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Rising Temperatures Are Making Life in Tropical Cities Precarious for the Poor

HONG KONG ― The numbers are in: NASA announced Monday that August 2016 was the hottest month ever recorded since global records began in 1880. Several parts of Asia, including Hong Kong and Singapore, have also recently had their hottest months ever recorded.

Standing outside in the middle of the day in Jakarta, Manila or Mumbai is sometimes almost unbearable. Calling it “humid” would be an understatement. In Singapore, the mean annual relative humidity is 84 percent, frequently reaching 100 percent during prolonged rain. A World Bank report released last week estimates that the “welfare losses” as a result of air pollution have dramatically increased over the last 25 years as developing countries urbanized and industrialized.

This is the environment that millions of urban dwellers in the tropics currently live in. It does not need to be like this. Tropical cities can be made livable again. But it will require governments to make very difficult decisions.

If the people living in tropical cities are to survive our hot future, governments need to radically rethink how they manage urbanization.

Tropical Asia's dense and overcrowded cities are already subject to the heat-island effect, which makes them significantly warmer than their rural surroundings. As temperatures threaten to increase by a further two to three degrees, as some scenarios by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predict, tropical cities are quickly becoming unlivable. And this is not even taking into account overcrowding, poor housing and slums, water and sewerage issues, solid waste disposal and the curses of urban traffic and pollution.

Yet like the proverbial frog in boiling water, city inhabitants appear helpless ― as if resigned to their fate with no other options. If tropical cities, and the people that live in them, are to survive our hot future, governments need to radically rethink how they manage the urbanization trend ― and perhaps even consider moving people away from these unlivable cities.

For those who live in temperate or sub-tropical zones (or in climate-controlled rooms), it can be hard to know what a tropical city life feels like. The humid air sits on you, preventing your body from cooling itself properly, thus affecting productivity. For the poor, without air-conditioning, heat can make entire homes unlivable. Night temperatures can be so high that deep sleep becomes impossible. Many have to work in the heat outdoors or in a poorly ventilated, uncooled office, sometimes a long uncomfortable and pollution-ridden commute away.

The upper and middle classes have an escape from the unbearable heat: air-conditioning. Cooling is not seen as a luxury, but a necessity: as an article in the New York Times notes, “an air-conditioner has become a sign of middle-class status in developing nations, a must-have dowry item.” When air-conditioning first arrived in Asia, it was only available for the wealthy at a time when cities were a quarter the size they are now. But air-conditioning is now wildly popular in Asia, which now makes up half the global market for cooling units.

Rich cities like Singapore have even been able to ensure much broader access to artificial cooling; in Hong Kong, opposition politicians blocked the construction of a new homeless shelter, calling its lack of air-conditioning “inhumane.” For well-off households across Asia, air-conditioning is, to quote Lee Kuan Yew, “the greatest invention of the century.” One is perhaps also reminded of Noel Coward's old song: that only “mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.” Yet for hundreds of millions in these cities, escaping the midday sun is not an option ― they must live, work and sleep in uncooled and sweltering surroundings.

Air-conditioning is an unsustainable solution to the problem of hot cities. A/C units release heat as waste, which is then trapped between dense skyscrapers. This pushes cooling units to work harder and use more energy. All these units consume electricity, which is likely produced by fossil fuels. As more and more people in the tropics buy air-conditioning, more carbon is released into the atmosphere. A/C units are also a major contributor to other less known but potent greenhouse gases. Research suggests that the energy demand for air-conditioning will increase by 40 times this century, overtaking the energy used for heating by around 2060.

An air-conditioner has become a sign of middle-class status in developing nations, a must-have dowry item.
New York Times

Tropical cities in general are getting hotter even before we include the effect of climate change. The combination of heat absorbed by building materials and waste heat from transportation and homes means that cities can be up to 3 degrees warmer than rural areas. The temperature difference is greatest at night, as concrete and asphalt radiate the heat absorbed during the day. Waste heat from cities can even be carried to remote areas by air currents, with some scientists finding a temperature increase of 1 degree in some rural areas due to nearby urban development.

