The new year's first Monday is upon us and there are already reefs of news worth sharing. Some stories are primed for readers seeking inspiration; others for those more in need of a healthy dose of motivation.
- President of Palau Tommy Remengesau Jr. - co-chair of the Global Island Partnership (GLISPA) - penned a powerful call to act and protect the oceans in The Guardian. "We will not restore the health of our planet without repairing the well-being of the ocean."
- Sir David Attenborough - aka one of the world's most respected and badass naturalists (and the British voice you hear on Planet Earth) - has started an interactive and visually rich campaign to raise awareness of the threats facing the Great Barrier Reef. The initiative - called David Attenbourough's Great Barrier Reef, An Interactive Journey - deserves and will soon get a post of its own.
- A team of University of Sheffield-led researchers "found that speeding up the naturally-occuring process of the weathering of rock... could help avert ocean acidification" by helping draw excess carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, as reported in The Yorkshire Post.
- The Maharashtra state government in India launched an artificial reef building and coral transplantation project near the coastal town of Malvan, per DNA India.
- Elsewhere in India, the Hindustan Times reports that the Zoological Survey of India used coral farming to restore a Gujarat reef that's been dead for over 10,000 years.
- Grand Cayman, no stranger to coral controversy over the past year, is experiencing new political turmoil according to The Cayman Reporter over the decision by the Department of the Environment to allow the extraction of black sea rod soft coral for use in a cosmetics product.
- And finally for today, The Sunday Times announced that corals were successfully grown in British labs for the first time ever, raising Australian branching species in wild reef-simulated conditions at London's Horniman Museum (we're grinning at the name too).
We hope you each have a healthy and a happy start to 2016. Here's to another year of #OceanOptimism.
-Sam