Close-up underwater photo of escape gaps on fish trap.

Through online voting at solutionsearch.org, the public voted for their top three solutions. The Wildlife Conservation Society won the grand prize with its solution, “Bycatch Escape Gaps for Fish Traps” in Curaçao and Kenya. It received a U.S. $20,000 prize to support its conservation and resource management initiative. The two runners-up, Off the Hook Community Supported Fishery and the Misool Baseftin Foundation, each received prizes of U.S. $5,000 for their respective solutions, “Fresh. Fair. Fish.” in Canada and “Defending the Heart of Marine Biodiversity: Community Stewardship of Raja Ampat’s Reefs” in Raja Ampat. The winners will receive their awards at a ceremony in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 8.

This first-ever global Solution Search sought applications from organizations worldwide with demonstrated innovations that benefit coastal communities and marine ecosystems. More than 100 applications were received from 48 countries, from which a panel of expert judges selected 10 finalists, with the public choosing the winners. Solutions submitted for the contest includedthe implementation of no-take zones, introduction of innovative fishing gear and the development of alternative livelihoods. Submissions came from across the globe, including Indonesia, Madagascar, Brazil and Turkey.

“For too long the conservation community has focused on problems,” said Brett Jenks, president and CEO of Rare. “But there are a lot of working solutions in remote parts of the planet. These finalists, and particularly the winners, prove just that. By sharing their solutions with the world, they are improving conservation everywhere.”

“Discovering and sharing solutions that restore marine life and human communities is key to changing the broader world of fishing and seafood,” said Miguel A. Jorge, director of National Geographic’s Ocean Initiative. “By telling the stories of these win-win innovations, we hope to inspire more people and communities to transform their relationship with the ocean.”

Platform sponsors are the Goldring Family Foundation, the Barr Foundation and the Cedar Hill Foundation. Judges for the contest were Steve Gaines, professor of ecology, evolution and marine biology, and director of the Marine Science Institute at the University of California at Santa Barbara; Carl Safina, president of the Blue Ocean Institute; Ahmed Djoghlaf, executive secretary of the Convention of Biological Diversity; Eileen de Ravin, program manager of the Equator Initiative at the United Nations Development Programme; Enric Sala, marine ecologist and a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence; Monique Barbut, CEO and chairperson of the Global Environment Facility; and Nicolas Gutiérrez, fisheries scientist with the Marine Stewardship Council.

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Town of Amaluza (downstream) with upstream watershed in background

A week or so after returning from visiting our China campaign managers in Kunming, I was back in the air again, this time heading west to Ecuador, a country of geological and geographic contrasts. From the offshore islands of the Galapagos (where Rare has a campaign) to the Amazon rainforests; from the Pacific to the towering Andes. It is also a country made up of great human and biological diversity. This nation is not only one of 17 mega-diverse in the world according to Conservation International, but has more biodiversity per square kilometer than any other nation on the planet.

After an overnight in the capital of Quito, I headed south to Loja close to the Peruvian border where I met up with Rare’s Pride Program Manager, Alan Hesse. Alan has been with Rare a little over a year and is responsible for over-seeing the campaign that I was to visit. However, I first met Alan years earlier at a Parrot Conference in the Canary Islands and our paths crossed again when he kindly helped produce a suite of cartoons for our Pride curriculum. From Loja we drove further south to Espíndola, site of a Pride campaign being run by Maritza Azanza and the Ecology Foundation, “Arcoiris.” Maritza is a member of Rare’s first thematic cohort, a group of dedicated campaign managers all working in the Andes on watershed threats, with the solution being so-called “reciprocal agreements”.

Agreements based on the principle that users and beneficiaries of a natural resource should compensate those who safeguard the resource. Lowland farmers, who depend on stewardship of highland watershed habitats, contribute to a conservation fund. [This] fund provides “payments” to the highland landowners as an incentive to maintain healthy forests. Pride campaigns accelerate and deepen community support for this approach (1/2).

Another shared attribute of the “Guad 8” cohort – so called this because the campaign mangers that comprise this group are the 8^th cohort to train at our Mexican university node in Guadalajara, Mexico – is that they are all working to conserve habitat for “AZE species”.

