A Climate Change with Matt Matern Climate Podcast

I often joke that the ocean saved me from a light of God knows what, because it kept all of my attention. What defines unreasonable is often the risk that we as humans are willing to bear and how much we’re willing to lose the ecosystem. My focus now is what’s called nature based solutions, looking at climate change in particular coastal zone. Many years ago, my pain crashed on takeoff. Fortunately, I survived.

You’re listening to A Climate Change. This is Matt Matern, your host, I’ve got a great guest on the program, dr, Deborah Brosnan. She has an outstanding career. She’s currently President CEO at Deborah Brosnan and Associates. She’s an expert in climate change, ocean science and resilience, an advisor to public, private and tech sectors, visiting scholar at Stanford University, past board chair at the UC Davis sea dock, on and on. She’s appeared on all kinds of TV shows. CNN, BBC, Fox, Oprah, board member, Patty aware, she’s done it all. So great to have you on the show, Dr Brosnan.

It’s my pleasure to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

So tell us about your career. Like to start at the beginning, like, what was the beginning of your story in terms of leading you on the arc towards environmental science and advocacy.

My story is growing up in Ireland, on the west coast of Ireland, and spending my childhood on the rocky shores of places like little key and Galway and literally exploring for hours and being in the ocean and and just falling in love with the sea, it was really that simple seeing the connection we had to nature. You know, I often joked that the ocean saved me from a life and God knows what, because it kept all of my attention. So it’s really I owe the ocean a lot.

Well, that is beautiful story. My mom’s family, both her mother and her father were 50% Irish, so I’ve got only 25% in May, so it’s watered down a little bit, but certainly have a great affection for Ireland. It is a wonderful country and an important 25%

Yes. So tell us then, where did that lead you, in terms of school and then your academic achievements, where you took them out into the world and really used them for great purposes?

Yeah. So my undergraduate was in Ireland at University College Galway, and I was working on fisheries for my masters as well, looking at this emerging fishery for spider crabs. And that really made me aware that we can’t divorce nature and ecosystems from humans because we’re so intricately connected with them, and it’s how we manage them and how we manage that relationship that’s important, and that science had a huge role to play in this applied world, particularly now with climate change and everything else going on in the world.

But then I went to the States for a couple of years working on the project to help define in scientific terms unreasonable How can you detect when you’re unreasonably degrading a marine environment, which came from the Team Water Act, and that led me to a PhD, and I thought I would want a career in academia. That was where I thought I was headed, and I did, for a number of years, be a professor.

But I found that What really excited me and what really drove me was not just the pursuit of knowledge, but the use of that knowledge, and bringing that knowledge into the real world, into people who need to have that information, where you need to have the dialog, and might not necessarily be hear it otherwise.

Well, that kind of sounds like a legal argument here unreasonable, and it’s certainly a legal concept that we lawyers use all the time, and it’s kind of fascinating how scientists are helping define that in the Clean Water Act, and what makes something unreasonable. And maybe you could tell us a little bit more about what makes unreasonable unreasonable.

Well, I think to me, that’s where the intersection gets really interesting, because science can give you the data and you can detect changes in systems, but what defines unreasonable is often the risk that we as humans are willing to bear and how much we’re willing to lose the ecosystem, how much we’re willing to let the ecosystem change. And the science can tell you what is happening with species. Can tell you what’s happening with ecosystems, but the decisions really are societal ones, and that’s where I think the beautiful nexus between the scientific knowledge and how the community uses that knowledge starts to come into play.

Well, we’ve seen certainly a tug back and forth on this for well over 50 years, in terms of the environmental movement up against governments and trying to set reasonable boundaries for what kinds of pollution should be allowed, and it seems as though, certainly in the United States, that those boundaries are being pushed in the wrong direction currently. And what are your thoughts on that, and how we can make sure that that doesn’t continue? Continue?

Yeah, I think we are in a very pivotal point in the US, in the sense that it seems like the gains, if you like, or the understanding of that was happened in the let’s say the 1990s 2000s are now facing a pushback, and we see it particularly with climate change. Now the US government, effectively has pulled out of the cop agreement, Paris Accord, and is looking at other rolling back other regulations, and where I think what’s going to happen now is other sectors have to step in, and that is the private sector.

