Updates from Cancun!

Last week I wrote about the success of the Brazilian government in reducing Amazon deforestation, from over 27,000 km2 in 2004 to below 6,500 km2 in 2010. This was a huge victory when one recalls the media coverage of the annual burning of the Amazon rainforest in the 1980s and 1990s to clear land for cattle ranching and agri-business. For example, between May 2002 and May 2003, Brazil lost more than 24,000 square kilometres of forest – an area larger than Israel. People from around the world felt so helpless as they watched those massive forest fires on TV each year. That is why there was such rejoicing when people learned that Brazil had cut its deforestation so dramatically..

This is this opposing this new legislation is so important. When all the greedy, cattle ranchers, soya agribusiness and loggers have vanished from the face of the earth – their legacy of pain, destruction and death will unfortunately remain.

EUREKA MOMENTS AT THE UN CLIMATE TALKS!

Acronyms

This is my fifth time at the COPs – the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNDFCC) and the Conference of the Parties of the Kyoto Protocol (KP). These meetings are always very exciting, but there are a number of things which make it difficult to follow what is going on. The first is the constant use of acronyms in both official and unofficial discussions and texts. One could listen to a 10-minute conversation in English on the floor of the COP or in one of the many restaurants and not have an idea what was being discussed. It is like learning a new language. And the number of acronyms keeps increasing at each COP. It is like going back to language school for a refresher course to be told by your teacher that a lot more new words have appeared in the intervening year. The only place I could find a Glossary of Terms was at the stall of the International Petroleum Industry Environmental Conservation Association. I wouldn’t like one of my environmental friends to see me browsing at that particular stall. I would be seen to be supping with the Devil and would probably be immediately excommunicated from the environmental community!

Keeping many balls in the air

The second difficulty is that there are so many different discussions taking place simultaneously. These focus around the topics such as the Common Vision, Mitigation, Clean technologies, Adaptation and financial arrangements, to mention just a few. It is almost impossible to keep abreast of a single set of discussions and negotiations, not to mention them all. To add to the complexity, the texts for negotiation have often more brackets than free texts. The bracketed texts have not been agreed on and, therefore, need to be negotiated. The negotiators have to bear in mind that a change in one set of texts may have implications for other texts. It can take an hour or longer to remove one or two of these brackets, so that text can move up along a supply line to officials at a higher level. Eventually the Ministers will agree to accept or reject the wording. Newcomers find this exacerbating. I was chatting with a delegate for Malawi on my way to the Cancun Messe on December 8th 2010. He is an agriculturalist by profession and therefore a practical man who likes to see things completed. He was finding the semantic tug-of-war between, for example, “will” and “shall” difficult to stomach, given the seriousness of climate change.

Inclusive processes are valuable, but not easy

On the positive side, an inclusive, multilateral negotiation process gives each nation an equal voice, no matter how small in size, population or wealth. Furthermore, it is one of the few areas where bodies from the Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) can have an input into the discussions, especially during the first week. Many of these people have huge expertise so their contributions are very valuable. There are also stalls or booths where various Scientific and CSO groups share their research or work with anyone who is willing to drop by. Some of these groups are well-known charities, or environmental organisations such as Greenpeace, Friends of The Earth, Caritas Internationalis or the Tyndall Institute.

One thing is certain at COP – there is an abundance of information. Some might say there is even too much. But without good information from the physical sciences on their current understanding of climate change, to how governments or charities are responding to it in the field, good decisions could not be made. Decisions based on bad data will exacerbate rather than solve a problem. One day I attended a side event organised by the government of Pakistan on the devastating floods in August 2009. I had followed this appalling tragedy in the media and also through contacts with Columban colleagues. Still, I got good firsthand account of the floods which inundated one fifth of the country, destroyed tens of thousands of hectares of arable land and displaced 20 million people. Many of these are still living in makeshift shacks away from their homes.

Can nation states deal with complex global problems?

This is the kind of background against which countries are trying to work out some way of reducing the release of greenhouse gases (GHG) into the atmosphere and also designing institutions to help and support people who are, even now, experiencing the effects of climate change. One of the major problems is that climate change is a global challenge, but the only instrument we have to address it is through negotiations between nation states – political structures which emerged in the 18th century, but are poorly designed to deal with global issues. Naturally, countries with similar profiles or interests often join together in negotiating blocks. The difficult is that they negotiate to protect their own national interest instead of working from a perspective that climate change will affect everyone. Of course, the poor, who have done least to cause the problem, will suffer most.

