Who is polluting the ocean with plastic?

People produce around 350m tonnes of plastic waste per year, a figure projected to almost triple by 2060. The ocean is suffering, as plastic pollution threatens marine life and human coastal communities.

Small island states are often disproportionately affected, because of their dependence on fishing and tourism.

This film looks at what these islands can do about a global problem that must ultimately be fixed by bigger, richer countries.

It explores the potential of a new technology to improve recycling.

1880 Brault map of Pacific ocean winds in July, August, and September

This is an 1880 Léon Brault significant map of Pacific Ocean winds. 

The map is innovative in its expression of both quantitative and qualitative data in relation to wind direction, intensity, and frequency - presaging the work of Matthew Fontaine Maury (1806 - 1873) in the mid-19th century.

A Closer Look Brault's innovative wind roses fill the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

The frequency of calm winds is noted at the center of the wind roses.

courtesy of Geographicus Rare Antique Maps 

 

Description

This is an 1880 Léon Brault significant map of Pacific Ocean winds.
The map is innovative in its expression of both quantitative and qualitative data in relation to wind direction, intensity, and frequency - presaging the work of Matthew Fontaine Maury (1806 - 1873) in the mid-19th century.
A Closer LookBrault's innovative wind roses fill the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
The frequency of calm winds is noted at the center of the wind roses.
The overall length of the segments represents the total number of winds blowing in that direction, with notations representing the frequency of each of the five different wind classifications.
(At the time, the French used a scale of 10 wind classifications based on intensity.
On his wind roses, Brault differentiates between Class 2, 3, 4, and 5 winds, and then grouped Classes 6-10, as these occurred rarely.) On each, the branches follow wind direction.
Publication History and CensusThis map was compiled and designed by Léon Brault, drawn by Ernest Dumas-Vorzet, engraved by C. Legros, and published by the Dépôt des Cartes et Plans de la Marine in 1880.
We note two complete sets of Brault's four Pacific Ocean wind maps cataloged in OCLC which are part of the collections at the University of Oxford and the National Library of Australia.
The separate map is not cataloged in OCLC and we have found no records of this map entering the private market.

Cartographers

Louis Désiré Léon Brault (January 7, 1839 - August 27, 1885) was a French naval officer, meteorologist, and cartographer.
Born in Vendôme, he attended the École Polytechnique beginning in 1859.
He joined the French Navy in 1861, eventually rising to the rank of capitaine de frégate.
He fell ill from dysentery in 1868, and during his convalescence began contemplating how wind is represented on maps.
With this new fascination in mind, he requested a transfer to the Dépôt des cartes et plans de la Marine, which was granted.
He began working at the Dépôt on March 17, 1869, but, after the French declaration of war beginning the Franco-Prussian War, Brault requested to be sent back to sea.
He was assigned to the Invincible, an ironclad frigate.
A recurrence of dysentery forced him to convalesce for the entirety of 1871.
After regaining his health in January 1872, Brault asked to be reassigned to the Dépôt des cartes to finish his work on the wind maps.
In 1874 Brault published the first set of wind map, a set of our maps of seasonal winds of the North Atlantic.
He was named the Director of Meteorology at the Dépôt des cartes in 1878, a post he held until his death.
Brault also published several books, including Traité d'astronomie et de la météorologie appliquées à la navigation.
Brault eventually created wind maps for the Pacific, North Atlantic, South Atlantic, and Indian Oceans.

Ernest Dumas-Vorzet (18 - 18??) was a French line and letter engraver active in Paris in the late 19th century.
He engraved the lettering on nautical charts for the Dépôt des Cartes et Plans de la Marine.
His later work is often associated with Émile Delaune (18?? - 19??) and Hachette et Cie.
He is likely the father of Edouard Dumas-Vorzet, a French publisher and cartographer.