The NGO sector has always been at the table. The academic sector is going to have to take a larger role. So in essence, the board has been created. And I think the voices of the other, if you like, team members, are on that table need to be heard more loudly.

Well, how is that going to happen? And in the face of strong governmental opposition to these things, maybe just looking at your specialty in terms of water protection, what rollbacks have occurred in the current administration, and how can those be challenged effectively.

I think there’s no doubt that we are pushing uphill at the moment, and the only way that we can challenge them is to show up, really focus on the data and to build teams and to try and educate and that has really been the way that US has led for many years and dealt with pushbacks before, and I think we still have to do the same.

Right. So tell us about your work currently, and what are the causes that you’re most engaged with.

So my focus now is what’s called nature based solutions. And so I’m looking at climate change in particular coastal zone, and what’s happening to our coastal zone, and how do we deal with that? And it ties into what’s happening with our ecosystems. So nature based solutions, just to give you a definition of that, is it’s really looking at the services that nature provides us for free, and that is everything from coral reefs breaking 95% of waves energy, keep sand on the beach, protect our coastlines, to marshes and mangroves, filtering sea water to sea grass beds helping with sand.

So it’s really all of these services we get from nature that have been our original technology and provide a lot of value to us, and we’ve tended to take them for granted. And we have also degraded ecosystems to the point where, I mean, the coral reefs are a good example, where they can’t provide the same level of service. And so it’s understanding what that service is and working to restore it.

So what are some wins in that area that you worked on?

So a couple. I think one of the very first ones that I worked on was in the Caribbean, where I still do a lot of work today. And an oh, one wonder man who bought this property was effectively a beach front for a half mile of beach. And the beach was really degraded. The Dune was flattened because it had been very heavily very heavily overused. There was almost no vegetation left. And so the sea was coming in very close to the property, and his first thought was to build a seawall.

So the then president the island said, you know, what do you risk you? Why don’t you talk to me? And we had a great conversation, and I explained that if he built a sea wall, what would happen is, yes, he would protect his property, but you would lose all the beach because sea walls will speed up the water and it takes away the sand. But by restoring the dune, you could have the same level of protection. You could also privacy, build back the vegetation, and that vegetation holds the sand in place.

And I explained that if you had storms, the storm would come in and take the beach away to the dune, but return the sand very quickly, and so he agreed to do it, and within a year, we’d restored pretty much a half mile of beach with a 12 Foot Dune, in some places, 14 feet. So it looked beautiful, and the sand was on the beach. But was more important was that Dune, which stood four hurricanes, and then along came hurricane Irma, one of the strongest hurricanes on record.

And hurricane Irma beat up that dune like for hours, and it looked like it had been beaten up like on 12 rounds in a ring, but it held the line, and literally held the line against one of the strongest storms in history in the Caribbean. And the insurance adjuster came down and said to the property manager, had you not rebuilt that Dune, all of your buildings, your property, would have been in the water. So to me, that was a $200,000 investment protected an $89 million property. I think that was a good outcome for him, and it was a great outcome for nature, because we built the dunes, and other people have gone, wow, we should do that too. So that was very cool.

I guess the question is, are we going to be able to build enough dunes to protect the islands in the Caribbean against these monster hurricanes. And I know there’s some litigation regarding hurricane Maria that hit Puerto Rico saying that the oil companies and their pollution exacerbated the storm so that they were stronger and more deadly.

Yeah, we’re seeing well, first of all, the not the entire Caribbean has dunes, but a lot of areas, you can see where those dunes have been affected previously. Some of those dunes can be 3040, feet tall, and some of them have been sand mined, because sand is a valuable resource there, and it’s often the only resource. So I think we can in air. Is where those dunes make the difference between protecting your property, protect your investment, protecting your community.

It is very possible to restore the dunes, but that’s something that has to be factored into if you’re doing a development, if you’re a government, that it has to be part of, like if you like the pro forma and part of the whole plan. How do we build in resilience to what we’re doing? In the first place we should turn to is nature, because nature has been doing it for eons. And so, yes, we can certainly rebuild, we certainly rebuild the dunes.

Well, in terms of making the changes so that climate change doesn’t get worse than it already is, what are the things that you’re working on that are towards that end?

