Yesterday I realized what it might feel like to live in an acidifying ocean. After waking up to red hazy light filtering through my blinds, I prepared to take my daily coffee walk — one of my COVID-19 rituals to break up the monotony of working from home in my small bedroom. Upon stepping outside, my first inhalation brought acrid smoke and ash from 4.7 million acres of land burning in another country into my lungs. 

The air we breathe in Vancouver right now is unhealthy. It is filled with toxins that compromise our respiratory systems. It brings sadness and fatigue into our minds and bodies, and most importantly, it does not affect us equally. Portions of our population — the elderly, the young and the immunocompromised — are at a significantly higher risk of acute health impacts caused by the smoke, which further increases their vulnerability to COVID-19.

This experience is exactly what is happening to our ocean and the millions of sea creatures who are trying to breathe, grow and survive in increasingly corrosive and acidic seawater.

Ocean acidification is caused by the growing concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, which increases the amount of carbon dioxide that dissolves into the sea. Once it enters the ocean, carbon dioxide interacts with water molecules and undergoes two chemical reactions, the outcome of which is increased seawater acidity and altered carbonate chemistry. 

Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution (circa 1760), the ocean has increased in acidity by approximately 30 per cent — a direct result of humans burning fossil fuels. Because our carbon emissions have accelerated immensely over the past two generations and are projected to continue accelerating under business-as-usual scenarios, by 2100 we can expect a 150 per cent increase in seawater acidity. In essence, over the next 80 years we can expect our ocean’s acidity to increase five times faster than it did over the past 260 years.

In certain places in the world, these changes in seawater chemistry are more significant due to localized water circulation patterns. For example, upwelling during spring and summer months along the Pacific Northwest coast brings naturally acidic waters from deep in the ocean to the surface. This means that when we consider the ever-increasing baseline acidity caused by ocean acidification, seawater around Vancouver and down the burning coastal states of Washington, Oregon and California is becoming more corrosive to certain life forms, specifically animals that build shells out of calcium carbonate. 

In British Columbia, we have come to expect to breathe smoke-filled air for several weeks each summer.

Like us, many animals along our coast are guaranteed to experience seawater for several weeks each year that is so acidic and corrosive that it severely compromises their ability to build, grow and repair their shells. These effects are particularly impactful to small animals, including juvenile and larval invertebrates and plankton, such as pteropods, whose shells are so thin that even the smallest impairment to shell growth and development can cause death.

Sea butterflies rely on calcium carbonate minerals to form their shells. The availability of these minerals lessens as water becomes more acidic. Photo: Jens Terhaar

Degradation of a sea butterfly shell over a 45 day period when exposed to increased acidity. Photo: Pacific Marine Carbon Laboratory / NOAA

Already, shellfish aquaculture facilities along the Pacific Northwest coast from Oregon to British Columbia are suffering from the mass mortality of larval oysters, mussels, clams and scallops. This effect of ocean acidification on economic opportunities and livelihoods is not just a Pacific Northwest phenomenon: it is estimated that globally, ocean acidification will cause annual losses of more than US$1 trillion to the world economy by 2100. Importantly, this stark number does not include the far larger impact that ocean acidification will have on our coastal cultures, health and well-being.

By the end of my coffee walk, I realized how the reduction in air quality that we are currently experiencing is analogous to the alterations in seawater chemistry that are happening all over the world. I began to understand how the changes in quality of life and even survival that my local and global community will continue to experience over the coming decades is much the same as that of oysters, plankton and corals in the sea.

The extent to which sea creatures and humans can adapt to the rapid rates of ocean acidification and climate change is uncertain and our challenges are magnified when we consider the many additional pressures that we all face, such as disease and pollution. 

While this seems overwhelming, our reality in 2020 is one that we cannot ignore. We must proceed forward with a strong acknowledgement and acceptance of the multiple pressures that our society and globe is experiencing. We know the actions that we need to take to address climate change’s threat to our health, livelihoods and ocean: reduce and mitigate greenhouse gas emissions; adapt our economic development patterns; and reconnect our cultures and societies with the nature that supports and surrounds us.

