Ten good news in 2020

We are in a snow poor Tromsø this Christmas, but with enough cold for the small pond Prestvannet to have 15 cm of ice. We go ice skating. Makes me happy. Kids and wife are smiling, laughing and racing. For the time being, skiing opportunities seems to have moved to the deep forests near the Swedish border and high up in the mountains.

I look down into one of the cracks on the frozen pond and try to imagine the Thwaites glacier in Antarctica. Even the small Prestvannet contains a few thousand cubic meters of ice, it strikes me. Thwaites is the size of England. The melting from this glacier alone accounts for 4 percent of today’s sea level rise. And it melts fast. If the whole glacier melts the global sea level will rice by 40-50 cm.

It is the second day of Christmas and we drive around Kvaløya, Norway’s fifth largest island. Over the bridge from Tromsøya the wind from the South is 17 m/s, according to the light sign. It would have been nice to windsurf, as we did in the summer of 2019.

Good news no. 1

We turn left after the bridge and follow the South side of the island. From my window I see Bentsjordtinden draped in a gentle light telling people here up North that it is still a few weeks until the sun returns. When it does however, they get it 24/7.

I have some key words in my head for some of the good news for the oceans in 2020. It’s easier to tackle what works when you look in that direction than if you’re just worried about how things shouldn’t be. If you are going to do a forward loop on a windsurfing board, you look ahead, not over your shoulder.

I think of a quote my wife read to me last summer:

“It is not true that the Sea is unfaithful; for it has never promised anything: without demands, without obligation, free, pure and unadulterated, the great heart beats – the last healthy in the sick world. “

Alexander L. Kielland. Garman & Worse. Norwegian author, written in 1880.

The “last healthy” needs help. Joe Biden, Plastics, CO2 reductions, a UN convention and Gaming are some key words for 2020.

Measured in numbers, the covid-19 pandemic’s indirect effects on CO2 reductions may be at the top of the list. 2.3 billion tons less CO2 emitted globally means roughly 800 million tons less absorbed by the oceans. Acidification and heating may be slightly delayed.

But we can’t base our existence on luck.

However, the pandemic gained momentum for the EU’s new green deal. It was adopted in 2019 and largely determines the spread of 1.8 trillion euros for a planet-friendly society, post corona. The monster budget was adopted on December 17 and a sustainable blue economy gets a lot of attention in the plan.

Plastic

2018 was the year when disposable plastic was banned in several countries. Two years later, things have happened.

The EU has estimated that the environmental costs of plastic pollution will be 22 billion euros less over the next decade because of the ban. Critics say the ban has a limited effect because the problem lies in the plastic economy itself.

Companies make sales products from marine plastic like never before.

The collaboration between Dell, General Motors and several other smaller companies aim to collect and recycle plastic in their products. The initiative gained momentum in 2020 and in the last two years it has prevented 1,300 tons of plastic from entering the sea. It is also one of the finalists in the SDG Action Awards.

The consortium will collect recyclable plastic from Indonesia, China, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines. The goal is to turn plastic into salable products before they reach the sea:

Bottle cage from Chilean fishing nets, payment cards and backpacks. Computers from plastic bottles in Haiti; bags, cushion covers and table cloths, office chairs, PC-bags, and carpets from fishing gear from Cameroon, Indonesia and the Philippines.

On December 7, toy maker Lego set its own goals to reach the Paris Agreement. Lego’s is basically founded on plastics. All of their building blocks and toys are made of 100 percent plastic. They probably feel the pressure, and it seems that they have taken the plastic problem seriously. They have no choice, really if they are to survive. By 2030, all Lego and packaging will be made from sustainable materials.

Joe Biden

We drive out towards Hella close to the sea and further west on Kvaløya in my mother-in-law’s little Toyota. An ocean spray is blowing up on the road. A reindeer is grazing in a yard. The landscape looks like the shores of Lake Michigan, I imagine.

“Back to the good old United States” was one of the sentiment when Joe Biden was elected, in the euphoria that Trump would no longer go berserk with his bat on the federal ming vases, like NOAA. The United States was not an environmental lighthouse before Trump, but the damage that has been done in several agencies in the last four years can hopefully be corrected with Biden.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) was one of those who got to taste Trump’s bat. For 2021, Trump cut the budget by $727 million (13.5 percent from the previous year). The budget of just over $4.6 billion has been reduced by almost 25 percent since 2016. In June 2018, Trump rejected Obama’s ocean strategy and replaced it with a new, MAGA strategy.