In the midst of all of these swirl of meetings and frenetic activity I often find that a particular moment, happening or encounter gives me an insight into what is happening, which is different from what I glean from the considerable body of information available in books, pamphlets, website or DVDs.

My eureka moments

The word eureka comes from the Greek word eureka meaning ‘I have found something’. Tradition has it that the famous Greek mathematician, Archimedes of Syracuse, uttered these words when he discovered the principle of buoyancy which is called Archimedes Principle. At the Nairobi COP, my eureka moment came after attending a seminar on carbon markets, which were being promoted as a way to get the private sector to engage in alleviating climate change. Afterwards, one of the people who had been making the presentation for a global financial corporation, approached me and asked whether I had any money to invest, because I could make a killing on the carbon markets. The goal of reducing carbon emissions had somehow slipped out of view, to be replaced by another mechanism to make easy money.

Cancun is not sustainable

In Cancun three things struck me that put the negotiations into context. First of all, Cancun is a resort city on the Gulf of Mexico. There is a lot of talk here about carbon sinks, especially forests. In 1974, before the World Bank began to fund the tourist development here at Cancun, the area was forested with a number of small communities, fishing villages, mangroves forests and flourishing coral reefs. Fast forward 36 years and there are now 500 major hotels here and 80,000 hotel rooms.

The ecological cost has been horrendous. Iglesias-Prieto, a marine eco-physicist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Puerto Morelos, estimates that in the state of Quintana Roo which includes Cancun, mangrove forests are being lost at about 4% per annum. That means a loss of 150,000 hectares each year. With the mangroves removed, the beaches are regularly devastated by storm surge each year. In 2009, Cancun spent $20 million shipping sand to refurbish their beaches.

The human cost of this tourist explosion may only be beginning. In early November 2010, an explosion in one of the hotels killed five Canadians tourists and injured 20 more. Though the investigation into the cause of the accident has not been completed, many people are saying that it was probably as a result of gases released by decaying mangroves on which the hotel was hastily built. If this proves to be true, many more explosions can be expected in the near future. According to Barbara Bramble an adviser to the National Wildlife Federation in Washington DC, when the building boom began in Cancun in the mid-1980s, “mangroves covered all the coastal area. They have just been paved over. This is the star example of how not to build a mass tourist mecca. It is an ecological mistake that should never have happened.”

There is a lot of talk at the negotiations about the vulnerability of low lying islands or coastal areas. The Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), is making a very good case for immediate support because in some cases they are already being negatively impacted by climate change. Even a one-metre rise would endanger many of them. But I heard no one in Cancun saying that this tourist city will probably share that fate and become a ghostly submerged testimony to the ecological madness of a different era.

The second insight also focuses on Cancun. On Monday I attended a series of lectures on Ethics and Climate Change. The venue was Hotel Riu Cancun. I took a bus from Cancun Messe, where the CSO groups and stalls are located, down the coastal strip where all the hotels are built one after another. Many of the 500 hotels have familiar names such as Hyatt Regency Cancun, Holiday Inn Cancun and others in local ownership. Some of the facades are pretty garish, but to be fair that’s probably a question of taste. However, everything which used in the hotels – from the food to the water – has to be brought in from outside. On the way down I saw sprinklers dampening lawn after lawn, even though I am told that water is becoming a major problem because so much is being drawn from the lake and local aquifer.

I felt uncomfortably chilly in the room during the seminar because the air conditioner was turned up so high. I asked about it and was told that’s how the guests like it. So, from an ecological perspective the Cancun tourist strip is a disaster. Without huge amounts of fossil fuel it could not function at all.

But that is only part of the damage. Iglesias-Prieto points out that pollution from pig farms, golf courses, new roads and the destruction of the mangroves is all seriously degrading the water quality. Nearly all the human waste water is “deep injected” below the drinking water aquifer. This might have seemed to be a good idea 25 years ago, the problem now is that this waste water is seeping up through the rocks and making its way into the aquifer. In terms of the vision or paradigm which the COP is attempting to shape, Cancun and hundreds of others like it across the world are dinosaurs. By the way, I found the discussion at the Ethic Forum very stimulating. Their key objective was how to get ethical language into the negotiation documents, which is one of the reasons I am here.

