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Coral reefs in the Gulf are mostly dead now, but can we do anything about it?
MPB-07188; No of Pages 6 Marine Pollution Bulletin xxx (2015) xxx–xxx
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Coral reefs in the Gulf are mostly dead now, but can we do anything about it? Charles Sheppard Department of Life Sciences, University of Warwick, CV4 7AL, UK
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history: Received 1 July 2015 Received in revised form 3 September 2015 Accepted 21 September 2015 Available online xxxx Keywords: Gulf Coral reefs Ecosystem management
a b s t r a c t This article discusses two key issues: firstly, the demise of reefs in the Gulf which is happening probably more rapidly than elsewhere; and secondly, the reasons why this remains such an intractable problem. Most reasons for this decline are scientifically well understood, though clearly not by the region's managers. Several factors may cause people to ignore the problem, even though habitat loss is vastly costly to the region. About 70% of the Gulf's reefs have essentially disappeared in a few decades, and although scientific indicators confirm that this is happening, it is commonly discounted as even being a possibility. Management of human interactions with the Gulf's marine systems remains very inadequate, to the detriment of the Gulf's marine systems and its people. It is clear that this not a scientific issue any longer but rather it is a political problem and failure. © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction There is much evidence to suggest that a massive decline is occurring in the Gulf of all of its major marine systems including coral reefs, mangroves, seagrass beds and fish stocks, to the extent that it has been called a ‘young sea, in decline’ (Sheppard et al., 2010). There is no doubt about the ongoing, substantial degradation, as several scientists have been measuring it for many years (Sheppard et al., 2010, 2012 for reviews), and the extent of degradation in most cases is known both for the Gulf as a whole and for most of the surrounding countries individually (Burt, 2014; Burt et al., 2014). The history of the marine environment's deterioration and its management in this region is not good, so the questions are: why is this happening; what can be done about it in a biological or ecological sense; and what can be done about it in governmental or intergovernmental arenas? There seems little doubt that the cost to the region of such extensive environmental damage is substantial. For example, it was estimated using 20 year old figures from Costanza et al. (1997), that the marine habitats of Bahrain were worth about $2 billion per year to that Kingdom (Al Khuzai et al., 2009; Loughland and Zainal, 2009), yet development continued to go ahead that now has almost totally killed a significant proportion of that country's marine habitats. More recent figures (Costanza et al., 2014) suggest that the annual loss today should be valued many times higher, and the largest coral reef in that part of the Gulf, Fasht Adhm, is now totally killed by sediments (Fig. 1). For the Gulf as a whole, figures of coral reef loss are very alarming (Fig. 2). Burt (2014) calculated that historically the Gulf contained 3800 km2 of coral reef, about 70% of which are effectively dead (see next section). Using both this figure and the newer, revised values
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of habitats from Costanza et al. (2014), this equates to an annual loss of the immense value of about $94 billion. This is necessarily speculative: these values for reefs are global estimates and, for example, values attributed to tourism aspects of reefs will be less in the Gulf than in many other places. (By comparison, oil revenues from the region are about $340 billion per year from the production of approximately 6.8 billion barrels per year at $50 per barrel (Statistica, 2015; CNN, 2015)). But, speculative or not, the message nonetheless should be clear, the more so given that the land surrounding the Gulf is arid, and the loss of so much of the once rich reefs is loss of a significant part of the region's total biological richness. Obviously, development takes place because of the gains and advantages accruing from it, but it is equally clear that the costs of losing habitats are almost invariably not taken into account sufficiently during development planning, so that inadequate efforts are made to maintain the healthy ecosystems which benefit the people of the region. The causes of loss have been known now for at least three decades, so the question instead becomes: why does action not take place sufficiently to try and achieve the development that the region desires along with maintaining the important and valuable ecosystems? 2. The evidence Are reefs of the Gulf really dying, or is the alarmist view grossly exaggerated? We know that there is a very marked West to East gradient of effects both within the Gulf and within different parts of it too (Burt et al., 2011) so exceptions exist to any very generalised pattern. The two severe global warming events of the late 1990s caused major deterioration in a short time (Sheppard and Loughland, 2002) from which many places in the Gulf have not recovered at all. Recovery, however, did occur in a very patchy and sporadic way for a while in some parts such as in the UAE, though these subsequently became buried by
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.marpolbul.2015.09.031 0025-326X/© 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Please cite this article as: Sheppard, C., Coral reefs in the Gulf are mostly dead now, but can we do anything about it?, Marine Pollution Bulletin (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.marpolbul.2015.09.031
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Fig. 1. Coral cover on Bahrain's Fasht Adhm in 1985 and 2007, using the same sites in each survey. From Al Khuzai et al. (2009) and Sheppard et al. (2010).
such as those around the islands of Saudi Arabia are less impacted than are reefs closer to mainland shores. In the worst cases there remains no resemblance of coral reef at all over several square kilometres while in others (Fig. 3) the dead and heavily eroding structures can still be seen. A large site in north Qatar which was flagged up by Kinsman (1964) as having unexpectedly high richness and cover before much industrialisation had taken place was found, in 2000, to have no living coral at all and not a single fish was seen in several hectares, the entire place being covered by sedimented coral rubble with seaweed (personal observations). The second-biggest category in the Gulf, occupying about 15% of the remainder, are themselves termed as being at ‘critical stage’, and the present progression suggests that many of these may never recover. Some comparable information is available too for seagrasses and mangroves (Burt, 2014). When it is considered that much of the shoreline landfill that is being done on the Arabian side is taking place in shallow waters with a gentle slope that can, and usually did, support mangrove and seagrass habitat, it is very likely that the declines in these habitats will be very similar to that of coral reefs. 3. Causes of damage in the Gulf
industrial activities (Burt et al., 2014). Even sites distant from shore that might have recovered still show a much degraded form when compared with historic descriptions (Burt et al., in this issue). That recovery is often possible can be seen from many other places in the tropical world, a process attributed to a lack of local impacts such as sedimentation from coastal development, and an absence of other forms of pollution or overfishing (Ateweberhan et al., 2011). Wilkinson (2008) developed estimates of the degree to which reefs had deteriorated in particular ocean basins and for the world as a whole, and he divided the world's reefs into four major categories from low threat level (broadly equating to being in good condition), to reefs which are effectively lost (Fig. 2, left column). In very rough terms, in most ocean basins and in the world as a whole, each category occupies about a quarter of the total (which is bad enough!), but the same measures applied to coral reefs in the Gulf by Burt et al. (2014) show a very stark picture: no less than about three quarters of coral reefs in the Gulf are ‘effectively lost’, three times greater than the global estimate. The percentage of reefs classified as being in the best category now is only about 5%. It is not unreasonable therefore to conclude that the reefs are effectively not far from being lost, although of course examples can be found, especially by diving clubs and the like, of reefs that are worth visiting for recreational purposes. (It is commonly the case, though, that even these are covered with fish traps and lobster pots.) Reefs further from shore
Fig. 2. Major categories of reef condition, for the world and for the Gulf. From Burt et al. (2014).
