3 minute read
''How Vulnerable is Pacific Marine Life to Climate Change?"
This report is about a scholarly article titled “Assessing the Vulnerability of Marine Life to Climate Change in the Pacific Islands Region” written by a number of authors at the Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research. This paper was peer reviewed four months before finally being accepted and published so that we can now read it, so you know it's thorough. Marine life is very susceptible to the effects of climate change as they can’t adapt fast enough to the differences in the environment, and they can't go somewhere else. So what are we going to do about it?
The article starts with an abstract section which explains the actions taken by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to combat the effects of climate change. The article then has an introduction which explains the need for the Rapid Vulnerability assessment (RVA) and how useful it is in evaluating impacts to ecosystems. It then presents the results it collected in groups of vulnerability. Pelagic fishes in total were ranked moderate to high vulnerability with the striped marlin being the highest.
However, sharks had a moderate to very high vulnerability with many sharks ranked very high. Deep-slope fishes on the other hand were not as high ranking as the sharks with moderate to high vulnerability. Coastal fishes were ranked just low to moderate so they are one of the lowest groups. Coral reef jacks, emperors, groupers, and snappers are all in the same group and were ranked moderate to high but mostly moderate. Coral reef parrotfishes
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by Albert Schwartz
England
were also ranked moderate to high, very similar to the previous category. Coral reef surgeonfishes were ranked moderate to high but this time it was mostly high. Other coral reef fishes were unfortunately ranked moderate to very high. And most unfortunately of all the groups that ranked highest in vulnerability were the invertebrates.
The research team then moves on to the methods of collecting this data. They established ‘taxonomic scope’ to explain how far reaching the assessment was including the locations and groups of species. ‘Exposure’ is an environmental issue as a consequence of climate change that can cause detrimental change to a species. ‘Sensitivity ’ is how
by Albert Schwartz
England likely a species is to suffer from climate change based on its traits. ‘Vulnerability matrices’ is the process used to come to a conclusion on the overall vulnerability rank of each group.
‘Climate exposure’ explains that the majority of the high vulnerability in certain species was brought about by decreases in oxygen concentration, rises in sea surface temperature and increases in ocean acidification. ‘Bootstrap sensitivity scores and uncertainty ’ lists all the species that had a low probability of being categorized as a specific level of vulnerability, and there are a lot more of them than you might think. There are, of course, data gaps as
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there always will be in any environmental study, and I like how they were pointed out by the paper.
The article finally moves on to a discussion about drivers of vulnerability and data needs. ‘Drivers of vulnerability ’ are things such as rising ocean temperatures that can affect an environment and it explains what the findings of all the research means and why it is interesting. The ‘data needs’ were how difficult it was to perform the assessment, and I appreciate the paper's willingness to point out how it's not perfect.
In conclusion, I think that the fact that so many species even reached moderate vulnerability is really tragic. While the article was an interesting read it was a difficult one. It had lots of important data but was difficult to interpret and clearly is only meant to be read by professionals. It also only presents problems and not solutions, but I suppose solutions would have to be part of a different paper. Nevertheless, the authors communicated the scale of the threat to marine life in the region caused by climate change and left me keen to take action on the issue.
by Albert Schwartz
England
Works Cited/Image Credits
Giddens J, et al. 2022.
"Assessing the Vulnerability of Marine Life to Climate Change in the Pacific Islands Region. " PloS ONE 17 (7): e0270930. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0270930
