Earth Day: Act to prevent climate catastrophe

In Glasgow, the widely-publicized climate summit ended yesterday with most experts saying some clean-air results are likely since the United States and China signed an agreement this week to prevent the temperature from rising beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius and take other measures to limit carbon emissions including the wider use of clean energy such as solar and wind power with most vehicles also being made to run on electricity. 

Coinciding with the summit in the capital of Scotland, one of the world’s most popular television channels CNN (Cable News Network), launched a Call To Earth Day on Wednesday. According to CNN, humans are causing alarming changes to the planet. Collectively, we are destroying ecosystems, polluting the ocean and altering our climate. Change needs to happen at every level of society, but as individuals we can play a role in making things better.

On Wednesday, CNN held the first-ever Call to Earth Day. Celebrating a planet worth protecting, it will partner with schools, individuals and organizations across the world to raise awareness of environmental issues and to engage with conservation education. 

What is Call to Earth? It is a CNN initiative dedicated to conservation, environmentalism and sustainability. Across TV, CNN website and social media, the network tells stories about our incredible planet and the remarkable people who are protecting it.

How can I be involved? Everyone is invited. We can all play a role in creating a movement for good. To participate in Call to Earth Day, we simply have to do something positive to protect the environment. The scope is broad and CNN asks the people to think big, get creative, and make the event impactful. 

Referring to California’s kelp forests, CNN says in 2014, a giant expanse of warm water, which had gathered off the coast of Alaska the previous year, expanded all the way down the west coast to Mexico. Nicknamed “the blob,” this marine heat wave wreaked havoc on ocean ecosystems over the following two years, spurring harmful algae blooms and killing sea life like fin whales, sea otters and salmon. While marine heat-waves can occur naturally, research has linked “the blob” directly to human-induced global warming. Its impacts have been devastating. California’s north coast has lost about 95% of its kelp canopy since 2014 over a 350-km (217-mile) stretch of coastline, according to a recent study by researchers at the University of California in Santa Cruz.

Kelp systems are dynamic, often impacted by storms or cyclical weather systems like El Niño. Turnover is high but those watching kelp over the past decade have noticed this is not the usual boom-and-bust cycle. “What we're seeing right now, particularly up on the north coast, is fundamentally different,” says Dempsey. “We are seeing a climate-driven catastrophe with massive impacts to the ecology of that system, as well as the kelp-dependent communities up in the north coast and the larger state economy.”

He estimates that the kelp forests on the northern coast of California are worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year in terms of storm protection, carbon sequestration, fisheries services and tourism. Now, they have been laid to waste by purple sea urchins.

A native species, purple urchin populations exploded after one of its last remaining predators, the sunflower starfish, succumbed to a mass die-off starting in 2013. This army of ravenous purple urchins has eaten almost all the kelp, their primary food source and created an expanse of urchin barrens — swathes of prickly, purple orbs as far as the eye can see, CNN says.

Along the whole California coast, people are experimenting with different methods for removing urchin barrens. Southern California has seen these areas expand over the past century due to overfishing and a decline in the populations of other urchin predators. When The Bay Foundation, a non-profit environmental group based in Santa Monica, first started working on its Palos Verdes site near Los Angeles, purple urchin numbers had reached up to 100 per square metre -- a healthy ecosystem usually has two. “They were everywhere, they were on top of each other,” says Heather Burdick, The Bay Foundation’s director of marine operations. “It was terrifying to swim over it because you're just afraid that you're going to get spikes all over your body every time you're doing surveys.”

These purple urchins have been described by researchers as “zombie-like” because they can survive in a starved state by lowering their metabolic rate, living for up to 50 years off algae that grows on rocks on the seafloor. In this state, with their insides shrunk to almost nothing, these starved urchins have no commercial value to divers and no nutritional value to other predators, which consequently ignore them.