Environmental damage is commonly considered to come from two general classes of impact which can be called local and global (Table 1). Of the ‘local’ class some are commonly termed ‘bottom-up’ controls such as excess sewage or sediment, dredging and discharges, or ‘top-down’ controls which include overfishing or destructive fishing, in which removal of predators or grazers has an effect further down the food chain. The ‘local’ impacts increase with burgeoning populations and have synergistic effects, while global changes are those commonly attributed to climate change, particularly temperature extremes. All these impacts superimpose onto naturally elevated salinity and large temperature fluctuations resulting from the region's intense evaporation, its relatively shallow nature and its very restricted interchange with the Indian Ocean (Sheppard et al., 1992, 2000). While naturally warm and high salinity water has been the norm in the Gulf for thousands of years, it is not without consequence to overall biodiversity because only about a quarter or less of the corals that occur in the Indian Ocean have the natural tolerance to survive in the Gulf at all. For coral reefs, interesting changes also take place that fall short of simply being killed (Fig. 4). Branching forms of corals have been particularly susceptible to warming events, and these provide (or provided) much of the extensive three-dimensional structure that is so important for increasing habitat diversity and niche structure. As a result of their selective elimination, reef areas where these branching forms used to thrive have sometimes changed to having a cover of more resistant, massive forms which have a far lower three-dimensional structure, something observed in many parts of the Gulf (Sheppard and Loughland, 2002 (in the UAE); Sheppard et al., 2010 (for Iran); Burt et al., 2011 (UAE); Burt et al., 2013 (Bahrain); Burt et al., in this issue (Qatar)). Even when coral cover remains fairly high or recovers measurably, the result is still an area with lower rugosity. Essentially the 3-D structure of the Gulf's reefs has largely changed into a more 2-D planar structure. Overfishing is a global problem, and the Gulf is as susceptible to it as anywhere else (Grandcourt, 2012). Most fisheries have deteriorated to some degree, or have collapsed. Table 2 shows some results from the UAE, and Sheppard et al. (2010) present several histograms of more detailed declines in the western part of the Gulf. Approximately half to two thirds of fish caught are reef associated species (Grandcourt, 2012) so that, in addition to issues of overfishing, reef destruction has added additional consequences of habitat loss for fish. The overall consequences may already be being shown: Grandcourt (2012) shows that, over the last 30 years, overall fishing intensity has risen resulting in a rise in total fish catch, but not of reef-associated species for about the last 25 years (Fig. 5). Of the most commercially important reef fish
Please cite this article as: Sheppard, C., Coral reefs in the Gulf are mostly dead now, but can we do anything about it?, Marine Pollution Bulletin (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.marpolbul.2015.09.031
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Fig. 3. Two scenes from Fasht Adhm, Bahrain. This was the largest reef in that country, and was thriving in 1985. These images capture its condition 20 years later in 2007, but by 2015 much of it is covered with thick sediment. Photos: the author.
species, 65.5% were considered to be over exploited with a further 5.3% fully exploited (Grandcourt, 2012). To add to the problem, the region suffers from gross underreporting and inaccurate data: reconstructions by Al-Abdulrazzak and Pauly (2013) using remote sensing show that unreported catches of coastal fisheries exceed by as much as six-fold the reported catch. Data collection programmes therefore are grossly inadequate and fishing intensity appears to be much heavier than is recognised (‘Seas Around Us’, 2015). The substantial loss of coral reef habitat is unsurprisingly having impacts on reef-dependent fishes in particular: all of the 23 coral-dependent species assessed by Buchanan et al. (in this issue) are considered ‘regionally threatened’ under the IUCN's Red List criteria, and in similar vein, Riegl (2002) showed that reef fish diversity in Dubai has declined by a third too, correlating with thermal anomalies. 4. The needs: Management and alignment of regulations with needs Thus several urgent changes to management attitude and monitoring are required if the decline of coral reefs (or mangroves, or seagrass beds) is to be arrested, let alone reversed. While this has been stated by many observers countless times before (e.g. Sheppard et al., 2010; Sale et al., 2011; van Lavieren et al., 2011; Al-Cibahy et al., 2012), this paper tries to add reasons why the much needed actions are simply not taking place, or are insufficient. It also addresses whether they even could now take place if the intention was there. Firstly, scientific data and evidence are treated as being subordinate to other, usually commercial factors so that a shift is needed in how scientific evidence is viewed by managers. Scientists are commonly viewed by the government as providing a service no more important than any other, yet scientists are probably the only group capable of warning about dangers to the region's local life-support systems. Furthermore, information is misleading and useless if it is highly inaccurate (see fisheries example above) and in such cases is likely to do more harm than good. Ecological evidence, based on accurate data, should not be viewed as being just another optional ‘stakeholder input’ alongside the voices of, for example, a construction project's managers, or an
investment company's interests, whose focuses are, quite naturally, on immediate economic efficiency. The environmental scientists are those who provide evidence in the way that the others cannot, of stresses to the life-support system that quite literally keeps large areas of valuable ecosystem alive. Construction and investment need to work around the needs of maintaining the ecosystems because ecosystems cannot work around the needs of a heavily invested construction project. Senior managers are not managing if they fail to see this point, and in fact many of the companies engaged in massive Gulf coastal projects also work in parts of the world where such considerations are required and applied. It is a mistake, perhaps, to think that ‘management’ of coral reefs, or indeed any of the other marine habitats, is even possible in the first place! In one sense it is simply conceit or hubris to consider that we can manage such a complicated habitat, because we cannot successfully manage even its component species or industries (such as fishing) satisfactorily. The management that we can do, in contrast, is management of people's interactions with the habitat. This may not be such an appealing concept, but probably is much more realistically aligned with what managers could do, and it is certainly what they should be focussing on (Sheppard, 2014). Following this point, the framework for managers needs to be aligned more with what nature requires. Environmental laws must be compatible with what ‘nature’ can actually do. With fisheries, for
Table 1 Categories of stress affecting the Gulf marine systems. Local impacts
Global impacts
Sewage/nutrient runoff Overfishing (and destructive fishing) Sedimentation Thermal and hypersaline effluent from industrial and desalination plants Other construction disturbance such as burial
Warming Acidification Sea level rise
Fig. 4. Juvenile faviids showing healthy recruitment at 9 m depth — an alternative stable, if temporary, state. Fringing coral assemblages, faviidae dominated, western side of Kharku Island which is the most western boundary of developed coral communities in the northern part of the Gulf. Photo: Samimi Namin.
