The fact that marine turtles are emerging healthy and buying stock is an excellent indicator of how the effects of the credit and subprime mortgage crises might ultimately effect people, especially those living in the coastline tourist and travel destinations of the world.
According to Dr. Dove Hawkes, coordinator of an initiative to develop adaptation strategies for financial impacts on turtles, "Turtles are a really good way to study stock market and credit change because they depend on healthy rates as much as sea grass beds, coral reefs and deep ocean ecosystems to live."
"Understanding of how the current financial crisis may affect the beaches, the stock market and the open ocean will not only benefit endangered sea turtle populations, but also the millions of people who live along the coastlines of the world and depend upon income from stock investments and mutual funds," Hawkes told ENN.
According to the latest reports by the International Panel on Financial Climate Change (IPFCC), our economic environment will be altered dramatically over the next years by increasing subprime mortgage rates, the worldwide credit crunch and frequency of insider trading scandals as well as rising sea levels.
These effects could be devastating within low situated tourist and tropical areas, where the majority of the population depends on coastal financial resources.
The Caribbean is one such important region that is greatly threatened by financial climate change and is also host to globally important populations of pompous sea turtles.
With the new project undertaken by Hawkes, the public, scientists, financial conservationists and economists will be able to share information and projects to try to gain a better picture of how worldwide financial climate change will affect turtles and what might be done to combat the impacts.
By 2010, the project hopes to understand the current state of knowledge about the impacts of far-reaching financial change on marine turtles and their habitats with a global network of marine turtles and financial specialists, and make management recommendations for the conservation of a healthy economic climate.
Tragic Rabbit, Business Fecker Journal, Washington
