62 and offshore discharge of sewage treatment effluent. Finally, observations made during other studies indicate that the coral reefs of the northern Bahamas (Andros Island, New Providence, Berry Islands, Abacos) may be in as bad or a worse state of decline than Florida reefs, and thus reef decline in Florida may be part of a regional phenomenon related to long term climate change. This is a potential problem that requires urgent attention, even if we as humans may not be able to do anything about it. Dr. ROSENDAHL. Let me stress, also, I think this legislation is wonderful, and badly, badly needed. But I don't want it to die after five years. After four or five years, we could have this set up, no more money and it just peters out. The long-term issue here is absolutely essential. Mr. NOWAK. And that is why the investigation and the information is fine. But unless we have a cost-benefit really assigned to this, there are a lot of other things in the country, health care and I don't want to get into education, which one of the great experts in the House our Chairman is here. But there are a lot of competing policies here that we are going to have to take a hard look at and assign the quote cost/benefit as we move forward because of the Federal budget and State budget and everybody else. Dr. ROSENDAHL. Absolutely correct. I don't think a one-year program is cost-effective, to be absolutely blunt. Dr. PORTER. I would like to make a comment, also, that although these other legitimate needs are pressing the Congress and our nation, environmental quality is the issue, even if we have not heard from the contenders for national office about this subject. It is the issue. Mr. NOWAK. Let me just make a personal observation about it being the issue. When you try to get dollars for the issue, it gets a lot tougher. Unless you have, you know, some cost/benefit, or unless we create a crisis, then the Congress will act. Then the President will act. Then the bureaucracy will react. What I am trying to do is get ahead of the crisis that Jim talks about. Mr. SCHEUER. You have a crisis in coral reef management. They are dying out at a accelerating pace, exponential pace, compared to the 50 million years they have been around. For the 10 to 20,000 years they have been in this country, they are dying out at an extraordinarily rapid pace. You have your crisis if you want it, if you see it. Mr. HERTEL. Presidential candidates talk about the environment; if you can talk with Senator Gore and others who run, they talk about it all the time. The fact is, it is not covered. They cover all the other things rather than some serious things. Certainly to me it is the number one concern for lawmakers. I think the candidates have done a pretty good job of speaking out. I think the debates in the future should focus more on the environment. I would hope they would have different debates, as they have had in the past, on separate subjects for the entire two-hour debate. Mr. FASCELL. The fight for priority on money is still there. Mr. SCHEUER. Okay, it has been a great panel. We enjoyed it as you can see by the extended questioning. Thank you very much. Now we will go to the last panel: Dr. Rod Fujita, Staff Scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund; Dr. Donald M. Axelrad, Director of Marine Conservation for The Nature Conservancy; and Dr. Archie Carr, III, Director, Caribbean Program for Wildlife Conservation International-New York Zoological Society. We are delighted to have you all. We thank you for your patience and for waiting so long. You have heard the comments we have made about the arrangements. We hope you stick to five minutes. Your prepared remarks will be printed at this point in the record in full. Dr. Fujita, when you are ready, please proceed. Dr. FUJITA. Thank you. Mr. SCHEUER. Summarize your views and mention anything you have heard up to now this afternoon. STATEMENTS OF DR. RODNEY M. FUJITA, STAFF SCIENTIST, EN- Dr. FUJITA. Thanks very much for the opportunity to testify. Mr. SCHEUER. Pick up the mike and speak right into it. Dr. FUJITA [continuing]. And respond briefly to the questions asked by the panel. First, there was discussion about has there been a synthesis about current knowledge of coral reefs. I just wanted to introduce into the record that the International Union for the Conservation of Nature has compiled a book called "Coral Reefs of the World," three volumes, which tries to synthesize a lot of the past research. It is badly out of date. It was published in about 1985. It needs to be updated, synthesized, reviewed, perhaps by the National Academy of Sciences, but it does represent a building block. Mr. FASCELL. Here, here. Mr. SCHEUER. That goes back to 1965? Dr. FUJITA. No, it was published in 1985, so it is out of date. Dr. FUJITA. Sue Wells, who edited this, is awash in current reports from reefs all over the world but doesn't have the funding to update it and put it together. On the question of natural and anthropogenic change, it is very important to tease those out and differentiate between the two. But we must recognize that, for instance, natural levels of nutrients induced by up-welling offshore doesn't mean there is not an anthropogenic problem in coral reefs which are sensitive to nutrients. It may indicate there is low tolerance for increased levels of nutrients. So we need to take a cautionary view when we are trying to address this issue of what is natural and what is anthropogenic. As a coral reef issue for global change for research in the U.S. government, I think it is clear that coral reefs are a very good target for this kind of research. