Coral Reefs' Only Hope Is Halting Global Warming, Study Says

InsideClimate News - Nicholas Kusnetz

Bleaching events have stressed coral worldwide, particularly the Great Barrier Reef, and research says their survival depends on quickly slowing climate change.

The Great Barrier Reef has experienced a series of damaging bleaching events since 2014. Credit: Getty Images

Two doses of bad news for the world's coral reefs came in the last week. First, Australia's government confirmed that the Great Barrier Reef is in the midst of a second consecutive year of mass bleaching. It's the first time the reef has experienced back-to-back events, and it seems to be weakening many of the corals.

Then on Wednesday, leading scientists published a new study about last year's bleaching—the worst to date—suggesting that when the seas are hot enough for long enough, nothing can protect coral reefs. Their only hope is that we rapidly slow climate change.

The research, published in the journal Nature, looked at data from three bleaching events along the 1,400 mile-long Australian reef system dating back to 1998. By looking at factors including water temperature, water quality and fishing protections, the authors determined that last year's bleaching was linked almost exclusively to ocean warming.

Conservationists have long hoped that protecting corals from other threats, such as pollution and overfishing, might help shield at least some of them from bleaching, too. While the new paper doesn't entirely deflate that hope—such protections likely help reefs recover—it shows that such work provides little if any relief from severe bleaching.

"At the level of heat stress that was seen during this event, it just didn't matter," said C. Mark Eakin, coordinator of the Coral Reef Watch program at NOAA and a co-author of the paper.

Ilsa B. Kuffner, a marine biologist with the United States Geological Survey who was not involved in the research, said the new paper supports a solid body of evidence suggesting that disease and bleaching are driving coral mortality, while other factors play a more important role in the recovery from those threats. "It's a distinction that, while it's subtle, is also very important when you talk about what's actually causing coral reef decline," she said.

The paper also found that a reef's history made little difference. Some studies have suggested that previous bleaching may make reefs more resilient if they are given time to recover, perhaps by killing off weaker corals or driving some adaptive response.

Warmer-than-average temperatures can cause coral to expel the symbiotic algae that live on its surface, turning the reef white. Such bleaching stresses coral and can make it more susceptible to disease and death.

The world's reefs are in the midst of what scientists consider to be a single, mass bleaching event dating back to 2014. Climate models project that most of the world's reefs could experience annual bleaching by 2050 without rapid cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

While coral can survive even extreme bleaching, surveys conducted this month along the Great Barrier Reef are showing evidence that successive hits take a toll. Eakin said the level of heat stress—a measurement of how hot the waters are for how long—is lower than last year, and yet the bleaching appears to be just as widespread.

"They haven't bounced back yet, so when you hit them with another event a year later, you can see more bleaching at a lower level of heat stress," he said. "A lot of the corals that have survived last year really are not ready for another event."

The bleaching has also spread to areas of the reef that escaped last year's event, according to the recent surveys.

Successive bleaching also appears to be reshaping the makeup of the reef system. Reefs are composed of a rich diversity of coral species, with some particularly sensitive to bleaching and some that recover much more quickly than others. With consecutive years of bleaching, and after four events over 20 years, the new paper said the composition of the reef is changing in areas that have seen recurrent bleaching, perhaps irreversibly.

"The good news is you've got some tough corals that are surviving," Eakin said. "The bad news is, one of the most important things about coral reefs is their diversity, and you're cutting out some of that diversity."

The paper's authors believe that protecting reefs from pollution and overfishing will help them recover from bleaching. But the most important action, they said, lies elsewhere.

"Securing a future for coral reefs, including intensively managed ones such as the Great Barrier Reef," they wrote, "ultimately requires urgent and rapid action to reduce global warming."

Links

• As Coral Reefs Continue to Struggle in Warming Oceans, a Group Forms to Save Them
• As Coral Bleaching Goes Global, Scientists Fear Worst Is Yet to Come
• Arctic Sea Ice Melt, Driven by Global Warming, Accelerated by Nature
• Chief Environmental Justice Official at EPA Resigns, With Plea to Pruitt to Protect Vulnerable Communities
• Exxon Concealed Tillerson's 'Alias' Emails From NY Climate Fraud Probe, AG Claims
• Scientists Call Out Pruitt's False View of Climate Change
• Massive Permafrost Thaw Documented in Canada, Portends Huge Carbon Release
• Rate of Ocean Warming Has Nearly Doubled Over Two Decades, Study Says
• What Slashing the EPA's Budget by One-Quarter Would Really Mean
• Cook Inlet Gas Leak Remains Unmonitored as Danger to Marine Life Is Feared

More Than 900 Examples Of How Climate Change Affects Business

Forbes - Carmen Nobel*

This word cloud is composed of blog posts by more than 900 students describing how individual organizations are likely to be affected by climate change.