As governments and communities around the world design COVID-19 recovery plans, we have an incredible opportunity to elevate the role and impact of each of these three actions so that we can protect our lives and values in the face of growing changes. The duration and effects of smoke and acidity for years to come depends on what we do now and how we choose to respond and adapt.

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Underneath the picturesque Salish Sea there are churning currents, with water swooshing in from the open ocean and surges of nutrient-rich fresh water from creeks and rivers that alter the sea’s chemistry — and can make life tough for species trying to survive in a rapidly changing environment.

And that’s why scientists are increasingly interested in the Salish Sea as they study ocean acidification — often called the evil twin of climate change.

The impacts of ocean acidification range from coral reef bleaching in the Caribbean and South Pacific to the hardships faced by oyster and mussel aquaculture businesses in the Salish Sea because shellfish are unable to form calcium carbonate shells.

The Salish Sea is a network of coastal waterways that includes the Strait of Georgia, the Strait of Juan de Fuca and Puget Sound. Researchers are interested in the differences between the semi-enclosed body of water near Vancouver and Seattle and the more exposed outer coast.

“We are a bit of a canary in a coal mine,” said Jay Manning, chair of the leadership council for the Puget Sound Partnership, a group charged with restoring the health of Puget Sound.

‘Stuck with acidic oceans for thousands of years’

The basic science of ocean acidification is simple — the ocean is absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which reacts with sea water and creates a weak carbonic acid.

In the Pacific Ocean, deep acidic water circulates for years and then surfaces in upwellings along the West Coast.

It isn’t a problem that is going to correct itself, even if humanity swears off fossil fuels tomorrow and, as oceans cover 71 per cent of the world’s surface and house 80 per cent of our biodiversity, acidification could disrupt food supplies and destroy coastal communities.

More than 80 per cent of the heat generated by climate change and about 30 per cent of carbon dioxide released by human activities since the start of the Industrial Revolution has been absorbed by the ocean.

“We are going to be stuck with acidic oceans for thousands of years, if not for millenia,” Kim Juniper, a University of Victoria professor who holds the  B.C. leadership chair in marine ecosystems and global change told DeSmog Canada.

An eight-year study by 250 scientists found that, even if global warming is held to no more than two degrees, there will be irreparable damage.

That means winners and losers, with shellfish and small creatures such as pteropods — a tiny sea snail that serves as food for salmon and other fish — on the losing end and jellyfish and sea grasses among organisms that could thrive.

“We are a bit of a canary in a coal mine.” https://t.co/BkDeudGP9W

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) March 12, 2018

‘Is there time to adapt?’

On the West Coast, ocean acidification sprung to public consciousness more than a decade ago when exceptionally low pH levels — meaning the water was more more acidic than usual — killed 100 per cent of young oysters at two major hatcheries in Washington State.

“That got everyone’s attention on the West Coast. A lot of jobs were at stake and it went from being an interesting thing to talk about in the classroom to something we had to take action on,” Manning said.

Washington Governor Jay Inslee said categorically that “the ocean has had enough” as he announced a Blue Ribbon Panel to study ways to cope with the new reality. Meanwhile, scientists, politicians and non-governmental agencies from California, Oregon, Washington and B.C. started working together to look for information and solutions.

Fisheries and Oceans Canada research scientist Debby Ianson is one of the few researchers looking at ocean acidification in the Salish Sea and has found that areas such as the Strait of Georgia are naturally more acidic than the surrounding ocean and upwelling water from the outer coast increases pH levels in the Salish Sea, making the water less acidic.

“The question is whether the Salish Sea has always been this acidic and what makes it this acidic,” Ianson said.

And, as the water becomes more acidic, is there time for some of the organisms to be able to adapt to the increasingly corrosive water?

Researchers have already found that indigenous oysters do better in low pH waters than the larger Pacific oyster, which has been used by shellfish farmers for decades, said Susan Allen oceanographer and professor at the University of B.C. Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science.

“Maybe we can develop strains that do better under these new conditions,” Allen said.

“By understanding the system and the impacts maybe we can mitigate and adapt,” she said.

