by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Sep 23, 2012 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction
By Gaia Vince / BBC News
Global fish stocks are exploited or depleted to such an extent that without urgent measures we may be the last generation to catch food from the oceans.
It has been some time since most humans lived as hunter-gatherers – with one important exception. Fish are the last wild animal that we hunt in large numbers. And yet, we may be the last generation to do so.
Entire species of marine life will never be seen in the Anthropocene (the Age of Man), let alone tasted, if we do not curb our insatiable voracity for fish. Last year, global fish consumption hit a record high of 17 kg (37 pounds) per person per year, even though global fish stocks have continued to decline. On average, people eat four times as much fish now than they did in 1950.
Around 85% of global fish stocks are over-exploited, depleted, fully exploited or in recovery from exploitation. Only this week, a report suggested there may be fewer than 100 cod over the age of 13 years in the North Sea between the United Kingdom and Scandinavia. It’s a worrying sign that we are losing fish old enough to create offspring that replenish populations.
Large areas of seabed in the Mediterranean and North Sea now resemble a desert – the seas have been expunged of fish using increasingly efficient methods such as bottom trawling. And now, these heavily subsidised industrial fleets are cleaning up tropical oceans too. One-quarter of the EU catch is now made outside European waters, much of it in previously rich West African seas, where each trawler can scoop up hundreds of thousands of kilos of fish in a day. All West African fisheries are now over-exploited, coastal fisheries have declined 50% in the past 30 years, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation.
Catches in the tropics are expected to decline a further 40% by 2050, and yet some 400 million people in Africa and Southeast Asia rely on fish caught (mainly through artisanal fishing) to provide their protein and minerals. With climate change expected to impact agricultural production, people are going to rely more than ever on fish for their nutritional needs.
The policy of subsidising vast fishing fleets to catch ever-diminishing stocks is unsustainable. In Spain, for example, one in three fish landed is paid for by subsidy. Governments, concerned with keeping jobs alive in the fishing industry in the short-term, are essentially paying people to extinguish their own long-term job prospects – not to mention the effect on the next generation of fishermen. Artisanal fishing catches half the world’s fish, yet it provides 90% of the sector’s jobs.
Protect depletion
Clearly, industrialised countries are not about to return to traditional methods. However, the disastrous management of the industry needs to be reformed if we are to restore fisheries to a sustainable level. In the EU alone, restoring stocks would result in greater catches of an estimated 3.5 tonnes, worth £2.7 billion a year.
Rather than having a system in which the EU members each hustle for the biggest quotas – which are already set far beyond what is sustainable – fisheries experts suggest individual governments should set quotas based on stock levels in their surrounding waters. Fishermen should be given responsibility over the fish they hunt – they have a vested interest in seeing stocks improve, after all – and this could be in the form of individual tradable catch shares of the quotas. Such policies end the tragedy of the commons situation whereby everyone grabs as much as they can from the oceans before their rival nets the last fish, and it’s been used successfully in countries from Iceland to New Zealand to the US. Research shows that managing fisheries in this way means they are twice as likely to avoid collapse as open-access fisheries.
In severely depleted zones, the only way to restore stocks is by introducing protected reserves where all fishing is banned. In other areas, quota compliance needs to be properly monitored – fishing vessels could be licensed and fitted with tracking devices to ensure they don’t stray into illegal areas, spot-checks on fish could be carried out to ensure size and species, and fish could even be tagged, so that the authorities and consumers can ensure its sustainable source.
The other option is to take humanity’s usual method of dealing with food shortages, and move from hunter-gathering to farming.
Already, more than half of the fish we eat comes from farms – in China, it’s as high as 80% – but doing this on an industrial scale has its problems. Farms are stocked with wild fish, which must then be fed – larger fish like salmon and tuna eat as much as 20 times their weight in smaller fish like anchovies and herring. This has led to overfishing of these smaller fish, but if farmed fish are fed a vegetarian diet, they lack the prized omega-3 oils that make them nutritious, and they do not look or taste like the wild varieties. Scientists are working to create an artificial version of omega-3 – current synthetic omega-3 versions are derived from fish oils.
Fish farms are also highly polluting. They produce a slurry of toxic run-off – manure – which fertilises algae in the oceans, reducing the oxygen available to other species and creates dead zones. Scotland’s salmon-farming industry, for example, produces the same amount of nitrogen waste as the untreated sewage of 3.2 million people – over half the country’s population. As a result, there are campaigns to ban aquaculture from coastal areas.
Farmed fish are also breeding grounds for infection and parasites that kill off large proportions of fish – escapees then frequently infect wild populations. Farmers try to control infestations with antibiotics, but usually only succeed in creating a bigger problem of antibiotic resistance.
Read more from BBC News:
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Sep 19, 2012 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Climate Change
By Inter-Press Service
Limiting climate change to two degrees C won’t save most coral reefs, according to new, state-of-the-art research.
About 70 percent of corals are projected to suffer from long-term degradation by 2030 with two degrees C of warming, the first comprehensive global survey reported Sunday in the journal Nature Climate Change.
