Harmful Algal Blooms
Background :- The Ministry of Earth Science has been actively working with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), USA towards strengthening of ocean observations in the Indian Ocean with a view to improve understanding ocean process for better forecasting capabilities including studying the Harmful Algal Blooms (HAB).
The Ministry also has conducted regular surveys along the coastal and oceanic area of India and recorded altogether about 84 algal blooms during the period from 1998 to 2016.
What is a harmful algal bloom?
These blooms are a national concern because they affect not only the health of people and marine ecosystems, but also the “health” of our economy — especially coastal communities dependent on the income of jobs generated through fishing and tourism. With climate change and increasing nutrient pollution potentially causing HABs to occur more often and in locations not previously affected, it’s important for us to learn as much as we can about how and why they form and where they are, so that we can reduce their harmful effects.
Why Do HABS Happen ?
While we know of many factors that contribute to HABs, how these factors come together to create a “bloom” of algae is not well understood. HABs occur naturally, but human activities that disturb ecosystems seem to play a role in their more frequent occurrence and intensity. Increased nutrient loadings and pollution, food web alterations, introduced species, water flow modifications and climate change all play a role.
Studies show that many algal species flourish when wind and water currents are favorable. In other cases, HABs may be linked to “overfeeding.” This occurs when nutrients (mainly phosphorus and nitrogen) from sources such as lawns and agriculture flow into bays, rivers, and the sea, and build up at a rate that “overfeeds” the algae that exist normally in the environment. Some HABs appear in the aftermath of natural phenomena like sluggish water circulation, unusually high water temperatures, and extreme weather events like hurricanes, floods, and drought.
Although all coastal states experience HABs, different organisms live in different places and cause different problems. Other factors, such as the structure of the coast, runoff, oceanography, and other organisms in the water, can also change the scope and severity of HAB impacts.
In the Gulf of Mexico, especially the west coast of Florida and the Texas coast, the most frequent cause of HABs is Karenia brevis. The toxin from this HAB becomes airborne when waves break on the beach, which causes severe respiratory irritation.
In-Detail
Phytoplankton are important constituents of the marine food web and comprise 40 % of the total fixed global primary productivity . Of about 5,000 species of marine hytoplankton that exist in the world, ~ 7 % are responsible for algal blooms (or red tides) which includes diatoms, dinoflagellates, raphidophytes, prymnesiophytes and silicoflagellatesOf this, ~ 2 %of phytoplankton species are harmful or toxic and ~ 75 % are contributed by dinoflagellates.. The occurrence of blooms are spontaneous and remarkable; their growth and persistence are brought about by a combination of physical, chemical and biological factors interacting in ways that are often sudden and unpredictable
Algal blooms that discolour the seawater are commonly referred to as ‘red tide’.
India, being one of the major maritime countries is endowed with a coastline of approximately 7,500 km and embraced by two important seas i.e. the Arabian Sea (AS) on the west and Bay of Bengal (BOB) on the east coast of India. This marine environment embodies diverse habitats such as estuaries, mangrove swamps, brackish water lakes, coral reefs, islands and offshore waters that support a great diversity of flora and fauna. The coastline is dotted with 12 major ports, six each on the west and east coasts of India.In addition, there are 163 minor and intermediate ports along the coastline and sea–islands. These serve as gateways for international and national trade. With increase in shipping traffic, this region is also susceptible to ship–mediated invasion. Bioinvasion is considered is one of the vectors for global expansion of HABs in other parts of the world.
Possible causative factors responsible for algal blooms:-
(a)physical processes such as upwelling, cyclones and eddies
(b) chemical processes such as increased nutrient conditions (eutrophication)
(c) biological processes like competition, grazing and allelopathy
India, Monsoon and Bloom
The seas along the Indian coast – the AS (Arabian Sea) and BOB (Bay of Bengal), are land–locked in the north and forced by seasonally–reversing monsoon winds, making it unique among the world oceans. The monsoon winds reverse twice a year, blowing from south–west (SW) during May–September and from the north–east (NE) during November–January with the transition taking place during the months in between.
Differences between regions of AS and BOB arise because of the following reasons-
Both, the AS and BOB show opposing trends in surface circulation during summer (SW) and winter (NE) monsoons.
The BOB receives larger quantities of fresh water and sediment load from rivers compared to AS.
The AS has salinity usually in the range 35–37 psu due to excess evaporation over rainfall. In contrast, the BOB has much lower salinity (30–33 psu) due to large influx of freshwater from river discharge and high amount of rainfall.
