It is time for the public to hold the UN and the world’s nations accountable for the miserable state of the environment and their inability to effectively manage existing “green” governance programs.

An independent non-government organization like the International Union for Conservation of Nature, World Resources Institute or the International Council for Science needs to develop a credible, science-based system for grading all nations and responsible UN agencies’ compliance with environmental treaties and agreements.

More important, the report card should provide the public with a user friendly assessment of nations’ and UN agencies’ efforts to protect clean water, adequate water supply, clean air, sustainable food supply and other critical needs. Perhaps this type of communication tool could be used to embarrass nations and the UN to do more than just sign treaties and contemplate where the world went wrong.

This tool may lead to a global environmental movement that pressures heads of states to make environmental protection a top world security issue. But it must be combined with a concerted effort to educate and activate the vast majority of the world’s population that is impacted severely by degrading environmental conditions.

Perhaps we need to give citizens the right to sue their own governments for multinational environmental agreement violations in international courts. UN officials certainly do not have the will to police themselves.

These ideas may seem like naïve, wishful thinking, but continued pursuit of a UN solution to the world’s environmental ills makes no sense in light of the last 35 years of poor performance.

Does anyone really think that another Rio Conference in 2012 will make a difference?  We already have amazing goals in the Earth Charter (never even adopted by UNEP, let alone the General Assembly) and dozens of multinational environmental agreements. What we don’t have is world leadership ready to take the bold steps necessary to halt the continued degradation of the world’s precious natural resources.

What we need is the sort of bold leadership only seen in times of crisis. Sounds like yet another job for President Obama. I just don’t see another leader out there with the vision, creativity, optimism and eloquence to catalyze the bold changes the environment needs.

Yes, we can?

UN environmental governance programs are failing the Earth

The fathers and mothers of the international environmental movement all met in Montreux this week to reminisce and relive past exploits of green diplomacy at a conference hosted by the  Global Environmental Governance Project.

The list of attendees reads like an environmental hall of fame: Maurice Strong (he of Stockholm, Rio and Earth Charter fame); the other three  former heads of the UN environmental program; Achim Steiner, the current head of UNEP; William Ruckelshaus, the first and fifth EPA administrator; Ambassador John McDonald, the creator of the UN population program and revered negotiator; Mohamed El-Ashry,  the former CEO of the Global Environment Facility;  Ambassador Peter Mauer from Switzerland; Gus Speth, the dean of Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, a founder of the NRDC and former director of the UN Development Group.

The group also included Jim MacDaniel;  former chair of the International Institute of Sustainable Development;  Julia Marton-Lefevre , the director-general of the world’s largest environmental group — the International Union for Conservation of Nature; and numerous other ambassadors, from Pakistan to Sudan.

With such a truly impressive gathering of enviro legends, I expected the debate to be provocative and hopeful. Depressingly, the discussions were like “Groundhog Day.”

The debates over optimizing international governance have raged for over 35 years with little change. Everyone agrees that the global state of the environment is at crisis levels and will only get worse due to climate change and the global recession. No James Inofe climate change deniers here.

Yet, they may as well have been. All of the old excuses for lack of environmental progress and problems were trotted out again, mutliple times: UNEP is grossly underfunded. UNEP has no effective compliance assurance programs. (Enforcement is a taboo word with these guys).  Nations in the Northern Hemisphere (developed) and Southern Hemisphere (developing) can’t agree on the importance and role of sustainable development in environmental protection.  As a lowly program, UNEP and the environment are a low priority in the United Nations, with heads of state often ignoring environmental issues. No adequate capacity building and project funding in the south.

At the end of the conference, you’d think my biggest question would revolve around what we can do to enhance international governance so that treaties and multinational environmental agreements (MEAs) are implemented in a manner that leads to compliance.

Instead, I wonder how can these same people argue and negotiate over identical issues for over three decades? I’m not sure if it is patience or insanity.

Ambassadors were correcting each other on the sequence of events 35 years ago. I felt like I was watching a dramatic treatment of the Dr. Suess book “Yertel the Turtle.” These diplomats and leaders were rehashing historic hot issues and reasons for the ineffectiveness of global bodies like UNEP. At the end of the discussions, the debates were over control of an ineffective bureaucracy  (like the small pond in the children’s book).