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was considering putting emphasis on coral reefs as a monitoring kind of harbinger, if you will, of climate change because of the sensitivity of coral reefs to temperature. They were dropped from the priority list. I argue they should be put back on. Recently, in a program announcement, I noticed that coral reefs were back on the agenda. Nevertheless, I think it would be a good idea for Congress to direct NOAA and EPA to emphasize coral reefs as they put together their global climate change research pro grams. Again, as Jim Porter mentioned, because elevated temperature is now known to cause coral bleaching in his stations. I am not an expert on the Clean Water Act. You wondered what the monitoring requirements were. My understanding of the Act is that it mandates dischargers to show to EPA that no ecological harm will be done; in other words, the biological, chemical, and physical integrity of the ecosystem will be protected. And if there is uncertainty, in other words, if it is not clear whether the outfall is going to be harmful or not, the law says that EPA should not allow that permit to be awarded. Just to mention the Great Barrier Reef-I just read some recent literature down there-they would be expected to have a large database on changes in the huge marine ecosystem. Unfortunately, the measurements I have seen are very sparse. Nevertheless, it is clear from some of that data that polluted reefs are showing no recruitment just as these reefs are showing no recruitment, no new children entering into the homes of coral reefs and that reefs that have been physically damaged by storms or by ships are very, very slow to recovery when water quality is a factor in the reef. Let me summarize my testimony quickly. I concur with all the panelists that research is desperately needed in coral reefs all over the world but this should not deter us from trying to take action to prevent further degradation. The reality is, as summarized by the EPA, NOAA, NSF-sponsored workshop in Miami last June, that certain issues do not require more research in order to make policy decisions and that is siltation, clearly damaging to coral reefs; excessive nutrient loading from sewage and runoff which clearly is inimical to coral reef development, and bleaching, and et cetera. So this reality of continuing degradation, rapid degradation, puts a premium on targeting research to meet management goals. And we also have to put a premium on taking whatever actions we can to prevent further degradation. We have to recognize that, yes, we can put together a very elaborate expensive and long-term research strategy and implement that strategy, but it takes time, it takes years, maybe decades to sort these things out. Well, we know, obviously, that degradation doesn't wait for the knowledge to come in. There are a number of different ways that this research can be carried out and I would concur with John Ogden that different components of research should be integrated, that monitoring should not be separated from manipulative experiments, for instance. One approach can be seen as a reductionist approach where we take components of the ecosystem, do controlled experiments in laboratories and we use these experiments to make statements and inferences about ecological processes. In the case of trying to figure out what the effects of pollutants are on a coral reef, we would take these components, algae, coral, sponges, tunicates, etc., and conduct dose response experiments where we dose the organisms with pollutants and see what the response is. The next step would be to try to examine interactions between those components with manipulative experiments. Obviously, we need to get at the natural variations. Then the difficulty lies in taking all of those small experiments which, if carefully conducted, can yield very useful information and so-called strong inferences about reality; but the difficulty lies in taking those experimental results and extrapolating to the real world. My experience as a research scientist has indicated to me that there are a lot of variables out there that impact on how organisms actually respond in nature as opposed to how they respond in the laboratory. Key among them is water exchange in a laboratory. It is very difficult to simulate the natural patterns of turbulence and other characteristics of a coral reef. There is a large amount of water washing through the system at all times. In a laboratory, you have a little bottle or test-tube and it is difficult to replicate that. Because our knowledge about fluid dynamics is so limited at this point, I don't believe, at least that it is possible at this moment to, with a reasonable amount of certainty, extrapolate the results of laboratory experiments to the field. That means that we need to go out in the field, and take measurements in nature; this is directed monitoring. Another approach that is used by the University of Rhode Island Marine Ecosystems Research Laboratory which, in my view, has provided some of the few relevant environmental data linking nitrogen loading to eutrophication or that sequence of events that you probably all know about which involves the stimulation of algal growth, the decay of organic matter which out strips the ability of organisms to eat it and the subsequent lowering of oxygen levels in marine ecosystems. This marine laboratory at the University of Rhode Island is a Mesocosm because it is large enough to adequately simulate natural water flow characteristics and to replicate natural variations in phytoplankton in different seasons and so on, so if you conduct an experiment in a Mesocosm, you have more confidence that it will relate in some way to the natural environment. The third approach that I want to talk about is whole ecosystem experiments. In the case of acid rain, for instance, Canadian scientists dosed entire lakes in the Canadian Shield and those experiments yielded very valuable experiments on how whole lake systems respond to acidification. We don't want to dose the whole coral reef with pollutants just to see what is going to happen even though it would be a definitive experiment. But my suggestion would be to try to get multiple benefits, fulfill multiple objectives by combining all these research approaches, reductionist, Mesocosm and whole ecosystem monitoring, with a protected area. Now, in a protected area, you would not allow consumptive uses, you would restrict visitation to research scientists, and you would allow no discharges of pollutants. The reason you would want to do this is because this affords a way to prevent degradation of certain areas of the reef tract while uncertainty about the causes and effects of degradation remains high. |