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soph-n-ag-vcd · 7 years ago

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Solution to coral bleaching

Conserve water: The less water you use, the less runoff and wastewater will pollute our oceans.

Help reduce pollution: Walk, bike or ride the bus. Fossil fuel emissions from cars and industry raise lead to ocean warming which causes mass-bleaching of corals and can lead to widespread destruction of reefs.

Research what you put on your lawn: Although you may live thousands of miles from a coral reef ecosystem, these products flow into the water system, pollute the ocean, and can harm coral reefs and marine life.

Dispose of your trash properly: Don't leave unwanted fishing lines or nets in the water or on the beach. Any kind of litter pollutes the water and can harm the reef and the fish.

Support reef-friendly businesses: Ask the fishing, boating, hotel, aquarium, dive or snorkeling operators how they protect the reef. Be sure they care for the living reef ecosystem and ask if the organization responsible is part of a coral reef ecosystem management effort.

Plant a tree: Trees reduce runoff into the oceans. You will also contribute to reversing the warming of our planet and the rising temperatures of our oceans. Help us Plant a Billion.

Practice safe and responsible diving and snorkeling: Do not touch the reef or anchor your boat on the reef. Contact with the coral will damage the delicate coral animals, and anchoring on the reef can kill it, so look for sandy bottom or use moorings if available.

Volunteer for a coral reef cleanup: You don't live near a coral reef? Then do what many people do with their vacation: visit a coral reef. Spend an afternoon enjoying the beauty of one of the most diverse ecosystems on the Earth.

https://www.nature.org/ourinitiatives/urgentissues/oceans/coral-reefs/ways-to-help-coral-reefs/index.htm

Limiting the amount of nutrient run-off is the most significant action that needs to be taken. Recent advances in agricultural practices and additional government programs has seen a reduction in sediment and nutrient inputs into some coastal river systems, but a long lag time is expected before there are positive effects on marine water quality.

https://www.coolaustralia.org/challenges-and-solutions-for-the-great-barrier-reef/

Step one is to deal with localized threats. Coral mortality caused by ocean warming is widely misattributed to pollution, although there are a handful of places where sewage and sediment are indeed degrading reefs. Impacts related to intensive tourism, mostly caused by anchors or people standing on corals, also need to be managed.

This approach is promising. But to make a meaningful difference it needs to be drastically scaled up and better funded so that entire seascapes can be restored. There’s also the problem that we’re transplanting corals back into rapidly changing environments — which means they may not survive for long. All the threats that wiped corals out in the first place — disease, warming, acidification and hurricanes — are still present.

Coral restoration programs are largely based on volunteer labor, so there is ample opportunity for education and community engagement. For example, the innovative Force Blue project is training retired Special Forces soldiers to transplant endangered coral species. Many of these veterans, including former Navy SEALs, find applying their military training to a global conservation mission therapeutic. Working underwater requires total focus; to get the job done, it’s essential to stay in visual contact with your dive partners, monitor your instruments and keep track of large predators eyeing you as a potential snack.

There is also a growing effort to develop super corals that can withstand warming seas. In Florida, Hawaii and Australia, this is being done by collecting corals that survived bleaching that killed off most their neighbors. Traditional selective breeding is then used to increase thermal tolerance with new generations.

One of the oldest solutions is to restrict fishing to decrease the sensitivity of coral populations to climate change. The idea is that more intact food webs are more resilient to human disturbances. Unfortunately, tests on dozens of reefs indicate fishing bans don’t measurably help. The most striking example is the northern Great Barrier Reef off northeastern Australia. The reef is remote, protected from local impacts and has an abundance of top predators. But summer temperatures only about 3 degrees Fahrenheit higher than normal wiped out nearly half the reef’s corals in 2016.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theworldpost/wp/2018/01/09/coral-reefs/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.ad23f2bd5266

Reduce Your Home Energy Carbon Emissions

Insulate and seal your home. Reduce drafts and air leaks with caulk, insulation, and weather stripping. Many states offer programs and incentives to facilitate this, and a great example is Energy Upgrade California.

