News of IEF members

This page is reserved for recent news of IEF members and their activities for the environment and sustainable development. Members are encouraged to send in short news items and photographs. Some of these may also be included in the newsletter Leaves. Older items will be removed as new ones are added.

Three IEF members attended the 11th International Coral Reef Symposium in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on 7-11 July 2008. Dr. Austin Bowden-Kerby, a world specialist on community reef management and coral transplantation for reef restoration, came from Fiji. Elizabeth McLean, who recently moved from Puerto Rico to Buffalo, New York, to study coral reef sponges for a Ph.D., also attended. For IEF President Dr. Arthur Dahl from Switzerland, this was the ninth Coral Reef Symposium that he has participated in since 1972. It is normal that IEF members would be interested in coral reefs; the complex ecology of coral reefs provides a good model for human society. Unfortunately, as many of the papers at the Symposium made clear, coral reefs around the world are threatened by overfishing, pollution, global warming and ocean acidification. One paper documenting this was a 90 year record of reef coral changes in American Samoa built on Arthur Dahl's own research there in the 1970s.