The well-off, thanks to air-conditioning, are insulated from a warming climate, and so there is little political will to make cities cooler. The upper and middle classes live and sleep in climate-controlled apartments, work in cooled offices and sit in air-conditioned cars when traffic is gridlocked. Their children enjoy the same and can sometimes cool off in private swimming pools. But for the vast majority of urban dwellers in tropical cities, these luxuries are out of reach.

The problem of these hot and unlivable cities has been worsened by uncontrolled and poorly conceived urbanization. According to the World Bank, 200 million people (equivalent to what would be the world's fifth-largest country) have moved to cities between 2000 and 2010. Urban areas have grown by an area the size of Taiwan. These migrants all need housing and transportation. Many are migrants who live in shanties or poorly constructed buildings and often work in uncooled environments that have become unbearable as temperatures have soared in recent years. They sit sweltering in congestion: in Jakarta, where the number of vehicles on the road increases by about 10 percent each year despite no growth in roads, 12 people reportedly died from heat and carbon-dioxide poisoning in a three-day-long traffic jam.

To make matters worse, urban migration often disproportionately targets one city: the capital. All cities are growing, but major cities like the capital attract the most migrants, which tests their provision of basic needs and social services ― in which regard most have failed. One would think that an urbanization drive that is much more equally shared amongst several cities and towns would lessen population pressures, but that is not what has been seen in the developing world because of poor economic policies and regional planning.

It is too often assumed that urbanization and economic development must go hand in hand. It is true that urbanization does unlock economic potential in a country's population. However, the problem is that many developing countries have not properly controlled and channelled urbanization. The enormous number of man-hours lost in traffic jams and persistent illnesses in crowded and hot cities decreases productivity and quality of life.

Letting people move to the city is “easy” but it is an archaic short-term path to growth with long-term negative consequences, as evident by the all-too-obvious and deteriorating conditions in tropical cites. It is also easy for the government to focus its energy and attention on the capital where big business is concentrated and where the rich tend to live, rather than developing a broad-based program that develops multiple reasonably sized cities and small towns simultaneously.

The well-off, thanks to air-conditioning, are insulated from a warming climate, and so there is little political will to make cities cooler.

If countries in the tropics are serious about mitigating and reducing the effects of climate change, they need to understand urbanization differently and appreciate that their increasingly unlivable cities must be the target of new and daring economic planning and environmental policy. Countries must find a way to channel people to less crowded areas, by providing economic opportunities in the countryside and developing secondary towns in order to broaden the economic base. They may need to do something that few have ever considered: moving people out of these large cities, to make sure that urban environments are actually livable.

All the efforts to make cities in the tropics adapt to climate change need a fresh dose of reality ― to move beyond hypothetical approaches towards reducing carbon demands, green cars and “smart cities” and toward an acceptance that these cities are too large and unmanageable to survive in a new climate that makes them too hot to live in. Only by cooling its drive to urbanize will Southeast Asia cool its sweltering cities.

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Feds must dismiss unhinged advice on wild horses

Our nation's management of wild horses has been a long-running debacle of poor execution layered over questionable intentions and flagging resolve. Those problems have been compounded by violence toward horses by ranchers and other private resource users. The latest incident involves an attack on a number of wild horses living on a ranch overseen by the philanthropist and wild horse advocate Madeleine Pickens.

Since 1971, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has had the task of managing wild horses, who are now classed, for administrative purposes, into 179 Herd Management Areas in 10 western states. The bureau's primary strategy over the past 20 years has largely consisted of rounding up and removing the animals from our public lands, ostensibly in an effort to protect the range from overgrazing. The original plan was to adopt out horses to private parties - which has been fraught with its own set of problems - but the removals have happened at a volume that not even a spirited adoption program can offset. This has resulted in approximately 45,000 wild horses and burros being maintained in government-financed holding facilities throughout the United States.

