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Fisheries Management: A Possible Venue for Navigating Fisheries Conflicts in the Indian Ocean
›A significant increase in fisheries-related conflicts in the Indian Ocean since 2000 is heightening regional tensions. These conflicts have ranged from purely verbal and diplomatic disputes to armed attacks on fishing vessels by coast guards and navies. These disputes are most often low-intensity, but constitute true “wild card” scenarios in which competing powers’ navies reach the brink of engagement due to the actions of third parties that they neither command nor control.
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To Reduce Future Conflicts over Water, Reconceptualize “Shared Waters”
›In the years ahead, climate change and the proliferation of new technologies and information availability will require us to reshape our vision of shared waters. Because these megatrends are experienced in concert, the opportunities, challenges, and uncertainties for shared water management will continue to compound over time.
While it is impossible to know precisely how shared water will look in the future, we should already be working to expand how we conceptualize shared waters, address inequities embedded within water management, and develop criteria and processes that successfully identify and include non-traditional shared water actors in decision-making. These shifts will strengthen our ability to generate creative and sustainable management strategies and help us avoid water-related conflicts.
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Our Ocean and Cryosphere Under Threat
›Evidence of the effects of climate change continues to mount. We see it in extreme weather events, including droughts and intense hurricanes and cyclones, in biodiversity loss, and in erratic weather patterns around the globe. While many of these impacts rightfully make it into front-page news, climate change is also profoundly affecting parts of our planet that we do not understand well—the ocean and the cryosphere.
In September 2019, the International Panel on Climate Change issued a Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate (SROCC). The report provides a new and sobering analysis of current conditions, as well as projections into the future. Produced by more than 100 authors from 36 countries, the SROCC painstakingly reviews the latest scientific literature, referencing some 7,000 scientific publications in all.
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Two Divergent Paths for Our Planet Revealed in New IPCC Report on Oceans and Cryosphere
›The world’s ocean and cryosphere have been absorbing the heat from climate change for decades, said Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Vice Chair Ko Barrett at a recent Wilson Center event on the IPCC’s Special Report on Oceans and Cryosphere. “The consequences for nature and humanity are sweeping and severe,” she said.
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Upcycling ‘Beach Snow’: Clearing Taiwan’s Oyster Farming Marine Debris
›“If you go to some Taiwan beaches, you can see snow,” said Chieh-Shen (Jason) Hu, Ocean Initiative Coordinator for Taiwan’s Society of Wilderness, a 6,000-member organization similar to Sierra Club. Hu was referring to pervasive Styrofoam marine debris from western Taiwan’s oldest industry, oyster aquaculture.
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Nothing Marvelous About Plastic Waste: China’s Pollution Endgame
›Our world is drowning in plastic pollution with nearly 8 million tons of single-use plastic and some 700,000 tons of abandoned fishing gear leaking into marine ecosystems each year. Plastic waste endangers marine species. For example, animals become entangled in abandoned nets. Marine birds, fish, whales and sharks are sickened or die when they accidentally ingest plastic. According to a 2017 study, around 90 percent of single-use plastic that pollutes our oceans comes from 10 rivers, 6 of which are in China. No Avenger superheroes can make this problem go away; rather the world needs heroic efforts by consumers, businesses, and governments to curb these plastic leaks. Encouragingly, China’s war on pollution has catalyzed new bottom-up activism and top-down policies that are starting to spur action to reduce plastic leakage.
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With Knowledge Comes Responsibility: A Conversation with Sylvia Earle on the Ocean
›“Having a planet that is suitable for us has taken a very long time, like four and a half billion years,” said Sylvia Earle, Explorer in Residence at the National Geographic Society, in a podcast interview with Ambassador David Balton before a recent Wilson Center event on marine protected areas. “It’s taken us about four and a half decades to significantly unravel, deplete, [and] modify those precious systems that really have little margin of error.”
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Concerns Rise Over Governance Gap in Arctic
›“We’re attempting to do something that’s never been done before in world history,” said Senator Angus King (I-ME). “The peaceful development of a major new physical asset.” He spoke of the Arctic Ocean at the 8th Symposium on the Impacts of an Ice-Diminishing Arctic on Naval and Maritime Operations. The symposium was hosted by the Wilson Center’s Polar Institute, in partnership with the U.S. Arctic Research Commission, U.S. National Ice Center, Arctic Domain Awareness Center, Patuxent Partnership, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, and the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center.
Showing posts from category oceans.