So you know, ultimately, we have to look at Greenhouse gasses, and ultimately, we have to look at the way we’re managing our ecosystems. We focus on the ecosystems, and what I’m working on right now, it’s a program that I started with a man called John Paul DeGioia a couple of years ago, and that is to look at coral reefs. So I mentioned them a little earlier too. So basically, coral reefs have been protecting us for time immemorial. So coral reefs are these great big structures. They’re like architecture.

They always remind me of somewhere like New York, where I am today. When I walk down New York, I think it looks like a reef. It’s a big structure, and you’ve got the penthouse and the basement, and these corals create those kind of structures. And you have the fish, like the predators that like to live on the top, and the lobsters that like to live in the basements, and every all the species have their own place on that reef. And coral reefs support 25% of marine biodiversity globally. So they’re really important for biodiversity. They’re important to our fisheries. They’re important to really holding a lot of the ocean together.

Now they’ve been in decline for many years, to the point we’ve probably lost between the third and a half of them. And when we lose that much reef, we lose two things. We lose the structure. So the structure the reef doesn’t continue growing, which means it’s lower down, and we lose the habitat and the biodiversity and the value. So when we’ve been losing these reefs, the storms come in. The reef is not as resilient, so the reef gets mashed up. The storm comes in stronger, further, faster, so it comes in and it inundates the land.

It causes more damage. So what we’ve been doing is looking at these reefs and saying, what exactly is it about the structure if we were to go to places where the reef is dead, or to places where we’re seeing high sea level and sea level rise, and we’re seeing a lot of that in the Caribbean and islands. And we wanted to create a protection what could we do from a nature based solution?

So what we’re looking at is, how do we design these reef structures? How big should they be? How wide should they be, so that they fulfill the service or the value that a reef had done in that place before, or can do going forward? And so you get not just the protected value, but you also get the biodiversity value and the amenity value. And when you think that a lot of these Caribbean island to small island states, 55 to 80% of their GDP comes from beach tourism, there’s a very strong economic argument as well to be made for this.

That is pretty remarkable, that it is that high? I didn’t realize that 55% of their GNP was attributable to to tourism. In terms of the fisheries in the Caribbean and that area. Are you seeing a lot of degradation of the fisheries, or are they being reasonably well managed? Or is overfishing going on that is unsustainable?

Yeah, it depends on where you are, to be honest, but overfishing has been a huge problem in the Caribbean going back to the 1960s there’s some studies coming out that show that about the mid 1960s that overfishing was already taking place in certain areas, and that has continued. I worked on setting up a marine reserve in st BARTs, for instance, and we, when we did the first set of surveys, there were no grouper anywhere on the reefs. And grouper are they’re the top predator on the reef.

They’re a major part of the fishery. And that’s not unusual for the Caribbean to see a reduction in group or to see a reduction in parrotfish. So the Marine Reserve did actually help to bring back grouper because they were protected in the reserve. But what we’re seeing around the Caribbean is overfishing has led to the reefs being more likely to be covered with seaweed because there’s nothing to graze off the seaweed. So the ecosystem and knock on effects are very strong as well.

But there was more awareness. There’s certainly more awareness now, let’s be honest, the fishermen are not catching as much fish because the reefs are degraded and the fish are overfished. So there’s a real awareness among the fishing community that this livelihood cannot sustain the way it is. So we’re seeing more interest in taking care of nature, but we need to see more, and we need to see it faster, right?

I was talking to another guest here that’s based out of Los Angeles, and talking about the wastewater that is causing algae blooms that are toxic to the marine life, and that’s basically because of human cause, that it’s human wastewater not being treated properly, that it’s causing this algae are you. Seeing those same things in the Caribbean and other areas to your study?

Yes, it used to be a lot worse, to be honest, when we talked about, what’s the GDP? A lot of it is tourism. A lot of the tourism construction, lot of the original hotels. There was not a lot of interest in what happened to the water, because there was a thought that you can’t, you know, the seas can take anything too big to fail, was the idea with the sea. And so we did see in a lot of places, in the Caribbean, particularly many years ago, that the wastewater effluent created these algal blooms and destroyed some of the restructure. I’m pleased to say that that is not as bad as it was, and there’s been a huge effort to clean up.

Well, that’s a good news story. Are you looking into like the Florida area as well. And what are you seeing there?