The Alliance for Zero Extinction (AZE) is a global initiative of biodiversity conservation organizations, that aims to prevent extinctions by identifying and safeguarding key sites where species are in imminent danger of disappearing (3).

Maritza’s campaign has its flagship species the Andean Spectacled Bear which she is using to draw attention to the upper watersheds of her site, a habitat also frequented by a little known and likely endangered frog with the nearly unpronounceable name of  Eleutherodactylus balionotus. Helpfully it is also known as Pristimantis balionotus! Without a common or local name and known only from the type locality, 13.5km east of Loja, at the crest of the Cordillera (Abra de Zamora) between Loja Province and Zamora-Chinchipe Province, it is (like many other AZE species) something of an enigma (4).

Maritza was born in the Ecuadorian city of Loja, on December 27, 1984, and studied Environmental Engineering at the Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja. Her thesis focused on  environmental education and as a result of it she gained experience in working with local authorities, children, teachers and community leaders. After graduating and before joining Fundación Ecológica Arcoiris, Maritza coordinated the construction of several self-guided trails including one in the forests of Colambo Yacuri. She joined Arcoiris, as the technician responsible Environmental Education.

I spent the week working with Maritza and Alan reviewing the progress she was making with the campaign, meeting key stakeholders, visiting the areas where reciprocal agreements were planned, and helping with Pride collateral development.

Maritza (r) Marybelle (campaign assistant) and Alan (l)

You can read more about Maritza’s Pride campaign here.

 References:

1: http://rareconservation.org/program-aze-habitat-and-watershed-protection-andes

2: http://www.rareconservation.org/blog/2011/01/28/protecting-cloud-forests-with-reciprocal-watershed-agreements/

3: http://www.zeroextinction.org/AZE_report.pdf

4: http://www.iucnredlist.org/apps/redlist/details/56450/0

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Rwanda has become the newest winner of the prestigious future policy award 2011 (IPS)

• “‘Rwanda has sought not only to make its forests a national priority, but has also used them as a platform to revolutionise its stances on women’s rights and creating a healthy environment,’ said Wangari Maathai, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and founder of the Green Belt Movement.”
• “Rwanda’s forest policy has brought a range of benefits, including a better water supply, reduction in erosion, improved livelihoods and better quality of life overall. The goal is to cover 30 percent of the country in forest by 2020.”

Groundwater depletion, a possible new worry for rising sea levels (New Scientist)

• Adding to the expected list of factors adding to rising sea levels, “another source of water adding to the rise [is] humanity’s habit of pumping water from underground aquifers to the surface. Most of this water ends up in the sea.”
• “1.26 cm may not seem like much, but groundwater depletion has accelerated massively since 1950, particularly in the past decade. Over 1300 cubic kilometres of the groundwater was extracted between 2000 and 2008, producing 0.36 cm of the total 2.79-cm rise in that time.”

Google puts up $75 million for residential solar installations (EcoGeek)

• This large sum will “pay for about 3,000 residential solar installations in California, Colorado, and Arizona.”
• “This fund is the second for Google, who also created a $280 million residential solar fund that California-based SolarCity will administer.  That fund will be overseeing installations, lease agreements and power purchase agreements in 11 states and Washington, D.C.”

A proud day for Conservation International: Marine sites among best protected in the Philippines (Conservation International)

• “ Sulu-Sulawesi Seascape team’s two marine protected areas in the Verde Island Passage project site — Twin Rocks Marine Sanctuary and Agsalin Fish Sanctuary — were recently recognized as among the best managed MPAs in the Philippines.”
• “Starting at just over 1,000 hectares (2,470 acres) in 2005, the MPA network now covers more than 17,000 hectares (42,000 acres) of critical habitats.”
• “Plans for future work include improving the management effectiveness of existing MPAs, developing local climate change adaptation plans, promoting mangrove reforestation and establishing more mangrove conservation areas, and improving law enforcement.”

A soldier dies or is injured for every 50 fuel convoys (The Energy Collective)

• “On alternative fuels, we feel a bit alone out there,” Hicks shared. “But the reality is the ships and planes we have today are going to be the ships and planes we have 10-20 years from now. We need to focus on finding alternatives now to use in that fleet.”