Suggestions to enhance compliace with MEAs by putting in incentives, disincentives and sanctions fell on deaf ears. Enforcement has been stricken from the vocabulary of diplomats because of sovereignty concerns (perhaps just a euphemism for not wanting to spend the money and do the work to comply). Although many agreed with the need for conflict resolution, mediation and management, no UNEP types committed to including compliance assurance provisions to all treaties and MEAs.

Bottom line: The Earth is going to hell and the UN and its systems are not effective players to save it. How depressing is that? Where are the 6.7 billion people on Earth supposed to go to make the necessary dramatic change?

Numerous wondeful agreements have been signed by all of the critical nations, but signing a treaty doesn’t protect the environment. The system shouldn’t allow nations to sign MEAs with no intent to ever comply with requirements.

MEAs like the Kyoto Protocol have no teeth or meaningful enforcement provisions. One of the few MEAs with teeth, the Montreal protocol on CFC reduction, has been effective because it has enforcement provisions, strong monitoring, and incentives and disincentives to avoid compliance. But when asked why UNEP or another entity in the UN system doesn’t modify MEAs to make nations accountable for implementaion requirements, UNEP staff acted like the questioner had sprouted horns and demanded a completely healthy planet by next Tuesday.

Tomorrow: More from Montreux and what needs to be done to fix this mess.

Current and previous UNEP Executive Directors (seated). Photo: Suzanne Biegel

Over the weekend, I went down to Montreux on the Lake Geneva shoreline. I didn’t see Zappa, but I did witness environmental history. For the first time ever, all five people who have served as executive directors of the UN Environmental Program (UNEP) attended the same event.

Maurice Strong, the founder and father of the Stockholm Conference and the Rio Earth Summit, is in Montreux. He’s joined by current director Achim Steiner, and past directors Klaus Topfer, Mostafa Tolba and Elizabeth Dowdeswell.

They are joined by a who’s who of UN environmental dignitaries to discuss the future of global environmental governance. With the Copenhagen climate change summit just around the corner in December, there’s an urgency to coming up with real, tangible recommendations to fix the ineffective, fractionalized system we have in place right now.

UNEP is underfunded, not empowered, and has struggled with the task of effectively coordinating over 500 multinational environmental agreements. And UNEP is not providing the essential function of ensuring accountability through environmental assessment, compliance assurance and enforcement.

The kudos for pulling off this gathering of enviro legends goes to a young professor at William and Mary, Maria Ivanova. She has worked with Dan Esty and Gus Speth from Yale, the Swiss government, the UN and others to partner on this critical endeavor.

Now that the band is back together, I hope that the inspiration of the Swiss Alps and Lake Geneva are enough to come up with some hard-hitting global environmental governance reform recommendations. We sorely need to hold nations and corporations accountable for the fate of the planet.

Last night, the Santa Monica City Council took statewide leadership on the single-use bag issue by opting to fund an EIR that needs to be completed if the city is to adopt its long-awaited ordinance to ban plastic bags and charge a fee for paper bags at retail outlets.

The measure has been stalled by a recent misguided court ruling that required cities’ to complete EIRs if they wanted to remove single-use bags from their borders.

With a slew of progressive cities faced with the prospect of funding individual EIRs, the state’s Ocean Protection Council had set aside $70,000 for a Master Environmental Assessment to provide cities and counties with the environmental impact information needed for them to easily comply with the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) requirements.

Unfortunately, the Governor froze OPC funds for the assessment due to the budget crisis.

As a result of state inaction, the Santa Monica City Council stepped into the void last night by unanimously approving $60,000 in funding for an EIR.

The city already had the strongest single-use bag reduction ordinance in California, but council members delayed their final vote because of the Save the Plastic Bag Coalition’s successful CEQA lawsuit against Manhattan Beach over its plastic bag ban ordinance. Richard Bloom introduced the funding measure, with strong backing from fellow councilmember Kevin McKeown.

Now Santa Monica will complete the EIR and a nexus study to determine the appropriate paper bag fee and use of fee funds. When these studies are completed, Santa Monica will likely approve the draft ordinance and set a statewide example for how local government can provide environmental leadership on the plastic marine debris crisis. Hopefully, the ordinance and studies will be approved by the end of the year.