If you’re studying at all, we’re not working in Florida. Most of my work is in the Caribbean and beyond there. But we are keeping an eye on Florida because the two ecosystems are very similar. So if you look at what’s happened in Florida the last few years, we had the hottest sea temperatures on record over the last summer, I think about year and a half ago, it reached 101 degrees Fahrenheit off parts of Florida. Now that’s the same temperature as a hot tub, which is extraordinary.

And the consequence of that was the corals started to bleach. Means the calls basically turned bone white, because all the zoos and Telly left. And usually, once that happens, the corals very ill. Some of them will survive, but very few of them, and most of them, in this case, died. So we saw 100% mortality of corals in some areas in Florida, and then that spread, and we started to see some of the same in the Caribbean, this huge bleaching event, leading to the death of corals, which is very serious under any conditions.

But when you have a very low density of corals to begin with, you’re losing the adult population for new recruits. So it’s a really worrying situation.

Now, in terms of is that creating a cycle in which the ocean is getting sicker because of all the CO two that’s being sucked up by the ocean, because we’re producing so much CO two, and temperatures are rising and acidification of the ocean is increasing. How can we best deal with this?

Yeah, part of this is, you know, the oceans, as you may know, have absorbed about 90% of the excess heat from CO two, and they are getting hotter. And in getting hotter is changing the ecosystem, and it’s changing the ability of the species to withstand these heat events. And really the only thing we can do, I mean, it’s very hard to say this, but this has already happened. This is not something that’s going to happen in the future.

So what we’re dealing with, the problem today, climate change isn’t on. 10 years time, the oceans will be in this state. The oceans are in this bad state today, and the only thing we can do is to try and protect what’s there, and that includes managing the resources that are whether it’s the reach, whether it’s the sea grass, whether it’s the coastal mangroves around the world, to try and protect those either in protected areas, to maintain the stock of our natural resources.

And the other is to really work on helping some of these ecosystems through transition where we can, because we know the oceans are transitioning. And the third of course, is the one we’re all talking about is really looking at greenhouse gas emissions, and how do we stop this runaway train that we’re on and reduce greenhouse gas emissions and start to stabilize our planet in a way that all of life can thrive together?

Well, in terms of making these changes, nature based solutions, like mangrove restoration, coral reef protection, wetlands restoration, those take money. And are the Caribbean nations funding these? And is there a shortage or gap between what is necessary and what is being done?

There’s a huge shortage. There’s a huge gap, particularly in Caribbean nations, particularly in emerging nations and small island developing states. And part of the reason for that is that a lot of these nations, island nations, are caught in what’s called the debt and disaster cycle. So they go through a disaster, they take debt to start to rebuild and grow, and then they get hit by another disaster. So financially, they are not places that institutions lend money to because they seem like a risky investment.

So the first thing to do for these nations is get them out of that cycle. It’s a tripling cycle for many of them. But secondly, to your other point, is governments understand that people who live in island nations, you don’t have to tell them the value of nature. They’ve been living with it, and they’ve been using it, where we can see the opportunities are for the private sector, private sector that’s coming in to do development.

Additionally, they haven’t paid attention to nature. So by investors private sector, by really bringing them on board and educating them that they need to invest in nature, because nature is an asset and because it reduces their risk, that is one way that it’s funded, because it becomes part of the whole financial model. The other we should look at is the insurance industry.

Because if ever there was an industry that worked on risk and pricing risk and managing risk, it’s that industry, and we are seeing the insurance industry now become interested in you. Nature, there’s a thing called parametric insurance, where they’ll insure reefs against, let’s say, a category three hurricane. If that happens, they expect a certain amount of damage on their payout. But more generally, to have them really be engaged in looking at premium reductions for, let’s say, countries and developers or private sector that invests in these kind of nature based solutions that you can then quantify the value we have just signed, I’ve designed an MOU with the world sustainable Hospitality Alliance, which represents 66,000 hotels around the world, and we’re working with them on nature positive.

How do we get these hotels that rely on nature, particularly on the coastal areas, to recognize that investing in nature is an investment in themselves and their business. So stay tuned for that. We’re excited about a couple of flagship projects coming out. But the thing is that the solutions are there. The solutions are there in the private sector. It’s really a matter of education and getting people on board.

