Date: October 3, 2017
Source: British Ecological Society (BES)
Showing posts with label threat to environment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label threat to environment. Show all posts
Sunday, 8 October 2017
Prioritized list of invasive alien species threatening the UK's environment
Monday, 2 December 2013
The Government-proposed Water Bill could endanger our rivers
WWF calls for safeguards to regulate water abstraction
November 2013: A third of England's rivers are in danger of long-term damage that could ruin the country's environment and threaten wildlife if new legislation comes into force without important safeguards in place. WWF argues that the Water Bill going through Parliament will cause even more water to be taken out of some of the nation's most water-stressed rivers, reducing water levels to a point that would not support native wildlife such as the Water Vole and the Kingfisher.
Thursday, 6 June 2013
Jellyfish surge in Mediterranean threatens environment – and tourists
A project is tracking the phenomenon as global warming and overfishing boost numbers of the venomous sea creature
Scientists across the Mediterranean say a surge in the number of jellyfish this year threatens not just the biodiversity of one of the world's most overfished seas but also the health of tens of thousands of summer tourists.
"I flew along a 300km stretch of coastline on 21 April and saw millions of jellyfish," said Professor Stefano Piraino of Salento University in southern Italy. Piraino is the head of a Mediterranean-wide project to track the rise in the number of jellyfish as global warming and overfishing clear the way for them to prosper.
"Citizen scientists" armed with smartphones and a special app are now tracking them along thousands of miles of Mediterranean coastline. Population growth has continued over the four years of the project, and appears to be part of a global phenomenon, with most coastal areas studied around the world also reporting a rise in numbers.
"There are now beaches on the island of Lampedusa, which receives 300,000 tourists a year, where people can only swim for a week in the summer," said Piraino.
Josep María Gili, a veteran jellyfish researcher at the Institute of Marine Sciences in Barcelona, said: "It is a growing problem in the Mediterranean, as it is in the rest of the world. But the problem is at its greatest in the open sea."
The institute has detected a surge this spring in one of the most poisonous species, the mauve stinger or Pelagia noctiluca, along the coast of Catalonia and Valencia. "We have seen banks several kilometres long and with a density of 30 to 40 jellyfish per square metre," the institute's Verónica Fuentes told Spain's ABC newspaper. "The ones we have found this spring are particularly big."
Gili said this was mostly surprising because the mauve stingers were close to beaches. "Normally, that size of jellyfish does not reach the coast because of the temperature of the water," he said.
Other badly hit coastlines include Sardinia, Sicily, Malta and the eastern Mediterranean beaches of Israel and the Lebanon.
Piraino said at least 150,000 people were treated for jellyfish stings around the Mediterranean each summer.
Tuesday, 16 October 2012
National Marine Plan delay threatens sustainability agenda
Delay to Scotland Marine Plan
threatens environment
October 2012. Environmental groups have expressed deep concern about the
sector-led planning that threatens to sideline Scotland's marine environment
and the national sustainability agenda. Members of Scottish Environment LINK -
an umbrella group for Scotland's environmental organisations - argue that
delays to finalising a National Marine Plan will favour short-termist,
large-scale development without ensuring due consideration of wider
environmental impacts and the interests of broader marine activities.
2 year delay
A two year delay to the publication of the Scottish Government's National Marine Plan has now been disclosed. It means that an overarching marine plan, originally scheduled to be finalised in 2012, will now remain on the bureaucratic shelf until its publication at the end of 2014. Meanwhile sectoral plans, such as those for the offshore renewable industries, are due to be signed off long before.
The National Marine Plan should provide forward-looking guidance to businesses wishing to develop the marine environment and ensure that marine activities develop alongside each other sustainably, much like the terrestrial planning system. Meanwhile, however, activities such as the aquaculture and renewable industries are developing at a rapid pace without such a coordinated approach.
Members of LINK's marine taskforce believes this delay not only risks Scotland's natural and historic marine environment and resources, but also creates uncertainty for businesses within the wider marine sector. Scottish Environment LINK is calling on Marine Scotland and the Scottish Government to provide assurances that the National Marine Plan is a priority and will be progressed as a matter of urgency. Furthermore, LINK's marine taskforce also asks the Scottish Government to ensure that sectoral plans will be revised in light of the National Marine Plan where necessary.
Calum Duncan, of Marine Conservation Society (and taskforce convenor) said: "Unfortunately, this has the appearance of the tail wagging the dog, in this case development plans leading the national plan. Both the environment sector and marine industries are very much in favour of the sustainable use of our seas, but without an overarching national marine plan in place, we remain in bureaucratic limbo and risk developing beyond environmental limits."
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