Tundi Agardy, Ph.D.
What Can We Do
1. Put pressure on decision makers to take ocean health seriously
Most governments have shown a certain unwillingness to tackle the difficult issues around managing oceans to maintain ocean health and productivity. Decision-makers are far too easily able to use the excuse of “too little information”, or “too much uncertainty” to put off making intelligent choices and instituting good governance. The command control management that characterizes most maritime nations has been successful in establishing territorial claims and maintaining them, but much less successful at protecting oceans so they can continue providing the ecosystem services upon which we all depend.
Awareness-raising, education, and outreach are regularly passed by as donors invest in more tangible and showy marine conservation outcomes. While everyone acknowledges that raising awareness and educating the public (decision-makers among them) is crucial, few have made that a priority. It is no wonder, then, that leadership to stem the tide of ocean degradation and the political will to tackle difficult issues is lacking.
2. Support scientific research and education
At a recent Gordon Conference25, participants discussed the new scientific discipline of Oceans and Human Health and the present, future, and potential effects of oceanic processes and marine organisms on human health and wellbeing. The impact of climate change and extreme weather events on growing coastal communities worldwide and the human health effects from exposure to substances that occur widely in marine ecosystems were discussed, as was marine pharmaceuticals for the treatment of human diseases and dietary deficiencies.
Tony Knap and colleagues wrote in 2003: “To understand fully the interactions between ocean health and human health, programs should be organized around a "models-based" approach focusing on critical themes and attributes of marine environmental and public health risks. Given the extent and complex nature of ocean and human health issues, a program networking across geographic and disciplinary boundaries is essential26”. This sort of integrated and targeted research is the focus of four centers for human and ocean health around the world, including: the Pacific Northwest Center for Human Health and Ocean Sciences; the Pacific Research Center for Marine Biomedicine; the Woods Hole Center for Oceans and Human Health; and the Oceans and Human Health Center - University of Miami. Integrated ocean observing systems (IOOS) also have an important role to play in furthering our understanding and keeping the public informed.
Despite the paucity of programs directly linking human health and oceans, especially outside the U.S., there are a few initiatives that offer demonstrations of excellent public education and outreach on the topic of human health and the oceans. For example, the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School has produced a short film, with appeal to younger people as well as adults, highlighting the importance of oceans to human health.
The film, called “Once Upon a Tide”, is downloadable at http://chge.med.harvard.edu/programs/healthyoceans/once_upon_a_tide/home.html.
3. Stay informed, and modify your own behavior – reduce, recycle, reuse & minimize ecological footprints, on the land and the sea
That much is being lost as the world ocean declines in health and viability, yet most people remain unaware that it is happening (and even less aware of the implications of this decline for their own health and well-being), underscores the huge challenge that faces ocean advocates and managers. A focus on whales and other flagships may have caused ocean conservation to be treated as a luxury, not a necessity. Until we are able to articulate all the ways the world ocean nurtures, protects, and enriches us, we will never generate the necessary public interest to demand leadership in dealing with these issues.
Everything we do as individuals, anywhere on the planet, has the potential to harm ocean ecosystems. By minimizing our ecological footprint – driving less, managing waste, choosing organically grown products and using organic gardening practices, reducing energy use in home and office, etc. –we can each make a small contribution to a more sustainable and healthy world ocean.
4. Recognize the linkages between land, freshwater, and oceans
The essential link between freshwater and seawater underpins the great array of life in the sea. Rivers and streams deliver freshwater to estuaries, and nutrients to all coastal seas. But the link between rivers and oceans also has a cost - whatever degradation is occurring in freshwater ecosystems inevitably impacts marine life as well. As pressures on aquatic systems mount around the world in response to growing needs for drinking water, irrigation, and energy needs, less and less water is able to reach the world's coasts -- and the very nature of marine ecosystems is changing. And as poor land use practices lead to pollution and erosion, run-off and other non-point discharges create a toxic brew of coastal seas downstream. Disappearing coastal wetlands only exacerbate the problem, as the ecosystem services that these critical habitats provide are being lost. Recognizing the linkages between land and sea, as mediated by freshwater (and, to a lesser extent, atmosphere), is crucial to having us be better able to keep oceans in their nurturing role, and not predominantly their threatening one.
In some ways the global ocean is like a living organism that is beginning to show signs of illness not yet fully diagnosed. The symptoms that we do see (trash on the beach, for example) are often not the most important indicators of what is actually happening to ocean health, and can be a distraction. Triage would tell us that the really crucial issue is that we are impacting the most ecologically critical parts of the ocean system – the vital organs – and not even realizing the damage we are doing. The chronic degradation of coastal wetlands and estuaries is particular cause for concern, and has cascading effects all throughout the world ocean. Other stresses, caused by overfishing, invasive species, and even more widespread pollution (much of which originates on land and in freshwater habitats), act to wear down ocean resilience and impede its recovery. It is imperative that we begin to look at ocean health as a physician would – focusing on physiology and functioning rather than outward appearance and structure, and taking into account all the cumulative stressors affecting the patient. And, much as a doctor would, we must prioritize, with some sense of urgency.
5. Manage remaining natural ecosystems to minimize degradation and make them maximally resilient in the face of ever-increasing stresses and climate change
Protecting the biodiversity and the ecological processes supported by marine and coastal ecosystems is more than an esoteric pursuit. There is strong evidence that well-managed ecosystems in which biodiversity is maintained are more resilient in the face of rapid or sustained environmental changes (such as global warming) and more resistant to ecological impoverishment and lowered productivity. Tailoring management so it is effective is not simple – it requires good information, time, human capital, and sustained financial resources. But the cost of not practicing effective management are generally high, and the costs of restoring ecosystems once they have become degraded can be exorbitant.
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The linkages between ocean health and human health are many, ranging from direct associations (both good, as in marine pharmaceuticals, and bad, as in waterborne diseases, for instance) to indirect (e.g. oceans playing a crucial role in regulating planetary balances, and the role of oceans in making our spiritual lives fuller and better). We ignore these connections between ocean health and human well-being at our peril – to pretend they don’t exist, underplay them, or decline to support further research on them, is folly.
25 See http://www.grc.org/programs.aspx?year=2008&program=oceans
26 Knap et al 2003. “Indicators of ocean health and human health: developing a research and monitoring framework,” Environmental Health Perspectives 111(3): A142