Well, it is fascinating that I had said recently on the show that the insurance industry may lead the way in waking people up because premiums are going up so dramatically around the country and around the world that people are having to take notice that this is costing them, that climate change is costing them Real money every single month, or every single year when their premiums go up. I know I’ve felt it, and I know friends and family, neighbors are talking about it, and I read articles that it’s happening in Florida, and they’re about.

You’re spot on, you’re absolutely right.

Maybe it’ll wake people up. I mean, people have been very asleep about it, but yeah, I’m kind of curious as to whether Florida is doing any of the types of things. I realize some of these island nations don’t have enough money to do it, but Florida certainly would be a much more well heeled government than, say, a small island nation. Are they taking a proactive role in restoring mangroves and coral reef protection and wetland restoration.

Yeah, it’s Florida is and again, it depends on where you are in Florida in terms of the level of investment and how strongly it’s been done. Florida, for a long time, was pioneering coral restoration. That’s a coral species, rather than the restructure. We focus an ocean shot on the structure of the reef, and Florida had been focusing on the species that have been dying. Unfortunately, what happened when the temperature sea temperature rose is a lot of those restoration efforts died.

So there’s a rethink of, how does Florida go back and think about reef restoration? But Florida has very strict rules for mangroves, very strictly sea grass in order to maintain and preserve them. So yes, Florida certainly has been doing something, and there’s a lot of very good scientists down there. There’s a lot of very good NGOs working on it.

So in terms of the role of collaboration and achieving climate resilience, what do you see as your role, and how can you kind of bring about those changes, and who are you working with to help make those changes in the public, private sector and science sectors?

Collaboration is the only way we’re going to solve this. Scientists may have all the knowledge and all the data in the world, but unless we can actually communicate it to the people that matter and get those solutions implemented, all of the science in the world doesn’t matter. And so for me, I feel very strongly that the role that matters to me, the role that I bring is that I do talk to governments. I work very closely with government, particularly island nation governments, but also others.

I work with investors, I work with developers, and my goal is to get them all together and communities, because we can engage communities, get traditional knowledge, but also provide a different kind of job, which is one environmental stewardship and management, things that don’t often exist in the islands. So for me, I see my role as in part, bringing together these diverse sectors. And the communication tool is science. It’s the knowledge. It’s the understanding of what’s happening with nature and why that matters to the different sectors, and how we can come together because we have a common goal.

Well, that’s very important work now, in terms of the problem and why we’ve kind of gotten here, it seems to me that there’s a fundamental lack of pricing environmental degradation into our economic model. So we just didn’t price the loss of mangroves or things like that into our economic models, and so we didn’t care as much as we should have when we destroyed them or destroyed reefs and things like that. What are the chances of really effectively pricing nature into our system so we take better care of it.

I think we’re starting to see that be more accepted and more recognized. Now it’s always been, particularly in the conservation and environmental and science community, almost like a slippery slope. Does nature have inherent value, or should it be in the value chain itself? And I don’t think it’s an either or, but we have failed to put value on the amount of protection that we give us, the way that marshes filter water and the clean water that it gives us, the fact that a tree has more value standing often than it has been cut down.

But none of those have factored, as we said, it, into the there’s no line item for nature in terms of cost or cost and benefit. I think that is beginning to change, mainly because we are seeing the consequences. Parts of the East Coast are seeing barrier islands disappear. People are seeing what they consider what they took for granted, the natural world they took for granted, begin to change and disappear. And it’s that sense of really understanding of loss and seeing the loss, but also it’s affecting the business cycle. If you have a, let’s say, a hotel or large building on a coastal zone that is suffering sea level rise or storms, there is a risk and there is a cost, not just from the damage, but the recovery time.

So we’re beginning to see a shift in nature being in the value chain. And interestingly, like King Charles in UK, has been talking for many years about nature and the value chain, and set up the sustainable markets initiative specifically to bring in nature and sustainability into the private sector. And that whole effort is moving forward. So we’re seeing it more and more. It is not mainstream yet, but I believe it’s getting there.

Yeah, it’s definitely made a tremendous move from where it was when I was in economics classes in the early 80s, certainly wasn’t talked about that I could recall, so it wasn’t a thing at all. You’ve had an incredible career working at the intersection of science, sustainability and climate resilience. Can you think back to a pivotal moment when you found your drive to tackle climate change.

