Global insurer maps Caribbean coral risk

By CB Online Staff cbnews@caribbeanbusinesspr.com; cbprdigital@gmail.com

International insurer Catlin Group Limited is underwriting a massive expansion of its study of coral reefs with a new campaign in the Caribbean and Bermuda. The Catlin Seaview Survey program – which will significantly widen opportunities for ocean, coral and climate scientists to understand the changes that are occurring within the region – starts in Belize, Mexico, Bermuda, St. Vincent, Guadeloupe, Turks and Caicos and the Bahamas.

Coral reefs in the Caribbean, like elsewhere, are under growing environmental stress. Being highly sensitive to environmental change, corals are considered the “canary in the coal mine” when it comes to impacts of climate change and ocean acidification. Exploitation, pollution, warming waters and increased storms linked with climate change has caused the massive loss of corals across the Caribbean Sea over the last 50 years.

Caribbean economies given their dependence on coral reefs and other marine ecosystems for goods, services and economic welfare. According to the World Resources Institute, the value of shoreline protection services provided by Caribbean reefs is between $700 million and $2.2 billion per year. Within the next 50 years, continuing coral degradation and death could lead to losses totaling $140 million to $420 million annually.

“We are committed to understanding the future risks posed by climate change,” said Catlin Group CEO Stephen Catlin. “It is not only important that scientists have access to this valuable data, but companies such as ours must understand the impact that significant changes to our environment will have on local economies.”

A scientific race against time

Coral reefs globally are in an unprecedented state of decline due to pollution, overfishing and climate change. The U.S. National Oceanic &d Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predict increasing frequency and severity of mass bleaching events over the coming years. As the Catlin Seaview Survey embarks on a race against time to survey the coral reefs of the world, the Caribbean serves as an ideal launching point to take the campaign global because of the stress already experienced by its reefs.

“The Caribbean was chosen to launch the global mission because it is at the frontline of risk. Over the last 50 years, 80 percent of the corals in many places in the Caribbean have disappeared because of coastal development and pollution. They now are also threatened by invasive species, climate change and ocean acidification – it’s the perfect storm,” said Richard Vevers, project director for the Catlin Seaview Survey.

Coral reefs pump some $483 million annually into the U.S. economy tied to tourism and water sports, according to a study. NOAA says reef-based U.S. fisheries represent another $100 million in commercial activity every year.

An international conservation organization painted a grim picture of the Caribbean’s iconic coral reefs in a recent report.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature said in September that the Caribbean’s reefs are in sharp decline. The report pointed to Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands among the hardest-hit in the region.

The causes include overfishing, pollution, disease and bleaching caused by rising global temperatures.

Scientists say record amounts of coral have died off in the Caribbean from pollution, sedimentation and rising sea temperatures since the late 1990s and reefs in Puerto Rico are still under stress from an unprecedented bleaching event and die off that began in 2005. Puerto Rico’s reefs have shown some signs of recovering from the catastrophic bleaching event of 2005, which took a huge toll on vital coral populations.

When corals are exposed to very warm water, they either expel or consume the colorful algae they host, which leads to the bleached color. If the stress is not too severe and decreases in time, the affected corals can regain their symbiotic algae. But if the stress is prolonged and the algae populations do not recover, the coral host eventually dies.

In 2005, up to 90 percent of corals in parts of the eastern Caribbean suffered bleaching, and more than half died, according to previous research.

Tourism-dependent islands worry about the effect that bleaching will have on their economies. A rapid decline in the world’s coral reefs could damage economies that rely on underwater sea life for tourism revenue, researchers say. After the 2005 bleaching, the World Resources Institute estimated Caribbean reef degradation would cause between $350 million to $870 million in economic losses a year, according to a 2006 NOAA statement.

Pollution, habitat destruction, improper fishing and overfishing have contributed to the problem and corals in the eastern Caribbean have been hit hardest.