Dépôt des Cartes et Plans de la Marine (fl.1720 - present), often called the Dépôt de Marine, was a French hydrographic mapping organization founded in 1720 under Charles-Hercule of Albert de Luynes (1674 - 1734).
Much like the U.S. Coast Survey, the British Admiralty, and the Spanish Deposito Hydrografico, the Dépôt was initiated as a storehouse and distribution center of existing nautical and marine charts.
Eventually the Dépôt initiated its own mapping activities in an attempt to improve and expand upon existing material.
Some of the more prominent cartographers and hydrographers associated with the of Dépôt des Cartes were, Philippe Buache, Jacques-Nicholas Bellin, Giovanni Rizzi-Zannoni, Rigobert Bonne, and Jean Nicolas Buache. 

IBM extends NASA collaboration to apply generative AI to weather

Dr Juan Bernabé-Moreno.

Image: IBM

From Silcon Republic by Ann O'Dea

As part of its annual presence at COP28, IBM has announced that it will expand its collaboration with NASA to work on a new, separate AI foundation model for weather and climate.

As climate leaders gather at COP28 from today (30 November), IBM and NASA announced a new AI foundation model for weather and climate, which goes beyond their initial commitment to build and deploy a geospatial foundation model.

 

NASA satellite imagery of Hurricane Ida flooding in 2021.

By applying its AI technology, IBM says the new model aims to improve the accuracy, speed and affordability of weather forecasting and other climate applications.

As well as forecasting, sample applications of the model include identifying conditions conducive to wildfires and predicting extreme meteorological phenomena.

IBM says its researchers will work alongside NASA domain experts to train and validate the new model.

Earlier this year, IBM and NASA set out to build an open-source geospatial foundation model, to gain new insights on Earth’s climate through the power of AI technology, combined with the abundance of Earth observation and geospatial data that NASA has gathered.

The goal of this partnership was to provide an easier way for researchers to analyse and draw insights from these large datasets for climate research.

And sure enough, back in August the two partners announced they would release the large geospatial foundation model on open-source AI platform Hugging Face to make it widely available to scientists and researchers, saying at the time that it would be the largest geospatial foundation model on Hugging Face and the first-ever open-source AI foundation model built in collaboration with NASA.

As well as using the model to estimate the extent of past floods and wildfires, IBM is also using the model to help map urban heat islands in the UAE, track reforestation in Kenya and track climate resiliency in the UK.

Now, encouraged by these results, IBM and NASA have decided to branch out and build a new foundation model aimed at making weather and climate applications faster, more accurate and more accessible.

It says potential applications include helping climate experts infer high-resolution information from low-res data, identify conditions conducive to wildfires, and predict hurricanes, droughts and other extreme events.

When complete, this model too will be made open source.

 

Open access is key

The open access to these models is key if it is to help tackle extreme weather events and other climate challenges, says Dr Juan Bernabé-Moreno, the director of IBM Research Europe for the UK and Ireland, who also has responsibility for the accelerated discovery strategy for climate and sustainability at IBM.

Bernabé-Moreno was previously chief data officer and global head of analytics and AI at Eon, leveraging data and algorithms to support the energy transition.

He is greatly encouraged by the success of the initial NASA collaboration.
“We found that it was not just economies of scale we were achieving by performing many tasks more quickly, but the tasks we were doing were performing better,” he says. “That gave us a lot of encouragement.
“So, we proceeded from small tasks where we looked at whether an area had been affected or not by fire or by flood, and started on more complex tasks like understanding land use and its impacts over time, and it worked extremely well.”

He cites the work done in Kenya where, in December 2022, its president William Ruto unveiled the National Tree Growing and Restoration Campaign, which aims to plant 15bn trees across Kenya by 2032, including in areas of critically affected water towers (forested landscapes that retain water and source many rivers in Kenya).

Deforestation has been contributing to increasing water scarcity in these regions.

IBM has an agreement with the government there to support the initiative and leverage IBM’s geospatial foundation model to enable users to track and visualise tree planting and tree growing activities in specific water tower areas, to monitor forest restoration and measure above-ground biomass like sequestered carbon, with the ultimate aim of mobilising local efforts to plant more trees across Kenya.

