Reefs At Risk

TRANSCRIPT:

Tourism is Hawaii's number-one industry and we are very grateful to have visitors come from all over the world to

enjoy our beaches and the rest of our natural resources

however the marine environments around an island are very fragile and so the more visitors that we have the more of an impact they have on all of our beaches.

We started noticing declines in coral reefs around 1980 1985 which is about the same time that personal care products like sunscreen lotion were used prominently by tourists going to these beaches and visiting these coral reefs.

What we're doing is we're looking at oxybenzone a common UV chemical found in many sunscreen lotions and aerosol sprays oxybenzone can cause an adverse effect in coral at 62 parts per trillion

That is equivalent to one drop of water in 6.5 Olympic sized swimming pools so you don't need a lot to cause a lot of damage.

The researchers that offer this revolutionary paper they in the lab have seen that these compounds are lethal to coral larvae it also sterilizes them and it bleaches them at a lower temperature by 10 degrees.

What that means is that if we lose a coral to bleaching or if it's damaged just from climate change it can't recover.

Corals are animals they actually have a basic immune system that is a lot like humans they react when they're being stressed out they're white they're stressed it's a lot like us when we're sick we're pale and we're not as healthy and that's what's happening to the coral.  I've worked the last nearly decade on coral health and disease I never thought in my lifetime I would see reefs just completely wiped out by bleaching the level of alarm that I have now is higher than I thought it would ever be.

We lose those reefs we lose a large amount of income from:

·       tourism

·       from biomedical products

·       from coastal protection and

·       really importantly to communities from food.

Oxybenzone is a toxicant.

·      It can cause harm to humans,

·      mammals

·      it causes harm to fish

·      at particular concentrations.

As it relates to human health these chemicals are linked to:

·       causing breast cancer to become more aggressive

·       polluting breast milk

·       causing Hirschprungs deformity in newborns and

·       associated with women's uterine diseases ,

·       threaten male sexual health and

·       can damage DNA.

·       There's evidence that oxybenzone is even showing up in our aquifers in our drinking water.

What we put on our skin is going to wash off and it flows into the ocean whether you're in the middle of the US and the mainland or you're right next to the reef.

Mother dolphins are exposed all the time to oxybenzone because it's they're polluting the marine environment and when the mother dolphins breastfeed oxybenzone that it's contaminating the mother passes on to the baby.

mr. president I rise in strong support of the measure he's pursuing colleagues this legislation is a big step forward for the protection of our coral reefs marine life and human health it will be the first law passed not only in the country but in the entire world to ban sunscreens that contain the dangerous chemicals oxybenzone and octinoxate.

We have these global stressors that in the foreseeable future they're not going away temperature is rising we have increased co2 ocean acidification but there's the local stressors and if we can minimize those we give the corals of far greater capacity to respond adapt and survive so what's the easiest thing you control don't put sunscreens that have harmful chemicals on them you can just put on a long sleeve rash guard you can use lotions that don't have that same impact there's little decisions like that that if we all do collectively is going to help this environment.