Survey focused on four main scientific goals

It is expected the state of the Caribbean reefs will provide insights into the future prospects for coral reefs in other regions of the world. Specifically, the new survey will focus on four major scientific goals:

– Change detection (creating a Caribbean-wide ecological baseline): Accurate measurements of the current state of the coral reefs in the Caribbean are crucial to support timely decisions about their management.

– Understand stress within the Caribbean – when, where and how much?: The survey team will use direct measurements as well as information from NOAA and NASA satellite systems to understand how patterns in the health of coral reefs (e.g. coral cover, reef complexity) are influenced by local and global stressors such as changes in sea temperature, coastal pollution, fishing intensity, and exposure to wave stress and storms. This will fill in critical gaps in our understanding of why coral reefs have been in decline over the past 50 years.

– Understanding climate change vulnerability: Develop deeper insights into mesophotic (deep-water) coral reef communities: The Catlin Seaview Survey’s work during 2012 on the Great Barrier Reef has revealed that mesophotic coral reefs may play an essential role in regenerating shallow water reef systems. The Survey will gather a more comprehensive understanding of the threat of climate change to coral reefs in the Caribbean by using similar techniques and technologies to map mesophotic coral reefs in the region and to investigate the genetic connectedness of those reefs to shallow water reef systems.

– Produce new tools for understanding changes in tropical reef systems: Rapid, semi-automated and rigorous surveys of coral reefs are essential for developing an understanding of the rates of change, vulnerability and priorities for management intervention. To aid in the Survey’s campaign, a new camera has been developed; the SVII-S is a lighter-weight version of the main SVII camera that can be operated by a single diver, allowing dive team members to cover extra survey areas

Climate change and implications for the insurance industry

500 million people worldwide rely on coral reefs for food, tourism, economic stability and shoreline protection. When reefs are harmed or destroyed due to climate change and regional drivers, the effects can be devastating and far-reaching. There is a shift in the insurance industry; evaluating and helping clients minimize risk is critical to business, the assessment of the impact of climate change is a natural extension for the future of the insurance industry.

The Geneva Association, the international association for the study of insurance economics, recently released a report, Warming of the Oceans and Implications for the (Re) Insurance Industry, highlighting how climate change has effected the warming of oceans and the correlating effect on the insurance industry’s risk assessment strategies. The report highlights three main drivers of change:

– Greater volumes of water = greater risk: Not only do rising sea levels increase the risk of flooding or the potential impact of storm surges, but they also decrease the protective lifespan of coastal infrastructure. While the probability of a storm is not increased, the damage caused by one is.

– Warmer ocean = more water in the atmosphere: A warmer atmosphere contains more water and therefore more energy. This has the potential to increase the intensity of extreme events and associated precipitation. This greater intensity increases the loss potential of natural catastrophes.

– Effect on large-scale climate patterns: The warming of the oceans is also likely to affect large-scale climate patterns such as El Niño, various monsoon systems or the North Atlantic Oscillation.

Scientific collaborators

The Catlin Seaview Survey has teamed up with the Global Change Institute at The University of Queensland in Australia and Davey Kline, a project scientist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California-San Diego. Kline and other Scripps collaborators are working with the Global Change Institute to develop autonomous assessments of the hundreds of thousands panoramic images taken of the reefs within the Caribbean using their sophisticated semi-automated image recognition software to analyse the percent coverage of the main benthic organisms (e.g. corals, algae, other invertebrates) in the photographs. Analysis of such a large data set of photographs would not be possible without a semi-automated computer analysis system.

These relationships are essential to the success of the research program,” said professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, chief scientist of the Catlin Seaview Survey. “By collecting and analyzing images in a semi-autonomous fashion, the research project can cover huge distances. This has never been done before.”

Catlin Group Limited is a global specialty property/casualty insurer and reinsurer operating worldwide through six underwriting hubs: London/UK, Bermuda, the United States, Asia Pacific, Europe and Canada.

Source: http://www.caribbeanbusinesspr.com/news/global-insurer-maps-caribbean-coral-risk-87318.html

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