It’s reassuring to see that Santa Monica leaders haven’t been intimidated by the plastic industry, nor were they complacent in waiting for marine debris leadership from the state.

California halibut is now on reduced consumption list because of contaminant levels

The state Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) finally released its health advisory and safe eating guidelines for fish caught from coastal areas from Ventura Harbor south to the Dana Point area. The results do not bode well for those that regularly eat locally caught coastal fish.

The recommendations are based on a NOAA/EPA fish contamination study of DDT, PCB and mercury contaminant levels in fish collected over five years ago. The agency used some supplementary fish contamination data from Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts and Los Angeles monitoring programs as well. 

DDT and PCB manufacturing was banned over 30 years ago, but there are still over 100 tons of DDT and PCBs contaminating the sediments off of the Palos Verdes coast.

Despite the fact that OEHHA unconscionably chose to set the cancer risk for fish consumption at 1 in 10,000 (1 in 100,000 to 1 in a million is the norm and those ranges are the risk levels used by EPA), the health recommendations are pretty far reaching.

From just south of Santa Monica Pier to Seal Beach Pier, OEHHA recommends that women 18-45 and children under 17 stay away from eating white croaker, black croaker, barracuda (due to mercury contamination – a big driver of risk in this fish), barred sand bass and topsmelt.  Yes, topsmelt.

On top of those disturbing recommendations, those same groups shouldn’t eat California halibut, sargo, California scorpionfish (sculpin), rockfishes, kelp bass or shovelnose guitarfish more than once a week. 

There are even strict warnings of not more than two meals a week for Pacific chub mackerel, corbina, yellowfin croaker, queenfish, surf perches and opaleye for young women and children. 

Basically, the guide is saying that women of child-bearing age and children should reduce or avoid eating most fish from central Santa Monica Bay to Palos Verdes to all of San Pedro Bay.  That’s a big difference from the old guidance to avoid white croaker caught off of Palos Verdes.

The recommendations for adult males and women over 45 are more lenient, as are the recommendations for fish caught outside the red zone from south of Santa Monica Pier to Seal Beach Pier.  However, no one should be running out any time soon to catch and eat barred sand bass, topsmelt and white croaker.

Another surprise that should hit home for all of the locals is that California halibut is now on the reduce consumption list:  two meals a week for the migratory, bottom dweller for the entire study area (Ventura to Dana Point).  Not a great outcome for the popular annual Santa Monica Bay Halibut Derby.

Until this health advisory was released, we always had a logical explanation for why certain fish should be avoided for consumption.  For example, Heal the Bay, OEHHA and others warned people to stop eating white croaker caught near Palos Verdes because the croaker was a non-migratory, bottom-dwelling fish that frequented the organically enriched waters (read – near the sewage outfall) over the DDT- and PCB -contaminated Palos Verdes shelf.  Scientifically, it is pretty tough to come up with an ecological reason why topsmelt are so contaminated.  But they are. And so are rockfish, kelp bass and barred sand bass to the most sensitive fish-consuming populations.

OEHHA gave some strange advice on how to enjoy eating fish in a safe manner.  Its consumption advice is based on contaminant levels in skin-off filets. That means that the risk to fish consumers is even higher if they eat whole fish or fish with skin.  The reason why eating whole fish is a bigger risk is because DDT and PCBs concentrate in fat and organs such that whole fish have three to 12 times more contaminants than fish filets. 

So if you want to eat contaminated fish more safely, call over your surgeon friends or start honing ginzu knife skills on topsmelt.  Otherwise, I’m pretty sure that no one is going to filet tiny contaminated fish to reduce carcinogen intake. The reality is that Asian and Pacific Islander fish consumers prepare fish by gutting it, cooking it, and eating it whole. 

Another piece of sage advice offered by OEHHA is to keep eating lots of fish because of the health benefits of Omega-3 fatty acids.  Consumption of fish is good for the heart and for brain development.  Don’t let those pesky carcinogens and neurotoxins (mercury) get in the way of good dietary practices, they seem to urge.  This advice ignores our right to consume fish that is good for us and is NOT contaminated with anthropogenic toxins.  The recommendations from OEHHA, although extremely scary, are definitely fishy in their underestimating of the health risks to substantial sensitive populations.

