Technical Lecture by Dr. Lubchenco | 生物・生態系環境研究センター| NIES

Thank you very much indeed, for the opportunity to spend a little bit of time with you here today, and to share some thoughts with you. It is a very deep honor for me to receive the Blue Planet Prize. This is a very prestigious, very well-known award, and I am deeply grateful for the Asahi Glass Foundation and the Blue Planet Prize committees for this very great honor. It’s also been a special treat for me to spend a little bit of time here in Japan and I thank all of you for such a warm welcome; everyone at the Foundation, and all of the different Agencies with whom I met, and those of you here at the NIES have been very, very gracious.
It is a special treat for my husband, Dr. Bruce Mengi and me, and two of my colleagues from NOAA, Dr. Laura Patesh, and Ms. Danielle Riox, to have a chance to be here today, and learn a little bit about the very interesting research that many of you are doing.
I thank Dr. Ohgaki, for the wonderful overview of the institute, and for the presentations that we had this morning. I only wish we had more time to learn more about what you are doing. It’s very interesting. There are a lot of interesting things we can trade and talk about.

I think that it’s especially appropriate that one of the winners of the Blue Planet Prize this year focuses on the blue portions of our blue planet. And I speak of course of the ocean. The oceans, as you know, cover 70% of the Earth surface, and they contain 97% of the planet’s water. We think they are likely the origin of all of life on earth. They support far greater biodiversity, more different kinds of life than exist on land. Oceans regulate our weather and our climate, they provide very important life-support systems for everything on Earth: people, plants, animals, microbes. In short, oceans sustain life on Earth. And so it’s particularly important that we have an opportunity to focus on them.

The blue parts of our blue planet, have long served as grocery stores, pharmacies, highways, playgrounds, temples, shrines, churches, and mosques for people on Earth. They inspire us, and they offer us knowledge, for those who choose to listen. However, mislead by their vastness, and blinded by their murky depths, humanity has taken the beauty and the bounty of oceans for granted. Thus far, we have failed to safeguard their future, and therefore, our own future. The result is increasingly vulnerable society, vulnerable coastal communities, vulnerable economies, and vulnerable human health.

Scientific information gives us an opportunity to understand the nature of the problems and also to find solutions to these problems. Today I’m going to be focusing on both the problems and the solutions. My message is a two-fold message. One of urgency, and one of hope. And the message that I bring also focuses on the role of science and scientists in helping not only to understand the problems but also in finding solutions. And doing more than just finding them; sharing them with policymakers, with business leaders, and with communities. Some of those solutions don’t come only from science. They may come from local communities and from traditional knowledge. The concept of the social contract with science involves not only responsibilities of scientists to be more helpful to society, but also to be open to what the Earth and life on Earth is telling us, and to be open to what other people, －lay people/ non-scientists－ what ideas they have. These are all parts of the idea of the social contract.

Some of the solutions I’m going to be focusing on today emphasize local empowerment. Empowering communities to help find solutions, and to embrace solutions, and implement them. Opportunities for industry. Opportunities to align conservation and economic in sentence. Too often we think that there’s a choice to be made between the economy and the environment. I would suggest that it is a false choice, a false dichotomy, that we can find better ways to have both environmental benefit and economic benefit for the short term and the long term. And those solutions that combine both will be the most long-lasting and the most durable. So the solutions that I’ll talk about today are born out of both scientific advances and also local knowledge. And the goal here is transition to more sustainable use of oceans, so that we can use them without using them up. The goal is very simple. Healthy oceans and healthy people; major ingredients for healthy blue planet.
The perspectives that I bring to this subject are won as a scientist who has been in an academic, research, and teaching world for many years, and also more recently as the head of a scientific agency NOAA: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. My experiences have been, through a science agency, delivering services to the American people, and also with responsibility for stewardship.

I was nominated by President Obama to be part of his science team. So, I left the university and I went to NOAA to be the administrator ―the person in charge of NOAA― as part of the President’s science team. And a little over a year into my job, we were faced with a crisis in the Gulf of Mexico, the Deep Water Horizon oil spill. In that experience I came to appreciate how important partnerships are among nations and among peoples across the world. During this crisis, we were very grateful to the government of Japan, and the people of Japan who helped us out when we needed help. Providing containment boom, providing information, and scientific expertise that was very helpful to us. In a similar fashion, the people of Japan were very generous in helping Americans after the Katrina hurricane and after 9.11. So I have seen firsthand how helpful countries that are friends can be to each other in time of need. And so when your country experienced the 3.11 events, it was our turn to be helpful to a friend. That’s what friends do. They collaborate, they cooperate. And NOAA was one of the federal agencies that were contributing expertise, knowledge, and information during the aftermath of the 3.11 events. You see here (photos in the slide) a team of Japanese and US scientists that were working together to understand and model where radiation in the ocean would go, how fast it would be diluted, where it would be transported. This was a workshop with some scientists from JAMSTEC and from other federal agencies working together on those problems. I have come to appreciate how important science is around the world and partnership across countries as well.