“We measured the above-ground biomass at two different points of time to compute the difference, and then applied a multiplicator to understand how many gigatonnes of CO2 they are in a position to capture. So, we made climate mitigation measures quantifiable,” says Bernabé-Moreno.
“We need to be able to quantify how successful these measures are because it will encourage people to do more, because they will now have the proof. We did something very concrete, very local, it made a difference, and we can quantify the difference. So that’s what encouraged us to do more, and to do something as difficult as weather and climate.”

Bernabé-Moreno says the open-source nature of the models is crucial. 

“It’s vital to support open source. Yes, these kinds of models around weather and climate, these are innovations, and we will use these innovations to differentiate our product, but instead of keeping it for ourselves, we believe that the community is going to help us make the simulations even better.
“If you think about the foundational model, it is not a solution, it is a capability. Now imagine putting that in the hands of the community and having scientists create their own applications. Imagine that these scientists start tracking sustainability measures done locally, suddenly you have the whole community quantifying sustainability progress by a particular initiative or government, it changes the game.”

When it comes to climate change mitigation, the more we can do, and the sooner we can do it the better, and this is where AI can really make a difference, says Bernabé-Moreno. 

“The technology we’re developing and the open science spirit, they will help us measure things, and inform climate change strategies. Instead of trying everything, measuring nothing and hoping we are doing a good job, we can be way more targeted. I believe that’s the big role that technology has to play when it comes to climate change.”

Links :

• IBM : Geospatial models NASA AI / IBM and NASA Open Source Largest Geospatial AI Foundation Model on Hugging Face / Earth’s climate is changing. IBM’s new geospatial foundation model could help track and adapt to a new landscape
• SilconRepublic : IBM and NASA team up to advance climate science using AI / IBM and NASA open-source AI model to study climate data / IBM and NASA Open Source Largest Geospatial AI Foundation Model on Hugging Face

Adriatic Sea or Gulf of Venice? How medieval politics played out on maps

Atlas factice des possessions de Venise et de l’Archipel, created in 1571.

From Medivalists 

For centuries a debate was taking place among Europe’s mapmakers: should the Adriatic Sea be called the Gulf of Venice?

A new article in the Journal of Historical Geography explores this issue, examining 100 maps and nautical charts that were created between the 13th and 19th centuries.
They find that mapmakers were wrestling with whether or not to call the body of water separating Italy from the Balkans the Adriatic Sea or the Gulf of Venice.
And like some of the maritime naming disputes today, geopolitics was playing a role.

The name Adriatic Sea goes as far back as the 6th century BC and comes from the ancient Greeks, who named it after Adria, a port at the mouth of the Po River.
There were a couple of other names used, namely the Sea of Cronus and the Gulf of Rhea, but the Adriatic Sea predominated into the Middle Ages.

Around the year 1000, the Republic of Venice began to expand its power significantly, taking control of lands along the east coast of the Adriatic.
For the next several hundred years the Venetians became a maritime empire, extending as far as Crete and Cyprus.
Venetians were understandably proud of their Republic – in the words of one 16th-century writer, they saw their domain as “the work of immortal gods rather than of men; it is for this reason in particular that they think the city of Venice is superior to all others, whether in our time or even before.”

As the Venetians extended their political rule, as well as cultural and economic power, across the Adriatic, they began seeing that Sea as their particular zone of influence.
It was also during this period that a new name emerged for the Adriatic Sea: the Gulf of Venice (in Italian Golfo di Venezia).

The article’s authors note:
Geographical names are carriers of messages about the objects to which they refer – whose they are or whose they should be – that can influence how they are perceived.
Geographical names shape social space by labelling places and related ideas and images.

The first use of this name comes in the works of Abū’Abdullāh Muhammad al-Idrīsī, a cartographer working for King Roger II of Sicily in the 12th century.
A copy of his work, Nuzhat al-mushtaq fi’khtiraq al–afaq (‘The Book of Pleasant Journeys to Far–off Lands’), produced between 1250 and 1325 includes a map showing the southern part of the Adriatic.
Al-Idrīsī calls it in Arabic Sea/Gulf of Venice.