There is a growing consensus that the average global temperature should not be allowed to rise above 1.5o C. This would involve reducing the current amount of CO2 in the atmosphere from 389 parts per mission (ppm), to something like 350ppm. Such a move would mean reducing carbon emissions by more than 30% for rich countries by 2020. This, in turn, would demand a much less affluent lifestyle for the majority of people in Northern countries. The expectation of spending a week or so each year in a resort such as Cancun would not be on the cards. So, while participants here discuss different climate scenarios, no one is saying that the low-carbon world we are striving to create will not be an affluent one.

Huge ecological footprint

I remember during the height of the Celtic Tiger in Ireland there were numerous seminars in Dublin hotels encouraging ordinary people to buy a second home in Spain, Portugal, Latvia, Hungary and even as far away as Turkey or Thailand. People were told that the property was cheap, Ryanair will be flying into an airport close by, and the bank manager will advance the money. We will not be able to enjoy that kind of lavish living in a post-carbon world, where the demands of equity will dictate that poor countries have a moral right to use their fair share of carbon in order to move people out of poverty. I have never heard anyone at any COP say that, in low -carbon-based economy, affluence is doomed. In fact one often hears the opposite, namely that a move to a green economy will promote economic growth and a new kind of affluence.

This is a new and strange kind of alchemy. If, as ecologists tell us, our ecological footprint at the moment is once-and-half what the planet can support with only 6.7 billion people, how will the planet cope with a population of 9 billion affluent people by 2050? As I walked back through the tourist city I was convinced that it, and many more similar tourist cities around the world, are facing extinction. There is also the social apartheid – most of the workers are Mexican, while the tourists are from the U.S., Canada, Japan and Brazil. But that discussion is for another day.

I have often been critical of the Holy See’s lack of engagement with ecological issues. A case in point is that the Holy See, while here in Cancun with observer status, is not issuing a statement, though one could be helpful in breaking the deadlock on a number of fronts. I am reliably informed that this decision was made in Rome, presumably by the Secretariat of State. If the meeting was on divorce, abortion, same-sex marriages, I am sure the Holy See would make a contribution. Still, the Catholic Church is one of the few organisations which has understood what the lifestyle demands of a new sustainable world will be. In Peace with God the Creator, Peace with All Creation, the late Pope John Paul II wrote: “modern society will find no solution to the ecological problem unless it takes a serious look at its lifestyle. In many parts of the world society is given to instant gratification and consumerism while remaining indifferent to the damage which this causes ….Simplicity, moderation and discipline as well as a spirit of sacrifice, must become a part of everyday life, lest all suffer the negative consequences of the careless hubris of a few.”

Pope Benedict, in a document published on January 1st 2010, entitled, If You Want to Cultivate Peace, Protect Creation, repeats the same message. In No. 11 he writes, “it is becoming more and more evident that the issue of environmental degradation challenges us to examine our life-styles and the prevailing models of consumption and production, which are often unsustainable from a social, environmental and even economic point of view. We can no longer do without a real change of outlook which will result in new life-styles, “in which the quest for truth, beauty, goodness and communion with others for the sake of common growth are factors which determine consumer choices, savings and investment.”

The third eureka moment happened in a very different space. At both Cancun Messe and the Moon Palace there are meditation rooms. I spend most of my time at this COP at Cancun Messe and have popped into the mediation room at least once each day. During each of my visits I have not seen another person in the room. I remember after the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro talking to the Brazilian economist Marcos Arruda. Marcos felt that there would have been a much better outcome, if more philosophers and less economists and politicians had been present at the meeting. At least philosophers, in style of Socrates, would ask the questions which everyone else fears and avoids.

There is no doubt in my mind that people here at Cancun, government parties, members of the CSO organisations and scientists are working very hard around the clock trying to tease out viable solutions to climate change. Their effort is huge and I salute them, however, one cannot help wondering whether it might be somewhat easier if they took 30 minutes a day to settle down and meditate. Maybe some of the solutions might emerge from silence rather than a frenzy of activity.