Last fall, first-year MBA students at Harvard Business School received a new assignment in their mandatory Technology and Operations Management (TOM) course. The topic: How climate change affects business.
“Choose a company or non-profit organization whose operating model is likely to be significantly affected by climate change’s physical manifestations and/or related regulation, including threats and opportunities associated with mitigation and/or adaptation,” the assignment read. “Describe how the organization is likely to be affected, the steps the organization is taking to address those effects and describe and justify what additional steps you think the organization should consider implementing.”

Some 929 students took the Climate Change Challenge, analyzing organizations including Toyota, General Mills, Maker’s Mark, Amazon Web Services and Vail Ski Resort. Their responses, each 800 words or fewer, can be read on a public blog called Open Knowledge, which was designed to let HBS students discuss business issues with each other and to share their ideas with the rest of the world. (Because the posts are public, students have the option of whether to post under their own names or under a pseudonym.)
“We launched the challenge to expose students to the broad array of ways climate change is affecting organizations,” says Mike Toffel, Senator John Heinz Professor of Environmental Management at Harvard Business School and the head of the TOM course, who spearheaded the challenge. “It’s affecting the energy sector and agriculture, of course, but it’s also affecting supply chains and operations.”

The challenge was a pedagogical shift for HBS, which traditionally teaches management lessons via in-depth case studies about individual organizations. “Instead of presenting students with a case that distills a management scenario, this assignment required students to do research and cite reputable sources,” Toffel explains.
The new class format “allowed the students to appreciate the diversity of ways in which climate change affects companies and companies react to climate change,” says Assistant Professor Chiara Farronato, who was among several professors who taught the challenge. “For some, it's a nuance; for others, survival depends on their response to climate change. Climate change is multifaceted. It has many physical manifestations, regulatory standards, consumer preferences, and levels of uncertainty. One case study would have focused the discussion on one example, whose generalizability would have been limited given this diversity.”



The blog posts cover a wide swath of industries that grapple with climate change.
“Many of the students wrote about the industries and companies they were most familiar with, which led to a remarkable diversity of posts,” says Assistant Professor Ariel Dora Stern. “Students discussed the business implications of climate change in contexts ranging from fast fashion to cloud computing and from banking and financial services to leadership issues facing coastal municipalities. I believe we all came away with a deeper understanding of the ubiquity of climate change as a challenge for business leaders of the future.”
For example:

• Nikhil Dewan looks at how water scarcity affects a beverage giant in Is Coca Cola Staying Ahead of Climate Change? The blog post discusses the company’s 2007 pledge to replenish all the water is uses by 2020, and then takes a critical eye toward next steps. “Coke’s Replenish projects are not always to the aquifer from which the water was originally sourced,” he writes. “The strongest critics question the act of ‘balancing’ when depletion of a certain community aquifer is mitigated by replenishing water in another community aquifer that may be hundreds or thousands of miles away. I personally believe that Coke must double down on efforts to ensure that replenishment actually benefits the communities that were impacted by its operations.”
• Having lived through Hurricane Sandy, another student considers climate-change-related insurance claims in Insuring the End of the World: Allstate at the Intersection of the Causes and Effects of Climate Change. “In this rapidly shifting landscape, it is imperative for P&C insurers like Allstate to continue to adapt, not just to the newly arisen risks from climate change, but also to the opportunities to serve their clients better,” writes the student under the name “TOM.”
• And “SWSC” digs into the environmental impact of the apparel industry in The Nike Model: Garbage In, Sneakers Out. “With 666 factories in 43 countries and 1,000 retail locations across continents, Nike’s widespread operations and supply chains require significant amounts of water and energy to produce, package, and ship its merchandise to points of sale across the globe,” the student explains, going on to discuss what the company is doing to shrink its environmental footprint—and improve its reputation.

Other posts focus on entrepreneurial ventures borne of the need to fight climate change. “For many companies, climate change poses a threat to their current operating model,” says Assistant Professor Kris Ferreira. “However, there are also a few examples of companies or startups for which climate change actually poses opportunities.”
For instance, a post entitled Climate Change ... Understanding the Meat of the Problem looks at Impossible Foods, a food-tech company looking to create a veggie burger that tastes like a hamburger. “Livestock is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than all transportation exhausts combined,” writes David Mravca, and the company is banking on people who care about that. “Impossible Foods is taking advantage of the effects of climate change to successfully obtain funding (approx. $180M), to build its brand, bring on staff, develop a great product, and market its product to the public,” Mravca writes, “… and it’s getting an advantage because of all the climate change articles being published and paid for by other groups.”

