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Climate Change has a significant impact on biodiversity and ecosystems found worldwide. Maintaining the balance of ecosystems is important to ensure their survival without collapse. A well-sustained ecosystem helps keep the environment resilient, yet anthropogenic activities, including climate change, destroy this sustainability.
Why is this article helpful?
- To understand the importance of marine ecosystems
- To identify current trends in marine ecosystems
- To evaluate the impact of climate change on marine ecosystems
What are Marine ecosystem services?
Marine ecosystems are aquatic environments that cover 70% of the earth’s surface with high levels of dissolved salt and are also defined by their unique biotic and abiotic factors. These environments can begin from up to 100 kilometers inland and include ocean systems with waters up to 50 meters in depth. You can find these ecosystems nearby the sea, such as estuarine, coastal wetlands, marshes and mangroves, sand beaches and dunes, seagrass beds, coral, and oyster reefs.
Comprehensively, these are responsible for many benefits provided to humans and are referred to as ecosystem services. Marine ecosystem services comprise various goods, services, and cultural or other benefits. The goods produced by marine ecosystem services include fish harvests, wild plant and animal resources, and abstracted water. In developing countries like Sri Lanka, some of the more important uses of marine ecosystems tend to involve both small-scale commercial and ‘informal’ economic activity to support the livelihoods of local populations, for example, through fishing, hunting, fuelwood extraction, and so forth. Moreover, recreation, tourism, and water transport are familiar services provided by many marine ecosystems. Marine Ecosystems are blessed with some unique characteristics. Coral reefs are particularly important as they are the most structurally complex and taxonomically diverse marine ecosystems, providing habitat for thousands of associated fishes and invertebrates. Marine ecosystems also act as the massive carbon sink in the world, pollution control, storm protection, flood control, and shoreline stabilizers. Read more about this here Archived
How does Climate Change impact marine ecosystem services?
The relatively unexplored nature of oceans and their vastness made it a great misleading to think that marine ecosystems are unaffected by anthropogenic influences. Most people widely believe that it is difficult to pollute the high seas as the self-purifying capacity of the marine environment is huge. However, it is now reliably learned that climate change and global warming result in significant impacts, including an increase in sea surface temperature (SST), increased carbon dioxide levels in the oceans, sea level rise, etc.
In fact, marine ecosystems represent some of the most heavily exploited ecosystems throughout the world. Sri Lanka, a country with nearly 1,340 kilometers of coastline, is definitely affected by the changes in the marine environment due to climate change. Human activities are now threatening many of the world’s remaining marine ecosystems and the benefits they provide while severely impacting climate change. Read more here Archived
The rising sea level due to the melting ice cover is a major threat to marine ecosystems. While sea level rise is threatening the existence of coastal communities and their livelihoods, climate change is also responsible for ocean acidification, and coral bleaching and its cascading effects on the biota are affecting oceanic islands and coral reef ecosystems. Harmful algal blooms could become more frequent, and ocean acidification may stimulate nitrogen fixation. Changes in Ocean temperature and salinity are expected to enhance ocean stratification with a consequent reduction in vertical nutrient flux to the surface waters. Oligotrophic conditions may spread to more areas of the ocean, negatively impacting global marine productivity and the Biological Carbon Pump.
Increased sea surface temperature has also resulted in frequent occurrences of harmful algal blooms across the world’s oceans, and their impact on fishery and other marine biota is drastic. Coupled with climate change impacts, indiscriminate fishing operations also take a serious toll on marine resources. The impacts of even local changes are quite significant in the global scenario of the oceans being interconnected and highly dynamic in nature. However, marine ecosystems will respond to Climate Change in ways that are not fully understood. Nevertheless, ecosystem resilience is expected to depend largely on the plasticity of its biotic components’ biotic characteristics, functional traits, genetic traits, morphological traits, phonological traits, and structural traits. Read more here .Archived
Local and International issues faced due to Marine Ecosystem Destruction
2021 was the warmest year on record for the world’s oceans. Climate change affects the warming of the ocean, leading to more frequent and severe marine heat waves. Over the past year, excess heat absorbed by the ocean was equivalent to seven Hiroshima atomic bombs detonating every second. Over the past decade, marine heatwaves have caused mass deaths of key species along 45% of Australia’s coastline, including corals, kelp, seagrasses, and mangroves. This reef is referred to great barrier coral reef. The Great Barrier Reef is the world’s largest coral reef system, composed of over 2,900 individual reefs and 900 islands.