So now let me transition to some of the challenges, problems we face as related to oceans. What we actually know at a scientific basis about what is happening. And I want to begin with physical changes that we have documented, and I’ll talk about biological changes that we have documented.

Physical
First the physical. In short, oceans, compared to a century ago, are now warmer, higher, stormier, saltier, lower in oxygen, and more acidic. We have good scientific documentation of each of those. I’d like to highlight just a few of those here.
Sea surface temperature has been increasing. You can see that on this particular slide. In addition, global sea level has been rising both as a result of melting of the polar ice caps and glaciers on land, and because warmer water takes up more space. And we are seeing a decrease in pH in the oceans. As oceans absorb CO2 from the atmosphere they become more acidic. Oceans are now 35% more acidic than they were at the beginning of the industrial revolution. That ocean acidification is being studied by some of you here in this institute (NIES). Many scientists around the world are very, very interested in understanding more about how fast ocean acidification is happening, how it varies from one place to another, and what the consequences will be. One of the major impacts of the ocean acidification is that it will affect plants and animals that have a skeleton or shell made of calcium carbonate. It’s harder for plants and animals with a calcium shell or skeleton, it’s hard for them to make the skeleton and it erodes more quickly.

Biological
You see here (in the slide), corals, oysters, sea urchins, mussels, and phytoplankton. Those are some of the groups which will be challenged as oceans continue to become more acidic. But ocean acidification affects more than just calcification. It also affects the transmission of sound in ocean water. Ocean acidification also affects how marine animals smell. For example, salmon, who depend on smell to find their streams, to go up the stream to spawn. Ocean acidification interferes with that olfactory ability.
Another example comes from clown fish. If any of you saw the movie “Nimo”, you know Nimo the clown fish. They live in the tentacles of sea anemones and they depend on smell to tell when the predator fish is around. If a predator fish is nearby they dive into the tentacles, and that’s safe for them. One consequence of ocean acidification is that Nimo fish cannot smell very well and so when the predator fish comes around, they swim toward the predator fish, not away from the predator fish. We are just beginning to understand many of the consequences of ocean acidification. This is a very real challenge. Not all plants and animals are affected negatively by ocean acidification. Some appear to benefit, but vast majority are negatively affected by ocean acidification.

There are many other biological changes that are under way in oceans. Not just physical changes. You see a few of them highlighted here (in the slide); more dead zones, more harmful algal blooms, coral bleaching, polluted beaches, more endangered species, loss of top predators, more diseases that in some cases affects seafood, and depleted fisheries. I think in short, oceans now have fewer top predators, more over-fished species, and more endangered species.

I’d like to focus on a few of these problems in a little more detail, and show you some of the summary, numerical information that is available, starting first of all with the nitrogen cycle. In making of fertilizers and planting legumes over a broader area than occur naturally, humans have now more than doubled the amount of nitrogen that is fixed on an annual basis. This shows you the amount of nitrogen that is fixed on an annual basis. This of course have very real consequences because the nitrogen from fertilizers is not all taken up by plants and often results in eutrophication in freshwater or in coastal waters. Sometimes the eutrophication in coastal waters causes dead zones; areas of low to no oxygen. We’re seeing increases in invasive species, alien, non-native species, we are seeing significant increase and then leveling off of the harvest of wild fish from the oceans, and loss of many coral species both in the Caribbean as well as in the Pacific.

Let me focus for a minute on fishing and the changes that we are seeing in global fisheries, because this is a very important area that is not broadly appreciated for its importance. I’m going to show you an animation that was created using the data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). These data are reported every year, and in the lower corner here, this animation starts with 1951 and goes year by year until 1999. You will see the changes from one year to the other. White, most of the ocean at this time was pre-peak fishing. Red color in this animation will be where the peak of fishing activity is happening. After an area has been fished very heavily it is no longer economically feasible for fishermen to continue fishing there so they move on to a new area. So you’ll see the red area move and behind that is post-peak, which in many cases are depleted, collapsed, exhausted fisheries. Sometimes those depleted and exhausted fisheries can recover and sometimes they cannot. Let me start the animation. You can pick any coastal area around the world, and you can see that through time fishing activity went from being mostly coastal to farther and farther away from the coast, and farther and farther south. Now this is fishing, these are the major fisheries of the world. I’ll let it run again, choose a different part of the world, and watch the pattern again. In a very short period of time, we have gone from having most of the ocean to fish, to having everything being fished with no more new frontiers.