Please cite this article as: Sheppard, C., Coral reefs in the Gulf are mostly dead now, but can we do anything about it?, Marine Pollution Bulletin (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.marpolbul.2015.09.031
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Table 2 Biomass density estimates (tonnes km−2) of demersal species (based on trawl surveys) from the current survey and the demersal fisheries survey of 1978 (FAO, 1981). Taken from Shallard and Associates (2003a,b) and Sheppard et al. (2010) Fish group
1978 biomass (tonnes km−2)
2002 biomass (tonnes km−2)
% of 1978 biomass remaining in 2002
Non-commercial fish Commercial fish Total
2.0–3.0 2.0–3.0 4.0–6.0
0.44–0.53 0.26–0.65 0.70–1.18
19.4% (18–22%) 15.2% (13–22%) 18.8% (17–20%)
example, it is commonplace both in the Gulf and around the world for regulations to run almost exactly counter to what we might call nature's laws. Fisheries laws may state that it is alright to keep a large fish and throw back the small ones, for example. But commonly, one large female of a given weight, say 10 kg, will produce many times more juveniles than would ten females of 1 kg each. Protecting the big one is, as a result, many times more important than protecting ten small ones. Thus, fisheries regulations which permit large adults to be taken but not small ones run counter to what is required to sustain both a healthy stock for future use by humans and for ecosystem maintenance. Because there is no net which will keep small ones and release large ones, the only way to do this is to keep entire areas of habitat intact and unfished. Such areas are commonly called no-take marine reserves. Many exist around the world, and these have been advocated strongly for the Gulf region in the past (e.g. Van Lavieren and Klaus, 2013). In many cases, however, in an extraordinary negation of their purpose, many MPAs actually permit fishing. Fishing is one of the most ecosystem distorting activities of all, so that reefs in such an MPA are essentially not effectively protected at all. This contradictory and ineffectual state of affairs commonly arises from ill-advised pressure from various stakeholders, along with having an authority that is not strong or informed enough to take the action needed to conserve the habitat. 5. The nation state problem None of the above management measures will work well in a very enclosed and not particularly large marine basin like the Gulf unless there is much better cooperation between the States using it. This has been stated for a very long time (e.g. Sheppard et al., 1992; Sale et al., 2011). Although several measures towards environmental cooperation have been made, the fact that environmental trajectories in the Gulf are still almost invariably declining, demonstrates that what is happening in this respect is quite clearly nowhere near enough. The issue of state co-operation is perhaps the most intractable issue of all if only because it lies outside the remits of even the best managers
Fig. 5. Fish catch and effort in the Gulf over the last 30 years. Unbroken line: total landings; dashed line: landings of reef fish only (from Grandcourt, 2012). Dotted line and right y-axis: Number of industrial fishing ships (in Saudi Arabia only which has approximately half of the Arabian Gulf coastline). Data from Morgan (2004).
of the region. The problem can be traced to the idea of the nation State and the sovereignty of each. As a simple example: massive sediment plumes from coastal construction in one country commonly affect adjacent, down-current countries as well. Or: overfishing in one location might affect the stock of the species throughout the Gulf — this is the marine equivalent of Garrett Hardin's ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ (Hardin, 1968). The idea of the nation State is presumably here to stay and this ‘Tragedy of Common Resources’ is an important reason for the decline in a shared and enclosed water body such as the Gulf. By itself this should perhaps be no reason not to show environmental consideration to neighbours, especially as it would also help the country causing the problem, but this is the realm and problem of diplomacy and politics, not of science. When politics is not underpinned by sufficient biological understanding then it seems that progress cannot be made to stop the relentless decline of habitats and of species that the habitats support and which people benefit from. Sufficient science already exists in this respect — it is simply ignored. 6. Butterflies and black swans There are one or two fundamental principles that affect habitats which also should be borne in mind, especially by managers of marine systems and major projects in the region. The first is the Black Swan theory of Taleb (2010). This is a metaphor that describes an event that has a major or catastrophic effect, but which is very rare indeed so is discounted. The event in question may well have been thought of but was discarded as being too improbable to worry about. A strike by a large meteorite would be one such example, but we cannot do anything about that, and it is most unlikely in any case, so we do not factor it in. The Black Swan comes from the idea that everybody once ‘knew’ that all swans are white – there was never anything else – until the black swans of Australia were found, thus negating the whole concept. A good example of a black swan event in recent times is the banking system collapse: people knew such an event would have massive effects but did not worry about it because it was so unlikely to happen! Coupled with this, human psychological biases make people individually and collectively blind to such uncertainties and thus unaware of the massive roles of the very rare event. This can be translated into the Gulf's ecological situation. In terms of corals and their temperature tolerance for example, for thousands of years temperatures had been ‘just so’, as was the corals' tolerance to it, and the same can be said about corals' tolerance to the Gulf's natural sediment loads. However, today the rise in temperature (Sheppard, 2003) and massive pulses of sediment which have accompanied coastal developments have moved such factors to a place totally outside the environmental experience of corals and reefs. The extreme environmental changes and events of the past 20 years were always potentially foreseeable, but they were ignored (they were the black swans). The fact that the extreme events subsequently have come to happen has meant consequent collapses in coral reefs. Even in the early 1960s, Kinsman, referred to earlier, is unlikely to have considered climate change as likely to cause such massive impacts to the rich coral communities he had recently discovered. The second principle to consider is the butterfly effect, introduced by Lorenz (1963). This is complementary, in one sense, to the Black Swan. It explains how a small change at one place may have a massive effect later on, perhaps somewhere else. In this case it is deterministic: a small change at one place can have a deterministic non-linear response elsewhere. The name comes from the idea of whether the flap of a butterfly's wings at one time might cause a hurricane several weeks later — presumably exaggerated but illustrative. Or, a ball placed at the top of a hill may roll downhill along any one of several valleys depending on, amongst other things, very slight differences in the initial position. Unlike black swans, the butterfly's consequences are entirely predictable at least mathematically and in principle, if only we knew all the elements and starting conditions. However, usually we do not
Please cite this article as: Sheppard, C., Coral reefs in the Gulf are mostly dead now, but can we do anything about it?, Marine Pollution Bulletin (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.marpolbul.2015.09.031
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know them, so effects are unpredictable in practical terms. In the context of coral reefs, an example might be the removal by overfishing of a species which turned out to have had no redundancy, meaning there existed no other species which could have filled the same role in the ecosystem. In this case, there may then be a release in grazing pressure on algae which then go on to smother the reef. Examples of this have been found in fact, and many readers will know of examples of a marked deterioration that followed a shoreline development, which took those responsible completely by surprise. 