Much of the research is in its infancy, and Ianson said that even the decline of pteropods in the Pacific Ocean may not be directly attributable to ocean acidification.

“They have been around for thousands or millions of years. They were around even when there was more CO2 in the atmosphere than now,” she said.

A study published last year in Nature found colonies of marine snails thriving in seawater that was 30 times more acidic than normal, a discovery that suggests some animals are able to adapt to ocean acidification.

Climate change raises ongoing questions

But, as the impacts of climate change increase, there is also the question of which creatures will be able to withstand the multiple stressors of increasing temperatures and decreasing oxygen, Ianson said.

One key to understanding what is happening in the water that surrounds us is to gather the essential baseline information. Sensors that measure pH levels are being installed at stations along the Ocean Networks Canada observatory system and on B.C. Ferries.

Jim Christian, research scientist with Fisheries and Oceans Canada and an adjunct faculty member at the University of Victoria, recently led an international workshop on gathering data to measure ocean acidification.

They are not easy measurements to make and autonomous sensors make more sense than having researchers take bottle samples, he said.

“These sensors are new and to some degree they are untested. There’s a lot of potential there… but it’s a long, slow process of getting the sensors in place and then we have to make sure the data are reliable,” he told DeSmog Canada.

The lack of historical data and the variability of acidity in the Salish Sea makes the task challenging, Christian said.

The Salish Sea saturation state in the surface water is low, meaning it is naturally acidic in the winter, with the summertime plankton bloom taking up carbon dioxide making it easier for shellfish to produce shells, Christian said.

“That may mean that the organisms that live there are well adapted to an environment that is naturally acidic or it may mean that it’s relatively close to a threshold that could be really bad for those organisms,” he said.

“What we do know is it’s a trend that is going on all over the world. In a place like this the natural variability is extremely large, but the long term trend goes in one direction,” Christian said.

The one certainty is that the only way to stabilize the oceans is a global effort to stop putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which means a halt to burning fossil fuels, scientists agree.

But there are other actions that will help and work done in Washington State has confirmed that freshwater runoff and sewage are major contributors to acidification in Puget Sound.

“Get a good septic system if you care about the shells on your shore,” Ianson recommended.

On a small scale, experiments such as restoring eelgrass and kelp beds in the Hood Canal are also underway, Manning said.

“The idea is that, as plants grow in the water they absorb CO2 so they can buffer and raise the pH as the plant is actually growing. The question is what happens when the plant dies — does it re-release all that CO2 as it decomposes?” he said.

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The Pacific coast of North America is becoming more acidic as human-produced carbon dioxide emissions dissolve into the water and communities from B.C. to California must take action now to offset changes that are already affecting West Coast marine life, say leading ocean scientists.   The panel of 20 scientists from B.C., California, Oregon and Washington have spent three years studying changes in ocean chemistry along the West Coast and a report released Monday says regional strategies are urgently needed to combat changes that are coming and, where possible, reduce the impacts.   “Ocean acidification is a global problem that is having a disproportionate impact on productive West Coast ecosystems,” Francis Chan, an Oregon State University marine ecologist, said. Chan is the co-chair of the West Coast Ocean Acidification and Hypoxia Science panel.   “There has been an attitude that there is not much we can do about this locally, but that just isn’t true. A lot of the solutions will come locally and through coordinated regional efforts,” he said.

Some mitigation measure could be low-tech, such as using kelp beds and eel grass to remove carbon dioxide from seawater and each area should develop new benchmarks, monitoring stations and rules to protect vulnerable areas, says the report. 

