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In situ carbon dioxide enrichment experiments show that ocean acidification poses a threat to coral reefs by reducing the saturation state of aragonite and the concentration of carbonate ions and that this impairs community calcification. Acid oceans threaten coral reefs Ocean acidification impairs coral calcification and poses a substantial threat to tropical coral reef ecosystems. Rebecca Albright and colleagues exposed a natural coral reef community in the southern Great Barrier Reef to levels of ocean acidification that are expected to occur later this century unless deep carbon emissions cuts are made, and monitored calcification. Net community calcification was reduced by 34% in the acidified reef. The findings suggest that acidification of the ocean will compromise coral reef function in the near future. Coral reefs feed millions of people worldwide, provide coastal protection and generate billions of dollars annually in tourism revenue 1 . The underlying architecture of a reef is a biogenic carbonate structure that accretes over many years of active biomineralization by calcifying organisms, including corals and algae 2 . Ocean acidification poses a chronic threat to coral reefs by reducing the saturation state of the aragonite mineral of which coral skeletons are primarily composed, and lowering the concentration of carbonate ions required to maintain the carbonate reef. Reduced calcification, coupled with increased bioerosion and dissolution 3 , may drive reefs into a state of net loss this century 4 . Our ability to predict changes in ecosystem function and associated services ultimately hinges on our understanding of community- and ecosystem-scale responses. Past research has primarily focused on the responses of individual species rather than evaluating more complex, community-level responses. Here we use an in situ carbon dioxide enrichment experiment to quantify the net calcification response of a coral reef flat to acidification. We present an estimate of community-scale calcification sensitivity to ocean acidification that is, to our knowledge, the first to be based on a controlled experiment in the natural environment. This estimate provides evidence that near-future reductions in the aragonite saturation state will compromise the ecosystem function of coral reefs.

The Salish Archipelago includes more than 400 islands in the Salish Sea, an amalgamation of Canada's Georgia Strait, the United States’ Puget Sound, and the shared Strait of Juan de Fuca. The Salish Sea and Islands are named for the Coast Salish Indigenous Peoples whose homelands extend across the region. Holiday homes and services have in many places displaced pristine ecosystems, Indigenous communities, and historic farms. Will age-old island environments and communities withstand the forces of commodity-driven economies? This new, major scholarly undertaking provides the geographical and historical background for exploring such questions. Salish Archipelago features sections on environment, history, society, and management, accompanied by numerous maps and other illustrations. This diverse collection offers an overview of an embattled, but resilient, region, providing knowledge and perspectives of interest to residents, educators, and policy makers.

Global shallow water bathymetry maps offer critical information to inform activities such as scientific research, environment protection, and marine transportation. Methods that employ satellite-based bathymetric modeling provide an alternative to conventional shipborne measurements, offering high spatial resolution combined with extensive coverage. We developed an automated bathymetry mapping approach based on the Sentinel-2 surface reflectance dataset in Google Earth Engine. We created a new method for generating a clean-water mosaic and a tailored automatic bathymetric estimation algorithm. We then evaluated the performance of the models at six globally diverse sites (Heron Island, Australia; West Coast of Hawaiʻi Island, Hawaiʻi; Saona Island, Dominican Republic; Punta Cana, Dominican Republic; St. Croix, United States Virgin Islands; and The Grenadines) using 113,520 field bathymetry sampling points. Our approach derived accurate bathymetry maps in shallow waters, with Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) values ranging from 1.2 to 1.9 m. This automatic, efficient, and robust method was applied to map shallow water bathymetry at the global scale, especially in areas which have high biodiversity (i.e., coral reefs).

Increasing global emissions has led to research on the role of innovations play combating emissions. Mitigations from innovation perspective have mainly been focused on the role of patent, ignoring the role of trademarks. We therefore investigate the mitigating power of patent and trademarks in the OECD economies, benchmarking patent as the traditional mitigation strategy. Examining the complimentary role, we created an interaction term between patent and trademark. Our study divided the OECD economies into four subpanels which are OECD America, OCED Asia, OECD Europe, and OECD Oceania. We employed the Im, Pesaran and Shin W-stat, Augmented Dickey-Fuller, and Phillips Perron unit root tests, as well as cross-sectional dependence and Westerlund cointegration tests for the preliminary test on the variables. We also adopted ARDL approach to cointegration, Granger causality test, and OLS in examining the relationship between CO 2 and patent, trademark, urbanization, and economic growth. Findings show that jointly, eco-patents and trademarks mitigate CO 2 emissions. Also, bidirectional or unidirectional causal relationship was established between our variables of study, an indication that most of our variables can be used in forecasting one other.

Arsenic poisoning constitutes a major threat to humans, causing various health problems. Almost everywhere across the world certain “hotspots” have been detected, putting in danger the local populations, due to the potential consumption of water or food contaminated with elevated concentrations of arsenic. According to the relevant studies, Asia shows the highest percentage of significantly contaminated sites, followed by North America, Europe, Africa, South America and Oceania. The presence of arsenic in ecosystems can originate from several natural or anthropogenic activities. Arsenic can be then gradually accumulated in different food sources, such as vegetables, rice and other crops, but also in seafood, etc., and in water sources (mainly in groundwater, but also to a lesser extent in surface water), potentially used as drinking-water supplies, provoking their contamination and therefore potential health problems to the consumers. This review reports the major areas worldwide that present elevated arsenic concentrations in food and water sources. Furthermore, it also discusses the sources of arsenic contamination at these sites, as well as selected treatment technologies, aiming to remove this pollutant mainly from the contaminated waters and thus the reduction and prevention of population towards arsenic exposure.