This figure shows the same kind of information but in a very different format. This is the percent of all global fisheries and there are categories that the United Nations FAO uses. Underdeveloped, developing fisheries, fully exploited, overexploited, crashed, or depleted. You can see that in 1950, almost all of the fisheries, almost 90% were in these two categories of underdeveloped and developing. But by 2000, these were virtually non-existent. By the same token, in 1950, there were very few crashed and overexploited fisheries, but by the year 2000, almost 70% of fisheries were overexploited or crashed. So, industrial scale fishing, in the last few decades, has had a major impact on the global ocean.
Of course fisheries do not affect only the target species, they sometimes affect non-target species. Sea turtles, sea birds, marine mammals, and other fish are some of the bycatch that are accidentally caught, but non-the-less harmed. Other things than fishing, such as oil spills or elimination of nesting beaches also affect many species. For example, if we just look at sea turtles, all seven species of sea turtles are threatened or endangered. Habitat is also being threatened. You see here salt marshes, mangroves, sea-grass beds, and coral reefs lost the fraction of each that is lost or degraded. Within the last 50-100 years, 55% of corals in the Pacific and 80% in the Caribbean, coral reefs are threatened. Habitats, individual species, and fisheries are very significant biological changes.
Finally, the number of dead zones around the world is increasing dramatically. We have seen a doubling in the number of the dead zones every decade since 1960. These are primarily at the mouths of rivers that drain large agricultural areas. You see here only the dead zones in three different categories for this part of Asia, but the pattern is global. I’m just showing you a fraction of that.

In summary, we have many, many challenges. Physical changes and biological changes that are interacting to threaten the health of oceans and therefore threaten the benefits that we depend on the oceans for: whether it’s healthy sea foods, good jobs, or habitats for wildlife, or areas such as mangroves or coral reefs that absorb some of the power of storms and protect coastal areas.

This is a lot of bad news, a lot of challenges that we know from scientific information. But there is a lot of good news as well. There are solutions that people are creating based on our scientific understanding, to help address many of these problems, and I want to focus on those. I’m going to talk about five different categories of solutions.

Ecosystem Approaches
The first one are “ecosystem approaches”. Typically and historically, not in ancient times, but in the modern world, most different activities on land or in the oceans that affect oceans are regulated issue by issue, or sector by sector. So for example, there is different governmental agency; one that does fisheries, another one does water qualities, another one does underwater cables, another one does energy, another one might do endangered species. So this issue-by-issue, sector-by-sector approach has been part of the problem. This is not a holistic view of all of those activities on the water or activities on land that are affecting the ocean. There is not an opportunity to integrate across those, and understand how they interact with one another and the collective impact of all of them on the functioning of ocean and coastal ecosystems. The new way that is emerging is to take an ecosystem approach. Ecosystem-based management that considers people as part of ecosystems and it considers the individual and collective impacts of different activities on the ecosystem with a goal of having a healthy, productive, resilient ecosystem sustain through time. So this integrated approach is being embraced to a greater extent than it used to be. So these individual approaches; oil and gas, fishing, energy generation, shipping, all of those interact and ecosystem approaches are providing an alternative to doing that integration.

Spatial Planning
One way that integrated approach is playing out is to use “spatial planning”. To utilize mechanisms to consider in one place in the oceans the combination of activities that can co-exist with one another to minimize conflicts and minimize adverse environmental impact.
Oceans are becoming increasingly crowded places, and there are more and more social conflicts around different uses. We are seeing that with renewable energy and aquaculture. Spatial planning provides an opportunity to de-conflict areas as well as minimize environmental impact. But for spatial planning to be successful, it needs to be bottom-up. It needs to involve the local communities and local people to help define a combination of activities in an area that can be sustained through time. In the Unites States, we are beginning to embrace this combination of spatial planning and ecosystem-based approaches. Here (in the slide), President Obama is signing a new executive order that establishes for the first time; a National Ocean Policy for the US. This policy emphasizes stewardship, having healthy oceans and coasts, and it emphasizes and creates framework for spatial planning at the regional scale, focusing on large marine ecosystems.