 

Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Arabe 2221, 268 r

The authors of the article looked at 100 maps and nautical charts produced between the 13th and 19th centuries.
Among them, 29 refer the the waters as the Gulf of Venice, 28 as the Adriatic Sea, and 17 as both the Gulf of Venice and the Adriatic Sea.
A further 19 have no name, while 2 of them get the wrong names – in one case it was called the Tyrrhenian Sea, which lies on the other side of Italy, while another had an even more egregious mistake, naming it the Red Sea.

The use of the term Gulf of Venice would reach its height during the 17th and 18th centuries, which included maps made both in Venice and elsewhere in Europe.
The authors note that “the Venetian message was successfully transmitted and effectively disseminated in Europe, at least at the level of linguistic communication in and across space: the name Golfo di Venezia began to be used in other European languages, becoming in fact a widespread exonym.”

 

Map made by Olfert Dapper (1636–1689) in 1688.
Wikimedia Commons

However, this would all change with the downfall of the Republic of Venice.
In 1797 it was conquered by Napoleon and subsequently lost many of its possessions in the Adriatic to other European powers.
After this:

The centuries-old use of the name Golfo di Venezia on maps and nautical charts could not disappear ‘overnight’, so on some geographical maps and nautical charts restoration was gradual, with the Venetian name being retained for some years after the fall of Venice, whether written alone or in conjunction with the name ‘Adriatic Sea’.
The last known map with the Venetian name of the Adriatic Sea was made by the Spanish cartographers G. Massa, T. González and M. C. Maré (1824).

The debate over the name Adriatic Sea has been settled (at least for now), but it is a reminder of how countries often want particular names for bodies of land or water that show connections with their states.
This can still be seen in a couple of current disputes about maritime names: the Sea of Japan and the Persian Gulf.

The article, “Geographical names of the Adriatic Sea on medieval and early-modern maps and nautical charts,” by Josip Faričić, Orietta Selva and Dragan Umek, appears in Journal of Historical Geography.
Click here to read it.

 

 

A map by Girolamo Ruscelli from 1561.
Wikimedia Commons

Happy, faithful and tied to nature: life adapting to the climate crisis

Like most islands across the Pacific, climate chagne is changing the way of life in Kioa

Photo : Andrew Quilty

From The Guardian by Andrew Quilty and Virginia Harrison

 

Activists are pushing for action at the upcoming Cop28 summit as the way of life on Pacific islands such as Kioa in Fiji are reshaped by climate change

When Poiongo Lisati returned to her home of Kioa after decades away, she welcomed the shift in the pace of life.
The 58-year-old left the busyness of Fiji’s capital Suva for the island of about 400 people, who live off the land they are deeply connected to.
But some changes she noticed were stark.

 

Localization of Kioa Island, Fidji with the GeoGarage platform (UKHO nautical raster map)

 

“When I left the island, a good part of the beach was there,” Lisati says.
“But when I came back after 40 years … around six metres or more had been washed away.”

Lisati saw other changes: king tides now swept to the flats of the island and the water reached closer to the villages.
Coconut and pandanus plants, relied on for food and medicine, no longer grew on the beachfront.
Months that were once hot and dry had become colder and windier.

 

Kioa island, Fiji, at sunrise

 

A resident of Kioa strips the thorny edges from the fronds of pandanus palms.

 It is one of many steps in the process of preparing the fronds to be woven into traditional baskets, floor mats and ceremonial skirts.

 

Like islands across the Pacific, climate change is reshaping life in Kioa.
The tiny Fijian island has experienced increasingly frequent and more intense cyclones, disrupting crops.
Fish, a staple of the local diet, live further out from the shore.
In the past, residents would go fishing on the coast; now they must head out to deeper waters to get their catch.
Corals have bleached and some fish no longer survive in the reef.

 

Kioa island resident Lotomau Fiafia and his grandson John. Lotomau was born on the island in 1952 and has seen erosion of the shoreline in the past decades.