“We want to grow the number of tools in our tool box. Right now there are not a lot of tools,” Chan said in an interview with DeSmog Canada.   Ocean acidification and the twin demon of hypoxia — low-oxygen water — came to public consciousness on the West Coast about 10 years ago, when the oyster industry in Washington and Oregon, and several years later in B.C, found that seawater was so acidic that it dissolved the shells of baby oysters.   One strategy, used in Oregon, was to measure ocean chemistry throughout the day and it was found that, if hatcheries took in seawater during the afternoon, when CO2 levels were lower, juvenile oysters could survive.   More such studies of specific areas are needed and scientific buoys and gliders should help inform policy makers about the best place to focus their adaptation and mitigation strategies, the report says.   “We’re just starting to see the impacts now and we need to accelerate what we know about how increasingly acidified water will impact our ecosystem,” panel member Waldo Wakefield, a research biologist with NOAA Fisheries, said.   It is estimated that 30 to 40 per cent of carbon dioxide from human activity dissolves into oceans, rivers and lakes, forming carbonic acid. Over the last 250 years, ocean acidity on surface water has increased by 30 per cent and it’s expected to increase by up to 150 per cent by the end of the century.   The West Coast is a hotspot for acidification because of coastal upwelling, which brings nutrient-rich, low oxygen and high carbon dioxide water from deep in the water column to the surface. That can trigger phytoplankton blooms that die and sink to the bottom, producing more carbon dioxide and further lowering the oxygen.   Now, with politicians and scientists working together on the problem, there is hope that more steps can be taken to lessen the impact, Chan said.   “We can breed more resilient oysters that can do better in the ocean that we are expecting,” he said, pointing out that a varied gene pool and different ages of fish are needed so the right genes can be passed on to the next generation.   Panel member Jack Barth, associate dean at Oregon State University’s College of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, wants all West Coast residents to educate themselves about the effect emissions are having on the ocean.   “People are just dumbfounded when they find out that we are doing this,” he said.   Municipalities and watershed groups need to figure out the most vulnerable areas and then they can avoid adding more stressors such as organic runoff from the land, Barth said in an interview.   That could mean revamping regulations, he said.   The panel included Tom Pedersen from the University of Victoria, former executive director of the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions, and Debbie Ianson from Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s Institute of Ocean Sciences in Sidney.   The B.C. input was vital as the province is doing interesting work on ocean acidification in areas such as the Salish Sea, Barth said.   “And they’re doing good work with measurements and modelling. They are taking it very seriously,” he said.   For more information go to http://westcoastoah.org.

Image: Mark Smith/Flickr

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“Some people call it the elephant in the room. I like to call it the blue whale in the pool,” scientist Brian Kingzett told a room of naturalists this week. He was talking about the dramatic rise in ocean acidity along the B.C. coast.

As the Oceanside Star reports, Kingzett, field station manager for the Vancouver Island University Centre for Shellfish Research, met the Arrowsmith Naturalists at the Knox United Church to deliver a talk, Climate Change and Ocean Acidification.

“It’s going to sound a little doom and gloom,” he told the room. When it comes to recent discoveries about ocean acidity, Kingzett said he could hardly believe what he was seeing.

Scientists, Kingzett explained, traditionally haven’t spent much time measuring ocean acidity because levels have remained so consistent for nearly 300 million years. Yet when he began sampling water in and around the Strait of Georgia, Kingzett was so surprised by the results he asked fellow researchers along the Pacific Northwest to confirm them.

It was true: the region’s pH levels had dropped from an expected 8.0 to a staggering 7.57. The difference seems moderate, but each 0.1 decrease represents a whopping 25 per cent increase in acidity.

As a biologist and aquaculture expert, Kingzett said those acidity levels are a massive threat to shellfish.

“The water the small, shelled creatures are living in is actually corrosive,” he said. “Scientists aren’t sure where this is going. This is very much an emerging science,” the Oceanside Star quoted him as saying.

Kingzett was also surprised to find such high acidity levels within protected shorelines like Deep Bay on Vancouver Island’s inner coast.

Deep Bay is home to a 5,000-year-old shellfish industry. In February nearby Qualicum Scallops cut 30 per cent of its workforce after 10 million scallops were killed from high acid concentrations.

Kingzett said he expected increased acidity to affect the open ocean before changing the composition of waters in sheltered regions like Deep Bay. But thanks to polluted waters feeding the Fraser River, “some of the most acidic water is in the Strait of Georgia,” he said.

Google map showing Deep Bay in the Strait of Georgia.