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Mexico will ban shark fishing as global sanctuary movement grows (The New York Times)

• “Conservationists estimate that about 73 million sharks are slaughtered each year mainly for acquiring their fins, and they fear that the uncontrolled and illegal fishing of sharks will drive 30 percent of shark species to the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s classification of threatened or near threatened with extinction.”

Economists see global trade as a win-win proposition, but resource limitation turns it into a win-lose, zero-sum contest (New York Times)

• “Energy will give us serious and sustained problems over the next 50 years as we make the transition from hydrocarbons — oil, coal, gas — to solar, wind, nuclear and other sources.”
• Jeremy Grantham “rates soil erosion as the biggest threat of all. The world’s population could reach 10 billion within half a century — perhaps twice as many human beings as the planet’s overtaxed resources can sustainably support, perhaps six times too many.”
• “Grantham believes that the best approach may be to recast global warming, which depresses crop yields and worsens soil erosion, as a factor contributing to resource depletion. People are naturally much more responsive to finite resources than they are to climate change”.

Growing temperatures make for smaller fish (NewScientist)

• “It is well established that cold-blooded species get smaller as the climate heats up, says Andrew Hirst of Queen Mary, University of London. Experiments show that, on average, 1 °C of warming reduces their adult body mass by 2.5 percent.”
• Hirst says “changes in the size of species could prove critical in that such changes will affect what food animals can eat and what can prey on them in turn. If you start changing the copepods, you could cause all sorts of unpredictable knock-on effects in the ecosystem.”

HRH Prince Charles “If we lose the battle against tropical deforestation, we lose the battle against climate change.” (The Prince’s Charities)

• “The Prince’s Rainforests Project believes that emergency funding is needed to help protect rainforests and to encourage rainforest nations to continue to develop without the need for deforestation. If we don’t take action, we could lose another 100 million hectares of tropical forests over the next 10 years – that’s an area the size of Egypt.”

The majority of the world will pay the costs for a warmer Arctic (The Economist)

• “On September 9th, at the height of its summertime shrinkage, ice covered 4.33m square km, or 1.67m square miles, of the Arctic Ocean, according to America’s National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC).”
• “The Arctic is reckoned to hold around 15% of the world’s undiscovered oil reserves and 30% of those of natural gas.”

China’s new forests aren’t necessarily green- they include alot more than just natural trees (MongaBay)

• “Most of [the gain in forests] results from the increase in tree crops such as fruit trees, rubber and eucalyptus, not recovery of natural forest, yet Chinese data do not record this shift. The change threatens ecosystem services, particularly watershed protection and biodiversity conservation,” Jianchu Xu writes.
• “Xu recommends that China employ the best science possible in its tree-planting initiatives with a focus on payments for restoring natural forests, not planting artificial ones.”

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• The campaign’s goal is to “raise awareness of the dangers associated with global warming. Actors, athletes and musicians taking part include Mark Ruffalo, Serena Williams, Orlando Bloom, James Cameron, Adrian Grenier, Kyra Sedgwick, Kevin Bacon and others.”
• “The organization is hoping to get people involved by submitting a photo of themselves “with a sign of the city or community they love that is threatened by global warming due to sea level rise, floods, droughts or more severe storms.”

Do you eat seafood twice a week or more? (Seafood Health Facts)

• “Current advice from the government and health organizations recommends eating two seafood meals each week.”
• However, the report also states that “fish and shellfish can come from the wild, from fish farms, and from individuals who catch fish for recreation or to supplement their household food supply,” which means that to fill a need of such large amount of fish the probability that they are all coming from law-abiding fishermen is not as likely.

One of our favorite celebrity conservationist’s Yao Ming, is speaking out for the 200,000 Sharks that are killed PER DAY for soup (Virgin)

• Virgin’s Richard Branson said, “today, the shark population is being decimated as they are hunted for their fins, with up to 200,000 a day used for shark fin soup alone – what a disgusting waste for a bowl of soup! At this rate, 400 million years of evolution could be wiped out in just one human generation! We “so called” intelligent human beings just cannot let that happen.”

