Major threats foreseen due to Europe's changing marine environments

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-09/fmi-mtf091211.php

Public release date: 13-Sep-2011

Contact: Terry Collins
[e-mail]
416-538-8712
http://www.vliz.be/">Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ)

Major threats foreseen due to Europe's changing marine environments

Sea levels, erosion top public concerns

Europeans face greater risk of illness, property damage and job losses because of the impacts of climate change on the seas around them.

Worried citizens, whose biggest related top-of-mind concerns are sea level rise and coastal erosion, are taking personal actions to reduce carbon emissions. However, they largely blame climate change on other groups of people or nations and assign governments and industry responsibility for mitigating the problem (though they perceive government and industry as ineffective on the issue).

Those are among the conclusions after scientists synthesized an extensive collection of academic papers published since 1998 on climate change and Europe's marine environments, combined with a groundbreaking companion poll of Europeans on the issues, commissioned as part of Project CLAMER, a collaboration of 17 European marine institutes.

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"We have amassed convincing and disturbing scientific evidence," says CLAMER co-ordinator Carlo Heip, Director of the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research. "We need to communicate it much better than we have. We must all heed the clear warnings of the hazards we face from what amounts to an uncontrolled experiment on the marine environment."

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