Kingzett added that 2014 is projected to be the warmest year on earth since measurements began in 1881, with increasing pressure on the oceans to absorb excess carbon. This “changes the base chemistry of the ocean,” he said.

Increased levels of carbon in the water leads to the formation of carbonic acid that prevents calcium from binding, an essential step in the formation of shells.

Kingzett explained how ocean currents move around the globe like a ribbon, sometime carrying deep ocean water where acids concentrate to surface regions where there is a higher concentration of life.

Ocean currents take up to 40 years to circulate, so even if we were to stop adding carbon to the atmosphere, Kingzett said, acidic concentrate from the ocean’s depths will still continue to move to shore for another four decades.

“We’ve mailed ourselves a package we can’t refuse,” he said. “It’s a global problem that’s coming home and we really don’t know that the effects will be.”

“Everyone says the Earth is fragile. The Earth is not fragile at all. It will shake us off.”

Image Credit: Brian Kingzett via Casom.com

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As scientific studies continue to reveal how carbon emissions are making the world’s oceans more acidic, one prominent academic from British Columbia suggests that the rapidly changing marine chemistry could also eventually negatively affect the economies of some coastal communities. If the recent collapse of a scallop fishery off the coast of B.C.’s Vancouver Island is any indication, those negative changes may already be well underway.

Karen Kohfeld, a Simon Fraser University associate professor and a Canada Research Chair in Climate, Resource, and Global Change, said scientists have learned much about the oceans’ chemical makeup in the past three decades but are less certain about how the increased acid levels will affect ecosystems.

“There may be some species that adapt better than others,” Kohfeld told DeSmog Canada on Thursday. “And in the end, we are just beginning to understand how ocean acidification could impact our coastal fisheries in the long run.”

Although she noted that carbon dioxide exists in the ocean naturally through rotting plants and dead organisms, Kohfeld said that scientific evidence suggests that oceans have become about 30 per cent more acidic since fossil fuels began being burned in the Industrial Revolution approximately 250 years ago.

If that trend continues, she said, oceans could be between 100 per cent and 150 per cent more acidic by the end of this century.

“That is very alarming,” she said, referring to the relative speed that acid levels are increasing in the world’s oceans, cover more than 70 per cent of the Earth’s surface.

About 40 per cent of atmospheric carbon dioxide ends up in oceans where it dissolves and releases an acid that makes it more difficult for some organisms, notably shellfish, to develop properly. Scientists and media outlets have been reporting recently that scallop and oyster farms in the Pacific Northwest have struggled with the increased acid levels.

Scientist are also concerned with a recent mysterious wasting disease that is killing off numerous species of starfish or sea stars along the Pacific and Atlantic coasts of North America. The illness causes white lesions on the animal’s body before it ruptures, spilling out internal organs.

“The magnitude of it is very concerning,” said Cornell University ecologist Drew Harvell. “There’s the potential that some of these species could actually go extinct.”

Oceans have absorbed approximately 525 billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere, or about one third of the anthropogenic (human-caused) carbon emissions released both from industrial processes (mostly fossil fuel burning) and changes in land use practices (deforestation and urbanization), the University of Alaska says. “This absorption of CO2 has mitigated warming in the atmosphere, but is having negative impacts on the chemistry and biology of the oceans. When CO2 is added to the oceans it lowers the pH causing the upper ocean to become more acidic.”

Kohfeld said that acidification does not occur at the same rate in the world’s oceans. As an example, she said the ability for organisms to form shells is more difficult in colder waters like the North Pacific compared to waters near the equator because colder temperatures dissolve more carbon dioxide.

“One of the things we are seeing is that acidification is affecting organisms at different life stages,” she said adding she suspects scientists are going to start to see more related impacts on communities dependent on harvesting shellfish.

The California Current Acidification Network website notes “coastal ecosystems are particularly sensitive to three key drivers related to climate change: sea level, ocean temperature and ocean acidification.”

A recent National Climate Assessment (NCA) report in the U.S. said “increasing levels of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels and other human activities have a direct effect on the world’s oceans.”