Professor of biology Mark Hay goes underwater on a ten day mission to look at herbivore diversity and the restoration of reefs (Science Daily)

• “Consumption of seaweeds plays a critical role in structuring coral reefs and in selecting for algal traits that deter herbivorous fish,” Hay explained. “Recent studies have noted dramatic variance among species in the susceptibility of herbivorous fish to seaweed chemical and structural defenses. These differences can translate into dramatic direct effects of herbivore diversity on seaweeds.”
• “The new study will assess the impact of different species of seaweed-eating fish and compare those to previous results evaluating different mixes of fish. The goal will be to determine which specific mixes of fish can control the most damaging of seaweeds and to evaluate the importance of herbivore diversity in suppressing seaweeds and protecting corals.”

Particles that could overturn the laws of physics (Reuters)

• In Geneva, “an international team of scientists said on Thursday they had recorded sub-atomic particles travelling faster than light.”
• “A total of 15,000 beams of neutrinos — tiny particles that pervade the cosmos — were fired over a period of 3 years from CERN towards Gran Sasso 730 (500 miles) km away, where they were picked up by giant detectors. Light would have covered the distance in around 2.4 thousandths of a second, but the neutrinos took 60 nanoseconds — or 60 billionths of a second — less than light beams would have taken.”

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Blue Venture’s Rare Pride campaign on the Andavadoaka Coast in Madagascar is helping to ensure the health of the world’s third largest coral reef by working with local fishers and communities to protect juvenile fish species by eliminating the use of beach seine nets and the practice of poison fishing.

Rare Conservation Fellow Gildas Andriamalala runs this campaign and is working to reduce the threat of overfishing in his native Madagascar by using social marketing to engage local communities. Gildas finds creative channels to share the message of sustainable fishing, in ways that give that message more impact with the community members.

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China and Africa’s bi-lateral relationship goal: To create a united front to save Africa’s last great places and wildlife (The Nature Conservancy)

• “Members of The Nature Conservancy’s China Board of Trustees— which is already working to significantly expand the scope of our work in China — paid a visit to the Masai Mara National Reserve, the Namanyak Community Conservancy and the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy, where [they are] collaborating with partners to protect some of Kenya’s most important expanses of natural habitat.”
• “Over the past decade, a trickle of interest has turned into a flood as China has significantly scaled up its investment in Africa. Last year, trade between the two exceeded $100 billion; it’s now estimated that there are around a million Chinese workers in Africa.”

The indigenous people of Peru want to protect their wetlands and have had enough aggressive/exploratory oil drilling  WWF (Mongabay)

• “Over the weekend more than 100 Shuar indigenous people, also known as Wampis, blockaded the Morona River in Peru in an effort to stop exploratory oil drilling by Canadian-owned Talisman Energy. The blockade in meant to prevent oil drilling in an area of the Peruvian Amazon known as Block 64, home to four indigenous tribes in total and the Pastaza River Wetland Complex, a Ramsar wetland site.”
• “Around 70 percent of the Peruvian Amazon has been opened for oil and gas exploration and drilling under an aggressive industrialization of the Amazon by previous Peruvian president Alan Garcia. The opening up of so much of the Amazon to exploitative activities has led to numerous conflicts between large companies and indigenous people.”
• Besides this, many local people rely on the Amazon for fishing and their water supply.

The World Bank has decided to back NGOs and the UN’s desire to focus on the importance of fossil fuel subsidiaries (Treehugger)

• “According to draft documents leaked to The Guardian, the World Bank will tell G20 finance ministers that the $50 billion in subsidies given to the fossil fuel industry worldwide each year should be eliminated, so as to help poor countries adapt to climate change.”
• “Of the $50b in fossil fuel subsidies, about one quarter of that goes to coral and natural gas, and amounts to twelve times the support given to renewable energy sources.”

Solar power and tree planting: IKEA’s growing greener (Earth Times)

• IKEA has taken it upon itself to “be a good business while doing good business [which means] the firm now has 11 solar energy projects up and running in America with more on the way.”

Whales take Northwest Passage as Arctic sea-ice melts (BBC News)

• “Mads Peter Heide-Jorgensen from the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources led a team that has satellite-tagged more than 100 bowheads over the last decade.”
• After finding out that whales from different sides of the area had come together, Dr. Heide-Jorgensen said the whales would be ”capable of moving relatively long distances in a short period of time, and can venture into areas where we haven’t seen them for a very long time – so I’m sure they will use the open water if the ice disappears.”