He stands in the water roughly where the shoreline used to be when he was young.

credit : Eddie Jim

 

 This week the Cop28 climate summit begins in the United Arab Emirates, aiming to build consensus for limiting global warming.
Maina Talia, a climate activist who also works on development projects in Kioa, says the region had a “big win” at last year’s summit in securing a loss and damage fund to support nations experiencing increasingly severe climate impacts.

“Now we need to see commitments from governments, including Australia, to make significant contributions to that fund,” he says.

 

Churchgoers leave Sunday morning service in Kioa.

Talia lives in Tuvalu and works regularly with his community on Kioa.
Last year he visited more than a dozen times.
The two places are tightly bound: in the 1940s a group of men from Tuvalu purchased Kioa over fears their homeland was becoming too crowded.
Later that decade some families migrated from Tuvalu to start life in Kioa.
Talia calls both places home.

He says almost all the food people eat in Kioa comes from their garden.
The islanders are “totally reliant on subsistence farms so the change in weather patterns challenges the way they do their traditional planting”.

“These people are very close to nature.
They are tied to the environment,” Talia says.
“They are happy people.”

A cook chases a chicken out of the kitchen of the Kioa community hall.

 

Children leave school for lunch break on Kioa.

Earlier this year Pacific activists and civil society groups met in Kioa to formalise the Kato Fund, a development launched at the Cop27 summit to enable better access to climate finance.
Talia was one of the organisers of the Kioa talks.
Now, he wants “more ambition from Australia” at the Cop28 summit, which begins on 30 November.

“Phasing out fossil fuels urgently must be their highest moral obligation to the region and the world – it can’t wait.”

As he pushes for action on the climate crisis, Talia also works on projects that help Kioa adapt to a changing environment.
They have built a seawall on the island – which is 18.6 sq km and around 120m above sea level – to battle erosion.
A “mini-fishery” fitted with solar panels, freezers and an ice maker gives them more steady stocks of fish.
After they fish, the men fill two big freezers with leftover catch, taking it to a nearby island to sell.

 

Maina Talia (wearing light blue shirt, third from the right) stands with Kioa elders as they prepare to receive Tuvalu’s climate change minister, Seve Paeniu, to the island for climate talks earlier this year.
Talia says climate change has ‘disturbed the traditional way of living on Kioa’.

“That’s how we generate income,” he says.
“Because of the change of climate and weather patterns … people who have refrigerators now will store them in case of bad weather.”

 

Children play in the shallows and aboard a boat on a rainy afternoon on Kioa.

For the men, the day starts in the plantation; after that they fish, sometimes into the evening.
The women weave handicrafts, baskets and mats.
They sell their wares to tourists, who arrive most weeks from neighbouring islands.

 

Alfred Kaisami in the doorway of his home.

 

A Kioa resident makes traditional fresh flower garlands, ‘salusalu’, and crowns for guests attending climate action meetings.

At night, Talia says, the men drink kava and the women get the children ready for school.
There’s a primary school on Kioa for about 80 children, while older children travel to a nearby island for secondary school.
After school they play and later a bell will chime for evening devotion.
Religion is a big part of life on the island, and time is given to hymns, recital and prayers through the day.
Lisati says it is mostly Methodist, but other religions are practised as well.

The Kioa island choir welcomed guests as they arrived for climate talks earlier this year.

Talia says the island is known across Fiji for its hardwood and the elders have been approached by many logging companies.
But they turn them away over fears of what cutting down trees might do to their water sources.

“[Elders] don’t want to engage in logging,” he says, explaining that many on the island don’t want life to change.

Lisati says it’s “good to back home”.
She lives with her sister in Kioa and connecting with family is central to life on the island.

“In Suva, life was very, very busy.
Now I’m back on the island the pace is very different, it’s more relaxed.

“Irrespective of what climate change is doing to us … it’s home for me and I’m happy to be home.”

Links :

• Pacific Scoop : Pacific Leaders Present Historic Climate Finance Plan To Island Communities
• The Fidji Tilmes : Climate change fight – Regional partners sign declaration