The NCA report added “ocean acidification makes water more corrosive, reducing the capacity of marine organisms with shells or skeletons made of calcium carbonate (such as corals, krill, oysters, clams, and crabs) to survive, grow, and reproduce, which in turn will affect the marine food chain.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has reported “ocean acidification poses substantial risks to marine ecosystems, especially polar ecosystems and coral reefs, associated with impacts on the physiology, behavior, and population dynamics of individual species from phytoplankton to animals.”

The IPCC says ocean acidification, along with warming, decreased oxygen levels and pollution “can lead to interactive, complex, and amplified impacts for species and ecosystems.”

Assessing how acidification is changing the world’s oceans is hugely important to the survival of humankind. According to the United Nations, more than three billion people depend on marine and coastal biodiversity for their livelihoods. The UN also says the market value of marine and coastal resources and industries is estimated at $3 trillion per year or about 5 per cent of global GDP.

Some people call ocean acidification “that other CO2 problem,” Kohfeld said, “and it’s an example of how climate change is more than just a higher temperature.”

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Food is at the heart of our cultural lives. It’s not just sustenance—it’s part of how we celebrate, how we mourn and how we come together. But what happens when the food that defines us begins to disappear?

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s fifth assessment report released in March, climate change is already having an affect on food security. Extreme weather in “key producing regions” has already led to drastic jumps in food pricing. In cities we are padded from these effects by long supply chains, but not so in places like Hartley Bay on the northern coast of British Columbia.

“We depend on the sea so much for our food,” says Gitga’at Chief Ernie Hill, the principal of Hartley Bay Elementary/Junior High/Secondary School who has spearheaded efforts there to document and teach traditional indigenous harvesting practices.

Spring is harvest season around Hartley Bay, he says. Starting in April, when the clear weather coincides with low tides in the morning, families from the Gitga’at Nation travel to nearby islands where they collect seaweed and lay them to dry for the day in the warm sun. While the grown-ups harvest, the little ones scrape sea prunes, large shelled mollusks also known as chitons.

Now at the age of 73, Hill is no longer able to perch on the slippery rocks to harvest the seaweed, but he’s still committed to passing that tradition on to younger generations. He learned to harvest and prepare traditional foods such as seaweed, halibut and clams when he was a child, and over the years, he has passed that knowledge on to both his children and grandchildren.

Now, with the help of his students, members of the community, and “world class” videographers, he’s been steadily building a library of short documentaries that record traditional food gathering practices so they can be shared long after his generation is gone.

Through the ministrations of community elders like Hill and Helen Clifton, who just received a BC Community Achievement Award, the practices have endured as a way to bring families together much as they did before colonization disrupted lives. They also provide a respite from the rising price of importing food to the remote community, and the nutrient rich traditional diet helps to combat rising levels of diabetes caused by sugar-rich processed foods.

The trouble is that, because of climate change, nature is no longer cooperating the way it once did. According to Clifton, who co-authored a paper on the subject of environmental change with University of Victoria researcher Nancy Turner, weather in the region has been progressively less reliable over the last two decades. Unseasonable spring rains have obstructed the seaweed drying process. Frost and snow have damaged the plants.

And it’s not just seaweed—the rains have impeded the curing of halibut, disrupted pollination cycles and caused berries to grow so over ripe as to be inedible. For the last year the community has also been warned against harvesting clams because levels of toxins leading to paralytic shellfish poisoning (PSP) were more than twice normal. Hill says tests pinned the problem on a rise in pH level, which could be due to climate change—because the water is getting warmer, it can no longer hold as much oxygen.

Seeing that gradual decline in harvest, the Gitga’at Nation decided to contract sustainability experts from EcoPlan International to aid in the testing and planning process. Analyst Colleen Hamilton presented the work they had been doing at the most recent Livable Cities Forum in Vancouver.

Their goal, she said, was to corroborate local observations with science that would help further conversations already happening within the community. “The first thing we did when we started this project was go into the community and talk to people about all the weird things they were seeing.”

What the group found was that although the challenges were huge, the community was already making some moves to adapt by constructing buildings for drying halibut indoors and setting up freezers at the seaweed harvest sites to preserve it through the rain.