7. Regional needs The rate of atmospheric CO2 rise is increasing, which can be expected to cause increasing pulses of lethally warm waters (Sheppard, 2003). Coastal shoreline construction is similarly not only modifying but increasingly eliminating the natural life-support systems of the Gulf (Burt, 2014). These Anthropocene drivers are integral at the moment to the entirely reasonable desire of all Gulf States to develop and improve the lot of their people, but the drivers (which already have killed about three-quarters of the coral reefs, as noted) are themselves increasing: recurrent stress events such as bleaching occur at b 15 year intervals, and are increasing in frequency and magnitude (Riegl and Purkis, 2015). Is the arrest of ecosystem deterioration even possible therefore? It is possible, perhaps, but only if several conditions are addressed. Admission of the problems' causes is the first condition. It is not uncommon in Gulf States to hear that degradation of the shallow coastal habitats is caused variously by global warming, or by the massive and deliberate Iraqi oil spill, or by other factors which somehow are not our fault. This externalisation is a false deflection of blame (or of some important parts of it), but whether false or not, externalisation or deflection of blame does not, by itself, solve anything. Several issues are needed. Possibly all of them have been stated before, yet they need to be repeated. Comprehension of what the data is telling us (and adequate, accurate data!) is surely the first. One problem common to all marine environmental issues is that the major decision makers may have little idea or understanding of what is underwater. An example: pressure was being applied to permit recreational fishing (‘stakeholder’ pressure again) on a small set of artificial reefs that had been placed in an area where natural reef was in severe decline, with the intention of aiding restoration and enhancing the area's biodiversity. Fishing was prohibited there, following which recovery of some corals and large grouper was striking and swift. Resumption of spearfishing of those grouper was then requested. When this was refused, the question was asked whether spearfishing could perhaps be permitted on holidays only, with the reasoning that one day per week surely would not matter. This resumption looked like being permitted — it was ‘management’ after all. Arguments that it certainly would matter fell on deaf ears. But, that country had an Arabian Oryx recovery programme too, and the only explanation that eventually worked was that perhaps resumption of shooting of Oryx would not matter either if it was done only on holidays. Education of managers is extremely important, and while there is nothing new about advocating improved environmental education about marine systems, the fact is that it now has been advocated for decades, but for habitats beneath the surface of the sea, it is clearly still inadequate. Internalising costs is another area needing essential improvement. There needs to be a greater understanding of all costs involved amongst managers who sanction major construction projects. Very often there are ways to greatly mitigate most damaging effects but these will likely incur a direct cost to the project concerned. These costs are therefore not undertaken but that means that the cost might be greater elsewhere in other respects (loss of fisheries, loss of shoreline protection, recreation, ecological control etc.). Furthermore, those costs are borne by society generally, or by another sector, so are generally not something taken
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into account; minimising his company's costs, after all, is one thing any completely free market company accountant might strive for. In any case, it has frequently been reasoned, the rebound of such consequences to society is commonly tenuous, perhaps too distant, too hedged about with ifs and buts to be accurately considered — so they are not. One way to help circumvent such difficulties is to designate additional strictly protected marine national parks and marine protected areas as part of an integrated management plan for the region (Sale et al., 2011; van Lavieren et al., 2011). It is already observed that reef fish biomass density, for example, is significantly greater within protected areas compared with that outside them (Grandcourt, 2012) and, moreover, these are now the only mechanisms, along with the enforced controls on damaging and negligent methods of coastal construction already mentioned, that will allow countries to fully protect what coral reefs they have left and allow others to recover. Finally, and most obviously perhaps, some general rules are essential with regard to coastal construction. Coastal development and in particular dredging and landfilling has to be curtailed or properly managed; if it is not there is little point in any of the rest in the relatively small and very enclosed Gulf. For one thing, coral reef areas should never be approved for landfilling and building on. These points have been made for years, but the issues continue (Wilkinson, 2008). In all these respects the science has long been sufficiently understood. While there is a tendency to always say more information is needed, and as a scientist I fully appreciate the need for research and monitoring, scientists now need to pass the buck to the administrators, planners, managers and government. We already know enough about what is killing the shallow marine habitats of the Gulf — it is no longer a scientific issue and indeed has not been for a couple of decades. If the governments of the Gulf region wish to retain their marine natural ecosystems, they have little time to take action, unfortunately. Twenty years ago similar points were being stated. With current trends (that is, currently observed trends not fanciful predictions) in another 20 years an equivalent article to this one will not be talking about saving the reefs (or the mangroves or the seagrass beds or the fisheries) because there will almost certainly be no viable systems of that sort left in the Gulf. The development of the Gulf for economic reasons for its people is essential, beneficial, advantageous and greatly to be desired, as presumably everybody agrees, but it need not and should not come at the cost of massive destruction of the marine system, for that destruction is ultimately very costly to the people of the region. Unless the unrelenting quest for development and year-on-year economic growth irrespective of collateral damage, makes way for a longer-term vision that recognises ecosystem values, the downward spiral of environmental decline in the Gulf will likely continue. Acknowledgement I thank New York University and its campus in Abu Dhabi for the privilege of presenting these ideas to their marine science conference in 2015. I thank Prof. Andrew Price for his thoughtful comments on a draft of this paper. References Al Khuzai, J., Sheppard, C.R.C., Abdulqader, E.A.A., Khuzai, S.A.A., Loughland, R.A., 2009. Chapter 5: subtidal habitats. In: Loughland, R., Zainal, A.J.M. (Eds.), Marine Atlas of Bahrain, pp. 113–167. Al-Abdulrazzak, D., Pauly, D., 2013. Managing fisheries from space: Google Earth improves estimates of distant fish catches. ICES J. Mar. Sci. http://dx.doi.org/10. 1093/icesjms/fst178. Al-Cibahy, A.S., Al-Khalifa, K., Böer, B., Samimi-Namin, K., 2012. Conservation of marine ecosystems with a special view to coral reefs in the Gulf. In: Riegl, B.M., Purkis, S.J. (Eds.), Coral Reefs of the Gulf: Adaptation to Climatic Extremes. Springer Science + Business Media B. V., pp. 337–348. Ateweberhan, M., McClanahan, M., Graham, N.A.J., Sheppard, C.R.C., 2011. Episodic heterogeneous decline and recovery of coral cover in the Indian Ocean. Coral Reefs 30, 739–752.
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Buchanan, J.R., Krupp, F., Burt, J.A., Feary, D.A., Ralph, G.M., Carpenter, K.E., 2015. Living on the edge: vulnerability of coral-dependent fishes in the Gulf. Mar. Pollut. Bull. (in this issue). Burt, J., 2014. The environmental costs of coastal urbanization in the Arabian Gulf. City: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action 18 pp. 760–770. Burt, J., Al-Harthi, S., Al-Cibahy, A., 2011. Long-term impacts of coral bleaching events on the world's warmest reefs. Mar. Environ. Res. 72, 225–229. Burt, J., Al-Khalifa, K., Khalaf, E., AlShuwaik, B., Abdulwahab, A., 2013. The continuing decline of coral reefs in Bahrain. Mar. Pollut. Bull. 72, 357–363. Burt, J., van Lavieren, H., Feary, D., 2014. Persian Gulf reefs: an important asset for climate science in urgent need of protection. Ocean Chall. 20, 49–56. CNN, 2015. http://money.cnn.com/interactive/news/economy/worlds-biggest-oilproducers/ (Accessed September 2015). Costanza, R., D'Arge, R., de Groot, R., Farber, S., et al., 1997. The value of the world's ecosystem services and natural capital. Nature 387, 253–260. Costanza, R., de Groot, R., Sutton, P., van der Pleog, S., Anderson, S.J., Kubiszewski, I., Farber, Turner, R.K., 2014. Changes on the global value of ecosystem services. Glob. Environ. Chang. 26, 152–158. Grandcourt, E., 2012. Reef fish and fisheries in the Gulf. In: Riegl, B.M., Purkis, S. (Eds.), Coral Reefs of the Gulf: Adaptation to Climatic Extremes. Springer, Netherlands, pp. 127–161. Hardin, G., 1968. The tragedy of the commons. Science 162 (3859), 1243–1248. Kinsman, D.J.J., 1964. Reef coral tolerance of high temperatures and salinities. Nature 202, 1280–1282. Lorenz, E.N., 1963. Deterministic nonperiodic flow. J. Atmos. Sci. 20, 130–141. Loughland, R., Zainal, A.J.M. (Eds.), 2009. Marine Atlas of Bahrain. GEOMATEC, Bahrain (369 pp.). Morgan, G., 2004. Review of the State of World Marine Capture Fisheries Management: Indian Ocean. Country Review, Saudi Arabia (http://www.fao.org/docrep/009/ a0477e/a0477e0s.htm). Riegl, B., Purkis, S., 2015. Coral population dynamics across consecutive mass mortality events. Glob. Chang. Biol. (Available online; http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/gcb.13014). Sale, P.F., Feary, D., Burt, J.A., Bauman, A., Cavalcante, G., Drouillard, K., Kjerfve, B., Marquis, E., Trick, C., Usseglio, P., van Lavieren, H., 2011. The growing need for sustainable ecological management of marine communities of the Persian Gulf. Ambio 40, 4–17. Seas Around Us, 2015. http://www.seaaroundus.org (Accessed Sept 2015). Shallard, B., Associates, 2003a. Distribution and abundance of demersal fi sh stocks in the UAE. Technical Report 1Fish Resource Assessment Survey Project of Abu Dhabi and UAE Waters. Bruce Shallard and Associates and Government of Abu Dhabi (211 pp.).