Yeah, I can actually, I remember it quite well, and it was an interesting story. I was many years ago. I was coming back from a coral reef conference in Southeast Asia, and we had refueled to fly to Los Angeles, and we were in the middle of a hurricane, and my flight plane I was on, crashed on take off, and fortunately, I survived, but I found myself to six days with only the dress I was wearing when I crawled out of the plane. And a lot of local people showed up. And they showed up with what they could people came to pray. People came within long of money so you could buy food. Shortly afterwards, the Southeast Asia tsunami dropped in 2004 and I thought hard time to give back.

So I got together some scientists colleagues, I’m affiliated with caddy on their board, caddy aware, the professional diet associations, and we had some funding, and we worked with communities around Southeast Asia to clean up the reef, rebuild that relationship, do some restoration. And I traveled throughout that area, and what I saw there changed my world view, and it had to do with the strength of nature. So if you were somewhere near Banda, where the waves were 8090, foot tall, there was no infrastructure, nothing that could save those coastal communities. But as we moved away, 1000 miles away, when you’re in Sri Lanka, for instance, or the Maldives, what was really evident was those communities, those nations, that had protected their reefs and their ecosystems, had less damage.

The waves came in. It did not come in so strong, so far, so fast, and not only did they have less damage, but their resilience, their ability to bounce back, their downtime, is less. Now, that’s an observation, but there were several studies done after that showing that, for instance, in part of the Maldives, the Mallee, these reefs, were able to reduce wave action, wave force in the tsunami by 60% a place in southwest Sri Lanka, where I was, where the reef had been mined, you had waves coming in at eight meters, three miles down the coast, or three kilometers down the coast. There’s a beautiful coral reef protected zone. Reefs were intact. The waves came in two kilometers. That was a difference, sorry, two meters high. That was the difference between life and death in those communities.

And the science backed up the observation, and I came away from there thinking, fortunately, we don’t have a lot of tsunamis, but we do have sea level rise, we do have storms, and we do have nature to be that basically that form of protection. And if we can leverage that value and make ourselves more resilient and nature more resilient, this is what we should be doing, and that’s why these nature based solutions are key to the solution for climate change.

That is an incredible story. I mean, thank God you survived that plane crash. Wow, that’s a harrowing story, for sure. And I remember reading about people who were in that terrible tsunami in Southeast Asia back I can’t recall the exact year, but it’s not that long ago and and I assume that maybe they were probably not protected by coral reefs because of people not taking care of them.

In some cases, those waves are so strong that nothing would have stopped the waves. But in those areas, further distance, yes, things like coral reefs, things like mangroves, particularly reefs, made a difference.

Yeah, it might not have stopped them, but slowed them down enough to give people a little. Our time and not be so devastating. Now, how do nature based solutions compare with traditional gray infrastructure like sea walls, concrete barriers, in terms of long term effectiveness and cost? I know you’ve talked about it a little bit, but maybe you can expound on that a bit more.

Well. They stand up very well. In part, they’ve been doing it a long time, but they do stand up very well. So if you look at there’s not been several studies looking at comparing nature based solutions with traditional you want to call gray infrastructure, sea walls and in general, the cost of a nature based solution is four times less than a traditional engineered solution. And we’re seeing that in our own work with ocean shop, where the cost for, let’s say, a square foot might be five US dollars, five and a half US dollars, whereas in some cases, the cost for the sort of sea wall is somewhere between $702,000 now there’s other factors in play, obviously, but it’s a huge difference.

The other is where the studies have been done, and 65% of the cases, nature based solutions have outperformed the traditional engineering solutions. So we’re seeing certainly that the value, and we’re seeing that they do work. And as I said before, you have to know what you’re expecting from your nature based solutions, because sometimes they’re the best, sometimes not. You have to be clear with that, but they are standing up well, the other thing they do is they offer additional benefits. So they offer biodiversity, for instance. So when you’re doing a nature based solution, you’re getting biodiversity, you’re getting other amenities, whether it’s fisheries, whether it’s water purification, whether it’s amenity for people to snorkel on dive on places for them to go. So you get added benefits from nature based solutions. And with some of the engineering solutions, there’s a cost.