For a table of full health advisory and consumption recommendations, go to the SoCal Executive Summary.

L.A. County legal strategy puts swimmers at risk

This week, the State Water Board heard Los Angeles County’s appeal on the inclusion of enforceable beach water quality standards in the county’s stormwater permit.  The county appealed the permit despite the fact that the L.A. Regional Board modified the permit nearly three years ago and it has been relatively successful in getting a lot of beaches cleaned up of fecal pollution during the summer months.

The county’s dubious arguments stem from its challenge to putting enforceable numeric limits in the permit.  In the case of Santa Monica Bay, the limits are that every beach along the Bay must comply with fecal bacteria water quality standards 100% of the time from April through October.  Some beaches, like Santa Monica Pier, Dockweiler at Ballona Creek, and Malibu Surfrider exceed limits dozens of times each summer.

The state and the environmental community have correctly argued that the intent of the Clean Water Act is to implement and enforce water body specific standards (Total Maximum Daily Loads or TMDLs) through inclusion of numeric limits in permits.  Otherwise, TMDLs are unenforceable and basically voluntary.

As you can imagine, the county can save a fortune in potential fines for hundreds of violations if the State Board overturns the Regional Board’s action to include numeric beach water quality limits in the stormwater permit.

The hearing in Sacto was a circus and a decision on the matter was postponed to a meeting in July.  The county’s ubiquitous hired gun, Howard Guest, threw every issue imaginable at the board hoping something would stick.

Some board members seemed more concerned about the impacts of summertime dam releases (which are currently unregulated by the Regional Board despite Heal the Bay’s urgent pleas for years) on beach water quality and related compliance difficulties, than the health and welfare of the people that are swimming and surfing in poo-contaminated water.  Talk about misguided priorities.

I sure hope that all of the Board members thoroughly read the record before they make their decision next month.  The data speaks for itself. Many beaches exceed limits on a regular basis and pose health risks to beachgoers – all of which is against the law.

Without the deterrent of enforceable limits, beach pollution will continue to be the status quo at numerous Bay beaches.  The  federal EPA agrees that putting numeric limits in stormwater permits is a legal and effective way to ensure that TMDL requirements are being met. Now the State Water Board needs to support the Regional Board’s efforts to protect the health of the over 50 million people that enjoy our local beaches annually.

Last Friday, the Regional Water Board finally held the long overdue enforcement hearing on the chronic pollution problems at Paradise Cove.  At stake was a $1.6 million fine. The Kissel Co., owner of the mobile home park at the cove, has been violating the Clean Water Act for over 15 years with numerous raw sewage spills and nearly complete disdain for a series of Regional Board compliance assurance actions. In addition, the beach at Paradise Cove consistently ranks as one of the most chronically polluted in the state of California, and often receives an “F” on our annual Beach Report Card.

The hearing started at 9 a.m. and went to midnight without a final conclusion.  The marathon included compelling public comment from local Paradise Cove residents, including Kelly Meyer, Dr. Judy Villablanca, Lyndie Benson, Malibu Planning Commissioner Regan Schaar, councilmember Pamela Ulich, Dusty Peak, Nichole McGinley and others, including current and former mobile home park residents.

To a person, we expressed our outrage that these flagrant violations of the Clean Water Act and four separate Time Schedule Orders (timelines with enforceable milestones) occurred for years at the expense of public health at the idyllic beach.

After the public comment, the lawyers for the Kissel Co. and for the Regional Board made opening presentations.  Shockingly, the defense approach by the polluter’s attorney was to blame everyone else for the problems.  Resident sabotage of the sewer and septic system caused the spills. Bureaucratic hang-ups in the City of Malibu led to the snail’s pace of completing the new on-site sewage treatment plant and sewer system. The claim drew a McEnroe-like response of “You can not be serious!” from the audience.