Shallard, B., Associates, 2003b. Distribution and abundance of small pelagic resources in UAE waters. Technical Report 2Fish Resource Assessment Survey Project of Abu Dhabi and UAE Waters. Bruce Shallard and Associates and Government of Abu Dhabi (101 pp.). Sheppard, C.R.C., 2003. Predicted recurrences of mass coral mortality in the Indian Ocean. Nature 425, 294–297. Sheppard, C.R.C., 2014. Famines, food insecurity and coral reef ‘Ponzi’ fisheries. Mar. Pollut. Bull. 84, 1–4. Sheppard, C.R.C., Loughland, R., 2002. Coral mortality and recovery in response to increasing temperature in the southern Arabian Gulf. Aquat. Ecosyst. Health Manag. 5, 395–402. Sheppard, C.R.C., Price, A., Roberts, C., 1992. Marine Ecology of the Arabian Region: Patterns and Processes in Extreme Tropical Environments. Academic, London. Sheppard, C.R.C., Wilson, S.C., Salm, R.V., Dixon, D., 2000. Reefs and coral communities of the Arabian Gulf and Arabian Sea. In: McClanahan, T.R., Sheppard, C.R.C., Obura, D.O. (Eds.), Coral Reefs of the Indian Ocean: Their Ecology and Conservation. Oxford University Press, New York. Sheppard, C.R.C., Al-Husiani, M., Al-Jamali, F., Al-Yamani, F., Baldwin, R., Bishop, J., Benzoni, F., Dutrieux, E., Nicholas, K.D., Durvasula, S.R.V., Jones, D.A., Loughland, R., Medio, D., Nithyanandan, M., Pillingm, G.M., Polikarpov, I., Price, A.R.G., Purkis, S., Riegl, B., Saburova, M., Samimi-Namin, K., Taylor, O., Wilson, S., Zainal, K., 2010. The Gulf: a young sea in decline. Mar. Pollut. Bull. 60, 13–38. Sheppard, C.R.C., et al., 2012. Environmental concerns for the future of Gulf coral reefs. In: Riegl, B.M., Purkis, S.J. (Eds.), Coral Reefs of the Gulf: Adaptation to Climatic Extremes, 349–373. Coral Reefs of the World vol. 3, pp. 349–371. Statistica, 2015. http://www.statista.com/statistics/265311/oil-exports-from-the-middleeast/ (Accessed September 2015). Taleb, N.N., 2010. The Black Swan: the Impact of the Highly Improbable. 2nd ed. Penguin, London. Van Lavieren, H., Klaus, R., 2013. An effective regional Marine Protected Area network for the ROPME Sea Area: unrealistic vision or realistic possibility? Mar. Pollut. Bull. 32, 389–405. Van Lavieren, H., Burt, J., Feary, D., Cavalcante, G., Marquis, E., Benedetti, L., Trick, C., Kjerfve, B., Sale, P.F., 2011. Managing the growing impacts of development on fragile coastal and marine systems: lessons from the Gulf. A Policy Report. United Nations University — Institute for Water, Environment, and Health, Hamilton, ON, Canada. Wilkinson, C.R., 2008. Status of coral reefs of the world. 5th Global Report of GCRMN (296 pp.).
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Viewpoint
Coral reefs in the Gulf are mostly dead now, but can we do anything about it? Charles Sheppard Department of Life Sciences, University of Warwick, CV4 7AL, UK
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history: Received 1 July 2015 Received in revised form 3 September 2015 Accepted 21 September 2015 Available online xxxx Keywords: Gulf Coral reefs Ecosystem management
a b s t r a c t This article discusses two key issues: firstly, the demise of reefs in the Gulf which is happening probably more rapidly than elsewhere; and secondly, the reasons why this remains such an intractable problem. Most reasons for this decline are scientifically well understood, though clearly not by the region's managers. Several factors may cause people to ignore the problem, even though habitat loss is vastly costly to the region. About 70% of the Gulf's reefs have essentially disappeared in a few decades, and although scientific indicators confirm that this is happening, it is commonly discounted as even being a possibility. Management of human interactions with the Gulf's marine systems remains very inadequate, to the detriment of the Gulf's marine systems and its people. It is clear that this not a scientific issue any longer but rather it is a political problem and failure. © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction There is much evidence to suggest that a massive decline is occurring in the Gulf of all of its major marine systems including coral reefs, mangroves, seagrass beds and fish stocks, to the extent that it has been called a ‘young sea, in decline’ (Sheppard et al., 2010). There is no doubt about the ongoing, substantial degradation, as several scientists have been measuring it for many years (Sheppard et al., 2010, 2012 for reviews), and the extent of degradation in most cases is known both for the Gulf as a whole and for most of the surrounding countries individually (Burt, 2014; Burt et al., 2014). The history of the marine environment's deterioration and its management in this region is not good, so the questions are: why is this happening; what can be done about it in a biological or ecological sense; and what can be done about it in governmental or intergovernmental arenas? There seems little doubt that the cost to the region of such extensive environmental damage is substantial. For example, it was estimated using 20 year old figures from Costanza et al. (1997), that the marine habitats of Bahrain were worth about $2 billion per year to that Kingdom (Al Khuzai et al., 2009; Loughland and Zainal, 2009), yet development continued to go ahead that now has almost totally killed a significant proportion of that country's marine habitats. More recent figures (Costanza et al., 2014) suggest that the annual loss today should be valued many times higher, and the largest coral reef in that part of the Gulf, Fasht Adhm, is now totally killed by sediments (Fig. 1). For the Gulf as a whole, figures of coral reef loss are very alarming (Fig. 2). Burt (2014) calculated that historically the Gulf contained 3800 km2 of coral reef, about 70% of which are effectively dead (see next section). Using both this figure and the newer, revised values
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of habitats from Costanza et al. (2014), this equates to an annual loss of the immense value of about $94 billion. This is necessarily speculative: these values for reefs are global estimates and, for example, values attributed to tourism aspects of reefs will be less in the Gulf than in many other places. (By comparison, oil revenues from the region are about $340 billion per year from the production of approximately 6.8 billion barrels per year at $50 per barrel (Statistica, 2015; CNN, 2015)). But, speculative or not, the message nonetheless should be clear, the more so given that the land surrounding the Gulf is arid, and the loss of so much of the once rich reefs is loss of a significant part of the region's total biological richness. Obviously, development takes place because of the gains and advantages accruing from it, but it is equally clear that the costs of losing habitats are almost invariably not taken into account sufficiently during development planning, so that inadequate efforts are made to maintain the healthy ecosystems which benefit the people of the region. The causes of loss have been known now for at least three decades, so the question instead becomes: why does action not take place sufficiently to try and achieve the development that the region desires along with maintaining the important and valuable ecosystems? 2. The evidence Are reefs of the Gulf really dying, or is the alarmist view grossly exaggerated? We know that there is a very marked West to East gradient of effects both within the Gulf and within different parts of it too (Burt et al., 2011) so exceptions exist to any very generalised pattern. The two severe global warming events of the late 1990s caused major deterioration in a short time (Sheppard and Loughland, 2002) from which many places in the Gulf have not recovered at all. Recovery, however, did occur in a very patchy and sporadic way for a while in some parts such as in the UAE, though these subsequently became buried by
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Please cite this article as: Sheppard, C., Coral reefs in the Gulf are mostly dead now, but can we do anything about it?, Marine Pollution Bulletin (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.marpolbul.2015.09.031
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Fig. 1. Coral cover on Bahrain's Fasht Adhm in 1985 and 2007, using the same sites in each survey. From Al Khuzai et al. (2009) and Sheppard et al. (2010).