Because the captive horse management has cannibalized so much of the funding, the BLM has scarce funds for protecting horses remaining on the range, including fertility control programs that offer the only real hope of humane population management.

Last week, in an attempt to solve this financial crisis -- a self-inflicted wound created by serial round-ups -- a volunteer body called the National Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Board (the majority of whose members' main focus is not, and has never been, the humane treatment of wild horses) made a recommendation that the BLM consider euthanizing all unadopted horses in holding facilities. That's a prescription for mass slaughter on an almost unimaginable scale and it would perhaps make the United States the biggest horse killing enterprise in the world. While the Advisory Board has no legal authority to mandate action on the agency's part, the agency will consider this recommendation, a sort of "Final Solution" cooked up by public-lands ranchers and their allies.

In 2015, the Department of Interior's Office of the Inspector General released a long-awaited investigative report, which found that the BLM had sold thousands of wild horses to a livestock hauler named Tom Davis who subsequently sold these horses to kill buyers. Though they are not being sold directly by the agency, wild horses are still going to slaughter by a variety of circuitous pathways. Sources at the Sugarcreek, Ohio, livestock auction last week documented BLM freeze-branded horses, in very poor condition, being sold to kill buyers.

Our nation's wild horses deserve better than this sort of mismanagement and abuse, and an attitude that they are throwaway objects. A sensible program must be grounded on controlling the population on the range through fertility control, obviating the need for dangerous round-ups that betray the national interest in protecting horses, and ending wasteful spending that ultimately solves no problems and just builds a massive captive wild horse program.

This headlong and heedless advisory committee recommendation should be summarily rejected. But it's so outrageous and overreaching that it may be just the kick in the pants that Congress and the agency need to overhaul the entire broken and battered program.

Act now to save America's wild horses »

This article first appeared on Wayne Pacelle's blog, A Humane Nation

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Rising Temperatures Are Making Life in Tropical Cities Precarious for the Poor

If the people living in tropical cities are to survive our hot future, governments need to radically rethink how they manage urbanization.

An air-conditioner has become a sign of middle-class status in developing nations, a must-have dowry item.
New York Times

The well-off, thanks to air-conditioning, are insulated from a warming climate, and so there is little political will to make cities cooler.

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Pipeline Company Desecrates Graves On Sioux Sacred Land
Metropolitan Community Churches know what it means to have our sacred sites defaced with spray-painted slurs. We know what it means to have our ministers murdered. We know what it means to be turned away from funeral homes because of who we are. We know what it feels like to have all we hold sacred desecrated.

So we have some idea what the Sioux nation in Standing Rock Dakota and all the First Nations people gathered in the Dakotas are facing as they resist the desecration of their graves and sacred lands.

When graffiti taggers deface gravestones with their mark -- or symbols of hate like swastikas, outcries and headlines condemn the scurrilous act. But in the Dakotas, Native American gravesites were bulldozed recently in a shocking act of grave desecration. The bulldozers cut a swath through historic grounds to destroy evidence of the graves and to stake corporate claim to the land as a preemptory act of violence instead of waiting for a pending court decision. The company brought in vicious dogs that bit peaceful protestors. Despite dogs and pepper spray, the resisters continued to stand in the way until the bulldozers finally stopped. I thought, as a nation, we were done with using dogs to control and punish protestors, but this is not the case.

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Tribal Chairman, David Archambault II said, "This demolition is devastating. These grounds are the resting places of our ancestors. The ancient Cairns and stone prayer rings there cannot be replaced. In one day, our sacred land has been turned into hollow ground."

The pipeline company, Energy Transfers Partners (ETP), blatantly ignored the recommendations of multiple official departments: the Department of the Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. Each of these groups recommended more study before moving ahead with the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL).

Because burial grounds do not resemble European-style headstones, companies like ETP consider the burial sites to be open prairie. Just as when Europeans arrived in the Americas and decided there was nothing there since settlements did not look European, to this day, Native peoples are invisible and inconsequential to business interests. Racism's strategy of invisibility is alive and well today.