Kissel even played the poverty card to justify inaction over the last decade and a half.  Despite owning about 75 acres of some of the most beautiful coastal real estate on the planet, the Kissel Co. claimed it didn’t have the resources to build the needed facilities.  The lawyer also cited constraints by what California would allow the company to charge tenants for rent and sewage treatment plant and system construction.

(One nugget in the Regional board staff report is particularly galling. The assessed property value of the scenic property? It’s listed at just over $6.5 million, yet another clear sign of what Prop. 13 has done to the financial status of California.)

I don’t get this many excuses from my three children for shirking their chores and obvious responsibilities.

At around 2:30, after watching the excellent prosecution presentation by Regional Board staff and part of the Kissel Co. defense, I left for the day thinking the enforcement hearing was well in hand.  On Saturday, I was in shock to find out that the hearing did not end up with a final conclusion despite going to midnight.

Yesterday, I received the interim order from the Board.  Good and bad.  The final decision on the fine amount for the violations won’t be made until the December board hearing.  Yet another long period of no deterrent for a chronic polluter.

The good news is that the hearing board upheld 15 of the 17 documented raw sewage spills and numerous other violations of the waste discharge requirements.

Now the really bad news.  There is a question in the preliminary order of whether or not the Kissel Co. should incur any liability for blowing off the Time Schedule Deadlines for 18 months to two years.  The question posed is: Can polluters be found liable if they did not discharge raw sewage while they were in violation?

The question is ridiculous on its face, and can jeopardize the use of time Schedule Orders for compliance assurance in the future.  If there is no risk of fines when a time schedule order requires you to build new sewage treatment facilities except if you violate water quality standards, then what incentive is there for polluters to build the new facilities?

At this point, we’ve all run out of patience but we have no choice but to wait for the board’s final decision at the end of the year. To my mind, justice delayed is justice denied.

Yesterday, I went to the Blue Ribbon Task Force hearing on the latest controversy under the Southern California deliberations of the Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA). About 400 people attended the meeting at the LAX Airport Sheraton to battle it out on the issue of retaining a marine conservation proposal among the seven draft maps which currently exist in the negotiation process.

About 350 of the 400 people were sport or commercial fishermen. They were all wearing black, reminiscence of an afternoon in the Black Hole at a Raiders’ game.  Many wore MLPA shirts on which the acronym was spelled out as “Means Less Public Access.” I have to give props to the fishermen for their passion and their numbers.

As the Blue Ribbon circus proceeded, I was struck by the fact that the fishermen should be our greatest allies on these issues. In Northern California, the fishing community has partnered with the environmental community to save the salmon. However, in Southern California, the fishing community has been conspicuously absent on such issues as power plant once through cooling, desalination, wetland preservation and restoration, sewage discharges and polluted runoff. The fishing community benefits dramatically by reducing pollution sources and reducing the extraction of ocean water. If the fishing community weighed in on these issues, they would be a powerful force.

The black shirts won yesterday by getting the Blue Ribbon task Force to kill the conservation proposal. The MLPA leadership flip-flopped on this issue a couple of times before the task force vote. The outcome didn’t upset me as much as the realization that the fishing and environmental communities were adversaries despite the fact that we both want healthy, clean and productive coastal marine waters and ecosystems.

Over the last seven years, Heal the Bay has educated over 70,000 pier anglers on the health risks of eating DDT and PCB contaminated fish. Clearly, we have a long history of working with the fishing community on an environmental issue. Unfortunately, that history hasn’t meant much in the MLPA process so far.

Now that the conservation proposal is gone, there are six alternatives left and four of them are nearly identical and protect minimal areas of lower quality habitat. These proposals go to the Scientific Advisory Team who will evaluate them and find that none of them meet their criteria for an     ecosystem-based management approach to MPAs or even the minimal biological and ecological goals of the Act itself. That puts the scientists in a difficult position to come up with comments and recommendations.

The next few months will continue to be contentious. MLPA leadership acknowledged that the negotiations process needs to improve dramatically to achieve success. We’ll see if they provide the management leadership to make this happen.

Personally, I’m skeptical about the chances of a successful negotiation unless the environmental community, divers, academics, resource managers, and low intensity sportfishermen (spearfishing, kayak fishing, shore anglers) get on the same page.

