Conservation Notes: Good news and bad news in the seas

By Tom Molloy

As we prepare for the environmental and climate chaos coming towards us on January 20th, here is some good and bad news about our seas to ponder.

The U.S. gets a new national marine sanctuary, the first led by native Americans

More than 4,500 square miles of ocean has been protected by the federal government off the Central California coast. The Biden administration created a new national marine sanctuary, which will be the third largest in the U.S. It was established on November 30th, and is called Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary.

The sanctuary, was nominated by members of the Northern Chumash Tribe, who for more then a decade sought to protect their rugged coastline historical homeland.

Going forward, the new sanctuary will be managed in partnership with tribes and Indigenous groups in the area, who will advise the federal government. The final sanctuary boundaries are smaller than originally proposed due to California’s burgeoning offshore wind industry. The new sanctuary will be protected from oil and gas drilling, as well as undersea mining, while fishing is still permitted.

The Pacific Ocean has also been hit hard by climate change, like the massive marine heat wave which dramatically altered the marine life web from 2014-2016.

In 2022, the federal government held the first offshore wind leases on the West Coast, opening the door for wind energy. The new floating turbines will be outside the sanctuary, but under the original sanctuary boundary, the undersea cables that bring power to shore would have been within it.

After negotiations, wind energy companies and tribal groups agreed to a smaller boundary for the sanctuary. The current boundary leaves a corridor for wind energy infrastructure to be built. After that, NOAA has said it will begin the process to consider expanding the sanctuary to the original proposed size. (Editors note: doubtful with the incoming administration.)

Offshore wind energy could be vital for California to reach its goal of getting 100% of its electricity by 2045 from sources that don’t emit planet-heating pollution. Offshore wind can produce power as the sun sets and solar farms start turning off.

“The ocean is overflowing”; United Nation reports warn that Pacific sea level rise outstrips global average

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres in August issued a global SOS – “Save Our Seas” – from the Pacific Island nation of Tonga with a plea to the world to “massively increase finance and support for vulnerable countries” in grave danger of the human-caused climate crisis.

Calling it a worldwide catastrophe, Guterres said “The ocean is overflowing.” “This is a crazy situation. Rising seas are a crisis entirely of humanity’s making, a crisis that will soon swell to an almost unimaginable scale, with no lifeboat to take us back to safety.”

Guterres’ dire warning coincided with the release of two UN reports detailing how the climate crisis is accelerating disastrous changes to the ocean. In 2021, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded it is “unequivocal” that humans have caused the climate crisis and that “widespread and rapid changes” have already occurred, some of them irreversibly. A recent report said, “emerging research on climate ‘tipping points’ and ice-sheet dynamics is raising alarm among scientists that future sea-level rise could be much larger and occur sooner than previously thought.” It poses “major risks to the safety, security, and sustainability of many low-lying islands, populous coastal megacities, large tropical agricultural deltas, and Arctic communities,” the climate leaders said. Both reports call on global leaders to improve early warning systems for vulnerable communities, majorly increase funding for resilience and adaptation, and make deep, rapid and immediate cuts in emissions to keep global heating to within 1.5 degrees Celsius — a critical threshold that world leaders agreed warming should remain below to avoid catastrophic climate impacts.“Surging seas are coming for us all,” Guterres said.

A couple of months after this news, American voters – eyes wide open – have chosen to put Donald Trump back in the White House. The Washington Post reports that Donald Trump told them that “ he’s not a great believer in man-made climate change“, and they report that he has also long rejected climate science, sometimes calling global warming a “hoax.“