ANALYSIS

Global Ocean Observing System

GOOS is a global system for observations, modelling and analysis of marine variables to support ocean services worldwide. Keith Alverson, Head of Section for Ocean Observations and Services, speaks to International Innovation about the progress made in the past year and his impending role as Chief of Climate Change Adaptation at UNEP

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ANALYSIS Since we interviewed you last year, in what way has GOOS developed and evolved?
The good news is that despite the very difcult nancial situation for many of the countries that provide support, the system is being successfully sustained. This is quite a challenge. For example, maintaining the global array of 3,000 Argo proling oats requires about 700 new deployments per year, and simply changing the batteries on one of the equatorial moorings that provided us with accurate seasonal climate prediction of La Nia conditions this year required several weeks of ship time and several hundred thousand dollars. Regrettably though, the climate module of GOOS has plateaued, and stands, just as it did last year and the year before that, at 62 per cent of its design objectives. I even warned parties involved in the UNFCCC at their meeting in Cancun last December, that there was a greater risk of backsliding than progressing on this goal. We are making great strides in developing sustained ecosystem and biogeochemical monitoring as part of GOOS, in part because new funding for climate monitoring has been so elusive. Last year a global network of researchers in more than 80 nations completed the Census of Marine Life, vastly improving our understanding of marine biodiversity. Thanks to this development, the scientic community has begun to quantitatively map and assess global patterns and trends in marine ecosystems, and to correlate these changes with climatic and anthropogenic drivers. Were also learning more about the increasing acidity of the ocean. Modelling projections show that global patterns of aragonite saturation levels, a measure of stress on shell forming organisms and corals, are strongly inuenced by synergies between the combined impacts of carbon dioxide inputs from the atmosphere alongside changes in climatic variables including temperature, salinity and sea ice extent. These studies clearly demonstrate the underlying importance of monitoring beyond climate. Sustaining such a system will require the scientic community to agree to a clearly dened set of essential ocean biological and chemical variables, starting with those that are technologically and nancially feasible to measure. GOOS has secured substantial funding from the European Commission and The Global Environment Fund to begin this task, but sustained monitoring will require that countries have the political will to engage multilaterally in supporting the system. One mechanism GOOS is actively pursuing in order to ensure such national engagement is to develop a reporting relationship with the Convention on Biological Diversity analogous to the one that we have developed with UNFCCC over the years for climate monitoring.

In terms of climate change adaptation strategies, what is GOOS seeking to implement?

The community is really just beginning to outline strategies for how ocean observations can best underpin adaptation measures at this point. In principle, it is clear that sustained observations are required to detect climate changes, design relevant adaptation measures, and assess their efcacy. Invariably though, the ocean observations are only providing one piece of information in the context of a multifaceted challenge. Take sea-level rise for example. We have clear observational evidence that on a global average it has been rising at a rate of about three mm/ year over the past couple of decades. Less well publicised, though equally well established from observations, is that the rise is not globally uniform. In the western equatorial Pacic the average rise over this same period is larger than 10 mm/year, while the eastern Pacic sea-level (along the west coasts of North and South America) has actually been going down! Furthermore, local land subsidence is often orders of magnitude larger than sea-level rise. Land subsidence in Bangkok associated with groundwater extraction has been many metres over the past two decades, dwarng the few millimetres of climate change related signal. Low lying coral atolls withstood a sustained sea-level rise to the order of 100 mm/year at the end of the last glacial period, as coral growth kept pace with sea-level rise, but they were not inhabited at the time. Thus adaptation measures for these inhabited islands today have to take into account human presence as well as ensuring the health of coral reefs. As is so often the case, the developed world has numerous adaptation measures already in place, including for example the Thames barrier in London, the MOSE gates in Venice, and oating houses in The Netherlands, but it is not at all clear that such high-tech, expensive projects have much relevance to solutions in the developing world.