such as those around the islands of Saudi Arabia are less impacted than are reefs closer to mainland shores. In the worst cases there remains no resemblance of coral reef at all over several square kilometres while in others (Fig. 3) the dead and heavily eroding structures can still be seen. A large site in north Qatar which was flagged up by Kinsman (1964) as having unexpectedly high richness and cover before much industrialisation had taken place was found, in 2000, to have no living coral at all and not a single fish was seen in several hectares, the entire place being covered by sedimented coral rubble with seaweed (personal observations). The second-biggest category in the Gulf, occupying about 15% of the remainder, are themselves termed as being at ‘critical stage’, and the present progression suggests that many of these may never recover. Some comparable information is available too for seagrasses and mangroves (Burt, 2014). When it is considered that much of the shoreline landfill that is being done on the Arabian side is taking place in shallow waters with a gentle slope that can, and usually did, support mangrove and seagrass habitat, it is very likely that the declines in these habitats will be very similar to that of coral reefs. 3. Causes of damage in the Gulf
industrial activities (Burt et al., 2014). Even sites distant from shore that might have recovered still show a much degraded form when compared with historic descriptions (Burt et al., in this issue). That recovery is often possible can be seen from many other places in the tropical world, a process attributed to a lack of local impacts such as sedimentation from coastal development, and an absence of other forms of pollution or overfishing (Ateweberhan et al., 2011). Wilkinson (2008) developed estimates of the degree to which reefs had deteriorated in particular ocean basins and for the world as a whole, and he divided the world's reefs into four major categories from low threat level (broadly equating to being in good condition), to reefs which are effectively lost (Fig. 2, left column). In very rough terms, in most ocean basins and in the world as a whole, each category occupies about a quarter of the total (which is bad enough!), but the same measures applied to coral reefs in the Gulf by Burt et al. (2014) show a very stark picture: no less than about three quarters of coral reefs in the Gulf are ‘effectively lost’, three times greater than the global estimate. The percentage of reefs classified as being in the best category now is only about 5%. It is not unreasonable therefore to conclude that the reefs are effectively not far from being lost, although of course examples can be found, especially by diving clubs and the like, of reefs that are worth visiting for recreational purposes. (It is commonly the case, though, that even these are covered with fish traps and lobster pots.) Reefs further from shore
Fig. 2. Major categories of reef condition, for the world and for the Gulf. From Burt et al. (2014).
Environmental damage is commonly considered to come from two general classes of impact which can be called local and global (Table 1). Of the ‘local’ class some are commonly termed ‘bottom-up’ controls such as excess sewage or sediment, dredging and discharges, or ‘top-down’ controls which include overfishing or destructive fishing, in which removal of predators or grazers has an effect further down the food chain. The ‘local’ impacts increase with burgeoning populations and have synergistic effects, while global changes are those commonly attributed to climate change, particularly temperature extremes. All these impacts superimpose onto naturally elevated salinity and large temperature fluctuations resulting from the region's intense evaporation, its relatively shallow nature and its very restricted interchange with the Indian Ocean (Sheppard et al., 1992, 2000). While naturally warm and high salinity water has been the norm in the Gulf for thousands of years, it is not without consequence to overall biodiversity because only about a quarter or less of the corals that occur in the Indian Ocean have the natural tolerance to survive in the Gulf at all. For coral reefs, interesting changes also take place that fall short of simply being killed (Fig. 4). Branching forms of corals have been particularly susceptible to warming events, and these provide (or provided) much of the extensive three-dimensional structure that is so important for increasing habitat diversity and niche structure. As a result of their selective elimination, reef areas where these branching forms used to thrive have sometimes changed to having a cover of more resistant, massive forms which have a far lower three-dimensional structure, something observed in many parts of the Gulf (Sheppard and Loughland, 2002 (in the UAE); Sheppard et al., 2010 (for Iran); Burt et al., 2011 (UAE); Burt et al., 2013 (Bahrain); Burt et al., in this issue (Qatar)). Even when coral cover remains fairly high or recovers measurably, the result is still an area with lower rugosity. Essentially the 3-D structure of the Gulf's reefs has largely changed into a more 2-D planar structure. Overfishing is a global problem, and the Gulf is as susceptible to it as anywhere else (Grandcourt, 2012). Most fisheries have deteriorated to some degree, or have collapsed. Table 2 shows some results from the UAE, and Sheppard et al. (2010) present several histograms of more detailed declines in the western part of the Gulf. Approximately half to two thirds of fish caught are reef associated species (Grandcourt, 2012) so that, in addition to issues of overfishing, reef destruction has added additional consequences of habitat loss for fish. The overall consequences may already be being shown: Grandcourt (2012) shows that, over the last 30 years, overall fishing intensity has risen resulting in a rise in total fish catch, but not of reef-associated species for about the last 25 years (Fig. 5). Of the most commercially important reef fish
Please cite this article as: Sheppard, C., Coral reefs in the Gulf are mostly dead now, but can we do anything about it?, Marine Pollution Bulletin (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.marpolbul.2015.09.031
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Fig. 3. Two scenes from Fasht Adhm, Bahrain. This was the largest reef in that country, and was thriving in 1985. These images capture its condition 20 years later in 2007, but by 2015 much of it is covered with thick sediment. Photos: the author.