So you mentioned sea walls, a sea walls can be very good at protecting property, but because they basically they speed up their water, and the wave just hits against the wall and comes back faster. They take away all the sand. So you can have a sea wall or you can have a beach, but quite often you can’t have both. So you have to take all of those factors into account when you’re looking at the cost and the benefit.

Well, it’s fascinating. I would imagine that a lot of accountants are sharpening your pencils, looking at this stuff and saying, Hey, what’s the best way to design, whether it’s a city or a resort or just about anything, and what do we need to protect this area. So hopefully people start looking at the nature based solutions and taking them seriously, because they are just more cost effective. Yes, I hope so they are and they work. So tell us a little bit. Were you a paddy diver? Do you have a background in scuba diving at all, or in the Caribbean?

Yeah, I learned to dive in Ireland. I was actually the first woman to learn to scuba dive at my university. So it was very, very cool. I did. I used to dive a lot more than I do now. Yeah, diving is, to me, that was, that’s most magical, just being underwater. It’s where I feel at home.

Yeah, I’ve done diving a few times, handful of times, and I’ve enjoyed it down in Costa Rica and also in Belize and here in California. And it’s always amazing.

I did California’s cold water diving. Ireland was cold water diving. Then I came to the States, and we went to Florida on a trip, and I went diving. And I thought never again. It was so lovely. It was so warm. I didn’t have to dress like a Christmas tree to get in. There’s just I’d never been in warm water. It was amazing. So I’d fallen in love with warm water ever since then, but it is great.

That was kind of police experience. It was nice and warm there, and he didn’t even need a wet suit, because it was so nice.

And I think we should get more people somehow to understand the ocean. Because you’ve been underwater, you’ve seen it. I see it quite a bit, but the number of people who don’t see it, and they just see the surface of the water and don’t understand how teeming with life it is, how exciting it is, somehow we’ve got to get that vision, that message, and get more people in the water, because it is, I mean, it’s extraordinary,

and I think also how fragile it is in that I saw like, Hey, You’re not supposed to step on the ocean floor, because there’s so much sea life on the ocean floor that takes long, long time to develop. And if you kind of just stamp your foot down on that stuff, you’re crushing it. So it’s such a delicate environment. And I think that those of us who are land lovers were just not cognizant of how fragile the sea is.

Yeah, you’re absolutely right. And particularly those the calls, and particularly those very delicate branching calls. And now I’d click of a fin, or somebody getting little panicking, standing up, and it smashes it, and that’s near as a growth. It takes a long time for that to grow, and it is. It’s an odd mix. It’s incredibly fragile and yet hugely resilient. The system is resilient. The species are more fragile.

So what barriers do you see in implementing nature based solutions on a larger scale, and how can we overcome them, particularly in developing countries and emerging markets?

So in nature based solutions, we. Have to think about them being as replicable and scalable. And the way we’re approaching ocean shot is to be able to build real structures that we can do anywhere, and deploy them anywhere at a reasonable cost. When we look at nature based solutions, often because they’ve come to the lens of science and the lens of conservation, often these projects are tailored to specific areas and hard to replicate.

So I think first of all, thinking about them is one that we have to be able to transfer to other areas easily and quickly is important. I think the other barrier is, again, obviously funding to emerging nations to be able to see the value in that and get the support and basically grow it and scale it.

In terms of ranking nature based solutions, which of them do you think have the most bang for buck and kind of the most effective that you’ve seen?

It really depends on where you are in the world. So if in the tropics, that’s where you have coral reef and coral reefs, I think bring the most bang for the buck because they do everything from fisheries to coastal protection to keeping sand on the beach to creating sand and that you get a huge value from that mangroves are the other because mangroves can basically, they do help to break wave action, not as well as reefs, but they provide critical grounds for fish and nursery habitat for fish.

So depending if your fisheries are your big issue, maybe mangroves. And if you’re living in a more an area that doesn’t have huge wave action, mangroves can give you the better bang for the buck in the US, over on the east coast, where you don’t have coral reefs, oyster reefs are oyster reefs, and marshes provide very much the same function. So oyster leaves can give you a good bang for the buck in terms of creating barrier, but they also filter out a lot of pollution. So again, it depends on where you are in the world.

