13 Nov 2016

A Call to Action member from West Coast in the United States of America says what climate change is doing to oceans; including ocean acidification may have dire consequences if left unchecked.
Mr Jay Manning sounded the warning at a side event during the ongoing 22nd Conference of the Parties (COP 22) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) on November 10, in Marrakech, Morocco.
“In the states, for example there was an incident where Oyster hatcheries were wiped out due to rising acid levels triggered by increasing levels of carbon in the atmosphere,” he said.
He said ‘however unlike climate change, ocean acidification is not polarising the world as it is an issue that one can talk about and be given audience.’
It is against this background that Mr Manning has networked and collaborated with other stakeholders from as far as the United States of America, West Coast to the Ivory Coast in Africa to try and build scientific and political capacity to respond to ocean acidification.
Deliberating at the same event, Dr Mohammed Idrissi of the National Institute of Fisheries Research in Casablanca, Morocco said the situation calls on everybody to put up a spirited fight lest many livelihoods may be affected.
He said 170 000 people directly derive income from the fishery sector in Morocco.
The audience also learnt at the event that rising carbon emissions threaten the lives of many water species whose mortality continue to sky rocket across the globe.
They further learnt for instance that the results of the study conducted along the Egyptian coast were also not encouraging as experimentation indicated plummeting PH levels, rise in acidity as well as temperature levels.
Projections made thus far, paints to a gloomy picture in as far as fish and other water living organisms are concerned.ENDS