Inadequate funding levels are a major impediment to effective global biodiversity conservation and are likely associated with recent failures to meet United Nations biodiversity targets. Some countries are more severely underfunded than others and therefore represent urgent financial priorities. However, attempts to identify these highly underfunded countries have been hampered for decades by poor and incomplete data on actual spending, coupled with uncertainty and lack of consensus over the relative size of spending gaps. Here, we assemble a global database of annual conservation spending. We then develop a statistical model that explains 86% of variation in conservation expenditures, and use this to identify countries where funding is robustly below expected levels. The 40 most severely underfunded countries contain 32% of all threatened mammalian diversity and include neighbors in some of the world’s most biodiversity-rich areas (Sundaland, Wallacea, and Near Oceania). However, very modest increases in international assistance would achieve a large improvement in the relative adequacy of global conservation finance. Our results could therefore be quickly applied to limit immediate biodiversity losses at relatively little cost.

Coral reefs serve as natural barriers that protect adjacent shorelines from coastal hazards such as storms, waves, and erosion. Projections indicate global degradation of coral reefs due to anthropogenic impacts and climate change will cause a transition to net erosion by mid-century. Here, we provide a comprehensive assessment of the combined effect of all of the processes affecting seafloor accretion and erosion by measuring changes in seafloor elevation and volume for five coral reef ecosystems in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Caribbean over the last several decades. Regional-scale mean elevation and volume losses were observed at all five study sites and in 77 % of the 60 individual habitats that we examined across all study sites. Mean seafloor elevation losses for whole coral reef ecosystems in our study ranged from −0.09 to −0.8 m, corresponding to net volume losses ranging from 3.4  ×  106 to 80.5  ×  106 m3 for all study sites. Erosion of both coral-dominated substrate and non-coral substrate suggests that the current rate of carbonate production is no longer sufficient to support net accretion of coral reefs or adjacent habitats. We show that regional-scale loss of seafloor elevation and volume has accelerated the rate of relative sea level rise in these regions. Current water depths have increased to levels not predicted until near the year 2100, placing these ecosystems and nearby communities at elevated and accelerating risk to coastal hazards. Our results set a new baseline for projecting future impacts to coastal communities resulting from degradation of coral reef systems and associated losses of natural and socioeconomic resources.

Pacific Island Countries are highly exposed to climate change. Most impact studies have focused on the most densely populated core areas where top-down governance is most effective. In contrast, this research looks at peripheral (rural/outer-island) communities where long-established systems of environmental governance exist that contrast markedly with those which governments and their donor partners in this region favour. Peripheral communities in the Cook Islands, Fiji, Kiribati, and Vanuatu were studied. Traditional systems of environmental governance are described, and three common barriers to effective and sustainable climate-change adaptation identified. The first is lack of awareness among key community decision makers about climate change and associated environmental sustainability that could be lessened by targeted awareness raising. The second is the inappropriateness of traditional decision-making structures for dealing with both the complexity and pace of climate-driven environmental changes. The third is the short-term views of resource management and sustainability held by many community decision makers. Despite 30 years of assistance, there has been negligible effective and sustainable adaptation for climate change in peripheral parts of Pacific Island Countries, something that is explicable by both the ineffectiveness of top-down approaches in such places as well as a lack of attention to the nature and the context of adaptation communications. It is timely for interventions to be made at community level where the greatest disconnect lies between the science and stakeholder awareness of climate change.

Despite contributing minimally to global greenhouse gas emissions, Pacific Island Countries and Territories often shoulder an unequal burden of climate risks. To analyse pathways to sustainability, we conducted a leverage points analysis on the complex sustainability challenges facing the low-lying atoll Ouvéa in Kanaky New Caledonia (France). Leverage points are places within complex systems where interventions can lead to transformative change. Combining a literature review and qualitative interviews with regional, government, provincial, and local stakeholders, we contextualised eight leverage points: (1) expanding and improving coastal protection, (2) strengthening or creating monetary incentives, funding possibilities or forms of compensation to alleviate costs of climate change adaptation and sustainability measures, (3) conducting more research and monitoring, (4) strengthening environmental regulation and restrictions, (5) empowerment of women, youth, and local communities and increasing awareness of power imbalances to strengthen gender equity and social inclusion, (6) establishing new conservation management measures and improving existing ones, (7) increasing institutionalisation of environmental and climate change education, and (8) involving diverse knowledge systems and practices in research and management to strengthen participatory, transdisciplinary, and community-based initiatives. Our results emphasise the importance of acknowledging responsibilities across multiple scales, showing the non-transferability of some interventions due to perceived high costs and incompatibility with local culture. Illustrating dimensions of ocean equity in the context of Ouvéa, we discuss the importance of local values and knowledge systems to ensure fair distribution of costs and benefits in sustainability interventions.