Ocean Nourishment:
Sacrificing the Marine Environment for Profits
and the Need for SBSTTA 13 to Take a Stand
Global warming is undoubtedly the defining environmental problem today and in the near future. The unfolding catastrophes and dangers associated with global warming has made efforts at finding solutions and mitigating the problem a primary priority. However, there are solutions that help to fix the problem and there are purported ones that only make the situation worse. Ocean nourishment belongs to the latter category.
Late last year, the Sulu Sea in the Philippines became the subject of global attention when it was learned that an Australian company, the Ocean Nourishment Corporation (ONC), was preparing to dump hundreds of tons of urea fertilizers in those waters as part of its patented carbon sequestration technology called ocean nourishment. Ocean nourishment involves the release of urea or nitrogen fertilizers into seawaters to induce massive growths of phytoplanktons that could absorb atmospheric carbon doxide before trapping them into deep ocean. This carbon sequestration technology supposedly would lessen carbon dioxide presence in the atmosphere and therefore help reduce global warming.
Ocean nourishment has been roundly criticized by scientists and environmentalists as an unproven and environmentally hazardous technology. It has not been shown that carbon can be sequestered effectively and permanently in this manner. On the contrary, there is scientific concern that the opposite may happen, that the massive concentrations of phytoplankton will increase carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as a result of increased numbers of carbon-respiring plankton predators. Moreover, large phytoplankton concentrations will likely cause major ecological imbalances such as harmful algal blooms that are destructive to marine life and fisheries. Not only will marine biodiversity be adversely affected by fertilization but local economies dependent on fisheries would suffer tremendously. The Sulu Sea is an especially vulnerable area since it consists of major fishing grounds, is host to one of the richest marine biodiversity on earth and is where the UNESCO world heritage site, the Tubbataha Reef, is located.
If not for the ruckus raised by Philippine environmentalists and civil society organizations, ONC's Sulu Sea fertilization plan would have been allowed by government to be carried out despite the absence of environmental impact assessment and public consultations. In fact, there was already initial government approval for the project but protests forced government to step back. Since then, scientists, local and national government officials, and communities have all expressed opposition to ocean nourishment and questioned ONC's work in the Philippines. Ocean nourishment has been put on hold in the Philippines.
What has become clear though is that ocean nourishment is no solution to global warming but is really another attempt to exploit the global warming problem by getting into the lucrative carbon trading market. ONC has made no secret of its plan to sell its technology on the carbon market. Such barefaced attampts to sacrifice the environment for profits in the name of mitigating global warming must be opposed and denounced. It is not only the Sulu Sea that's being threatened but there are also other ocean fertilization activities and plans in other parts of the world's seas.
The London Convention on Marine Dumping has expressed grave concern over the ecological risk of ocean fertilization and sounded the need for oversight on these technologies due to their large-scale impacts on the environment. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has noted that “ocean fertilization remains largely speculative, and many environmental side effects have yet to be assessed”. We believe the 13th SBSTTA, which has mandate on marine biodiversity issues, is in a position to lend its voice to growing global concerns about the impact of ocean nourishment to marine biodiversity. We therefore call on the SBSTTA to make recommendations for the COP to adopt precautionary approach measures on ocean nourishment initiatives, limiting any experiments on this technology to laboratory conditions whilst scientific issues are debated and resolved. Moreover, SBSTTA can make similar recommendation towards international oversight mechanisms to regulate such technologies including other so-called geo-engineering initiatives whether they take place in national and international territories due to their possible wider and long-term global impact. We hope and believe that the 13th SBSTTA can contribute towards this goal of protecting the world's biodiversity.
13th SBSTTA, 19 February 2008
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