September 17, 2011 — andyextance

While the public is rightly concerned by sea-level rise, climate change’s impact on European seas will also affect people through shifts in where bacteria and fish are found. That means that as well as the distant threat of property damage, the risks of disease, unemployment and hunger are raised. Those are among the findings collected in a 200-page book summarising research done since 1998 about climate change’s effects on Europe’s ocean environments. “The main message is that changes are happening,” said Carlo Heip, Director of the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research. “The second thing is that they are happening much faster than we thought.”

Heip was among scientists unveiling the results of the Climate Change and European Marine Ecosystem Research, or CLAMER, project in Brussels, Belgium, on Wednesday and Thursday this week. Funded by the European Commission, CLAMER brought researchers from 17 European marine institutes both to create this summary, and look at how well-known the messages within it were among everyday people. “The European Commission has spent, over the last ten years or so, hundreds of millions of Euros in research to find what the impacts of climate change are on the environment, including the marine environment,” Heip said. “They wanted to know, first of all, what the public knows about it, how this research has contributed to public knowledge, what people’s perception is and whether they are willing to do something about it.”

Alongside compiling their book of science, to find out what people think, the scientists surveyed 10,000 people from 10 European countries in an online poll. In January, in association with Brussels-based TNS Opinion, they questioned 1,000 people each from Spain, Italy, Germany, France, Czech Republic, Netherlands, Ireland, United Kingdom, Norway and Estonia. The results showed that Europeans are concerned about climate change’s impact on the seas, with sea level rise and coastal erosion among their leading worries. Not only this, but their estimates of sea level rise and temperature generally matched scientific forecasts, suggesting that “some fundamental messages” are spreading widely.

Trillion-Euro threat looms

The awareness of sea-level rise risks with global warming comes despite a vagueness in scientists’ estimates, which predict rises anywhere in a range from 80 cm to 2 m by 2100. Yet, combined with higher waves being recorded in the North Atlantic and more frequent and severe storms, even the lower end of that range would pose a big threat. Europe has up to €1 trillion worth of physical assets – a figure roughly matching the value of all goods and services produced in Spain in a year – within 500 m of the shore. And around a third of the value of all Europe’s goods and services is generated within 50 km of the sea, the CLAMER book says. However whether these assets are threatened depends on the rate of sea level rise accelerating greatly from its current speed of much less than a centimetre per year – but Heip warns that this may already be happening.

“Sea level is rising, it’s still in the order of 2-3 mm, but it’s accelerating and some of the latest data on the melting of the ice in Greenland are starting to get quite alarming,” he said. “We are now talking about sea level rise that can go into the order of metres in a century. I think of the country where I live and work – the Netherlands. These low-lying parts will not be able to cope with sea level rise once it gets over a third of a metre. It will be an extremely difficult problem for Europe, though not in the immediate future, it will not happen in five or ten years time. It will happen, perhaps in a century.

But more immediate, and less well-known, effects can be felt in the rise of bacteria that can contaminate seafood and coastal waters, and through that make people ill, as our oceans warm. Research published in July that took samples near the river Humber in the UK and the Rhine in mainland Europe showed acteria from the dangerous Vibrio family increased in dominance with temperature rises. Vibrio bacteria can produce serious gastroenteritis, septicemia and cholera, the CLAMER researchers note, can cause food poisoning deaths and also kill molluscs and fish. “Millions of Euros in health costs may result from human consumption of contaminated seafood, ingestion of water-borne pathogens, and, to a lesser degree, through direct occupational or recreational exposure to marine diseases,” the book says. “Climatic conditions are playing an increasingly important role in the transmission of these diseases.”

Climate, poverty, and hunger

Meanwhile, if that hasn’t put Europeans off seafood, climate change is also contributing in shifts in the types of fish available for them to eat. As well as higher temperatures, that’s thanks to the linked changes in salinity and oxygen levels, and more acidic seas thanks to them dissolving some of the raised levels of CO2 from the atmosphere. Species like Baltic cod may go extinct, which will affect both food supplies and employment prospects in fishing. However, northern countries look set to fare better as species that used to live nearer the equator move towards them, though that will be bad news for people that currently eat them. That’s because these warmer-water fish often make up the majority of the protein people that eat them get, and researchers say that droughts and storms will damage farming in the same areas.

The Europeans CLAMER surveyed are clearly concerned about problems like these, as is shown by their answers to the question “What is the single most serious problem facing the world?” The top two answers were poverty and lack of food and drinking water, chosen by nearly a third, and climate change, chosen by nearly a quarter. They are also prepared to take responsibility for the issues, with almost nine out of ten saying climate change is caused entirely, mainly or in part by human activities. Less than one in ten thought it was mainly or entirely caused by natural processes, compared to around a third in the US. And with nine out of ten saying that they’d taken steps to reduce their home energy usage, there is an obvious suggestion that once people realise their responsibility, they do something about it.