The native oyster beds are gone. The vast saltmarshes that soaked up carbon and buffered the coast from stormy seas have been reclaimed for farms and towns. The species-rich maerl and horse mussel beds have vanished and now, in new research, we’ve uncovered the decline of another jewel in the UK’s marine environment: seagrass meadows.
Seagrass is a flowering plant that forms rippling underwater meadows in shallow coastal seas. Our study is the first to analyse all published data on this habitat in the UK, gathered from newspapers, diaries and other sources throughout history. We found that at least 44% of the UK’s seagrass has been lost since 1936 – most of it since the 1980s. But when we modelled which coastal areas were likely to have been suitable for seagrass, we found that as much as 92% of it might have disappeared.
POINT OF VIEW/ Race to restore Asia-Pacific s sustainable ocean economy : The Asahi Shimbun
asahi.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from asahi.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
UNESCO reveals largest carbon stores found in Australian World Heritage Sites
eurekalert.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from eurekalert.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Email
In the lush, bright-green thickets of the Philippine’s Agusan Marsh, nestled in the country’s far south Mindanao island, children steer canoes through meandering waterways and swim in lakes.
The marsh is a playground, as well as a source of food, shelter, and culture for the Manobo Indigenous tribe that lives there in moored floating houses that rise and fall with the rainy seasons. For hundreds of years, this wetland ecosystem has been a veritable paradise for the Manobo people who make a living there hunting and fishing. The more than 100,000 inland acres is also home to nearly 200 species of birds, as well as mammals, reptiles, and fish living in the region.
Share
Mangrove forests are a natural solution for both mitigating climate change, due to their ability to sequester carbon, and adapting to its impacts on the coast, providing flood mitigation benefits worth billions at a global scale. afp
Race to restore: Building Asia-Pacific’s sustainable ocean economy
Mon, 8 February 2021
‘Unprecedented” might be judged the most used adjective of 2020, and too often for dire reasons. Yet the end of last year brought one more occasion to use the word, when the leaders of 14 countries put forward a new ocean action agenda underpinned by sustainably managing 100 per cent of national waters. Asia-Pacific nations were well represented on the high level panel, by leaders of Australia, Fiji, Indonesia, Japan and Palau.