Keep eating fish; it’s the best way to feed the world

The famous ocean explorer, Sylvia Earle, has long advocated that people stop eating fish. Recently, George Monbiot made a similar plea in The Guardian – there’s only one way to save the life in our oceans, stop eating fish – which, incidentally, would condemn several million people to starvation.

In both cases, it’s facile reasoning. The oceans may suffer from many things, but fishing isn’t the biggest. Earle and Monbiot’s sweeping pronouncements lack any thought for the consequences of rejecting fish and substituting fish protein for what? Steak? That delicious sizzler on your plate carries the most appallingly large environmental costs regarding fresh water, grain production, land use, erosion, loss of topsoil, transportation, you name it.

Luckily for our planet, not everyone eats steak. You’re vegan, you say, and your conscience is clean. An admirable choice – so long as there aren’t too many of you. For the sake of argument and numbers, let us assume that we can substitute plant protein in the form of tofu, made from soybeans, for fish protein. Soybeans need decent land; in fact it would take 2.58 times the land area of England to produce enough tofu to substitute for no longer available fish. That extra amount of decent arable land just isn’t available – unless we can persuade Brazil, Ecuador and Columbia to cut down more of the Amazon rainforest. We would also add 1.71 times the amount of greenhouse gases that it takes to catch the fish.

And, again for the sake of argument, were we to substitute beef for fish, we would need 192.43 Englands to raise all that cattle and greenhouse gases would rocket to 42.4 times what they are from fishing.

But aren’t there alternatives that we can eat with a clean conscience? It depends. First, we must accept the inescapable truth that everyone has to eat. You and I and another few billion humans right down to the single cell organisms. The second inescapable truth arises from the first but is often ignored, is that there is no free lunch. The big variable in this business of eating is deciding the appropriate price to the environment.

There are costs to each mouthful. By the time you swallow it, that mouthful has racked up a huge amount of unseen costs: production of greenhouse gases, pollution of air and waterways, soil erosion, use of freshwater, use of antibiotics, and impacts on terrestrial and aquatic biodiversity.

However, it doesn’t have to be that costly. Ocean fisheries don’t cause soil erosion, don’t blow away the topsoil, don’t use any significant freshwater, don’t use antibiotics and don’t have anything to do with nutrient releases, that devastating form of pollution that causes algal blooms in freshwater and dead zones in the ocean. After extensive studies, it turns out that some fish have the lowest green house gas footprint per unit of protein. Better even than plants. Sardines, herring, mackerel, anchovies and farmed shellfish all have a lower GHG footprint than plants, and many other fisheries come close.

A ringing endorsement of fish over meat came in 2013, when Andy Sharpless, the CEO of the conservation group Oceana, pointed out that you can sustainably produce food from the sea at low environmental cost. In his book, The Perfect Protein: The Fish Lover’s Guide to Saving the Oceans, Sharpless says, “What if there was a healthy, animal sourced protein, that both the fats and the thins could enjoy without draining the life from the soil, without drying up our rivers, without polluting the air and the water, without causing our planet to warm even more, without plaguing our communities with diabetes, heart disease and cancer?” His answer was to eat fish.

There has been plenty of criticism of commercial fisheries, mostly focused on the impacts on marine ecosystems – fishing certainly reduces the abundance of fish in the ocean, and also non-target species like marine birds, mammals and turtles. But consider the alternative.

Suspend, for a minute, your image of food from the land as it appears to most of us in grocery stores or farmers’ markets – beautifully arranged vegetables, tasty bread, pretty cuts of meat as well as pre-cooked, pre-packaged, eternally preserved fast food. Then cast your minds to how and from where it comes, the raw material from a field. The land as it once was has been totally transformed by farming, replacing original habitat by clearcutting every type of existing flora and replacing it with exotic species, that would be grains, vegetables and fruit trees. Farming, be it agrobusiness or subsistence, essentially eliminates the habitat for indigenous species, and thousands of them have gone extinct because of food production, whereas no marine fish is known to have gone extinct from fishing. The ocean will remain the ocean, though of course we have to manage fish stocks well. We should press our governments to manage fisheries sustainably and minimize the environmental impacts of fishing.

Let’s give a final thought to the reality of boycotting fish and commercial fishing. The need for protein in this world is huge, and we certainly must not waste it. Fishing fleets are guided by quotas set by management and what Earle and Monbiot might boycott, will be shipped and gratefully eaten elsewhere.