There was another aspect of the meditation room which intrigued me. There were no chairs. It would appear that those who arranged the meditation room believed that meditation is primarily for the Asian religious traditions, where people can squat in lotus-like postures on the ground for long periods of time. Almost 30 years ago, I spent six weeks in an Ashram in Southern India and had no problem sitting on the ground as I had been used to that position during the Eucharist at the small chapel in Mindanao State University in Marawi City were I was assigned at the time. But time has taken its toll on my lower back and hips which means even the half –lotus position is no longer possible. Now any meditating I do is sitting upright in a chair. So, I felt discriminated against by those who organised the mediation room. Yes, in terms of ideas, it is very good one, but in terms of getting it right for every potential user, I would reluctantly have to fail them. Maybe this is a metaphor for the whole COP.

As I write on Thursday morning, December 9th 2010, the mood here at Cancun has changed from quiet optimism to brooding pessimism, given the slow progress of the negotiations. The Japanese have come under huge pressure to soften their stand on a second Kyoto commitment period, but they are sticking to their guns. Many feel that with only two days left for the negotiations, little will be achieved. Most difficult issues will be kicked to touch to be decided in South Africa in 2011. But COPs have a bad habit of kicking to touch, but never throwing the ball back in again to resume play.

Some are hoping that there might be an agreement on issues such as REDDs so that, at least, there is some tangible result from all the work and effort here at Cancun.

During most of the Presidency of George W Bush, the administration was either promoting climate sceptics or hindering global consensus and action on climate change. The election of Barack Obama appeared to introduce a new era in the US’s approach to climate change because the president himself both knew what was involved scientifically and seemed willing to do something about it. By mid 2009 the US appeared to be moving towards ambitious climate change policies with the passage of a comprehensive climate change bill in the US House of Representatives.

Then in December 2009 expectations were high that Copenhagen would complete the Bali Road Map and develop an ambitious, legally binding treaty to reduce green house gas emissions (GHG) and thus tackle climate change. Trust between the Parties to both the UN Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol broke down in Copenhagen when the Danish Presidency seemed to abandon the multi-lateral negotiation process in favour of cobbling together an Accord which was negotiated by a select handful of countries. The Copenhagen Accord did at least acknowledge that climate change is the greatest challenge facing humankind, and that steps must be taken so that the mean global temperature will not rise above two degrees Celsius. But there were no binding emission targets, timelines or sanctions. All that was asked of the Parties was that they make voluntary pledges to limit greenhouse emissions. A recent study by The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) entitled The Emissions Gap Report makes it very clear that current pledges would not reach the target of two degrees Celsius set by the Accord.

The emergence of the “Tea Party” complicated things further. Many of the “Tea Party” candidates, who were climate deniers, were well funded by right wing libertarians associated with the Republican Party. Some claimed that climate change was a conspiracy dreamed up to promote industry in China and India at the expense of US companies. This group took votes not just from Democrats but also from moderate-leaning Republicans, several of whom lost their seat in the election.

The mid-term election in the United States on November 2nd 2010, was not just a bad day for the Democratic Party, it also saw the election of a host of climate sceptics. This will make it much more difficult for President Obama to get an energy or climate bill through the US Congress during the next two years.

“With the possible exception of Tiger Woods, nothing has had a worse year than global warming. We have discovered that a good portion of the science used to justify “climate change” was a hoax perpetrated by leftist ideologues with an agenda.” – Todd Young, new congressperson from Indiana.

“I think we ought to take a look at whatever the group is that measures all this, the IPCC, they don’t even believe the crap.” – Steve Pearce, new congressperson from New Mexico

“There isn’t any real science to say we are altering the climate path of the earth.” – Roy Blunt, new senator from Missouri.

What about the science of climate change which many of these new members of Congress are dismissing? In 1999, Peter Stott, who was then head of climate modelling at the British Met Office’s, Myles Allen from Oxford University and a number of meteorologists published an article in the journal Nature. They based their predictions on the range of temperature change for the period between 2000 and 2040 on temperature data which had been collected in the period between 1946 and 1996. They then drew a graph representing the range of predicted outcomes for that period with a dotted line indicating the most likely outcome. The graph predicted that there would be a 0.8 degrees rise in temperature in 2010, when compared with 1946. This is exactly what has happened. So, in that stringent test, the science has been vindicated.