In addition, climate change deniers have been appointed to key positions in NOAA. The senior management has long consisted of overlapping functions without an actual leader.

Virtually all knowledge about the ocean and climate comes from decades of state-funded research. Utilization of marine resources will increase sharply in the coming decades and we will not achieve sustainable use without solid research.

Therefore, it is may be a good thing that Biden now hopefully provides NOAA with the necessary resources and ensures a professional and well organized senior management team.

Good news no. 4

The corona significantly cut CO2 emissions. Home offices alone accounted for 40 per cent cuts, about twice as much as the energy and industry sector, where the decline was 22 and 17 per cent.

Now this is not a solution. Rather, it shows that even a massive halt in human activity is not the solution. The emission cuts only made a tiny dent in global emissions. What is positive however, is that the decommissioning of coal-fired power plants is now going faster than the establishment of new ones. This has not happened since the Industrial Revolution.

While investments in new power plants reached 88 gigawatts in 2015, the number was down to 22 in 2018. In 2020, the IEA estimates that the decline will end at 11 percent. And the S&P Global Clean Energy Index, which covers 30 larger companies, has risen by 37 percent in two years.

Gaming

In 2020, many people became citizen scientists online.  Now you can assist NASA to register coral reefs through the video game NASA NeMO-Net, launched in april. The game itself is a noteworthy way to preserve coral reefs. What is really cool is how the images for this game is taken.

Collecting data is one of the most time consuming parts of science. A bit like a fish trawl, you get huge amounts of data you are not looking for. So you need to interpret and sort them. It takes time. But, you do not need a degree in marine biology to separate a fish from a coral reef. Citizen scientists, volunteers can help doing this job.

Floating lenses and algorithms

Under water photography is fun, but the images will always have a water filter, obviously. You don’t capture what it looks like, if it hadn’t been for the water around. The algorithm Sea-thru fix this. It understands what the water conditions do with the light and calculates and reverses the water effect. The result is an image as if the water wasn’t there.

NASA recently developed a camera lense based on the same principle, a so called liquid lense. The algorithm “straighten” out the curls on the ocean surface. The result is that you get crystal clear images of what is underneath the surface.

The site freethink explains: The lenses are put on drones and planes to massively photograph the ocean bed and coral reefs in Guam, Puerto Rico and American Samoa. The images are uploaded and made available in the video game NeMO-Net.

As you enter the game, you also enter the research vessel Nautilus. Your task is to recognise and classify coral reefs. As you play, your contribution is twofold. First, you help to separate coral reefs from other species and the sea bed. As you do this, the computer also learns what coral reefs look like. Which means that over time, this job can be done without humans. This is great because mapping and registering coral reefs is key for preservation. There is no time to waste.

Good news no. 6

Imagine a regular satellite image showing how the weather is developing over the next 24 hours across Europe. Warm in the south, rain over England and a little of everything over Central Europe. We see how precipitation and temperature move with different colors. We understand it intuitively. In the same way, Japanese researchers have now made a map of plastic that flows into the sea.

Previous attempts to find out how much plastic that run into the oceans have been based on a lack of garbage and plastic management. Based on this calculations have been made of how much run into oceans. However, these methods have not been able to document where the plastic actually comes from. At the University of Tokyo, some smart people have made their own “plastic radar” that does just that. And from these data, they have made a “plastic map”, similar to wheather maps.

Good news no. 7

In recent years, the United States has been a reasonably strong opponent of international agreements and cooperation. This also applies to the High Seas Treaty, which is still being negotiated. The agreement is important when offshore mining and patenting of marine genetic resources become increasingly relevant. Over fishing, which has been dramatic for many years, can also come under better control with such an agreement.

Countries have exclusive fishing and mining rights 200 nautical miles from the coast. Beyond this is the open sea. There is no agreement here that protects marine life. Although the Convention on the Law of the Sea has rules for the use of the sea and its resources, it does not clearly state how states should act in a sustainable manner and protect biodiversity.

The pandemic could lead to a better agreement.

Negotiations were scheduled to be finalized in April. But the pandemic made the states agree to postpone . Exactly that postponement may be good news. The agreement is intended to reconcile existing international agreements and national legislation. More time potentially means a better crafted agreement. When the countries meet again, it is with Biden at the helm of the United States and probably the activist John Kerry as Special Presidential Envoy for Climate.

