Breaking Waves: Ocean News

Historically, it was overfishing that hurt the much-prized fish – but now rising ocean temperatures are inhibiting the fish’s ability to produce codlings at all Guðrún Bjarnadóttir Bech sings to herself while she sorts through baby fish with a pair of tweezers. “Ding! Ding! Ding!” she suddenly bursts out. “That’s a plaice,” she says – her reaction testament to how few she sees. It is 2021 and Bech is working onboard the Jákup Sverri, a Faroese marine research ship that’s trawling for juvenile fish around the Faroe Islands in the north Atlantic to assess the state of populations including haddock, sand eel and Norwegian pout. Continue reading...

npj Ocean Sustainability, Published online: 27 November 2023; doi:10.1038/s44183-023-00024-8 Recent calls for an International Panel for Ocean Sustainability (IPOS) to provide consensus-based science advice for global ocean sustainability appeal to the successes of global science–policy platforms, specifically the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Intergovernmental Science–Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), and the World Ocean Assessment (WOA)1. A new IPOS may facilitate global ocean sustainability, but only if it proactively addresses the challenges facing existing international science–policy platforms—namely representation, accountability, and politicization.

‘As we go into another hot, dry spell, it is more critical than ever that we deliver fully on the Murray Darling Basin Plan’, Tanya Plibersek said Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates Get our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcast The Albanese government and Greens have reached a “breakthrough” deal on legislation to amend the Murray Darling Basin plan and ensure an additional 450 gigalitres of environmental flows. The environment and water minister, Tanya Plibersek, said in a joint press conference with the Greens environment spokesperson, Sarah Hanson-Young, that agreed amendments would strengthen the bill which is to be debated in the senate this week. Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundup Continue reading...

On The Capitol Beach, Derek Brockbank hosts Camille Crain, the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) section chief within Hazard Mitigation Assistance Division at FEMA. Only authorized 5 years ago, BRIC has quickly become one of the (if not the singular) biggest federal funding programs for resilience to natural hazards, in large part due to its funding coming directly from post-disaster funding. Specifically, 6% of Stafford Act disaster funding is now set aside for BRIC to improve resilience in communities pre-disaster. Even though BRIC is too new to have a fully a constructed project to its credit, the program is evolving to better support underserved communities, implement nature-based solutions, and provide technical assistance to communities unable to fully develop their own resilience project applications.  BRIC currently has a funding opportunity of $1 Billion (together with a $800 million opportunity from its “sister program”, Flood Mitigation Assistance), with state applications due to FEMA on Feb. 29, 2024.  All community applicants need to be part of state submissions, so individual applications will be due to their states’ hazard mitigation or emergency management office earlier. The next BRIC opportunity is anticipated for fall of 2024.