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NEW APPROACHES NEEDED TO FIGHT COASTAL POLLUTION

From Oceanspace Newsletter No. 314 (6 March 2001):

Arlington, Virginia, USA - After months of relative silence, the Pew Oceans Commission has suddenly come to life. Meeting recently in Maui, Hawaii, the commission wrote a report about pollution in coastal waters. Despite 30 years of progress in reducing pollution from ocean dumping, waste treatment facilities, and toxics such as DDT, the report said, America's coastal waters remain in peril. The new report of the Pew Oceans Commission released last week finds that polluted runoff from farms and cities -- often far inland -- went largely unabated or actually increased over the past 30 years, in many cases negating gains made in controlling direct sources of pollution. Scientists from the University of Maryland and University of Rhode Island point to increases in plant nutrients as the most pervasive pollution risk for estuaries, coral reefs, seagrass beds, and other coastal ecosystems.

"We've done a good job tackling many of the obvious causes of ocean pollution -- ocean dumping, discharges from industrial facilities, and toxic pollutants," said Leon Panetta, chair of the commission (see photo). "Now we need to get serious about the less obvious sources of pollution that flow from our cities, farms, and ships if we want to protect our coastal waters and the communities they support."

Dr. Donald Boesch from the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science led the review of marine pollution in the United States on behalf of the Pew Oceans Commission. The report, Marine Pollution in the United States: Significant Accomplishments, Future Challenges, finds that many of the nation's coastal environments exhibit symptoms of overenrichment. Such symptoms include algal blooms (some of which may be toxic), loss of seagrasses and coral reefs, and serious oxygen depletion. As a result, coastal regions are seeing a reduced production of valuable fisheries, threats to biodiversity, and ecosystems less resilient to natural and human influences. "The hard-to-control sources of nutrients flowing into our coastal waters grew dramatically in the last half of the 20th century due to increases in chemical fertilizers, animal agriculture, and emissions of fossil fuels," said Boesch. "We have only recently removed nutrients from treated waste, and new emission standards, if fully implemented, could reduce atmospheric deposits of nitrogen by 40%. Reduction in agricultural sources of nutrients is also feasible through improved agricultural practices and watershed restoration." The legal and institutional approaches to controlling coastal pollution have thus far been only modestly successful, the report finds. However, the authors conclude that watershed approaches to managing pollution are beginning to have an effect, citing a multistate effort to control pollution in the Chesapeake Bay as one example. Also, seagrass beds in Tampa Bay (Florida) are slowly recovering after improved sewage treatment greatly reduced nitrogen inputs. The report calls for solutions that combine voluntary and regulatory approaches to pollution abatement.