Appliances.Make energy efficiency a primary consideration when choosing new appliances like furnaces, air conditioning units, dishwashers, and refrigerators. ENERGY STAR labeled products are recognized as having superior energy efficiency.

Lighting. Turn off lights you’re not using and when you leave the room. Replace incandescent light bulbs with compact flourescent or LED ones.

Thermostat. Don’t set it too high or low. Install a programmable model to turn off the heat/air conditioning when you’re not home.

Solar. Add solar panels to the roof of your home. This costs a little more than the above options, but many providers offer financing options which minimize upfront costs. Two examples are SolarCity and SunRun. If you live in a state with a Net Metering law, you could eliminate your electricity bill or even earnmoney by selling electricity back to the grid.

Other Ways to Reduce Your Carbon Emissions

Water usage. Lower the amount of energy used to pump, treat, and heat water by washing your car less often, using climate-appropriate plants in your garden, installing drip irrigation so that plants receive only what they need, and making water-efficient choices when purchasing shower heads, faucet heads, toilets, dishwashers and washing machines.

Reuse and recycle. It has been estimated that 29% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions result from the “provision of goods,” which means the extraction of resources, manufacturing, transport, and final disposal of “goods” which include consumer products and packaging, building components, and passenger vehicles, but excluding food. By buying used products and reselling or recyling items you no longer use, you dramatically reduce your carbon emissions from the “provision of goods.”

Food. It has been estimated that 13% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions result from the production and transport of food. Buy local and eat a more diversified diet including less meat and dairy to reduce your carbon emissions resulting from the use of fossil fuel-based fertilizers, pesticides, and gas required to produce and transport of the food you eat.

Support clean energy sources. Whenever you can, advocate for clean alternatives to fossil fuels, such as wind, solar, geothermal, and appropriately designed hydroelectric and biomass energy projects.

https://cotap.org/reduce-carbon-emissions/

1. Change Your Lightbulbs

How often do you think about your lightbulbs? Chances are, not very often. An easy fix you can make that will help the planet every day is to switch all of the lights in your house to compact fluorescent bulbs. One bulb can reduce up to 1,300 pounds of carbon dioxide pollution during its lifetime. And if every house in the U.S. switched its bulbs, we could reduce the electricity spent on lighting by one half. Worth climbing up that ladder and whipping out your screwdriver, huh?

2. Unplug Your Gadgets

Completely powering off your gadgets isn't just good for your devices, it's good for the planet. What's even better is unplugging your chargers when they're not in use. If you're someone who always leaves your phone charger dangling from the wall, doesn't power off your cable box and forgets to put your computer on sleep mode, many of your tech behaviors can use some adapting. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, adopting these practices can save you $100 each year on your energy bill.

3. Take Public Transit or Carpool

According to The Rideshare Company, the average American spends 18 days of the year in a car, each car emitting its own weight in carbon dioxide. The benefits of carpooling are quite simple to see. One car uses less gas than two and much less than three. Similarly, riding the bus or train to work helps to slash down the number of cards on the road. Still looking to organize the perfect carpool? These apps can help you set one up.

4. Choose a Laptop Over a Desktop

Laptops, unlike desktop computers, are designed to be energy-efficient, because battery life is a major factor to laptop design. According to Energy Star, a laptop can be up to 80% more energy-efficient than a desktop. Energy-efficient LCD screens, hard drives, CPUs and adaptors all factor into making makes laptops much better tools for the planet.

5. Filter Your Own Water

If you still buy packaged bottled water, you're doing the planet a major disservice. Beyond the environmental toll of the plastic waste from each 16 ounce serving, consider just how far your water was transported before you bought it in the supermarket. If you live in most western countries, tap water is perfectly suitable for consumption, especially if you use a filtration pitcher.