A March 2016 report stated that coral bleaching was more widespread than previously thought, seriously affecting the northern parts of the reef as a result of warming ocean temperatures. Australian researchers reported that more than 500 corals had experiencedsevere bleaching. The number of baby corals born on the Great Barrier Reef dropped drastically in 2018. In March 2022, another mass bleaching event was confirmed, raising further concerns about this reef system’s future. However, there is an argument that a coral reef is completely dead, while other evidence suggests that even within places of severe bleaching, there are some extended areas that are alive and colorful.
The unusual conditions were visible in sea surface temperature maps, which show sea surface temperature anomalies across the northeastern Pacific in August 2019. The warmth in the upper ocean continued into spring 2020 but moderated somewhat as marine heat waves spread across the northeastern Pacific Ocean—an ocean weather event.
Currently, climate change is impacting fishing communities in Hawai ‘i and the U.S.-Affiliated Pacific Islands, the U.S. Caribbean, and the Gulf of Mexico. Also, many communities are already dealing with the consequences worldwide.
Besides the changes in mean sea level, changes in extreme sea level occur through storm surges, which are less frequent along the west coast of India. It has a direct impact on the Sri Lankan coast. Even in Sri Lanka, we lose important coral reefs and marine species due to marine acidification and climate change.
What would be the future of Marine Ecosystems?
Some argue that it is safe to say that the ocean has never died and will not die in the future. Of course, the oceans are vast and has its way of continuing to support marine life but we can not confirm its healthy life span with these numerous threats.
The oceans are facing numerous threats in the contemporary era with thousands of marine life dying and others going extinct. One of the most commonly used ecosystem modelling software is Ecopath with Ecosim (EwE), which has been widely applied to model aquatic food webs. This approach has been used to hindcast and forecast marine food webs’ future, such as fishing, and increasingly other stressors like climate change.
It shows the overall potential future benefits of fishing effort reductions and the detrimental impacts of increasing sea temperature and increasing biomass of alien species within the next few decades. Cumulative scenarios suggest that the beneficial effects of marine ecosystem reduction may be dampened by the impact of increasing sea temperature and alien species when acting together. Fisheries play an important role in the food supply, food security, and livelihood security of thousands of fishermen and associated fish supply chains living in coastal areas in Sri Lanka. This will severely effect on food supply in Sri Lanka.
How to protect marine ecosystems?
Healthy marine and coastal ecosystems provide many valuable services – from food security to resources for economic growth and recreation alongside tourism and coastline protection. Also, the ocean provides major opportunities for action to reduce climate change globally and its impacts on vital ecosystems and ecosystem services. Current pledges under the Paris Agreement are insufficient to hold the global average temperature increase to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels, calling for a dramatic increase in the global mitigation effort and to reach targets for the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. So, mitigation measures are essential, even under a successful mitigation scenario, impacts are expected at the local scale; hence the need for enhanced adaptation measures exists.
Ocean-based measures with relatively high global effectiveness (such as albedo enhancement) have significant adverse side effects on key marine ecosystems and services. Also, there are some measures that offer greater effectiveness in countering climate and its impacts including alkalinization, cloud brightening, albedo enhancement, and assisted evolution etc. currently exhibit but have too many uncertainties. Read more, here Archived
(With Inputs from Nuwandhara Mudalige )
Hmm is anyone else encountering problems with the images on this blog loading? I’m trying to find out if its a problem on my end or if it’s the blog. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.