When the court decision came down, shockingly, it went against the Native American claims of burial grounds and allowed the bulldozing to continue. In virtually the same moment, I learned that the Obama administration had stopped the construction of the pipeline through Native lands in the Dakotas. I can only imagine that President Obama and I shared similar feelings of horror as we watched dogs viciously attack Native Americans as they stood to protect the land and water against oil defilement. It may well be another legacy of the Obama Administration that this plea for justice from Native Americans was not ignored.

As the Global Moderator of Metropolitan Community Churches, I join religious leaders from Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopal, UCC, and others who have spoken out to support the stand of Native Americans. We know that both the government and the churches have a long history of exploitation, betrayal, broken treaties and wars. We have learned enough to know that when Native Americans are treated as trespassers on their own land, something is deeply wrong. We must act now. When the land is gone and the water is gone, there will be nothing left to save. For all Americans, the future of our children depends on a rapid shift to sustainable energy sources.

In the Dakotas, construction is paused, but we call on the U.S. government to stop construction on all pipelines. Oil is poisoning our waters and land. For Native Americans, this is just one more expression of genocide. Even the American Petroleum Institute projects spills of 40,000 barrels of petroleum products this year. Right now, almost 15 billion barrels of oil traverse the pipelines. Global warming and the poisoning of our land and water give us no option but to end the burning. This is a crime against humanity and a crime against nature. Those who are most vulnerable, the poor, those with little power or voice, will be the ones most impacted.

When will we learn? How do we stop the defilement of sacred lands and the despoilment of our waterways while our climate heats beyond all recognition? We must stop the burning and turn to renewable energies. It can be done, but there is not much time to do it. May all our relatives be blessed.

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How To Be An Organic Pioneer

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This past weekend we celebrated the Organic Pioneer Awards at the Rodale Institute, and it gave me a moment to reflect on the past 70 years and what it takes to be a pioneer and create change. But first some context... The change we have created has come in four distinct phases, and we are about to enter the fifth.

1. Invent organic
The first phase was when my grandfather, J.I. Rodale, invented the idea of organic. If you put it into scientific language, this is the hypothesis he created: Healthy soil equals healthy food equals healthy people.

2. Prove organic
Like any good hypothesis, it must be proven scientifically, which is what we started doing in 1983 with the Farming Systems Trial. As the picture shown above reveals, we have more than proven scientifically that organic is a viable, productive, and profitable way to farm--and the only way to feed people for the long term and mitigate climate change. (It was about 100 degrees inside the barn that night, by the way.) There are still many things left to prove, but that organic farming works better than conventional is not one of them.

3. Institutionalize organic
Our next step was to work together with all the people and organizations involved in organic farming to create the USDA Organic Certification. It took more than a decade, and it was what propelled the organic movement and market to a whole new level.

4. Demand organic
Through all our research and education, we have now succeeded in convincing the majority of consumers that organic is healthy, delicious, and worth it for both health and environmental reasons.

5. Supply organic
The biggest obstacle we now face is that there is not enough organic food in America to supply the demand! As a result, we need to transition as many farmers and acres to organic as possible. And that is where the Rodale Institute will now be focusing the majority of its efforts.

We've also learned at least four things on this journey...and now we are in the process of learning the fifth thing...

1. To be an organic pioneer takes courage and resilience
OPA award winner David Vetter talked about overhearing three farmers take bets on how long it would take for him to fail at organic farming. They gave him between 1 and 3 years. Five years later, he was the only one still farming, and now over 60 years later, he has helped many other farmers transition to organic.

2. We need need patience and persistence
True, lasting, pioneering change takes time. Generations! So taking one step forward every day is important and the only way to get there.

3. Emotions and experience change hearts and minds faster than facts do
Maybe someone gets sick, or has a financial crisis, and then suddenly they are open to a new way of doing things. People are stubborn and tend not to look for alternatives until they need to. It's just human nature.

4. But you need the facts
For so many reasons, we need to be ready with facts for when people are finally willing to change and are looking for alternatives.

