relevance of funded science is coming under increasing scrutiny.
Not every country has the same attitude to science however. Germany has taken seriously what was once coined as the ‘Obama factor’ – a push for increased investment in science and technology as a motor for economic growth in the medium to long term. Maybe they are doing it even better than the Obama administration which has its own battles with the sometimes uncooperative Congress. Recently, the replacement was announced of the huge German polar research vessel ‘Polarstern’ – an investment of some €250 millions, dwarfing the UK’s recent controversial investment in the new RRS Discovery (we could have bought a fleet of three of them for the cost of the Polarstern!). The question on the table therefore is ‘are we seeing the decline of the UK’s marine research’?
Let’s have a look at some of the evidence: We are accustomed to measuring research in terms of published output. A few years ago, I was invited to chair a panel evaluating the effectiveness of a Swedish research council’s investment in marine science and some Swedish colleagues conducted a fascinating bibliometric study of ten years of publications from 1999-2008. The study looked at key marine science publications, some 38,000 publications from a database of over 10 million. Of these, 23% were from the USA, followed by 8.2% from the UK, 7% Canada, 5.8% Australia, 4.2% France, 4.1% Germany, then Spain, Japan and Italy. So far so good for the UK; we could be seen as punching hugely above our weight. But maybe that is because we have long insisted as measuring science by what is published in key journals rather than how the science is used in our strategic interest, economy and society. Germany does not simply invest in polar science to produce good publications but to increase the knowledge base in a way that can lead to new technologies and knowledge, access to markets, etc … and also for the societal good. And many of these investments are long term. I have witnessed huge investments in sophisticated studies of gas hydrates for example – giving Germany a head start in the field. And is it coincidence that Germany’s rather small slice of the North Sea was full of wind farms long before anybody else had developed them on such a large scale?
I am not trying to argue against high quality publication; quite the contrary, it is a survival game for us all. But the load groan from scientists when they were told that a small measure of impact would be considered in the next Research Evaluation Framework reveals the need for a culture shift that extends all the way to the core of UK science funding and the academic community. We need to look beyond our shores to see how other countries have benefitted from their investment in science, valued it and are – sometimes – prepared to plough more money back into it. Perhaps we can develop a new societal compact with benefits on all sides, an overall expansion of UK marine science and continued production of the key papers.
Comments?
Laurence Mee, 5 March, 2012
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)