species, 65.5% were considered to be over exploited with a further 5.3% fully exploited (Grandcourt, 2012). To add to the problem, the region suffers from gross underreporting and inaccurate data: reconstructions by Al-Abdulrazzak and Pauly (2013) using remote sensing show that unreported catches of coastal fisheries exceed by as much as six-fold the reported catch. Data collection programmes therefore are grossly inadequate and fishing intensity appears to be much heavier than is recognised (‘Seas Around Us’, 2015). The substantial loss of coral reef habitat is unsurprisingly having impacts on reef-dependent fishes in particular: all of the 23 coral-dependent species assessed by Buchanan et al. (in this issue) are considered ‘regionally threatened’ under the IUCN's Red List criteria, and in similar vein, Riegl (2002) showed that reef fish diversity in Dubai has declined by a third too, correlating with thermal anomalies. 4. The needs: Management and alignment of regulations with needs Thus several urgent changes to management attitude and monitoring are required if the decline of coral reefs (or mangroves, or seagrass beds) is to be arrested, let alone reversed. While this has been stated by many observers countless times before (e.g. Sheppard et al., 2010; Sale et al., 2011; van Lavieren et al., 2011; Al-Cibahy et al., 2012), this paper tries to add reasons why the much needed actions are simply not taking place, or are insufficient. It also addresses whether they even could now take place if the intention was there. Firstly, scientific data and evidence are treated as being subordinate to other, usually commercial factors so that a shift is needed in how scientific evidence is viewed by managers. Scientists are commonly viewed by the government as providing a service no more important than any other, yet scientists are probably the only group capable of warning about dangers to the region's local life-support systems. Furthermore, information is misleading and useless if it is highly inaccurate (see fisheries example above) and in such cases is likely to do more harm than good. Ecological evidence, based on accurate data, should not be viewed as being just another optional ‘stakeholder input’ alongside the voices of, for example, a construction project's managers, or an
investment company's interests, whose focuses are, quite naturally, on immediate economic efficiency. The environmental scientists are those who provide evidence in the way that the others cannot, of stresses to the life-support system that quite literally keeps large areas of valuable ecosystem alive. Construction and investment need to work around the needs of maintaining the ecosystems because ecosystems cannot work around the needs of a heavily invested construction project. Senior managers are not managing if they fail to see this point, and in fact many of the companies engaged in massive Gulf coastal projects also work in parts of the world where such considerations are required and applied. It is a mistake, perhaps, to think that ‘management’ of coral reefs, or indeed any of the other marine habitats, is even possible in the first place! In one sense it is simply conceit or hubris to consider that we can manage such a complicated habitat, because we cannot successfully manage even its component species or industries (such as fishing) satisfactorily. The management that we can do, in contrast, is management of people's interactions with the habitat. This may not be such an appealing concept, but probably is much more realistically aligned with what managers could do, and it is certainly what they should be focussing on (Sheppard, 2014). Following this point, the framework for managers needs to be aligned more with what nature requires. Environmental laws must be compatible with what ‘nature’ can actually do. With fisheries, for
Table 1 Categories of stress affecting the Gulf marine systems. Local impacts
Global impacts
Sewage/nutrient runoff Overfishing (and destructive fishing) Sedimentation Thermal and hypersaline effluent from industrial and desalination plants Other construction disturbance such as burial
Warming Acidification Sea level rise
Fig. 4. Juvenile faviids showing healthy recruitment at 9 m depth — an alternative stable, if temporary, state. Fringing coral assemblages, faviidae dominated, western side of Kharku Island which is the most western boundary of developed coral communities in the northern part of the Gulf. Photo: Samimi Namin.
Please cite this article as: Sheppard, C., Coral reefs in the Gulf are mostly dead now, but can we do anything about it?, Marine Pollution Bulletin (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.marpolbul.2015.09.031
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Table 2 Biomass density estimates (tonnes km−2) of demersal species (based on trawl surveys) from the current survey and the demersal fisheries survey of 1978 (FAO, 1981). Taken from Shallard and Associates (2003a,b) and Sheppard et al. (2010) Fish group
1978 biomass (tonnes km−2)
2002 biomass (tonnes km−2)
% of 1978 biomass remaining in 2002
Non-commercial fish Commercial fish Total
2.0–3.0 2.0–3.0 4.0–6.0
0.44–0.53 0.26–0.65 0.70–1.18
19.4% (18–22%) 15.2% (13–22%) 18.8% (17–20%)
example, it is commonplace both in the Gulf and around the world for regulations to run almost exactly counter to what we might call nature's laws. Fisheries laws may state that it is alright to keep a large fish and throw back the small ones, for example. But commonly, one large female of a given weight, say 10 kg, will produce many times more juveniles than would ten females of 1 kg each. Protecting the big one is, as a result, many times more important than protecting ten small ones. Thus, fisheries regulations which permit large adults to be taken but not small ones run counter to what is required to sustain both a healthy stock for future use by humans and for ecosystem maintenance. Because there is no net which will keep small ones and release large ones, the only way to do this is to keep entire areas of habitat intact and unfished. Such areas are commonly called no-take marine reserves. Many exist around the world, and these have been advocated strongly for the Gulf region in the past (e.g. Van Lavieren and Klaus, 2013). In many cases, however, in an extraordinary negation of their purpose, many MPAs actually permit fishing. Fishing is one of the most ecosystem distorting activities of all, so that reefs in such an MPA are essentially not effectively protected at all. This contradictory and ineffectual state of affairs commonly arises from ill-advised pressure from various stakeholders, along with having an authority that is not strong or informed enough to take the action needed to conserve the habitat. 5. The nation state problem None of the above management measures will work well in a very enclosed and not particularly large marine basin like the Gulf unless there is much better cooperation between the States using it. This has been stated for a very long time (e.g. Sheppard et al., 1992; Sale et al., 2011). Although several measures towards environmental cooperation have been made, the fact that environmental trajectories in the Gulf are still almost invariably declining, demonstrates that what is happening in this respect is quite clearly nowhere near enough. The issue of state co-operation is perhaps the most intractable issue of all if only because it lies outside the remits of even the best managers
Fig. 5. Fish catch and effort in the Gulf over the last 30 years. Unbroken line: total landings; dashed line: landings of reef fish only (from Grandcourt, 2012). Dotted line and right y-axis: Number of industrial fishing ships (in Saudi Arabia only which has approximately half of the Arabian Gulf coastline). Data from Morgan (2004).
of the region. The problem can be traced to the idea of the nation State and the sovereignty of each. As a simple example: massive sediment plumes from coastal construction in one country commonly affect adjacent, down-current countries as well. Or: overfishing in one location might affect the stock of the species throughout the Gulf — this is the marine equivalent of Garrett Hardin's ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ (Hardin, 1968). The idea of the nation State is presumably here to stay and this ‘Tragedy of Common Resources’ is an important reason for the decline in a shared and enclosed water body such as the Gulf. By itself this should perhaps be no reason not to show environmental consideration to neighbours, especially as it would also help the country causing the problem, but this is the realm and problem of diplomacy and politics, not of science. When politics is not underpinned by sufficient biological understanding then it seems that progress cannot be made to stop the relentless decline of habitats and of species that the habitats support and which people benefit from. Sufficient science already exists in this respect — it is simply ignored. 