Another idea that came up was to shift focus onto other traditional foods that might better season the changes in temperature. There may be no clams this year, but there were mussels and cockles. Although the Gitga’at Nation is staunchly opposed to fisheries, which Hill says do more harm than good, the group has been experimenting with growing oysters and scallops that may deal better with the new conditions.

The resilience of the Gitga’at Nation, built up over a thousand years of observing and adapting to our planet’s shifts, may offer a road map to other communities dealing with climate change. According to a 2012 report for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), “Indigenous peoples have long and multi-generational histories of interaction with their environments that include coping with environmental uncertainty, variability and change. They have demonstrated their resourcefulness and response capacity in the face of global climate change.”

Still, it’s a slow, sometimes disheartening process, one that has been interrupted by the fight against the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline proposal which poses a much more immediate threat to traditional waters.

Another unexpected challenge to the process has been massive funding cuts in the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO). Since 2013, maintaining fish habitats is no longer part of the purview of the DFO. In the region around Hartley Bay, that has meant a suspension of water testing which was providing valuable clues about future avenues for adaptation.

“It’s such a strange thing for Harper taking the habitat out of the DFO,” Hill says. “It would have been interesting if the testing had continued over time. Then we would have known exactly what is happening.”

Image Credits: miguelb via Flickr | **604*250** via Flickr

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This is a guest post by Caitlyn Vernon and Torrance Coste.

The February 25th headline, “10 million scallops are dead; company lays off staff,” hit British Columbians like a punch in the stomach. The shellfish industry has been an economic powerhouse on central Vancouver Island for decades, providing hundreds of jobs and millions of dollars in revenue every year – over $30 million in average wholesale value. 

But when we talk about shellfish, we aren’t just talking jobs and economics. We are talking about food. Shellfish harvesting is one of our most robust local food systems, and the prospect of losing this industry makes us all feel, quite frankly, a little hungry.

Of the possible causes of the recent scallop die-off, ocean acidification seems the most likely. Ocean acidification is directly connected to climate change and to our runaway consumption of fossil fuels. In short, acidification occurs when carbon is absorbed into the ocean from the atmosphere, making the water more acidic. Acidification strips the ocean of carbonate ions, which marine species like scallops and oysters need to build their shells, therefore reducing the ability of these species to survive.

For years, groups like the B.C. Shellfish Growers Association have been raising the alarm about the verified threat of acidification to the shellfish industry.

Roberta Stevenson, the Association’s Executive Director, told us that the public and our elected decision-makers need to understand how serious the situation is for shellfish growers on B.C.’s coast. She said the significant economic benefits the industry provides could disappear if we don’t start to see the health of the oceans as an economic priority.

A major source of atmospheric carbon is the burning of fossil fuels: oil, coal, and gas. Here in B.C., we have a stake in important decisions over whether or not to build fossil fuel export infrastructure. The proposed Enbridge and Kinder Morgan pipelines, the prospective B.C. LNG industry, and the proposed Raven Coal Mine will all put much more carbon into the atmosphere, further acidifying the ocean and directly threatening the survival of shellfish species and coastal communities.

All these proposed projects need our consent. It’s important that we make the right choices and get on a path to a low-carbon future.

The recent scallop die-off is a clear illustration of what we will face if we don’t act now to reduce our carbon emissions. Climate change and ocean acidification will continue to have devastating consequences; not just for coastal economies, communities, and families, but for anyone who depends on the ocean as a source of food.

What’s more, coal, oil, and gas are finite resources, guaranteed to go bust when they run out, become too expensive, or when the environmental impacts are deemed not worth the risk. Any financial benefits we gain from extracting and exporting them will one day disappear completely. We will be left with the socio-economic hardship and lingering environmental problems well-known to many communities where boom-bust extractive industries have run their course.

By continuing to promote the extraction and export of coal, tar sands, and fracked gas instead of sustainable sectors in B.C., our government is making a political choice to prioritize short-term profits over renewable industries that can provide economic stability and contribute to viable, healthy communities over the long term.