The planet will get far hotter than two degrees C based on current commitments by countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, mainly from burning oil, gas and coal. Humanity is on course to heat up the atmosphere an average of three and even four degrees C, according to the Climate Action Tracker, an international scientific monitor. Those temperature levels are what most scientists consider “catastrophic”.
Global temperatures have risen an average of about 0.8C so far and already melted much of the Arctic and generated costly extreme weather events around the planet. Keeping that global average increase below two degrees is only a matter of “political will” not technology, said Bill Hare, director of Climate Analytics, one of the partners in the Climate Action Tracker.
If humanity wants to keep at least half of the remaining coral reefs, then global temperatures cannot rise to 1.5C. “Limiting global warming to 2 C is unlikely to save most coral reefs,” the paper reports.
“We must realise what is at stake as global temperatures rise,” said co-author Malte Meinshausen of School of Earth Sciences at the University of Melbourne.
“Countries must be as ambitious as possible in their emission reductions to give corals a chance,” Meinshausen told IPS.
Coral reefs are considered by many to be one of the life-support systems essential for human survival. For more than 2.6 billion people, seafood is the main source of protein. Corals act as the nurseries and habitat for many fish species, and are vital for up to 33 percent of all ocean species, according to the World Conservation Union (IUCN).
Reefs also provide vital shoreline protection from storms. Without reefs, for example, Belize would suffer 240 million dollars in damage from storms, according to one estimate.
This study used the very latest climate models and applied them to growing science about the impacts of rising temperatures and acidification levels projected in the decades to come, said co-author Simon Donner, a marine biologist and climatologist at the University of British Columbia.
The increasing ocean acid conditions appear to be reducing coral’s thermal tolerance, Donner said in an interview. Tropical corals have a narrow water temperature range in which they thrive. When water temperature rises only two or three degrees, they “bleach” or turn white.
Corals can survive this, but if the heat stress persists long enough – weeks instead of days – the corals can die in great numbers, as they did in 1998 when 16 percent of the world’s tropical corals died.
Emissions of greenhouse gases are not only warming the oceans, they have also made them 30 percent more acidic. The oceans and the atmosphere are intimately connected. When CO2 is released into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels, some of that extra CO2 combines with carbonate ions in seawater, forming carbonic acid. This level of change in ocean chemistry has not happened in millions of years and is beginning to dissolve reefs.
Some corals will undoubtedly survive and some will adapt to the new conditions, although the changes are far more rapid than anything corals have ever experienced, said Donner.
“The bottom line is that humanity will lose the services that corals have provided for thousands of years,” he said.
Even at 1.5 C degrees of warming, only about half corals are likely to survive, the study found. That adds scientific weight to the small island nations’ and other countries’ call for a global target of 1.5 C, Donner said.
Every nation in the world officially agreed to keep global temperature increase below two degrees C at a U.N. climate meeting in Cancun, Mexico in 2010. An alliance of small islands and African countries had lobbied for the global target of less than 1.5 C due to the damages they are expected to suffer if temperatures rise above that mark.
Emissions must begin to decline this decade for either target so it is pointless to debate these targets right now, says Meinshausen. Once emissions are in significant decline, then how fast and how deep those cuts will have relevance for the final target, he said.
“I fear we’re going to miss our only chance to peak emissions this decade,” he said.
Read more from Inter-Press Service: http://www.ipsnews.net/2012/09/deeper-co2-cuts-needed-to-save-corals/
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Sep 17, 2012 | Climate Change
By John Vidal / The Guardian
One of the world’s leading ice experts has predicted the final collapse of Arctic sea ice in summer months within four years.
In what he calls a “global disaster” now unfolding in northern latitudes as the sea area that freezes and melts each year shrinks to its lowest extent ever recorded, Prof Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University calls for “urgent” consideration of new ideas to reduce global temperatures.
In an email to the Guardian he says: “Climate change is no longer something we can aim to do something about in a few decades’ time, and that we must not only urgently reduce CO2 emissions but must urgently examine other ways of slowing global warming, such as the various geoengineering ideas that have been put forward.”
These include reflecting the sun’s rays back into space, making clouds whiter and seeding the ocean with minerals to absorb more CO2.
Wadhams has spent many years collecting ice thickness data from submarines passing below the arctic ocean. He predicted the imminent break-up of sea ice in summer months in 2007, when the previous lowest extent of 4.17 million square kilometres was set. This year, it has unexpectedly plunged a further 500,000 sq km to less than 3.5m sq km. “I have been predicting [the collapse of sea ice in summer months] for many years. The main cause is simply global warming: as the climate has warmed there has been less ice growth during the winter and more ice melt during the summer.
“At first this didn’t [get] noticed; the summer ice limits slowly shrank back, at a rate which suggested that the ice would last another 50 years or so. But in the end the summer melt overtook the winter growth such that the entire ice sheet melts or breaks up during the summer months.
“This collapse, I predicted would occur in 2015-16 at which time the summer Arctic (August to September) would become ice-free. The final collapse towards that state is now happening and will probably be complete by those dates”.