In the BOB, the surface temperatures range between 27 and 29 ⁰C; except for shallow areas near the coast. The fluctuations are much wider (23–29 ⁰C) along the AS coast of India.
Algal bloom reportings:-
In Indian waters, first observations on algal blooms that caused massive fish mortality was reported by James Hornell in 1908 while cruising along the Malabar coast to Laccadive islands.
A review of algal bloom occurrences in Indian waters from 1908 to 2009 showed a total of 101 bloom incidents
Trichodesmium erythraeum and Noctiluca scintillans were the common blooming species in coastal waters of India.
During the period from 1908 to 1950, the number of blooms was less and it was restricted between the 8 to 12 ⁰N latitudinal margins along the Indian coasts with majority of the blooms recorded from the SW coast of India. From 1950 to 2009, the distribution of bloom incidents has spread from 8 to 20 ⁰N latitude i.e. from southern to northern part along both the coasts of India.
Most of the blooms are generally reported in non-Monsoon times owing to rough weather and low sea vessel movements.Also , the bloom reported till date is higher in AS than BOB.
The positive aspect of diatom blooms is that it may be beneficial to fisheries whereas blooms can negatively affect fisheries and human health.
Notwithstanding the general trend of bloom occurring in non-monsoon times, few condition in AS and BOB trigger bloom in Monsoon times as well.
The west coast of India undergoes periods of strong upwelling during monsoon and delivers cold, nutrient–rich waters from bottom depths. As a result, upwelling coupled with monsoon leads to high nutrient conditions triggering high primary production.Due to high biological productivity, the intermediate water gets depleted of oxygen creating hypoxic conditions during September–October.Therefore, blooms occurring during monsoon can be the result of increased discharge of nutrients by land run–off, precipitation and upwelling.
The Indian summer monsoon has vigorous intra– seasonal oscillations in the form of active and weak (or broken) spells of rainfall within the monsoon season resulting in sudden changes of salinity and water temperatures This might act as a trigger mechanism to induce the blooming of certain species which prefer a particular range of salinity and temperature in the presence of sufficient nutrients in coastal waters.It is evident that the monsoons can provide favourable conditions to trigger bloom formation of several phytoplankton species. Break in monsoon can also provide a window of opportunity for
certain phytoplankton species to bloom.
Although, the conditions are favourable during monsoon, there are lesser occurrence of blooms during this period.This can be also related to non–efficient utilization of nutrients by phytoplankton under low irradiance due to monsoonal cloud cover.
The BOB is known for its unique characteristic features: large volume of freshwater input from river discharge and rainfall, warmer sea surface temperatures, monsoonal clouds and reversal of currents.
BOB is considered to have lower biological productivity than its western counterpart, the AS. The low biological productivity of BOB has been speculated to be due to various seasons such as narrow shelf, cloud cover during summer monsoon, turbidity resulting from sediment influx and fresh water–induced stratification
Along the east coast of India, upwelling does occur but the strongly stratified surface layer of the BOB restricts the transport of nutrients from deeper layers to the surface. The stratification is especially intense during the SW-monsoon period due to enormous influx of freshwater through precipitation and riverine discharges that leads to the formation of low salinity cap at the surface.
Hence number of bloom in eastern coast of India is less than that of western coast of India.
Impact of algal blooms on human health and sustainable fishery:-
- Paralytic Shellfish Poisoning (PSP)
- The Indian fisheries economy depends heavily upon the coastal zone for marine products, so it isespecially sensitive to constraints from red tides and toxic microalgae
- So far, there are 7 fish–killing species such as Cochlodinium polykrikoides, Karenia brevis, Karenia mikimotoi, Noctiluca scintillans, Trichodesmium erythraeum, Trichodesmium thiebautii and Chattonella marina that form
algal blooms and are responsible for massive fish mortality in Indian waters
On–going monitoring programmes:-
- For monitoring of HABs along the Indian coasts, a national coordinated multi–institutional research program on “HABs in the Indian EEZ” is being funded by Ministry of Earth Sciences (MOES) with Centre for Marine Living Resources and Ecology (CMLRE) as the project coordinator and participation of various institutions.
- Ignoring problems caused by ballast water introductions could pose a threat to coastal water bodies.The introduction of harmful aquatic organisms and pathogens to new environments via ships’ ballast water has been considered as an important vector for global expansion of HABs.Ballast Water Management
Programme–India (BAMPI) which is supported by Directorate General of shipping and Ministry of Shipping, India - A phytoplankton–monitoring programme under the Indian Expendable Bathythermographic (XBT) programme funded by Ministry of Earth Sciences is in existence since early 2000
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.