All the denial in the world will not stop the processes of Nature. The US government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that the first eight months of 2010 were as hot as the first eight months of 1998 – the warmest ever recorded. But there is a crucial difference. In 1998, there was a record El Niño – the warm phase of the natural Pacific temperature oscillation. The 2010 El Niño was smaller (an anomaly peaking at roughly 1.8C, rather than 2.5C), and brief by comparison to those of recent years. Since May the oscillation has been in its cool phase (La Niña). Even so, June, July and August this year were the second warmest on record.

On the positive side, the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) reported that GHG emission declined during the period 2008 – 2010. This was a result of the economic downturn and the conversion of some coal-fired utilities to natural gas. Another positive factor was the Obama economic stimulus package (the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act). This directed 18% of the total US$787 billion to climate change and energy projects. The five largest green allocations, in descending order, are renewable forms of energy, energy efficiency, transit and high-speed rail, and the modernisation of the power grid. This injection of capital was very important as ‘green’ energy companies were beginning to row back financially because of the recession.

While serious movement at the Federal level is being hampered by politicians in Washington promoting corporate vested interests, there has been quite a bit of movement at State and local level. 41 states have established greenhouse gas registers. In addition, nearly two-thirds of the states are involved in one of three regional initiatives for capping emissions. The three are the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), The Western Climate Initiative (WCI) and the Midwestern Greenhouse Gas Reduction Accord) MGGRA). While all of the three have relative modest targets the combined scale is significant.

Despite the dubbing which the Democrats received in the mid-term elections, Californians voted down Proposition 23, which was designed to suspend AB 32’s provisions until unemployment fell below 5.5%. The Republican candidate for the Governorship, Meg Whitman promised to impose a one-year moratorium on A 32 if elected. She was defeated by Democrat Jerry Brown, a longtime supporter of environmental initiatives, even though she spent a fortune on her election campaign. Furthermore, Proposition 32 was defeated by a large majority, despite a well-funded campaign backed by out-of-state fossil fuel interests and the “Tea Party.”

Participants, particularly from the CSOs, are hoping that the US doesn’t throw its weight around this week. Any effort by the Obama Administration to withhold funding from countries which have been critical of the Copenhagen Accord will backfire. It will only annoy countries of the South and possibly derail any substantive negotiations. The main media focus on Wikileaks documents last week was on the embarrassment felt by US politicians and diplomats because of comments they had made on fellow politicians and diplomats right across the world on what they thought were secure confidential cables. But WikiLeaks cables also show the extent to which the US was willing to put pressure on those nations which were critical of the Copenhagen Accord.

This is some of the background to the US presence here at Cancun. Like the Chinese, thus far they have not raised their voice too loudly. A lot will be revealed in the coming week.

Some of the above technical data is from A Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) Policy Brief distributed here at Cancun. The rest is my own gleaned from a variety of sources.

Even though the displacement of people, often on a permanent basis, always appears on any list of the consequences of climate change, little has been done to address their plight. The first assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR1), stated that the single greatest impact of climate change may well be the mass migration of humans, a phenomenon which is now being called –“climigration.”

The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change published in 2006, estimates that the figure could be as high as 250 million people. Despite these enormous numbers (and others would even project a figure of 500 million climate-induced migrants), these people have yet to receive significant attention at any of the COPs to date. Even if one accepts the 200 million figure, this is ten times the entire population of documented refugees and internally displaced people today.

And as yet, there are no policy measures to address “climigration”; in fact, there isn’t an agreed term for these displaced people. Many object to the term environmental or climate change “refugees,” because of the meaning of the term “refugee” is enshrined in international agreements such as the 1951 Refugee Covenant. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the International Organisation for Migration (IMO) have advised against using terms such “climate refugees” or “environmental refugees” because they have no legal basis in international refugee law. They advise that the terms be avoided so as not to undermine the international legal regime for the protection of refugees. Under the present rules for climate-induced migrants to be considered as refugees there would have to be evidence that their governments were intentionally destroying the environment and livelihoods of these people, which is very seldom the case.