Well, one of the things that I’ve talked to people about was creating seaweed and kelp forests, and whether or not that’s something you’ve been involved in, and whether that has a good bang per buck, I haven’t. I’m aware of it, but I haven’t been involved with it. So I don’t think I would be really most confident to answer that question.

That’s interesting. So are there less kelp forests in the Caribbean?

There’s none. So kelp forests are temperate zone. Kelp forests, you get off California, you get off the west coast of Ireland, you get off the northeast coast. So kelp is, yeah, kelp is temperate zone. These big kelp forests, almost like the when in the temperate zone you get a lot of seaweed, like kelp, whereas in the tropics, you get coral reefs. So they’re not exactly equivalent, but almost.

What about on the Upper East coast, where it’s a little colder, I would imagine. Yeah, kelp forest. Oh, they do. Where does that start? In the US?

Oh, so you start north of, you know, if you go to Maine, it’s where you start to see some very good ones, and basically all the way up the coast. So it doesn’t start until Maine, wow. You do get some kelp for a lower down of Connecticut. I think you may get little off Long Island, but not much. But basically, Maine, good cold water. It’s what it likes.

So the jet stream coming off of Florida is strong and keeps that water warm.

Well, the jet stream coming up, yeah. And then it turns around New York, and it heads over to Ireland, and it keeps Ireland in a template. We don’t have snow as much in Ireland. We don’t have ice, even though we’re pretty much on the same latitude as Newfoundland, right? Which is pretty required, it is, yeah.

So I’ve read a little bit about that that could change. The jet stream could alter because of all the things that are happening with climate change, is that something that you’re can comment on, or is that.

Yeah, there’s a lot of evidence, a lot of modeling evidence in particular, and some data that’s showing that there are some changes coming into the jet stream, and really that it’s slowing down. And one of the questions that’s being debated right now is, how, what’s the speed of the slowdown, so to speak, is it something that is going to happen over a very long period of time, or is it accelerating that we should be worried about it in the near future? And the science is not fully decided on that.

But like everything else that’s happened in climate change. We originally thought that the changes that are happening now were way in the future and the changes that have been predicted, but they’re happening faster and they’re accelerating. So I think it’s one to keep an eye on.

So what’s your favorite environmental hack or simple practice that people can adopt to contribute to a greener future, even if from the comfort of their own homes.

I think it’s find the thing that resonates with you, and for some people, it is how they spend their money, what kind of products they buy. For others, it’s supporting causes that they love to support. And for others, it’s literally getting out in the field, and whether planting something or being involved in beach cleanups. For other people, it’s calling your congressman or your senator. And no matter what it is, if it is something that resonates with you, you will make a difference doing it. And the most important thing is to show up do it and do it consistently, and that makes a difference.

So tell us, where are the places that the audience can find you and contribute to the work that you’re doing?

So you can find me in the Caribbean, you know, so we’re working you welcome there. But online, you can find me. I’m on LinkedIn, Deborah Brosnan at LinkedIn. My website is deborahbrosnan.com where we have our ocean shop project, is there as well as the consulting work we’re doing. And you can email me. Best email, because I travel, is info at deborahbrosnan.com

Well, that’s great. What’s a book or a film you’d recommend to those overwhelmed with climate anxiety, or just for those who are looking to get some positive notes as to what’s going on out there.

Some In fact, this book, called Blue Mind was written by Wallace Nichols, who sadly passed away just over a year ago, but it really talks about the power of water to really how water is very healing for us. I think that is a fabulous book. There is the series Netflix on the oceans, which is narrated by Barack Obama. Is wonderful series to watch. And there’s a new one that just came out with David Attenborough, called Oceans.

Well, those are all sound great. Thank you so much, Deborah, for being on the program. It’s been a pleasure talking with you, and you have an oceanic depth of knowledge in these areas. And thank you for contributing that to our listeners. And we wish you well going forward. And would love to collaborate with you, because the work that you’re doing is definitely helping all of us.

Thank you, and I really appreciate what you’re doing by bringing these messages to everybody that needs to hear them.

Thank you, and it’s been a pleasure speaking with you. I look forward to following up.

Well, fantastic. Everybody check out Deborah’s social media and follow her as well as contribute to the causes she’s working on. It’s important work and phenomenal stuff that Deborah has dedicated her life to. So thank you again, Deborah, for joining us. It was great having on the program, and we’ll be following you.

Thank you.

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