6. Adjust Your Curtains and Thermostat

Simple adjustments to moderate the temperature in your house can make a big difference for the planet. If you keep your house two degrees warmer in the summer and two degrees cooler in the winter you can save big bucks on your energy bills. Similar, turning off your thermostat while you're not in your home can save you 15% on your energy bill. Check out the U.S. Department of Energy for more thermostat tips.

Similarly, keep your curtains open during the day in the winter to let in sunlight, and close them at night to keep in warmth. During the summer, close the curtains during the day to keep out extra sunlight and open them at night to moderate the temperature, or even open them to let in a cool breeze. There are several energy-efficient curtains on the market that use insulation to further monitor your home's temperature.

7. Buy Local Food

Love eating watermelon year-round? That's great, but chances are, it isn't grown anywhere near where you live during the winter. Purchasing foods that are both in season and grown locally can drastically cut down the carbon emissions of the vehicles used to transport your winter watermelon across the country. According to the Worldwatch Institute, food travels 1,500 miles on average between the farm and the supermarket. We bet you can find foods grown closer to your home if you try to find them.

8. Plant a Tree

This classic way to give back to the environment is one of the most efficient ways you can cut your carbon footprint. Trees provide shade and oxygen while consuming carbon dioxide. According to the Urban Forestry Network, a single young tree absorbs 13 pounds of carbon dioxide each year. That amount will climb up to 48 pounds annually as trees mature. Just one 10-year-old tree releases enough oxygen into the air to support two human beings.

9. Print or Digital, Be Mindful Reading the News

People have been debating the environmental costs of consuming news online versus reading the print paper since the beginning of the digital media revolution. Newspapers, according to one study, cause roughly their weight in carbon emissions. That said, surfing the web expends energy, the amount of which varies based on the device you use.

The best policy to adopt when it comes to news consumption is to be mindful. If you subscribe to a print paper, be sure to recycle your paper every day. If online news is your preferred medium, chose an unplugged laptop or e-reader, rather than a plugged-in device for the majority of your browsing time.

https://mashable.com/2013/10/22/reduce-carbon-footprint/#wjzmd5r8aiqi

The first step in nursing these important ecosystems back to health is decreasing the rate of climate change. "There's no scientific doubt that warming oceans are driving these dramatic increases in bleaching events," says Joe Pollock, the coral strategy director for The Nature Conservancy, a green nonprofit. "Slowing the rate of climate change is the single most important thing we can do to not only protect corals but keep systems alive around the world." However, this won't happen overnight, and we need to find a way to nurse coral back to health in the meantime.

One way we can start to do so is with policy. Ecologically protected areas, like the one established by then-president Obama in 2016—a nearly 600,000-square-mile expanse in Hawaii—regulate the amount of fishing that can happen around a reef and therefore increase its chance of survival.

As the oceans continue to warm and coral continues to die off, though, scientists are also banding together to find innovative new ways to take matters into their own hands.

"This is a field that's definitely growing," Pollock says of reef restoration. "People are starting to realize that no coral reefs on the face of the planet are immune to the degradation we are now seeing. What we're doing right now isn't enough."

"It's so depressing to see what's happening in the reefs," says Ruth Gates, Ph.D., previously a professor of ocean science who is now spearheading research on how reefs can survive a warmer future out of the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology. "Watching their decline has made me think much more comprehensively about how we can take science and use it to solve the problem rather than just monitor it. For me, having an avenue to try things that could help the prognosis is the only way I can live with being a coral biologist at this time."

Traditional reef restoration techniques include micro-fragmentation—breaking corals into tiny pieces that can regrow up to 25 times faster than they would otherwise—and propagation—promoting conditions for sexual reproduction in reefs. Pollock's team is now looking into how scientists can scale up these techniques to bring life back to massive ecosystems relatively quickly. Right now, they're focusing on the Caribbean, and the results are promising. He describes a scene out of St. Croix: healthy coral fragments dangling from what look like little pieces of PVC scattered throughout the ocean floor.