Every single one of our organic pioneers has been part of this journey, and all of them are amazing leaders and models of what is possible. I am so proud of all of them. (For a complete list through the years, click here.)

And now for number 5...what we still need to learn...

The other day I brought a friend to the institute for the first time, and he asked a simple question: "How did we get into this mess in the first place?" At first I didn't want to answer because it was too complicated. But then I realized we are in this mess for two reasons: People have been afraid of nature and tried to control it. And lots of people have made lots of money taking advantage of that fear.

So how do we get out of "this mess" and move beyond fear?

5. Love. We need to love nature. Love diversity. Love our differences. Love each other.
Money can buy a lot of things--and we rely on it to do our research and support our staff and do our work. But it can't buy love. And that's what I'm most grateful for--the love I have felt and feel for so many of you: readers, farmers, supporters, friends, family, anyone who eats and appreciates where food comes from.

So take a minute out of your busy day and think about it. Think about love. And more importantly feel the love. And with that positive energy, you too can be an organic pioneer.

For more from Maria Rodale, visit www.rodalesorganiclife.com/bymaria

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House Science Hearing on ExxonMobil & Subpoenas: What You Should Know

This morning, the House Science Committee is holding an unusual hearing, at which the committee's chairman, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), apparently aims to justify subpoenas he already has issued to New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, and eight organizations and foundations concerned with the issue of whether Exxon deceived on the public on the issue of climate change.

Smith seeks communications between and among the attorneys general and the groups. Every entity that got a subpoena has refused to comply; Healey and Schneiderman each issued an emphatic response, as did each organization. Ranking member Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX) and other Democrats on the committee have sharply criticized the subpoenas, as have numerous others, including:

Abrams Institute at Yale Law School letter from legal experts
The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights statement
Open the Government statement
Letter from 2,000+ scientists
Boston Globe editorial, Congressional bullying on behalf of Big Oil
San Antonio Express-News editorial, Irony in Smith's latest subpoenas
Los Angeles Times editorial, House GOP members pursue an objectionable defense of fossil fuels

Here are some key points about what's happening at today's hearing. (Disclosure: I'm a consultant to some of the organizations that have received subpoenas from Rep. Smith.)

1. The subpoenas to the attorney generals of New York and Massachusetts are not grounded in any legitimate legislative purpose -- and they violate the Constitution's protections for states' rights.

At least five state attorneys general are investigating ExxonMobil, looking at claims that Exxon defrauded its shareholders and customers by supporting efforts to deny the risks of climate change from fossil fuels, when the company already had extensive research showing that the risks were real. These are clearly valid investigations; as Yale School Dean Robert Post has argued, the First Amendment does not protect fraudulent statements.

Chairman Smith's subpoenas violate state sovereignty by interfering with these attorney general investigations. The 10th Amendment says, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution...are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." The states have broad police powers to protect their residents.

Chairman Smith has not cited any provision of the Constitution or other federal law that gives him the power to interfere in a state's investigation of a corporation for fraud. Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court has consistently required a congressional committee to have a "valid legislative purpose" in order to investigate a matter.

Chairman Smith says the committee has a role in ensuring that the attorneys general are not pressuring the "private sector...to make research funding decisions based in part on a desire to avoid burdensome state investigations and political or ideological coercion." He also claims the committee could legislate to seek to "correct" any "imbalance in scientific inquiry" resulting from the fraud investigations.

Massachusetts Attorney General Healey responded that the committee's legislative authority is "limited to scientific findings made or funded by federal government agencies, not by corporations, such as Exxon." The committee is not authorized to act as America's "science police."

State officials need the authority to enforce fraud and consumer-protection laws, without congressional committees acting to hinder such work.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), who was previously the attorney general of Rhode Island, recently wrote regarding this controversy, "The constitutional principle of federalism requires 'proper respect' to states' constitutional functions, and what more proper and inherent state function is there than investigation and prosecution of violations of state law?"