Featured image: “Pile of Fish” by Oziel Gómez. Free for use via Pexels.

Ray Hilborn is a professor in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, University of Washington, specializing in natural resource management and conservation. He has co-authored several books and has published over 300 peer reviewed articles. His latest book, co-authored with Ulrike Hilborn, is Ocean Recovery: A sustainable future for global fisheries?

Original post: https://blog.oup.com/2019/05/keep-eating-fish-best-way-feed-world/

Squid Research Update 2018-19

Methodological Overview

The California Wetfish Producer’s Association (CPWA) in collaboration with NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center (SWFSC) and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife has been conducting a long-term data collection program targeting California Market Squid paralarvae in Southern California since 2011, and in Monterey since 2014. Sampling sites occur at fixed and known squid spawning and aggregation sites and were selected through a collaborative process involving the squid fishing community, government managers, and independent scientists. These sites are in shallow waters, generally between 40-100 meters, over sandy substrate and often within one km from shore. Sampling effort targets the winter hatching season in southern California, sampling occurs in December, January, and February. Summer surveys are also conducted in SC and Monterey. Depending on funding availability, additional surveys are conducted in spring and autumn. To date, over 1,000 net tows have been collected during 42 survey efforts spanning nine years. Sampling is done on chartered fishing vessels and paralarvae are captured via bongo nets with a 505-micron mesh. Zooplankton volume and preservation, paralarval sorting and identification and other lab work are conducted at the SWFSC. Paralarval ageing is conducted with SWFSC personnel in an on-going project. Paralarval condition is measured by obtaining an average weight for paralarvae at a given station location, as well as measuring lengths of all individuals at a station location, or from 10 randomized individuals if >10 individuals occur at a station.

Overview – Early Winter 2018

Market squid paralarval abundance in Southern California (SC) during the winter of 2018 remained very low compared to the long-term mean, and especially compared to paralarval densities found during previous La Niña time periods (prior to 2015), indicating lingering effects from the historic 2015-16 El Niño. The 3-month mean SC paralarval density index (PDI) for the December 2018, and January and February, 2019 winter paralarval hatching season was 3.17 paralarvae per 1,000 m3 of filtered sea-water (± 19 SD). This is down from 7.43 (± 46.9) the previous hatching season (2017-18). The long-term SC winter mean PDI is 51.3 (± 342). Measurements of productivity, both zooplankton displacement volume (ZPDV) and surface chlorophyll (SCHL) declined from the previous year. ZPDV has steadily declined since the onset of the strong El Niño in 2014. Surface chlorophyll concentrations have recovered slightly from the El Niño, but are lower than last year, and still much lower than the previous period of high productivity (Fig. 1). Local sea surface temperature (SST) and the Ocean Niño Index (ONI) both saw cooling periods in 2017, but have warmed slightly during 2018 and 2019.

Late Winter Hatching Season, 2019

Paralarval abundance, temperature, and ocean productivity began the 2018-19 winter hatching season similarly to previous years, marked by very low abundance, warmer ocean temperatures, and reduced productivity. However, February, 2019, marked a dramatic change. A series of strong winter storms drove coastal upwelling, which cooled surface waters, increased ocean mixing, nutrient availability, zooplankton abundance, and yielded a significant increase in paralarval abundance (Table 1, Fig. 2). Zooplankton biomass and availability seems to be particularly important for market squid, likely due to the high energetic demands required by squids (O’Dor 1982). General Additive Models were used (also see Van Noord & Dorval 2017) to evaluate the importance of oceanographic variables on determining variability in paralarval density for the 2018-19 season. Sea surface temperature, ZPDV, SCHL, and four geographic variables (separating the coast from the Channel Islands and north from south at Santa Monica Bay) explained 48% of the variability in paralarval abundance. Sea surface temperature and ZPDV were particularly important in the model (Fig. 3). Greater paralarval density was associated with lower SST and moderate to high ZPDV.

Monterey Bay Area and Summer Sampling

The Monterey Bay Area was sampled in June, 2018 (n=15) and the paralarvae density index was 10.5 (± 7.18). This was the highest paralarvae abundance measured during the 2018-19 season. Southern California was sampled in June, 2018 and the PDI measured 0.45 (± 0.04). This was the second consecutive year that Monterey PDI values were the highest recorded in a given fishing year, indicating the population’s center of distribution may still be north following the anomalous warm water event during 2015-16, indicating that squid are seeking cooler ocean waters and greater food availability.

