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Category Archives: United Nations

Walking In A Plastic Wonderland

June 3, 2017 DReynolds

Some friends of mine just celebrated graduation by going to Bimini, Bahamas and that reminds me of a trip I took over Spring Break to the Abaco Islands. A local fishing guide suggested that my family and I hike through a gumbo limbo forest along what seemed like a secret path through the jungle above a cliff overlooking the ocean until we came upon a private, secret beach. A beach with the most beautiful sand, the most incredible colored water, and coral reef you have ever seen.

The coral reef was amazing in that you could just step off the sand, into the ocean, and swim out a few yards into another world filled with a kaleidoscope of color, fish, sponges, sea fans, and beauty.

But, as pristine as that beach was, and as secluded as it was in that we did not see another person the entire day we spent there, that beach was evidence of a growing environmental disaster that our planet, its oceans, and the creatures living within it face: man-made plastic pollution.

The pictures below are all from that same beach and I should share with you that it wasn’t hard to find plastic. It was everywhere of every size and shape and it was related to everything that you could imagine; from food products to clothing to marine uses to household goods, you name it. It was like walking through a department store and finding a who’s who or a what’s what of things that you and I could buy everyday but that end up in our oceans and on our beaches.

The worst part, perhaps, is that these types of things not only end up on the sand but they all too often end up being eaten by or entwined around one harmless sea creature after another. Not a few, but probably a few million all over our planet and that needs to stop.

The United Nations UNESCO and the World Heritage Marine Programme will be hosting The Oceans Conference next week in New York. According to UNESCO, here are a few plastic marine pollution facts to consider:

Plastic debris causes the death of more than a million seabirds every year, as well as more than 100,000 marine mammals.
About ten years ago, the United Nations Environment Programme estimated that every square mile of ocean contains 46,000 pieces of floating plastic
Seven of the EU States, Norway, and Switzerland recover over 80% of their used plastics. That’s the good news. The bad news is the rest of the world remains a serious issue and has limited to no strategy in place at this time.
Plastics and other forms of litter often concentrate in our oceans and are drawn together by the ocean’s current into what are called gyres. There are five gyres in our world’s oceans now. The North Pacific Gyre is the biggest one, also known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and is about two times as big as the state of Texas.
Currents in the North Pacific Ocean gather litter from North America, Japan, and other areas in the region before bringing them together in the “Garbage” patch.

Stay tuned for more news about the United Nations and UNESCO’s incredible work (including about The Ocean Conference taking place at the United Nations in New York from June 5th through June 9th and World Oceans Day on June 8th) both here and through my social media channels and until then, please think of ways to keep our plastic products out of our oceans and off of our beautiful beaches.

Our oceans cannot protect themselves from mankind’s modern living, that’s up to each of us in our homes, on our boats, or while enjoying a day at the beach.

P.S. Over the last 24 hours, since the President’s announcement that he has decided to remove the United States from the Paris Pact, many people have asked me what I think and what we should do. My answers include staying calm and embracing hope.

The solution to our climate change crisis, in my view, begins on the local level, in the cities and towns all across America and in our States, not so much in Washington but all over America. Implementing local laws will begin to solve the problem and if anyone needed any motivation, then the farce of an announcement should certainly serve as motivation to take to the streets, to visit your local city council, your mayors, your state capital, and demand change. That should be our focus for the next three and a half years until we elect a president with vision for a sustainable future.

Abaco Islands, Bahamas, Bimini, Climate Change, Delaney Reynolds, Eco Warrior, Global Warming, Great Pacific Garbage Patch, Gyre, Marine Debris, Miami, Miamisearise.com, New York, North Pacific Gyre, Plastic, Plastic Pollution, Politics, Sea Level Rise, Sea Rise, Texas, The Oceans Conference, The Sink or Swim Project, UNESCO, United Nations, World Heritage Marine Programme, World Heritage Site, World Oceans Day

Bravo! COP21 Results in a Landmark Agreement on Climate Change

December 13, 2015 DReynolds

Yesterday, December 11th, the COP21 Conference including 195 countries came to an agreement on the need to shift from carbon-based fuels and on a way to do so. This is a start to the type of global progress that we need and while the goals and limitations will not solve the problem, it is, finally, a serious beginning. Congratulations to the world’s nations who came together to begin seriously addressing the problem that threatens our future.

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Children Solve Global Warming at COP 21 United Nations Simulated Climate Negotiations

December 7, 2015 DReynolds

While the world’s climate negotiations are taking place in Paris at the Conference of the Parties (COP21) at the United Nations Conference on Climate Change, a simulated negotiation took place here, in Miami, on December 5^th at the Frost Museum of Science that included 60 high school students from the Upward Bound program along with 120 students from StarBot Academy, Breakthrough Miami’s middle school STEM Program. I was proudly asked to act as a Climate Advisor to some of the children and was assigned to the group that represented the world’s developing nations including Pakistan and the Middle East, South Africa, Brazil, Mexico, and the Island Nations.

The program, which was sponsored by Breakthrough Miami, the Patricia and Phillip Frost Museum of Science, Dream in Green and the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science was a mock-UN climate negotiation that educated the children on climate change including social and economic impacts to the world’s various nations. It was fascinating to see the depth that children as young as middle schoolers undertook in considering how a changing climate will impact jobs, industry, technology, agriculture and, of course, various aspects of the environment. I am not surprised by the children’s understanding of these issues, I see such reactions all the time as I present my Sink or Swim initiative to children, but it sure was encouraging.

Organized by Climate Interactive’s World Climate Project, the children not only learned about many climate related topics but used a policy decision making simulator called C-ROADS (Climate Rapid Overview and Decision Support), which was developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Climate Interactive, the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, and Ventana Systems. The children from each country or group of countries then created an action plan that addressed the concerns of their member nations and then entered into robust, often passionate, debate from the auditorium stage as they argued their position and facts in support of their temperature goals.

It was a wonderful experience being with the children and so many passionate people. I am also happy to report that working together, negotiating with one another, we were able to set climate temperature goals (an increase of no more than 2%) that, if the world’s ‘real’ (current) leaders can accomplish the same result that the children did will lead to tremendous improvement in the future. To the children that participated, as well as the sponsors, thank you for allowing me to be with you. To those who are negotiating the real agreement in Paris, please do your best to set the most aggressive goals possible and know that what you are doing will soon be in the hands of the children that were with us here in Miami and around the world. We, the children of the world, are counting on you and if a bunch of kids can come to a helpful agreement then we expect you can too.