One thing that must be kept in mind in all this discussion is that the people who are forced to migrate because of the massive changes which climate change has brought about in their tradition habitat, did little to cause these problems in the first instance.. Rather, the impact has occurred because of the actions of other people in other parts of the globe who have burned and continue to burn fossil fuel. These people, whether from the coastline of Bangladesh or the Maldives, have a right to be resettled somewhere. In view of the causes of mass climate-induced migration, the potential numbers involved and the fact that the possibilities of returning to their original homes are virtually nil, these issues need to be drawn into the migration management policies and practices debate.

One real lacuna is that in international law there is no legal framework for dealing with states or territories which simply disappear as a consequence of a rise in sea-levels. This means that there is no legal framework at the moment for dealing with the status and rights of people whose state disappeared. Some precedence, such as the African Union Convention for the Protections and Assistance of Internally Displaced Persons in Africa, which was signed in Kampala in October 2009, might be helpful. The Economist stated that the “most significant bit of the convention is the recognition accorded to climate change migrants.”

The historical records show that the United States is responsible for 29% of GHG emissions, the countries comprising the EU for 26% and Russia for 8%. Developing countries and emerging economies are responsible for 24%, though, of course, that percentage is rising as their economies expand.

There is also an urgent need to recognise in international law the unique situation of climate-induced migrants, seeing that none of the traditional categories or legal frameworks appears to be of much help to them. It is time to develop a new category before the problem becomes overwhelming. The Stern Review constantly states that the cost of inaction on climate change will be far higher the longer we put off doing something concrete about it. The same logic applied directly to the situation of climate-induced migration.

Furthermore, the UNFCCC should include strong human rights language as a guiding principle in any post-Kyoto agreement, because a rights-based approach establishes procedural standards for government policies and international agencies. There would seem to be a need for the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the UNFCCC to co-operate more closely in developing guidelines for designing appropriate adaptation polices.

I have written this article, not because I have any great expertise in working with migrants, but because I am aware that many Regions and Mission Units in the Columban Society are addressing the current needs of migrants and refugees. As is obvious from this article, this is a new area and there are many more questions than answers. But I believe a start must be made because there is no doubt in my mind but that this will become a major issue in the not-too-distant future.

The oceans have a very special place in the story of the Universe. To many of us, they are just there and seem ordinary and common place. But we can truly appreciate their significance when we view them as a special aspect of the unfolding of the universe itself. As far as we know, liquid water is found nowhere else in the Universe. Water vapour and ice have been found on other planets, but only on planet Earth have the oceans been created and maintained in their liquid form for four billion years. Oceans were probably on the Red planet (Mars), but they have long since vanished.

Many people are now aware that the increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, since the beginning of the industrial revolution, is contributing to the rise in the ocean levels through thermal expansion and through melting glaciers in the Antarctic and Greenland.

Normally the surface waters of the oceans are slightly alkaline with a pH greater than 7. However, because they are absorbing more CO2, the oceans are about 30% less alkaline today than they were before the industrial revolution. The consequences of this are very significant and worrying on a number of fronts. Less alkaline water reduces the availability in seawater of carbonate minerals such as calcite and aragonite. These minerals are important in the formation of corals, shellfish, marine plankton and fish skeletons. The physiology, development and even survival of these creatures is thereby threatened.

They are very important for humans also. It is estimated that world-wide, 500 million people depend on corals reefs for coastal protection, food, tourism and other forms of income. Economists estimate that reefs and their products are worth between US$30 and $172 billion per annum. In Hawaii alone, for example, the tourism generated by the coral reefs brings in US $364 million per annum.

Pteropods are tiny swimming sea snails which are abundant in the oceans. There are often thousands of individual snails per cubic metre.2 They are an important element in the marine food chain as they form the diet of zooplankton, salmon, herring, and baleen whales. The question is, Will they thrive in an increasingly acidic oceans, because their calcium carbonate shells may not develop properly? Some predict that as early as 2050, pteropods may be unable to form shells which would threaten their own survival and the species which depend on them.3.

If the oceans become more acidic there will be a serious decline in biodiversity, and thereby affecting a whole raft of species, including humankind as the oceans are less able to supply us with food. Reducing GHG gas emissions, especially CO2 is not just important in tackling climate change, it is also necessary if we want to protect the fruitfulness of our oceans on which we all depend.5