Good news no. 8

Plans and reports written by skilled people, commissioned by heads of states and presented in an easy-to-understand manner are abundant. Practical and sensible measures and actions receive attention for a while, before ending up in a drawer, right?

But, “fail to plan = plan to fail”, as it is called. Therefore, the report that the ocean panel led by Erna Solberg presented December 3. qualifies as good news. The report shows how we can harvest from the sea without killing it and it highlights some areas with particular potential:

Production of electricity from offshore wind.

Sustainable sea-based food production.

Emission-free shipping.

Restoration of mangroves.

Here are some selected sectors that are up for grabs, from the report’s 74 priority actions:

Investing in farmed fish could ease the pressure on wild fish. It can also substitute some land use for food consumption.

Battery development is still looking for investments that can provide a eureka solution for mass production.

Hydrogen requires energy to be produced.

Offshore wind can prove to be semi efficient despite large investments.

Mass tourism is far from being carbon neutral.

The race for medicines from marine organisms is skewed.

Production of actually degradable plastic still depends on the old plastic and marine litter.

Good news no. 9

In the penultimate position of good news comes a straw of hope that deep sea mining is put on hold.

The Solberg report is skeptical about mineral extraction on the seabed. Rare earth minerals (REM) attract climate activists, big money and geopolitics. It is probably best for the sea if these interests remain on land for a while longer.

The Canadians are known to be avid miners. Avalon Advanced Materials got a real boost in 2020. The company stays ashore, unlike a number of other companies such as Deep Green. The company plans to suck up thousands of tons of nickel, copper and cobalt-rich manganese deposits (nodules) from the seabed and up on land from the North Pacific.

In 2018 The European Parliament called for a moratorium on deep sea mining.

The demand for copper, rare earth minerals and cobalt increases with the electrification of the world. For the first two, demand is expected to increase by between 2-4 percent until 2027 while there is a cry for more lithium: 650 percent increase until 2027. In 2019, 149,500 tons of minerals worth 4.5 billion dollars were produced.

According to the US Geological Survey, there are about 7.1 million tons of cobalt reserves on earth. With a total annual withdrawal, not only for batteries, of 110,000 tonnes, this lasts for 65 years. The USGS says there is probably more nickel, cobalt and other metals under the seabed than on land and estimates that 15 percent of the world’s cobalt consumption may come from such mining in 2025.

Battery demand for electric vehicles will grow 40 times the next 20 years. And the overall demand for minerals, 30 times, according to the International Energy Agency. Cobalt demand will increase by 70 times and manganese 58 times by 2040. The demand will unavoidably lead to more traditional mining. Cobalt, manganese and nickel are among the minerals on the ocean bed, and deep sea mining is by many seen as good money and as part of the solution.

China

The United States and several other countries are focusing on developing their own land-based industry for rare earth minerals in response to China’s long-standing near-monopoly, which is also land-based.

China extracts 220,000 tonnes of REM annually and has 85 percent of the world’s capacity. From 2014 to 2017, 80 percent of US mineral imports came from China. Many feared that China would use this in the trade dispute between the two countries last year. China has already enacted a law that blacklists countries that act against the country’s interests. Those who end up on this list may risk not being able to buy these coveted minerals from China. The law can come into force as early as next year.

There are several events that point in a positive direction for the production of REM outside China.

On July 14, Joe Biden launched a $2 trillion (USD) green infrastructure plan. The main areas in this plan are the electrification of the transport sector and the construction of 1.5 million energy-efficient homes. All this requires REM.

On 24 July 2020, the EU launched its €800 billion plan for green infrastructure and on the same day, the US Department of Defense announced its plan to strengthen REM production.

Hopefully, Joe Biden and John Kerry will listen to the warnings about deep sea mining when the High Seas Treaty is negotiated.

No. 10

“You take care of what you love. You care for things and people you know. And what you know is what someone taught you.”

This is roughly the mantra of a science teacher I had at the university. So when our daughter has had a good windsurfing season, it counts.

There are many thoughts and feelings that go through my head when we are out together. A day on the water usually begins a few days in advance. I check the wind on windfinder. Sees that something is coming from the South in a few days.

Then I ask my daughter if she has any plans that day. Friday to Monday is best. In the last two years she has become more keen. – We go out when it’s windy, Dad, she answers now.

Cover photo taken from Sommarøya, Tromsø.