"We've been successful in developing technology to essentially be coral farmers. It's great, but it's only part of the solution. The work we're doing now is looking beyond one or two species to a suite of corals that are more representative of what's on the reef. We're using mathematical modeling that shows how patches of reef are connected, so we can target restoration efforts to get healthy coral to where they have the best potential to spread." To do so, they're training local divers, fishers, and volunteers to become involved in reef restoration and monitoring.

Stepping in where necessary.

Over in Hawaii, Dr. Gates' approach is less about setting up the conditions for nature to thrive and more about pinpointing ways science can move the process along. Her lab has started to breed what she refers to as "super coral" that can thrive in a warming world.

"Fifty percent of the world's reef have survived conditions that have killed the other 50 percent. What that tells you is that some corals are actually hardier than others," she explains of her research. "We should start to interfere. We should start breeding coral that we think has the greatest chance of surviving." Like humans, some coral are genetically blessed, so to speak, covered in plant cells that are more tolerant to changing temperatures. Her lab seeks out those healthy, hardy coral and breeds them with others that are too.

She's also looking for ways to transplant the microbiome from healthy coral over to unhealthy ones, in what she likens to a fecal transplant in humans. Lastly, her research is looking into whether immersing coral in a difficult environment can actually make it more resilient in the long-term.

"We know that if coral survive a really bad temperature disturbance, they kind of fix that in their memory as something that they're used to. When they see that same disturbance in the future, it doesn't seem so stressful to them," she says, describing how her team can introduce them into warm, acidic water in a controlled lab setting.

While her research is still in a relatively early phase, it, too, has shown promise over the last two and a half years. Her team has already successfully bred coral, and now they're starting to condition them and experiment with microbiome treatments. Some contest that this more sci-fi-esque approach is unnatural, but Gates says that it's the same type of gene selection we've been doing with our food and pets for years now. And in this case, it's necessary given the ticking clock. "We can train corals to be better. But we have to do this now, and we have to be very proactive."

Both Gates and Pollock are hopeful that advancements in coral science can restore reefs before it's too late.

"We may not have the ultimate solution yet, but when you get lots of people coming to the table with different skill sets, the chances of solving the problem are increased," says Gates. "You have to be optimistic. I think people can solve things. Let's stop worrying about the scale of it and just get started."

https://www.mindbodygreen.com/articles/coral-reef-restoration

As they spent days working through a stretch of ocean off the Australian state of Queensland, Dr. Cantin and his colleagues surfaced with sample after sample of living coral that had somehow dodged a recent die-off: hardy survivors, clinging to life in a graveyard.

“We’re trying to find the super corals, the ones that survived the worst heat stress of their lives,” said Dr. Cantin, a researcher with the Australian Institute of Marine Science in Townsville.

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The goal is not just to study them, but to find the ones with the best genes, multiply them in tanks on land and ultimately return them to the ocean where they can continue to breed. The hope is to create tougher reefs — to accelerate evolution, essentially — and slowly build an ecosystem capable of surviving global warming and other human-caused environmental assaults.

The research here is part of a worldwide push that is growing increasingly urgent. After decades of accumulating damage, followed by a huge die-off in 2015 and 2016, some scientists say they believe half the coral reefs that existed in the early 20th century are gone.

Instead of standing around watching the rest of them die, a vanguard of reef experts is determined to act.

In Florida, they are pioneering techniques that may allow the rapid re-establishment of reefs killed by heat stress. In Hawaii, they are studying the biology of corals that somehow managed to cling to life as an earlier generation of people dumped raw sewage into a magnificent bay. In the Caribbean, countries are banding together to create a genetic storage bank for corals, a backup plan if today’s reefs all die.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/20/climate/coral-great-barrier-reef.html

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