6. Butterflies and black swans There are one or two fundamental principles that affect habitats which also should be borne in mind, especially by managers of marine systems and major projects in the region. The first is the Black Swan theory of Taleb (2010). This is a metaphor that describes an event that has a major or catastrophic effect, but which is very rare indeed so is discounted. The event in question may well have been thought of but was discarded as being too improbable to worry about. A strike by a large meteorite would be one such example, but we cannot do anything about that, and it is most unlikely in any case, so we do not factor it in. The Black Swan comes from the idea that everybody once ‘knew’ that all swans are white – there was never anything else – until the black swans of Australia were found, thus negating the whole concept. A good example of a black swan event in recent times is the banking system collapse: people knew such an event would have massive effects but did not worry about it because it was so unlikely to happen! Coupled with this, human psychological biases make people individually and collectively blind to such uncertainties and thus unaware of the massive roles of the very rare event. This can be translated into the Gulf's ecological situation. In terms of corals and their temperature tolerance for example, for thousands of years temperatures had been ‘just so’, as was the corals' tolerance to it, and the same can be said about corals' tolerance to the Gulf's natural sediment loads. However, today the rise in temperature (Sheppard, 2003) and massive pulses of sediment which have accompanied coastal developments have moved such factors to a place totally outside the environmental experience of corals and reefs. The extreme environmental changes and events of the past 20 years were always potentially foreseeable, but they were ignored (they were the black swans). The fact that the extreme events subsequently have come to happen has meant consequent collapses in coral reefs. Even in the early 1960s, Kinsman, referred to earlier, is unlikely to have considered climate change as likely to cause such massive impacts to the rich coral communities he had recently discovered. The second principle to consider is the butterfly effect, introduced by Lorenz (1963). This is complementary, in one sense, to the Black Swan. It explains how a small change at one place may have a massive effect later on, perhaps somewhere else. In this case it is deterministic: a small change at one place can have a deterministic non-linear response elsewhere. The name comes from the idea of whether the flap of a butterfly's wings at one time might cause a hurricane several weeks later — presumably exaggerated but illustrative. Or, a ball placed at the top of a hill may roll downhill along any one of several valleys depending on, amongst other things, very slight differences in the initial position. Unlike black swans, the butterfly's consequences are entirely predictable at least mathematically and in principle, if only we knew all the elements and starting conditions. However, usually we do not
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know them, so effects are unpredictable in practical terms. In the context of coral reefs, an example might be the removal by overfishing of a species which turned out to have had no redundancy, meaning there existed no other species which could have filled the same role in the ecosystem. In this case, there may then be a release in grazing pressure on algae which then go on to smother the reef. Examples of this have been found in fact, and many readers will know of examples of a marked deterioration that followed a shoreline development, which took those responsible completely by surprise. 7. Regional needs The rate of atmospheric CO2 rise is increasing, which can be expected to cause increasing pulses of lethally warm waters (Sheppard, 2003). Coastal shoreline construction is similarly not only modifying but increasingly eliminating the natural life-support systems of the Gulf (Burt, 2014). These Anthropocene drivers are integral at the moment to the entirely reasonable desire of all Gulf States to develop and improve the lot of their people, but the drivers (which already have killed about three-quarters of the coral reefs, as noted) are themselves increasing: recurrent stress events such as bleaching occur at b 15 year intervals, and are increasing in frequency and magnitude (Riegl and Purkis, 2015). Is the arrest of ecosystem deterioration even possible therefore? It is possible, perhaps, but only if several conditions are addressed. Admission of the problems' causes is the first condition. It is not uncommon in Gulf States to hear that degradation of the shallow coastal habitats is caused variously by global warming, or by the massive and deliberate Iraqi oil spill, or by other factors which somehow are not our fault. This externalisation is a false deflection of blame (or of some important parts of it), but whether false or not, externalisation or deflection of blame does not, by itself, solve anything. Several issues are needed. Possibly all of them have been stated before, yet they need to be repeated. Comprehension of what the data is telling us (and adequate, accurate data!) is surely the first. One problem common to all marine environmental issues is that the major decision makers may have little idea or understanding of what is underwater. An example: pressure was being applied to permit recreational fishing (‘stakeholder’ pressure again) on a small set of artificial reefs that had been placed in an area where natural reef was in severe decline, with the intention of aiding restoration and enhancing the area's biodiversity. Fishing was prohibited there, following which recovery of some corals and large grouper was striking and swift. Resumption of spearfishing of those grouper was then requested. When this was refused, the question was asked whether spearfishing could perhaps be permitted on holidays only, with the reasoning that one day per week surely would not matter. This resumption looked like being permitted — it was ‘management’ after all. Arguments that it certainly would matter fell on deaf ears. But, that country had an Arabian Oryx recovery programme too, and the only explanation that eventually worked was that perhaps resumption of shooting of Oryx would not matter either if it was done only on holidays. Education of managers is extremely important, and while there is nothing new about advocating improved environmental education about marine systems, the fact is that it now has been advocated for decades, but for habitats beneath the surface of the sea, it is clearly still inadequate. Internalising costs is another area needing essential improvement. There needs to be a greater understanding of all costs involved amongst managers who sanction major construction projects. Very often there are ways to greatly mitigate most damaging effects but these will likely incur a direct cost to the project concerned. These costs are therefore not undertaken but that means that the cost might be greater elsewhere in other respects (loss of fisheries, loss of shoreline protection, recreation, ecological control etc.). Furthermore, those costs are borne by society generally, or by another sector, so are generally not something taken
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into account; minimising his company's costs, after all, is one thing any completely free market company accountant might strive for. In any case, it has frequently been reasoned, the rebound of such consequences to society is commonly tenuous, perhaps too distant, too hedged about with ifs and buts to be accurately considered — so they are not. One way to help circumvent such difficulties is to designate additional strictly protected marine national parks and marine protected areas as part of an integrated management plan for the region (Sale et al., 2011; van Lavieren et al., 2011). It is already observed that reef fish biomass density, for example, is significantly greater within protected areas compared with that outside them (Grandcourt, 2012) and, moreover, these are now the only mechanisms, along with the enforced controls on damaging and negligent methods of coastal construction already mentioned, that will allow countries to fully protect what coral reefs they have left and allow others to recover. Finally, and most obviously perhaps, some general rules are essential with regard to coastal construction. Coastal development and in particular dredging and landfilling has to be curtailed or properly managed; if it is not there is little point in any of the rest in the relatively small and very enclosed Gulf. For one thing, coral reef areas should never be approved for landfilling and building on. These points have been made for years, but the issues continue (Wilkinson, 2008). In all these respects the science has long been sufficiently understood. While there is a tendency to always say more information is needed, and as a scientist I fully appreciate the need for research and monitoring, scientists now need to pass the buck to the administrators, planners, managers and government. We already know enough about what is killing the shallow marine habitats of the Gulf — it is no longer a scientific issue and indeed has not been for a couple of decades. If the governments of the Gulf region wish to retain their marine natural ecosystems, they have little time to take action, unfortunately. Twenty years ago similar points were being stated. With current trends (that is, currently observed trends not fanciful predictions) in another 20 years an equivalent article to this one will not be talking about saving the reefs (or the mangroves or the seagrass beds or the fisheries) because there will almost certainly be no viable systems of that sort left in the Gulf. The development of the Gulf for economic reasons for its people is essential, beneficial, advantageous and greatly to be desired, as presumably everybody agrees, but it need not and should not come at the cost of massive destruction of the marine system, for that destruction is ultimately very costly to the people of the region. Unless the unrelenting quest for development and year-on-year economic growth irrespective of collateral damage, makes way for a longer-term vision that recognises ecosystem values, the downward spiral of environmental decline in the Gulf will likely continue. Acknowledgement I thank New York University and its campus in Abu Dhabi for the privilege of presenting these ideas to their marine science conference in 2015. I thank Prof. Andrew Price for his thoughtful comments on a draft of this paper. References Al Khuzai, J., Sheppard, C.R.C., Abdulqader, E.A.A., Khuzai, S.A.A., Loughland, R.A., 2009. Chapter 5: subtidal habitats. In: Loughland, R., Zainal, A.J.M. (Eds.), Marine Atlas of Bahrain, pp. 113–167. Al-Abdulrazzak, D., Pauly, D., 2013. Managing fisheries from space: Google Earth improves estimates of distant fish catches. ICES J. Mar. Sci. http://dx.doi.org/10. 1093/icesjms/fst178. Al-Cibahy, A.S., Al-Khalifa, K., Böer, B., Samimi-Namin, K., 2012. Conservation of marine ecosystems with a special view to coral reefs in the Gulf. In: Riegl, B.M., Purkis, S.J. (Eds.), Coral Reefs of the Gulf: Adaptation to Climatic Extremes. Springer Science + Business Media B. V., pp. 337–348. Ateweberhan, M., McClanahan, M., Graham, N.A.J., Sheppard, C.R.C., 2011. Episodic heterogeneous decline and recovery of coral cover in the Indian Ocean. Coral Reefs 30, 739–752.
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