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Sorry hungry fish predators, the salmon are on to you (BBC)

• Dr. Laura Roberts, co-author of the study said, “It’s the predator’s diet- not just its own smell- that’s alerting the salmon.”
• “The salmon’s ability to sense these chemicals helps them react to a wide range of predators without the need to learn about each individual species.”

Making sure to help ourselves while we put the “cycling” back in recycling (Triple Pundit)

• “It is estimated that 76 percent of California’s PET, the dynamic material found in beverage containers) is exported to China. Once transported overseas, the recycled feedstock is converted into a variety of products ranging from plastic lumber to carpeting to textiles. Many of these value-added consumables are sold back to U.S. buyers at a hefty premium.”
• “According to statistics from Harvard University, using recycled plastics instead of virgin raw materials to manufacture products saves 70 percent of the energy by comparison.”

Ask your Senators to support offshore wind and protect dolphins. Learn how @ (Oceana)

• “Dead dolphins washing up on Gulf shores with BP oil on them. Seals forced to breathe in toxic fumes. Where there is drilling, oil spills are inevitable and deadly.”
• Wind energy is a great alternative. Oceana urges that individuals “call [their] senators TODAY and tell them that [they] demand a clean energy future and urge their support for  S. 1397.”

The Galapagos whale shark tagging project, have you ever seen one? (The Dorsal Fin)

• The promotional video has just come out for the project, showcasing what it takes with the close proximity of tagging of the largest fish in the ocean.
• The project’s goal is to learn more about the species such as how far it travels, where it finds a mate, and where the babies are born.

The ocean depths might be hiding the full extent of global climate change now, but the heat will have consequences (io9)

• “Scientists have long been searching for the so-called “missing heat” to explain the disparity between expected rises in global temperatures and the actual, relatively small increases.”
• Researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research have finally figured out “that all the heat energy is being stored in the ocean depths [and] masking the true temperature buildup for several years.” Though with various stimulations, “the overall health of the ocean and its wildlife is still anyone’s guess.”

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Once that Coca-Cola bottle is done quenching your thirst, most people would either toss it in the trash or recycling bin. But in the small town of San Pedro, South of Manila in the Phillipines, residents look everywhere for these empty bottles to be able to light up their homes. Not only does this invention create light but has created green jobs for the installers; all around benefitting the people within this now bright community.

In case you missed it, all that is needed for the 55 watts of clean and free solar light is:

• Soda bottle
• Water
• Metal sheet
• Chlorine

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Will jellyfish inherit the Earth, or at least the oceans? (let’s hope not) (MSNBC)

• “A study released Thursday found that the spineless creatures are becoming the dominant predator in areas where fish species are being reduced by overfishing and habitat destruction. It’s not just that reduced competition is giving the jellyfish more room. The jellyfish themselves are evolving into bigger specimens by increasing the water content in their gels, the study concluded.”

“Communities on some islands in the Maldives have been forced to relocate because of rising sea levels” (The Telegraph)

• Climate change will increase migration in Asia.
• “Maldives would be among the earliest victims of rising seas as glaciers melt due to global warming, and its officials have become vocal advocates of climate change policy.”

Cleared tropical forests never fully regenerate (Radio Australia)

• A study/interview stating that no matter the disturbance amount or time period, forests are never the same once they are disturbed.

4,600 sea turtles killed yearly by fishing (Conservation International)

• “This study showed that up to 98% of all turtle bycatch — and 80% of all turtle deaths due to bycatch — occurred in shrimp trawls, mostly in the Gulf.”
• “Fortunately, there is a solution. Turtle Excluder Devices, or TEDs, are trapdoors installed in trawl nets that let big animals like turtles escape. Little animals, like shrimp, go to the back of the net. When installed and used properly, these devices are nearly 100% effective in purging turtles from trawls.”
• Solution Search has $20k on the line if you can help sustainable fishing.

Save India’s coasts: For miles on end the waters of the Tamil Nadu coast are blood red from pollution

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