The Keeling Curve Hits 415 PPM

Watch the new video released by Scripps Oceanography

Scripps scientists measured a record level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere: 415 parts per million, on Sunday, May 12, 2019. This daily record, the Keeling Curve, is considered the foundation of modern climate change research. Geochemist Charles David Keeling joined Scripps in 1956 and built a manometer and other equipment to isolate the carbon dioxide in air samples. In 1958, the average carbon dioxide concentration of the first measurement was 316.16 parts per million. In 2013, the CO2 concentration surpassed 400 ppm for the first time in human history.

These Days, It’s Not About the Polar Bears

Polar bears feeding on garbage in Belushya Guba, on the Novaya Zemlya archipelago in northern Russia. Shrinking habitats has forced more bears to wander into town for food. Alexander Grir/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

By Benjamin Ryan  May 12, 2019

Climate science has struggled mightily with a messaging problem.

The well-worn tactic of hitting people over the head with scary climate change facts has proved inadequate at changing behavior or policies in ways big enough to alter the course of global warming.

While Europe has made some headway, the largest obstacles to change remain in the United States, which has historically been responsible for more emissions than any other country. And perhaps most important, climate change denial has secured a perch in the Trump administration and across the Republican Party.

Enter the fast-growing academic field of climate change communication. Across a swath of mostly Western nations, social scientists in fields like psychology, political science, sociology and communications studies have produced an expansive volume of peer-reviewed papers — more than 1,000 annually since 2014 — in an effort to cultivate more effective methods for getting the global warming message across and inspiring action.

While recent polls have shown an increase in the percentage of people who describe themselves as worried about climate change, experts say not enough people have been motivated to act.  “The main reason people reject the science of climate change is because they reject what they perceive to be the solutions: total government control, loss of personal liberties, destruction of the economy,” said Katharine Hayhoe, director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University.  “But ironically, what motivates people to care and to act is an awareness of the genuine solutions: a new clean-energy future, improving our standard of living, and building local jobs and the local economy.”

Schoolchildren taking part in a student climate protest in London in March. Chris J Ratcliffe/Getty Images

Social-science investigators have found that the most effective tools for engaging the public in the subject of climate change are those that appeal to core human tendencies. For example, people tend to focus on personal and local problems happening now, which means talk of the last remaining polar bears stranded on shrinking icebergs, far from most people, is out.

The best climate-related appeals are not a collection of statistics, but those that target people’s affinity for compelling stories. They also work best if they avoid fear-based messaging (which can cause a head-in-the-sand effect) and provide a sense that individuals can affect the environment in a personal and positive way — by updating to energy-efficient appliances, for example, or eating less meat, given meat production’s heavy carbon footprint.

But these efforts at persuasion are up against a well-financed opposition.  In the United States from 2000 to 2016, major carbon-emitting industries spent more than $1.35 billion lobbying members of Congress on climate change legislation. They outspent environmental groups and renewable energy companies by 10 to 1, according to a paper last year in the journal Climate Change by Robert J. Brulle, an environmental sociologist at Drexel University in Philadelphia.

A 2015 paper by Bruce Tranter, a sociologist at the University of Tasmania, analyzed 14 Western nations and identified an association between a country’s per capita carbon footprint and the prevalence of climate science skepticism among its citizens.  And in a recent study published in Nature Climate Change, Matthew J. Hornsey, a social psychologist at the University of Queensland, found that nations that had the strongest relationship between political conservatism and climate science skepticism tended to be those with economies more highly dependent on the fossil fuel industry, including the United States, Australia, Canada and Brazil.

At the vanguard of the social-science-based response to such doubt is a pair of centers for climate change communications research at George Mason University and Yale University.

An iceberg stranded near the village of Innaarsuit, in northwestern Greenland, in July. Karl Petersen/EPA, via Shutterstock

These research hubs just released new polling data indicating that 96 percent of liberal Democrats and 32 percent of conservative Republicans support the Green New Deal — a public-opinion gap that widened by 28 percentage points between December and April as awareness about the proposed legislation grew.

In 2009, the two climate labs produced the highly regarded “Six Americas” report, which identified six different groups of Americans who represented the range of public opinion on climate change.