Lessons Learned
To prepare for the class discussion on the Climate Change Challenge, students were told to read a few of each other’s blog posts, along with the note Climate Change in 2017: Implications for Business, written by Rebecca M. Henderson, Sophus A. Reinert, Polina Dekhtyar and Amram Migdal.
The professors who taught the Climate Change Challenge focused on the business implications of climate change and presented the issue as an established scientific reality. “We wasted no time debating whether climate change is real: in the scientific community, there really is no such debate anymore. The note we assigned beforehand presented a summary of the science and its projections, and we focused our assignment and class discussion on what organizations are saying and doing about it,” Toffel says.
Each instructor picked five or six student posts to discuss in class. “I deliberately called on students with very diverse opinions to see if they could be swayed or constructively argumentative,” says Senior Lecturer Christina Wing. “In many cases, the blogs in conjunction with the classroom discussion open students’ eyes to potential alternatives to issues and a new way of thinking. In the end, the majority of my students were very open-minded."
The broad lesson of the challenge is that climate change matters to the world of business, and virtually no industry is immune to the change.
“I think our students developed an appreciation for the breadth of consequences of climate change across industries and the sheer scope of this problem,” says Assistant Professor Joel Goh. “Unlike a traditional case discussion, where we go really deep into analyzing the operations of an individual company, here they had to grapple with how this single phenomenon is impacting organizations across industries that we don’t even usually think of as being related. The sense I got was that many students coming into class already understood, cerebrally, that climate change is a big problem, but the class session and discussion made this problem real for them, showing them that it isn’t just an issue for policymakers and scientists, but that it has tangible implications for the companies and industries that they themselves will work or invest in.”
The assignment also provided practical experience in summarizing and proposing solutions for a business problem—in 800 words or fewer.
“Today, all managers must write two-page memos,” says Shane Greenstein, the Martin Marshall Professor of Business Administration. “A blog post is a version of that. This assignment provided great practice at being short, punchy, engaging and to the point.”

*Carmen Nobel is the senior editor of Harvard Business School Working Knowledge.

Links

• Women Mayors From Across The World Step Up Fight Against Climate Change
• The First Climate Model Turns 50, And Predicted Global Warming Almost Perfectly
• Fearing White House Purge Of Climate Science, Scientists Frantically Copying Data
• Perspectives From Inside The Climate Change-Human Health Conference That Rose From The Dead

Climate Change Needs To Be Tackled For Better Health, Medical Groups Urge

NBC News - Maggie Fox

Heatstroke. Asthma. Zika. Climate change is helping illness and disease spread and become more common, according to a new consortium of medical groups.

A Contra Costa County worker uses a blower to kill off mosquito larvae found in a retention pond in Bay Point, California, in 2015. Justin Sullivan / Getty Images, file

It's not just extreme heat and flooding, but more intense storms — including blizzards — and a steady warming trend that lets disease-carrying mosquitoes thrive, the new Medical Society Consortium on Climate Health said.
The best answer? Cleaner energy, the consortium said, including agreements to cut carbon dioxide emissions and develop of solar and wind power.
"We believe the most important action we can take to protect our health is to accelerate the inevitable transition to clean renewable energy," the group of 11 medical societies, which includes pediatricians, gynecologists and infectious disease specialists, said in a statement.
To that end, the consortium is launching a coordinated public relations push of their agenda, including efforts to recruit hometown doctors to tell stories of climate-linked illness and injury.
"Doctors in every part of our country see that climate change is making Americans sicker," said Dr. Mona Sarfaty, director of the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University and the head of the new consortium.
 "Physicians are on the front lines and see the impacts in exam rooms. What's worse is that the harms are felt most by children, the elderly, Americans with low-income or chronic illnesses, and people in communities of color," Sarfaty added in a statement.
It's hardly a new idea that climate change can affect human health. The Obama White House issued a report saying rising temperatures were making allergies worse and causing more heat-related deaths. The World Health Organization has issued several warnings, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a program dedicated to climate and health
But health experts are worried that the new administration of Donald Trump is not just less worried about the problem, but might be downright hostile to efforts to slow the human impact on climate change.
There was more than a little suspicion that the cancellation of a CDC-sponsored meeting on climate change last month was a response to fears about what the new boss might think.
The new group wants to press forward from a medical perspective.
"The reality of human-caused climate change is no longer a matter of debate," they say in a report released with the launch Wednesday.
"These harms include heat-related illness, worsening chronic illnesses, injuries and deaths from dangerous weather events, infectious diseases spread by mosquitoes and ticks, illnesses from contaminated food and water, and mental health problems," the report adds.
"Unless we take concerted action, these harms to our health are going to get much worse. The sooner we take action, the more harm we can prevent, and the more we can protect the health of all Americans."
The full group:

• American Academy of Allergy, Asthma, Immunology (AAAAI)
• American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP)
• American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP)
• American College of Physicians (ACP)
• American College of Preventive Medicine (ACPM)
• American Congress of Obstetrics and Gynecology (ACOG)
• American Geriatrics Society
• American Podiatric Medical Association (APMA)
• Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA)
• National Medical Association (NMA)
• Society of General Internal Medicine (SGIM).

"Here's the message from America's doctors on climate change: it's not only happening in the Arctic Circle; it's happening here. It's not only a problem for us in 2100; it's a problem now. And it's not only hurting polar bears; it's hurting us," said Sarfaty.

Links

• Here's How Climate Change Might Kill You
• White House Says Climate Change is Ruining Health (2014)
• Trump Administration Reviews Fuel Efficiency Rules
• Is Global Warming Making us Sick?
• Earth Sets Record Temperature for Third Year Running