[Coral-List] 1.5 C not plausible anymore

[International Coral Reef Observatory]

Well said Peter and Franziska!!  I also think it is time for a new approach
to communicating what we know of the likely future of this planet - a
planet without any functional coral reefs and degraded in many other ways
besides.  That new approach is called telling the whole truth, rather than
just parts of the truth, or sugar-coated parts of the truth. It is time to
support the real implementation of the United Nations
Sustainable Development Goals SDG 13 and 14.

As scientists we should base our communication on transdisciplinary
research (ecological, social economics and citizen sciences as concluded at
ICRS 2022) and stop promising to save the coral reefs by scaling up coral
restoration with funds of developers that pollute, dredge, overfish or
destroy coral reefs. Because, the Blue Economy that funded these shadow
projects (Environmental economics) only justifies more degradation of coral
reefs of the world.

All the best,

Nohora Galvis

Director of the International Coral Reef Observatory

Facebook.com/ICRObservatory

Spanish Twitter @ArrecifesCoral

English Twitter and Instagram ICR_Observatory

El mié, 19 oct 2022 a las 15:01, Peter Sale via Coral-List (<
coral-list at coral.aoml.noaa.gov>) escribió:

> To: CoraL-LIST
> Thank you, Franziska Elmer for reminding us that the world is not heading
> towards 1.5 degrees and that doing so is (or is rapidly becoming) an
> impossibility.
>
> Over past decades, the coral reef community has tried doom and gloom.  And
> it has tried ocean optimism.  Neither approach has led to significant
> change in perspectives and action on the global environmental crisis.  Yes,
> lots of people have worked locally, or joined the global conversation, in
> an effort to change where we are headed, but little change has been
> achieved.  We have not even lowered the rate of increase in the
> concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.
>
> I support signing the letter as Franziska suggests.  But I also think it
> is time for a new approach to communicating what we know of the likely
> future of this planet - a planet without any functional coral reefs and
> degraded in many other ways besides.  That new approach is called telling
> the whole truth, rather than just parts of the truth, or sugar-coated parts
> of the truth.
>
> The whole truth, in my view, is that we have been deluding ourselves,
> since well before the days of the Rio Declaration, that it would be
> possible for an ever-increasing number of humans to raise their level of
> prosperity towards median advanced nation norms in an environmentally
> sustainable way.  This was not possible in 1992 and it is even less
> possible in 2022.  The extent to which we have already degraded the natural
> world is substantial.  The fact that we are eliminating coral reefs very
> rapidly through a combination of actions - warming of the planet,
> overfishing, inappropriate coastal management and pollution are the most
> egregious - is just the most conspicuous of many deleterious impacts.
> These broader impacts range from deforestation, land use capture by
> agriculture, urbanization, over-production of biologically accessible
> nitrogen, and massive removal of glacial ice reserves to a whole host of
> other slights, such as the immense shift of biomass and energy flow into
> humans
>   and their handful of food organisms.
>
> Even if we rapidly transition away from use of fossil fuels, our
> degradation of the planet in these many other ways will continue.  As we
> simplify the natural world, we erode its capacity to be resilient and
> continue to supply the goods and services that sustain human life.  To
> pretend that we can address all these threats while also ensuring a march
> towards heightened quality of life for a rapidly growing number of us, and
> do this with only modest changes to lifestyles of those of us already
> fortunate enough to live on more than $2 per day has to be denounced as
> perhaps the biggest lie out there.  A lie in which those of us struggling
> to articulate the need to live within the means of the planet are (almost)
> as complicit as those others of us who maintain that the state of the
> planetary system is irrelevant to human progress.
>
> I personally believe there is still a lot that humanity can do to lessen
> the impact of the Anthropocene.  But we will not get very far until we
> recognize that we and all other creatures share this planet and depend on
> it for our survival.  With that recognition, perhaps, we can mount the kind
> of all-out, global attack on the environmental crisis that has to happen,
> and which shows no signs of happening by itself.
>
> Peter Sale
> University of Windsor (emeritus)
> sale at uwindsor.ca<mailto:sale at uwindsor.ca>
> www.petersalebooks.com<http://www.petersalebooks.com/>
>
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