Big trouble for the marine ecosystem!
Despite its size, covering more than 70% of the global surface, the marine ecosystem is at risk. Numerous anthropogenic stressors are impacting even remote corners of this vast ecosystem. The seven most relevant ones are climate change, eutrophication, ocean acidification, (over)exploitation, seabed damage, marine plastic debris, and invasive species. Surprisingly, we do not know very much about many of these issues and have trouble quantifying how damaging they can be in different parts of the ocean. Marine ecosystems are seriously underrepresented in sustainability research and in the ATLANTIS project we want to contribute to solving this issue. One tool that is often used for assessing impacts of our human production systems is life cycle assessment (LCA). This is the method of choice in ATLANTIS. Although far from perfect, LCA does cover some of the impacts we mentioned, like climate change or marine eutrophication with some models. Other issues are not addressed at all and among those are the issues of plastic pollution and invasive species. These are the two stressors that ATLANTIS is focusing on.
Why should we care about the oceans?
We often forget how important, but also how vulnerable oceans are. To illustrate the importance of oceans we can turn to a concept called ecosystem services. These are services that ecosystems provide for us humans and are structured into provisioning, regulating, cultural and supporting services. Provisioning marine services would for example be fish or mussels that we collect to eat, regulating services include, as an example, storm protection from coral reefs and mangrove forests, but also carbon sequestration. Cultural services include aesthetic values, tourism and spiritual values and, finally, supporting services include the very basic services like nutrient cycling. All of these services are immensely important (and heavily undervalued) for us humans and losing them would mean losing a huge part of our livelihood on the planet, be it directly though the loss of food sources for coastal communities or indirectly through the loss of the carbon sequestration task, putting the whole planet at an even higher risk for climate change.
In addition, the oceans are "the next economic frontier" with many processes moving offshore (energy production, aquaculture, etc.) and thus healthy oceans are an important prerequisite.
It is however, not just the ecosystem services that are relevant. This is also about the biodiversity in the oceans itself, which, altruistically speaking, have a right to exist on their own.
Plastic pollution is an issue for hundreds of species every year with impacts ranging from death due to entanglement, ingestion or smothering to chronic impacts.
Likewise, invasive species are considered a major threat for the marine ecosystems. They are mostly transported through ballast water and on the hull of ships, but there are also increasingly reports about species that are being transported on waste items from one ecoregion to another, a process called rafting.
Invasive species can impact either individual species or also lead to the collapse of whole ecosystems, in many cases meaning that also the livelihoods of local people collapse.
What does ATLANTIS aim to do?
In ATLANTIS we aim to develop models for quantifying the impacts of plastic pollution and marine invasive species on the marine ecosystem, within the framework of LCA. We work on developing models that tell us how many species we potentially lose from plastic waste (entanglement/ingestion) and marine invasive species, but also how much selected regulating and cultural services are impacts by these same stressors. Since the marine ecosystem contains a large number of niches and regions with vastly different living conditions for species, we attempt to develop all pour models in a spatially-explicit way. We need to model and understand how plastic is moving through the ocean, which species get entangled or ingest plastic and what this means for them, how and which invasive species reach new destinations and what impacts they cause and what the most affected ecosystem services are.
LCA is lacking these details at the moment, meaning that any LCA containing plastic objects cannot assess the potential life cycle of a product in its entirety (missing the end-of life and potential mismanagement, as well as transport losses). We hope that our models will strenghten LCA and help to assess imapcts in a more comprehensive manner.