2. The subpoenas to the organizations and foundations are not grounded in any legitimate legislative purpose -- and they threaten free speech.

For a congressional committee to demand documents from advocacy and research organizations, as well as charitable foundations, simply because they have spoken out on an issue of concern, is a threat to free speech and our democracy. The subpoenas represent a dangerous new direction that threatens to suppress the speech not only of environmental groups, but also civil rights groups, reproductive choice groups, conservative advocacy groups, and others.

New York University law Professor Burt Neuborne called Chairman Smith's subpoenas "just another retaliatory gimmick aimed at making it too expensive and time consuming to criticize a powerful entity with deep pockets capable of enmeshing the critics in legal quicksand." These subpoenas are the legislative equivalent of SLAPP suits filed by corporations with the aim of stifling and deterring public debate by critics.

3. Two of the three witnesses that Chairman Smith has called for today's hearing -- Professor Ronald Rotunda and Elizabeth Price Foley -- have extensive financial ties to the fossil fuel industry and to think tanks that deny the dangers of climate change.

The fact that the Chairman is staking his argument about the validity of the subpoenas on the testimony of witnesses with such obvious bias suggests how improper this whole effort is.

4. The purpose of this effort by Chairman Smith seems to be to try to intimidate critics of, and to score political points for, fossil fuel companies.

It's worth noting that Chairman Smith and other members of the committee have taken extensive campaign contributions from the fossil fuel industry.

5. We are in the final weeks of this Congress and there is so much important work that the House Science Committee could be doing instead.

The American people expect Congress to address serious challenges our country faces. Instead, Chairman Smith wasting precious time, explaining the rationale for subpoenas that the Chairman already has sent. Worse, he is using his committee as a dangerous threat to our democratic system.

As ranking member Johnson wrote in a June 23 letter to the chair:

I have served on the Committee on Science for more than two decades, and during that time this Committee has accomplished great things. We've overseen the completion of the International Space Station and the sequencing of the human genome, and we've undertaken serious investigations, ranging from the Space Shuttle Challenger accident to the environmental crimes at the Rocky Flats nuclear site. However, lately the Committee on Science has seemed more like a Committee on Harassment. The Committee's prolific, aimless, and jurisdictionally questionable oversight activities have grown increasingly mean-spirited and meaningless. They frequently appear to be designed primarily to generate press releases. However, none of these recent investigations has rushed head long into a serious Constitutional crisis like we are about to face. We are moving into dangerous and uncharted territory.

...the Democratic Members of the Committee also take this oath seriously. We will not sit idly by while the powers of the Committee are used to trample on the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution. I implore you to cease your current actions before they do lasting institutional damage to the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology and the Congress as a whole.

This article also appears on Huffington Post.

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Youthful Hope to Save the Sea

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Sebastian Nicholls diving above a coral reef near Aqaba, Jordan. The Kingdom protects 7 km of its 27 km of marine coastline in the Aqaba Marine Park.

Millions of people saw Rio de Janeiro for the first time last month while watching the summer Olympics. Daily, they saw beautiful shots of the city--the glistening beaches and blue sea reflecting Brazil's crimson sunsets. Buildings dot the city's slopes, but a dense layer of vegetation lingers over the hills. Bright-billed toucans turn the dark quiet of the rainforest into a cacophony at daybreak. I lived there for two years, and Rio's natural beauty filled me with awe.

I felt the same sense of wonder when I saw a coral reef for the first time in the Islas del Rosario near Cartagena, Colombia. I didn't know then that the coral was dying--that overfishing, climate change, acidification, and pollution are rapidly choking the life out of tropical seas. Those same man-made problems also threaten kelp forests, mangroves and other magnificent ocean ecosystems that have existed for millennia.

Our ocean is not just beautiful, but also essential for life. It provides half the oxygen we breathe, regulates climate, and feeds millions. The next generation's future depends on it.

