Information & Meetings
	Conferences & Events
	Coastal Publications

Organisations
	New hyperlinks to websites

Environment
	Environment Bonn climate conference cleared enforcement of Kyoto Protocol

Development & Trends
	Overfishing main threat of coastal ecosystems, study concludes

Policy
	International Whaling Commission upholds moratorium

Events recently announded

Please note:
The overview of the Coastal Guide conference and event  meeting list can be found at http://www.coastalguide.org/meetings/

New Coastal Publications

New hyperlinks

Priority Actions Programme Regional Activity Centre (PAP/RAC): part of the Mediterranean Action Plan (MAP) - practical activities which are expected to yield immediate results contributing to the protection and enhancement of the Mediterranean environment, Split, Croatia

Rescoman: a remote sensing system for mapping submerged vegetation for coastal zone management, funded by life

WATERS (Water data Acquisition in real Time for coastal Ecosystems Research and Services), funded by Life

Bonn climate conference cleared enforcement of Kyoto Protocol

Delegates from 178 countries agreed in Bonn to a series of measures designed to ensure that the 1997 Kyoto Protocol against global warming goes into force, but left the USA isolated. It is the first international treaty to restrain energy consumption. Although the Bonn Agreement weakened the deal that was originally drafted in Kyoto, even environmental campaigners broadly welcomed the historic agreement. Some key points from the agreement are:

• Countries may offset their obligations to reduce industrial pollution by counting their carbon sinks (forests, farmlands).
• The European Union pledged $410 million to fund efforts by developing nations to improve emissions control.
• Enforcement measures will provide an incentive to comply. Nations that fail to meet targets on cutting gas emissions during the first commitment period will have to cut them by an extra 1.3 tons for every ton by which they exceed the target during the second period.
• The agreement allows for emissions trading if tough reporting and verification systems are in place.

The fine tuning of the Bonn Agreement will be forwarded for formal adoption to the Seventh Session of the Conference of the Parties to the Climate Change Convention (COP 7), which will be hosted by the Government of Morocco in Marrakech from 29 October to 9 November 2001. Several decisions still requiring some additional work will be finalised at COP 7 and adopted together as a package with the decisions completed here in Bonn.
Countries accounting for 55 percent of the 30-odd wealthy industrial nations' carbon dioxide emissions must ratify the treaty for it to take effect, forcing them to meet targets for cutting the emissions blamed for global warming. Since the United States, which accounts for about a third of that output, has already rejected the deal, virtually all the big polluters, notably European Union states, Russia, Japan and Canada, must ratify the protocol.
World press releases: http://www.unfccc.de/cop6_2/press/index.shtml?headlines

Overfishing main threat of coastal ecosystems, study concludes

According to a study published last week in the journal Science, overfishing over many centuries is the main cause of the worldwide ecological crisis in coastal and marine waters. A group of 19 scientists examined coastal ecosystems around the globe. Jeremy Jackson of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in California, who led the international study, said that they started out to study everything that people had done to the coastal and marine environment in history. They discovered that in each case they had studied, overfishing - in this context defined as the excessive removal of any marine organism - was the primary reason for ecological disasters and not pollution as previously believed. One example given is the American North Pacific coast where 2500 years ago there was a balance between sea urchins grazing the kelp and sea otters eating the urchins. After humans entered that "scene" by starting to hunt the otters they enabled the urchin population to grow and overgraze the kelp. In the late 20th century the sea otter came under legal protection and their number grew. This helped the situation for the moment, but killer whales have now started to eat otters, due to the declining of their traditional prey - seals and sea lions - as a result of overfishing. For further information read news articles on: http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=11779 http://globalarchive.ft.com/globalarchive/article.html?id=010728000964 http://globalarchive.ft.com/globalarchive/article.html?id=010727001642

International Whaling Commission upholds moratorium

The 53rd meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) took place last week (23 - 27 July) despite attempts by the pro-whaling nations Japan and Norway to disrupt the meeting and destabilise the IWC. The 16-year-old IWC ban on commercial whaling was almost lifted, due to the hard attack from the whaling countries Japan and Norway. Japan argued that the whale population had increased to over a million in the southern hemisphere, when again the anti-whaling nations claimed that it had decreased dramatically. Japan introduced recent studies which show that whales eat up to 5oo million tonnes of fish, krill and squid each year - a figure that is said to be five times more than human consumption. This would mean that humans and cetaceans were competing for the same fish. Conservationist groups such as the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society (WDCS) were pleased with the outcome of the meeting, as the moratorium was upheld and a number of significant conservation advances were made. WWF, the World Wide Fund for Nature, however, expressed its deep disappointment with the IWC and accuses it of failing to take any steps in controlling the whaling. WWF says it might be necessary to return to limited whaling to stop the collapse of the IWC (see also Coastal News No 14, 2000) and that it is vital that the anti-whaling countries develop a consensus and come up with serious proposals for the next IWC meeting in Shimoneseki, Japan in May 2002. Otherwise the international trade in whale meat might be reopened without a management scheme being in place.
For more information about the meeting see http://www.iwc.org/iwc2001report.htm, http://www.wdcs.org, http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsnid=11833 and for further information about WWF's position see http://www.panda.org/news/press/news.cfm?id=2436

Deadline for submitting contributions to Coastal Guide News No 16: August 15, 2001

COASTAL GUIDE NEWS is a biweekly newsletter published by the European Union for Coastal Conservation (EUCC) with financial support of Stichting DOEN, the foundation of the Dutch lottery "Postcode Loterij". For free subscriptions, comments or contributions to this newsletter, please contact news@coastalguide.org. 

© Articles may be reproduced free of charge with acknowledgement and citation of Coastal Guide News and the URL of the Coastal Guide (http://www.coastalguide.org). The articles of this and previous issues of Coastal Guide News can be found at http://www.coastalguide.org/news

Members of the Coastal Guide News editorial team: Erik Devilee, Irene Lucius, Hanneke Mesters, Albert Salman.

Established in 1989, the European Union for Coastal Conservation (EUCC) is an association involving the largest coastal network in Europe with 750 members and member organisations in 40 countries. For more information please contact EUCC International Secretariat, POBox 11232, NL-2301 EE Leiden, the Netherlands, tel.: +31-71-5122900, internet: http://www.eucc.nl

© EUCC, 2001