We all deserve good jobs that don’t destroy our children’s future. For the sake of these shellfish and the families that depend on them, let’s work together to develop a smart and creative strategy to transition away from fossil fuels and toward a low carbon economy – with meaningful jobs in sustainable industries that don’t compromise ecosystems. A healthy coast is one with abundant food that can still be pulled from the ocean, as it always has been.

If we keep pumping carbon into our atmosphere we’re investing in an acidic ocean for decades if not centuries to come, and we’re forsaking the sustainable shellfish industry and the communities, businesses, and jobs it supports.

Caitlyn Vernon is Campaigns Director for Sierra Club B.C. Find her on twitter: @caitlynvernon. Torrance Coste is Vancouver Island Campaigner for the Wilderness Committee. Find him on twitter: @TorranceCoste.

This article originally appeared in the Times Colonist. Reprinted with permission.

Image Credit: The Scallop by 5k1nnyt1g3r via flickr.

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A 2012 government report from scientists at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans warns that Canada’s Atlantic waters are “particularly vulnerable” to ocean acidification from rising greenhouse gas emissions.

Mike De Souza writes for Postmedia News, that “the government report, posted on a website without a formal announcement or news release, noted that the world’s oceans have absorbed a significant amount of carbon dioxide emissions from the atmosphere since the industrial revolution, with profound effects on marine ecosystems that could damage the Canadian economy.”

The October report, co-authored by Kristian Curran and Kumiko Azetsu-Scott from the department, focuses on what global ocean acidification “may mean for the marine ecology of the Scotian Shelf region of Atlantic Canada.” The Scotian Shelf is in the North Atlantic, which is “a global 'hotspot' for the absorption of carbon dioxide into the surface ocean.”

Unsurprisingly, Curran and Azetsu-Scott’s forecast isn’t too bright. The study notes that the present “concern regarding ocean acidification resides in its unprecedented rate of occurrence, due to the significant amount of carbon dioxide that has been added to the atmosphere over the past 250 years.”

De Souza notes that, according to the report, “marine ecosystems might be able to adapt to changes in their acidity over time periods greater than 10,000 years, but would have difficulty with emerging changes that are equivalent to a 30 per cent increase in acidity since the industrial revolution.”

The report says that further global increase in ocean acidity is “certain to occur over the coming century and longer due to present day atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, even with legislative or policy-driven reductions in carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere.”

Because ocean acidification and “its associated impacts cannot be easily reversed, adaptive measures coupled with a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere will have to be pursued to protect ecosystems and human livelihoods against this phenomenon.”  

Curran and Azetsu-Scott mention that more studies on the effects of ocean acidification on marine life are urgently needed, saying it is uncertain at this point what lasting alterations will be seen in the ecosystem. They emphasize, though, that “any potential impacts could be severe,” and that acidification is likely to be “enough of a driver to alter species composition and dominance in a manner that could profoundly alter marine ecosystem and functioning.”

As De Souza observes, the report also addresses possible socio-economic impacts of changes to the ecosystem of the Scotian Shelf. Shellfish industries in Atlantic Canada “worth hundreds of millions of dollars and responsible for thousands of jobs” could be adversely affected, since the animals they harvest could be “negatively affected” by rising acidity levels.

In a summary, the report states that the “current situation” concerning “use of fossil fuels” and “legislated targets for carbon dioxide emission reductions” in Canada is “poor” when assessed “in terms of implications for the state of the environment.”

“To adapt to the changing environment we have to identify where the most vulnerable area is and try to reduce that added stress like pollution (and/or) overfishing,” Azetsu-Scott told Postmedia News in her first major interview about the report since October 2012.

“But still a lot of work needs to be done for adaptation,” she added, calling ocean acidification and climate change an “urgent and serious problem” for Canada.

De Souza writes that Luke Gaulton, a spokesman for Fisheries and Oceans, confirmed the Canadian government “didn’t issue a news release when it published the report.”

It was instead posted on “the website of a network with representation from government, industry, academia and non-governmental organizations.”

Image Credit: Ocean Acidification: State of the Scotian Shelf Report

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