Beyond the stunning shots of whitecaps and shimmering carioca sunsets, the sea is in deep trouble--and the symptoms are visible at the surface. Driving out of the airport, views of Guanabara Bay revealed floating trash and thick layers of black mud where the pollution was worst. Thousands of dolphins used to live in Guanabara Bay , and it was a breeding ground for whales. Now, only 34 dolphins remain and the population is rapidly declining.

Yet Rio's story, like young idealistic eyes, also glimmers with hope. The Tijuca forest at the heart of the city is now among the largest urban forests in the world, but in the 19th century, the area had been cleared for coffee farming. In 1861, Dom Pedro II, Brazil's emperor, expressed concerns about deforestation and native plants were reintroduced. Now, it's a vibrant rainforest in a concrete jungle.

Youth, like Dom Pedro, can combine hopeful eyes with a vision, and create a better future for all. When I learned about the degenerating health of our ocean, I didn't know what I could do but despair. Yet we can reclaim the ocean, just as Dom Pedro revived the Tijuca forest, so that it can provide for generations to come.

Policy has started shifting towards improved stewardship, states are discussing protection of the High Seas , and nations are creating new and larger marine reserves every year . The Our Ocean Summit, a meeting of the world's ocean ministers convened by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, provides a venue for announcing ever-greater commitments on ocean stewardship. Most importantly, leaders are recognizing that youth should take ownership of our ocean and our future. Millennials are eager to make a difference, and the rest of the ocean conservation movement is beginning to take note.

My friend Daniela Fernandez founded the Sustainable Oceans Alliance, (SOA) in 2014. She had attended a UN meeting about ocean sustainability and returned to Georgetown University with a vision for mobilizing the next generation of ocean advocates. I heard her idea and I was in.

With guidance from an advisory board that believes in SOA and a team of hardworking students, we built a movement from scratch. Our plans came to life in less than a year: SOA's inaugural summit brought together some of the most influential figures in marine conservation, including Under Secretary of State Cathy Novelli, National Geographic Explorer Sylvia Earle, Director of Oceans at The Nature Conservancy Maria Damanaki, and National Geographic CEO Gary Knell.

This year, the Sustainable Oceans Alliance has partnered with the State Department and counts on its support to further our vision of empowering youth globally. Secretary Kerry's dedication to youth engagement and our shared desire to create impact will come to fruition this Thursday and Friday at the Our Ocean, One Future Student Leadership Summit.

At the summit, young participants will have the opportunity to become protagonists in the fight to save our ocean. From committing to coral restoration, to introducing marine environmental science into school curricula , action pledges submitted by summit participants can effect change on a large scale. In aggregate, these actions will improve ocean health.

Philippe Cousteau wrote recently that youth are the hope for our ocean. We need to show Millennials that the horizon of possibilities is as vast as their vision is bold.

The Sustainable Oceans Alliance, which started as a small group of committed students, has launched petitions that were delivered to the White House and the UN. They helped expand the Pacific Remote Islands National Monument and establish a Sustainable Development Goal on oceans. In Barbados, a four-person team took the initiative to create a new Marine Protected Area. One of the team members is only 19.

Empowering more young voices can guarantee the protection of our ocean, and ensure that the wealth of resources and ecosystem services it provides continue to inspire and sustain generations to come. We can restore the ocean so that its beauty on the surface is matched by abundance below. To paraphrase the great conservation advocate Margaret Meade, we should never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens--regardless of their age--have the power to change the world.

This post is part of a series produced by The Huffington Post in partnership with Secretary of State John Kerry's Our Ocean conference and Ocean Unite, an initiative to unite and activate powerful voices for ocean-conservation action. The series is being produced to coincide with the Our Ocean Conference (September 15th, 16th) as part of HuffPost's "What's Working" initiative, putting a spotlight on initiatives around the world that are solutions oriented. To read all the posts in the series, read here. The State Department does not endorse the content of this blog. Follow the conversation on Twitter with the hashtag #OurOcean #MakeASplash.

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gaia

Apparently, it was designed to be 'tongue in cheek'

Keen by Kate Scott