On one end of the spectrum are the “alarmed,” who are the most certain, and most concerned, about human-driven global warming. They’re also the most motivated to act to protect the climate. On the other end of the spectrum are the “dismissives,” who, as their name suggests, are least likely to accept or care about climate change. Between the two polarities are “concerned,” “cautious,” “disengaged” and “doubtful.”   The report has been updated repeatedly since its release and is often used by climate communication researchers to tailor their efforts to each demographic.

One such operation is the nonprofit Climate Outreach, based in Oxford, England. It recently issued a handbook that uses social science research to help climate scientists become better public champions of their own work.  Climate Outreach has also tapped into research that has identified especially effective visual techniques for communicating about climate change.

The Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, 16, during the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, this January. Arnd Wiegmann/Reuters

For example, authentic photos of people actively engaged in global-warming mitigation — such as community members installing solar panels on a roof — are far more resonant than, say, images of politicians at the lectern of a climate conference. So Climate Outreach started Climate Visuals, an open library of research-tested, impactful images.

Major environmental organizations such as Greenpeace and the Sierra Club are also looking to social science to inform how they communicate about climate change, including their choice of imagery, as are federal agencies such as the National Aeronautics and SpaceAdministration (NASA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration(NOAA), according to the agencies’ representatives.

Edward W. Maibach, director of George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication, has recruited an ever-expanding army to speak about climate science to the masses. His research revealed that the public puts particularly high trust in local TV weathercasters and health care providers as sources about climate science. So over the past decade, Dr. Maibach’s team enlisted 625 on-air meteorologists to give newscasts that help viewers connect the dots between climate change and hometown weather.

Another member of the George Mason team, John Cook, is one of various global academics working with a teaching method known as “inoculation,” which is a preventive strategy grounded in the finding that it can be very difficult to extract misinformation once it has lodged in the brain.

Dr. Cook has designed a high school curriculum as well as a popular online course that presents students first with facts and then a myth about climate change; the students are then asked to resolve the conflict.  In Europe, Sander van der Linden, a social psychologist at the University of Cambridge, codesigned an inoculation-based online game with doctoral researcher Jon Roozenbeek.

The game was designed to help its hundreds of thousands of players become better consumers of climate-related information.  “We’re trying,” Dr. van der Linden said, “to help people help themselves and navigate this post-truth environment.”

A version of this article appears in print on May 12, 2019, on Page A11 in The International New York Times. Order Reprints

Original post:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/12/climate/climate-solutions-polar-bears.html?action=click&module=MoreInSection&pgtype=Article&region=Footer&contentCollection=Climate%20and%20Environment

What is the Real Cost of Protein?

With headlines published in the media like “Two-Thirds of the World’s Seafood is Over-fished” and “Science Study Predicts the Collapse of All Seafood Fisheries by 2050,” what is really the state of the ecosystems in the Earth’s oceans?

Will we deplete the ocean’s resources in the near future? or do we have time to make adaptions to ensure the vitality of fisheries?

At the Foodable.io event in Seattle, Foodable Host Yareli Quintana sat down with Dr. Ray Hilborn, professor of Fishery Sciences at the University of Washington who has been researching the topic of conservation and quantitative population dynamics of seafood for the last eight years.

Hilborn starts out by pointing out that there a two environmental challenges when it comes to seafood supply.

First, it’s the substantial fuel used to catch the fish, which generates carbon foot and then, the impact on biodiversity. As specific fish populations continue to be caught, this is changing the ecosystem of the ocean.

The seafood conservation expert also clears up a common misconception that our ocean is being depleted.

“Within the last 20 years the abundance of stock has really turned around in many places, there are certainly exceptions where that’s not true though,” says Hilborn.

But that doesn’t mean that chefs shouldn’t be concerned about what fish product that they are serving.

Each type of seafood makes a different impact on the environment. For example, Maine lobster generates a lot of energy to catch, while sardines, oysters, and mussels, on the other hand, make a really low impact.

Oyster and mussels feed themselves and most of the environmental cost comes from feed production.

Then there’s the problem of food waste, which is a challenge for restaurants, but more so, for consumers eating at home.

“One of the big issues of fish and food, in general, is waste. Globally, about 30 percent of food is wasted. In rich countries like the U.S., that’s mostly at home…So it’s important to be more careful about making sure you buy what you need and use it,” says Hilborn.

Watch the Seafood Talk Session above to learn more about the sustainability, research and management practices that are being worked on and adjusted every day in order to do right by nature and to feed the masses.

Original post: https://www.foodabletv.com/blog/what-is-the-real-cost-of-protein