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This week, as part of our special Earth Month series of interviews, we sat down with Aulani Wilhelm, the Senior Vice President for Oceans at Conservation International (CI).
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Ten years after the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster, the Japanese government announced that it will release treated radioactive water from the destroyed plant into the ocean beginning in 2023. The decision to dump more than 1 million metric tons of contaminated water into the Pacific ocean has upset local fishers and surrounding countries.
Why This Matters: A decade after a 9.0 earthquake and resulting tsunami led to a meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the decision to release water into the ocean is just one part of the prolonged decommissioning of the plant.
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Hundreds of citizens will fan out across the nation’s capital next week to meet with lawmakers in what’s projected to be the largest ocean lobby effort in US history. On Tuesday and Wednesday, they will meet with Biden administration officials, federal agencies, and members of Congress for a nonpartisan Ocean Climate Action Hill Day.
Why It Matters: As the Biden administration and the Congress begin to debate what’s infrastructure and therefore within the American Jobs Plan, the blue economy needs to be front and center in it.
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Kelp forests along the U.S. West Coast are threatened because of an exploding sea urchin population caused by the climate crisis, but in Monterey Bay, sea otters keep the urchin population in check and kelp forests healthy. While many natural underwater systems are out of whack because of climate change, sea others aren’t the only marine mammals helping maintain some equilibrium:
Why this Matters: Marine mammals play an important role in global ecosystems as “apex predators, ecosystem engineers and even organic ocean fertilisers,” The Conservation writes.
Continue Reading 451 wordsThis week, we have featured this series of videos by the Environmental Defense Fund about the impacts climate change is having on the ocean as observed by the people who live and work there — fishermen and women. Their stories have been compelling and provided a sense of the ways that climate change is harming and shifting global fish stocks.
Why This Matters: On Tuesday, pursuant to President Biden’s climate executive order, NOAA announced: “an agency-wide effort to gather initial public input” on “how to make fisheries, including aquaculture, and protected resources more resilient to climate change.
Continue Reading 197 wordsA 21-year old woman from the U.K., Jasmine Harrison, became the youngest female to row solo across the Atlantic Ocean — she did it in just over 70 days — surviving capsizing twice and a near collision with a giant tanker ship. Why did she do it, you ask? She said on her website, “I […]
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