Report on state business climate cites need for energy and environmental planning

Bruce Ritchie, 01/02/2013 – 04:13 PM. http://www.thefloridacurrent.com/

A Florida Department of Economic Opportunity report on the state's business climate is calling for a statewide strategy to ensure adequate future water supplies and for a statewide energy strategy to reduce dependence on fossil fuels. 

The Legislature in 2011 passed bills reducing state oversight of local government land-use decisions and eliminating the Department of Community Affairs, while moving state planners to the new Department of Economic Opportunity. The Legislature also directed the new department to issue a report on Florida's business and economic development climate each year before Dec. 31.

While mostly laying out strategies for attracting new industries and creating jobs, the 2011 report made only slight mention of the need for protecting "critical lands, waters and habitats" and addressing potential harm from major developments.

The 2012 report, received Wednesday from DEO in response to a request, still deals mostly with the need for coordination among government agencies to attract new businesses and create jobs. But it also adds a few details about the need for policies dealing with growth management and environmental protection. 

The report says there is a critical need for a more "proactive, effective and collaborative approach" on development and infrastructure decisions at the state, regional and local levels.

DEO calls on the Department of Transportation and Department of Environmental Protection to initiate a statewide process to address economic development, land use, infrastructure and environmental stewardship over a 50-year period.

Read more at http://www.thefloridacurrent.com/article.cfm?id=30921554

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Reef port expansion not justified: WWF

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A Glimmer of Hope for Coral Reefs

by Dennis Normile on 7 January 2013, 3:10 PM. Science Now

Climate change is expected to devastate coral reefs, as warmer oceans are believed to be inhospitable to corals. But corals may be more robust than commonly thought. A number of studies have found coral colonies that endure high water temperatures. Now, a team of scientists has taken a step toward identifying the genetic mechanisms that might be giving some corals a natural resilience to thermal stress.

Coral reef ecologist Daniel Barshis and colleagues at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, took advantage of markedly different environmental conditions in two nearby but separate pools on a reef at Ofu Island, American Samoa. Because of local factors that isolate some areas of the reef from winds and waves that might mitigate temperature extremes, some pools in the reef are highly variable in temperature, with summertime water temperatures topping 34°C, which, depending on other factors, can trigger bleaching, or a damaging loss of the symbiotic algae that corals depend on. Yet Acropora hyacinthus, a common reef-building coral found in these pools, grows faster and is more thermally tolerant than corals of the same species in nearby pools that do not get as hot. The team took samples of corals from both the highly variable and the moderately variable pools and subjected them to thermal stress experiments under laboratory conditions while monitoring the levels of expression, or activity, of a wide range of genes.

Read more at http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2013/01/a-glimmer-of-hope-for-coral-reef.html

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