Wadhams says the implications are “terrible”. “The positives are increased possibility of Arctic transport, increased access to Arctic offshore oil and gas resources. The main negative is an acceleration of global warming.”
“As the sea ice retreats in summer the ocean warms up (to 7C in 2011) and this warms the seabed too. The continental shelves of the Arctic are composed of offshore permafrost, frozen sediment left over from the last ice age. As the water warms the permafrost melts and releases huge quantities of trapped methane, a very powerful greenhouse gas so this will give a big boost to global warming.”
From The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/sep/17/arctic-collapse-sea-ice
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Aug 23, 2012 | Climate Change
By John Vidal / The Guardian
Arctic sea ice is set to reach its lowest ever recorded extent as early as this weekend, in “dramatic changes” signalling that man-made global warming is having a major impact on the polar region.
With the melt happening at an unprecedented rate of more than 100,000 sq km a day, and at least a week of further melt expected before it begins to reform ahead of the northern winter, satellites are expected to confirm the record – currently set in 2007 – within days.
“Unless something really unusual happens we will see the record broken in the next few days. It might happen this weekend, almost certainly next week,” Julienne Stroeve, a scientist at the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Boulder, Colorado, told the Guardian.
“In the last few days it has been losing 100,000 sq km a day, a record in itself for August. A storm has spread the ice pack out, opening up water, bringing up warmer water. Things are definitely changing quickly.”
Because ice thickness, volume, extent and area are all measured differently, it may be a week before there is unanimous agreement among the world’s cryologists (ice experts) that 2012 is a record year. Four out of the nine daily sea ice extent and area graphs kept by scientists in the US, Europe and Asia suggest that records have already been broken.
“The whole energy balance of the arctic is changing. There’s more heat up there. There’s been a change of climate and we are losing more seasonal ice. The rate of ice loss is faster than the models can capture [but] we can expect the arctic to be ice-free in summer by 2050,” said Stroeve.
“Only 15 years ago I didn’t expect to see such dramatic changes, no one did. The ice-free season is far longer now. Twenty years ago it was about a month. Now it’s three months. Temperatures last week in the arctic were 14C, which is pretty warm.”
Read more from The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/aug/23/arctic-sea-ice-record-low
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Aug 6, 2012 | Mining & Drilling
By Oliver Milman / The Guardian
A “new frontier” in mining is set to be opened up by the underwater extraction of resources from the seabed off the coast of Papua New Guinea, despite vehement objections from environmentalists and local activists.
Canadian firm Nautilus Minerals has been granted a 20-year licence by the PNG government to commence the Solwara 1 project, the world’s first commercial deep sea mining operation.
Nautilus will mine an area 1.6km beneath the Bismarck Sea, 50km off the coast of the PNG island of New Britain. The ore extracted contains high-grade copper and gold.
The project is being carefully watched by other mining companies keen to exploit opportunities beneath the waves.
The Deep Sea Mining (DSM) campaign, a coalition of groups opposing the PNG drilling, estimates that 1 million sq km of sea floor in the Asia-Pacific region is under exploration licence. Nautilus alone has around 524,000 sq km under licence, or pending licence, in PNG, Tonga, New Zealand and Fiji.
“PNG is the guinea pig for deep-sea mining,” says Helen Rosenbaum, the campaign’s co-ordinator. “The mining companies are waiting in the wings ready to pile in. It’s a new frontier, which is a worrying development.
“The big question the locals are asking is ‘What are the risks?’ There is no certain answer to that, which should trigger a precautionary principle.
“But Nautilus has found a place so far away from people that they can get away with any impacts. They’ve picked an underfunded government without the regulation of developed countries that will have no way of monitoring this properly.”
The mining process will involve levelling underwater hydrothermal “chimneys”, which spew out vast amounts of minerals. Sediment is then piped to a waiting vessel, which will separate the ore from the water before pumping the remaining liquid back to the seafloor.
The DSM campaign has compiled a report, co-authored by a professor of zoology from University of Oxford, which warns that underwater mining will decimate deep water organisms yet to be discovered by science, while sediment plumes could expose marine life to toxic metals that will work their way up the food chain to tuna, dolphins and even humans.
“There are indirect impacts that could clog the gills of fish, affect photosynthesis and damage reefs,” says Rosenbaum.
Activists also claim that an environmental analysis by Nautilus fails to properly address the impact of the mining on ecosystems, nor explains any contingency plan should there be a major accident.
Wenceslaus Magun, a PNG-based activist, told the Guardian that local fishing communities are concerned about the mining and are planning to challenge the exploration licence.
“We are really concerned because the sea is the source of our spirituality and sustenance,” he said. “The company has not explained to us the risks of deep sea mining. They haven’t responded to my requests for information.”
“The government has turned a blind eye to the concern of its own people. We are mobilising people to raise funds to take this to court and retract Nautilus’ licence.”
Read more from The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/aug/06/papua-new-guinea-deep-sea-mining