Catch shares
Another type of solution that is emerging are new approaches to fishery management, and in particular, an approach that we call “catch shares”. Traditional fisheries management results in a race to fish where individual companies or individual boats are all competing for a scarce resource. They build bigger and bigger boats with more and more power. And devise technological ways to get fish faster and that race to fish has contributed significantly to the depletion of ocean fisheries. An alternative approach is rights-based and it allocates a fraction of fishery to individuals or boats or communities based on some historic catch information. It changes the dynamics of fishery economics. It turns it on its head, such that everyone who has a share of the fishery is guaranteed that share regardless of how big the fishery is. There is an incentive to have the fishery be healthy. There is an incentive to have the fishery be well-managed. You can think of fishery as a pie, and you always have, let’s say, a third of the pie. You want the pie to be larger and larger, and that means that fishery has to be healthy and well-managed. So you are guaranteed your third, regardless of how the fishery is doing, but now it is in your own self-interest to have the fishery be healthy. So, catch share is a mechanism of aligning fishery, economics, with conservation, in sentence. You see here (in the slide), different countries that are using one type of catch shares, in this case called the Individual, Transferrable Quotas (ITQs). There are other types of catch shares, some of which has been used in Japan for many years called TURF (Territorial User Rights Fisheries) where fishermen are guaranteed exclusive access to an area where they are fishing, and if you have the right to that area you will take care of it because you want it to sustain through time. So these rights-based approaches to fisheries are becoming increasingly important and more successful than traditionally managed fisheries.

Habitat protection
The third solution that I want to highlight is habitat protection, in particular marine protected areas and no-take marine reserves. The area of the ocean that is set aside in any kind of marine protected area is miniscule, it’s less than one percent. In contrast, we have between 10-15% of the land area protected. But the oceans are not very well protected. Only a small part of these marine protected areas are completely protected from extractive activities. No-take marine reserves where no extractive or distractive action is allowed are far less than one-tenth of one percent, but they are very viable and important new tool that is under-utilized. When areas are set aside as protected and no-take, biodiversity flourishes within it and spills out to the adjacent areas so they can help recover depleted fisheries outside the area. But an even more powerful potential benefit comes from what we call “export of young larvae or eggs” from an area to adjacent areas outside. Both fish such as the rockfish you see here and invertebrates, if you let them get large, they have many, many more young than do small ones. (Referring to the presentation slide)This rockfish (A) is much smaller than this rockfish (B). This one (C) is almost as two times the length as this one (A). Each of these fishes (D) represent 100,000 young. So this size of rockfish (A) makes 150,000 young. This size (C) makes 1.7 million young. A little bit larger size means a lot more reproductive potential. The way we typically manage fisheries, it’s very difficult to protect what are now being called “big old fecund –highly reproductive– females, or BOFFs”. BOFFs are good and we don’t have many ways to protecting BOFFs, except through no-take marine reserves. But that benefit is potentially immense.

Adaptation to Climate Change and Acidification
In addition, there are opportunities for helping to address climate change and ocean acidification. In addition to the very obvious need to reduce green house gas emissions. Above and beyond that, there are ways to think differently about adaptation to climate change and ocean acidification. By creating no-take marine reserves, we can protect biodiversity. And with the idea of there being richer genetic potential for adapting to warmer waters, more acidic waters, other changes that are under way. So protection of biodiversity can be thought of as adaptation strategy for climate change. In addition to that, there are local sources of pollution that make coastal waters more acidic and that interacts with the global scale ocean acidification that is under way. Local actions to reduce run-off of pollutants can help ameliorate some of the global scale ocean acidification that is under way.

Greater Awareness
The final solution that is very important is having greater public awareness of the problems and the solutions, and a commitment to stewardship. To living in harmony with nature, not just trying to think of controlling nature. We are seeing through young people, through social media, through more NPOs, opportunities to raise awareness and embrace solutions. It’s important that these be informed by good scientific information and so it underscores the importance of scientists interacting with and being open to those solutions so that they can be informed by science and also scientists can be involved in these. In conclusion, I’ve tried to emphasize how important the ocean is, to all of life on earth, and how important it is that we use science to not only understand changes under way, but also to create, and then implement solutions.

I’ve highlighted a number of different solutions that are scientifically grounded and it reminds me again of this dual message of urgency and hope, and I am reminded of the eloquent words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. who, as you know, inspired a social tipping point for civil rights in the United States and around the world. When writing about this great challenge, Dr. King wrote the following words that I think are appropriate, so I want to read them to you.
Dr. King said,

We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today
We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now
In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there are such a thing as being too late
The tide and the affairs of humanity does not remain at the flood: it ebbs
We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage
But time is deaf to every plea and rushes on
Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues, of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: “too late”
We still have a choice today. This may be human kinds’ last chance to choose.

I sense that fierce urgency of now, I also believe that scientists have an obligation to being more helpful to society in focusing on the most important problems, and sharing our information and in being open to what society is telling us. So I would emphasize and leave you with these two thoughts. The fierce urgency of now and the social contract with science. I’ve emphasized how important healthy, productive, and resilient oceans are, and I believe that by working together as a global community with a sense of purpose and urgency and hope, we can achieve a goal of a more sustainable future of our blue planet. I am committed to the social contract, I sense a fierce urgency of now. Do you share that?
Thank you.