Heal the Bay's Orrala, center, with other honorees

The U.S. Environmental Protections Agency recently honored the Palos Verdes Shelf Fish Contamination Education Collaborative by awarding the group its National Citizen Excellence in Community Involvement Award.  Heal the Bay has been a member of the collaborative since its inception and our Pier Outreach Program has been one of the cornerstones of the effort to educate fish consumers in the Southland about the health risks of consuming DDT- and PCB-contaminated fish. The Pier Outreach Education Program, led by HtB staffers Frankie Orrala and James Alamillo, has educated more than 70,000 anglers at piers and jetties from Santa Monica to Long Beach on contaminated fish issues since 2002.

As a reminder, the PV shelf is home to America’s worst DDT hotspot.  More than 110 tons of DDT remain in the sediments today, spread over an area of approximately 7 square miles. The EPA plans to release its long-awaited remediation plan for the PV shelf this summer.  EPA, resource management agencies and the Department of Justice sued numerous chemical corporations and local government agencies under Superfund for natural resources damages.  The final settlements totaled nearly $140 million.  Some of the settlement money funds activities to reduce DDT and PCB exposure to people who eat locally caught fish.  The money helped fund the creation of the collaborative to reach out to subsistence and recreational anglers, markets that sell fish that could be contaminated like white croaker, and consumers that frequent those markets.

At a Washington, D.C. ceremony, Barry Breen, the Acting Assistant Administrator of the Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response, presented the award to the group. Among the collaborative members on hand:  Yolanda Lasmarias, Dr. Howard Wang, Hee Joo Yoon, Frankie Orrala, Cabrillo Marine Aquarium, St. Anselm’s Cross Cultural Community Center in Garden Grove, and Boat People SOS – Orange County.

“The EPA commends the Palos Verdes Shelf Fish Contamination Education Collaborative for its commitment and dedication to communities at great risk, especially non-English speaking communities, affected by the Palos Verdes Shelf Superfund site located off the coast of Los Angeles,” said Breen. “The EPA’s Citizen Excellence in Community Involvement Award recognizes individuals and the community groups working collaboratively with the Agency to address environmental issues.”

The outreach team also discussed fish contamination and public education issues with numerous Congressional and White House environmental staffers.  The week marked a professional highlight for Orrala, an Ecuadorian marine biologist.  This was his first trip to the capital and he’ll remember his warm reception, accepting a prestigious award, meeting with Council of Environmental Quality staff, and hob nobbing with Congressional staff in the halls of Congress for years to come.

More importantly, he and the rest of the collaborative members can take ongoing pride at being at the absolute forefront of efforts to protect public health as a result of the settlement.

Earlier this week a San Diego Superior Court judge ruled that the city of San Diego had two weeks to come up with a plan to evict a colony of harbor seals at Children’s Pool in La Jolla, a breakwater area with calm swimming waters that attracts many families. The judge’s twisted ruling discounted a previous federal order prohibiting removal of the seals.  In his eyes, and the eyes of many locals, the seals are a hazard to children and pose a health risk to local swimmers.  These must be the same sort of folks that are constantly pushing for mountain lion and black bear eradication.

I agree with the locals and the judge on one thing: harbor seals are a large source of fecal bacteria. But the stigma of poor water quality hasn’t hit the region. Heal the Bay refuses to include Children’s Pool on our Beach Report Card because harbor seals are natural sources of fecal bacteria and people haven’t created artificial nuisance conditions to attract the seals, like open garbage cans attracting gulls.

Perhaps the most galling part of the ruling is that the cost of eviction could be in the near $700,000 range at a time when San Diego County has stopped beach monitoring at over half of its locations because of fiscal constraints.  The judge argued that the harbor seals should be removed to protect public health, yet the county doesn’t even have the funds to monitor all beaches, let alone safeguard the health of ocean users.

Let the harbor seals stay.

There has to be a place to enjoy the wonders of wildlife besides the San Diego Zoo and Sea World.  Besides, I don’t think the locals at the Bay Area’s Pier 39 have suffered much because of the sea lions on the docks there.  It has become a tourist attraction for San Francisco.  San Diego and La Jolla should embrace the harbor seals as a natural and entertaining addition to a beautiful coast.