You have just accepted the position of Chief of Climate Change Adaptation at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). What experience do you feel you are bringing to this role?
This is an unbelievably exciting and timely challenge that I consider myself very lucky indeed to have been given. The scope of the climate change adaptation challenge is so broad it is pretty much impossible to bring enough experience to the role, but I could mention one relevant eld that I dabbled in for a decade or so: paleoclimatology. Although anthropogenic forcing of climate change is relatively recent, its important to keep in mind that climate variability, subsequent ecosystem responses and human adaptation have all been occurring for millennia. The paleorecord is rich in examples of substantial, protracted regional climate changes coinciding with major changes in human societies. These changes include successful adaptation as well as societal collapse. In either case, studies of the past can enrich our thinking on modern climate change adaptation. One example from the paleorecord exists not far from UNEP headquarters in Nairobi. We know from well-dated sediment cores that there were century-long periods during which the level of Lake Naivasha was over 20 m higher than today. These moist centuries supported three episodes of pronounced prosperity over the last 600 years. During the prolonged dry intervals in between, inhabitants of the region migrated away towards climatically more hospitable areas. Though it may be tempting to argue that such ancient history is not relevant in the modern day,

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in fact these multi-decadal droughts were far longer and more severe than anything recorded in the instrumental record, and far beyond what local societies and infrastructure are designed to withstand today. Furthermore, migration remains an important adaptation mechanism, though it is clearly one that is fraught with difculties. Study of the past therefore provides a wealth of evidence to inform potential strategies for the future. have some great successes, for example enormous improvements in agricultural yields. Im optimistic, but I dont want to leave the impression the task is complete either. The problem is not intractable.

In what way does UNEP guarantee that its assessments are credible, especially in light of the recent controversy surrounding an IPCC report?
I cant really comment on UNEP policy, as I have not begun my new role there yet. But your question certainly treads on a difcult issue. To respond strongly, from my perspective the controversy surrounding IPCC has been greatly overblown; it was an irrational media commotion about some minor errors in the report. Of course there are errors in such a report. We need to get away from the apparent belief that assessments, or predictions, need to be, or could ever be, perfect. Adaptation will never be based on absolute certainty, but on a range of plausible scenarios. The IPCC reports provide one such range, and as I said earlier, past records of natural climate variability provide another. The bottom line is that most of humanity is already highly vulnerable simply to natural climate variability, so implementing adaptation measures to improve our resilience is a no brainer irrespective of where you stand on any of the various politicised debates about the existence of anthropogenic climate change, the credibility of the IPCC, or whatever controversy will be dreamt up next.

What are the main challenges facing climate change adaptation?

Adaptation to climate change is one of the dening global environmental, social and economic challenges of the 21st Century. At the root of this challenge is a troubling disparity between the global scale of the problem and the local scale of adaptation measures. Additionally, although the trigger may be physical climate change such as drought or sea-level rise the adaptation response usually requires much broader interdisciplinary considerations. Indeed, the challenges in local adaptation measures are often not technical or scientic at their core, but may be focused on ecosystem responses as well as social, economic and legal considerations. Take for example droughts in California: climate change is clearly playing a role in exacerbating water scarcity, for example through reduced winter snowpack in the Sierra Nevada. However, given that the existing infrastructure (dams and canals) and legal regimes governing water rights date back to the early 20th Century, it is pretty clear that the tenfold population growth since that time, along with economic growth and lifestyle changes, are much more important than climate in determining vulnerability to drought.

www.ioc-goos.org

What role does science and knowledge need to play to enable society to understand and respond to threats posed by climate change? Do you think enough is being done at the moment?
Science plays a very important role. We know about this problem because of science, and science will be key to nding solutions. Certainly I dont favour the more hubristic ideas that suggest science could, for example through geoengineering, provide a grand technical solution to global climate change. As to whether enough is being done, this question needs to be put in perspective, and balanced against other societal priorities. It is pretty easy to point to dramatic failures, like the levees in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, and say we have not done enough. But we also

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