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Oceans in Crisis by Jo Kuper, Greenpeace International

Over-fishing, climate change and pollution have severely degraded the world’s oceans. An international network of marine reserves is a key part of the solution to this crisis.

Oceans cover more than two-thirds of our planet. Every second breath we take comes from the oxygen they produce. These shared treasures are home to 80% of all life on Earth, from microscopic plankton to the largest of the great whales. Anywhere between half-a-million and ten million species live in the deep-sea, many of them yet to be discovered. Less than 1% of seamounts have been explored.

We do know that the world’s highest mountain is not Mount Everest, but the underwater Mauna Kea which measures 32 000 feet from the ocean floor to its peak. The 31 000 mile long Mid-Ocean mountain range is four times longer than the Andes, Rockies and Himalayas combined.

But the world’s oceans are in crisis. The United States journal Science recently found that more than 40% of our oceans are heavily degraded. Three-quarters of the world’s fish stocks are either over-fished or severely depleted. Human-induced threats to oceans include climate change, pollution and over-fishing.

Climate change is melting glaciers, warming the oceans, raising sea levels and threatening to alter ocean currents. It also endangers the future of key planktonic marine food supplies, including krill. Plastics thrown in the sea can take thousands of years to break down, and are often found entangling birds, fish, and marine mammals, or in their stomachs after being mistaken for food.

Over-fishing is destroying our oceans. For centuries the seas have been considered an inexhaustible resource from which people could take as much as they wanted. Today, thanks to the rise of industrial fishing over the last 50 years, fish stocks are rapidly disappearing. The crisis is exacerbated by high levels of pirate fishing.

In 2006 and 2007, the Greenpeace ship ‘The Esperanza’ conducted a 15-month long expedition, named ‘Defending Our Oceans’. It highlighted the beauty of our oceans and the threats they are facing. From confronting whaling in the Southern Ocean, to tackling pirate fishing in West Africa and the Pacific, to exposing the effects of plastic pollution in the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific, the tour illustrated the need for a global network of properly enforced no-take marine reserves to cover 40% of the world’s oceans.

Marine reserves are essentially national parks at sea. They are areas closed to all extractive uses, such as fishing and mining. A growing body of scientific evidence demonstrates that the establishment of large scale networks of marine reserves is not only urgently needed to protect marine species and their habitats, but could also be crucial to reverse the decline of global fisheries.

Fishing capacity far outweighs nature’s capacity to replenish itself

The fishing industry is worth billions of dollars. In 2004, world trade in fish and fish products was US$71 billion, more than three times the world trade in beef for the same year (US$18.3 billion). A primary driving force behind over-fishing and pirate fishing is a growing demand for seafood in the European Union (EU), Asia and other major markets.

According to Charles Clover, author of The End of the Line, "The global fishing fleet is estimated to be two and a half times greater than needed to catch what the ocean can sustainably produce." Yet, governments and Regional Fisheries Management Organisations (RFMOs) have been slow to listen to scientists, or learn the lessons from the spectacular collapse of fisheries such as the Atlantic cod. Despite repeated calls for a global reduction in fishing capacity, the number of large scale fishing vessels (above 100 gross tonnes) has remained stable at around 24 000, and several nations continue to build (and subsidise) new industrial vessels.

The EU and the International Commission for Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), for example, have both repeatedly failed to take the advice of their own scientific committees. For seven consecutive years, EU scientists have identified North Sea cod as being so endangered that there should be a zero-quota, i.e. that none should be fished at all. In December 2007, the EU, flying in the face of the science, increased the cod quota by a further 11%.

In 2006, ICCAT’s scientists recommended that the quota for Mediterranean bluefin tuna be capped at 15 000 tonnes. ICCAT yet again failed to live up to its name, nearly doubling the quota to 29 500 tonnes. There simply aren’t enough fish to sustain this.

Rich fishing nations invade the waters of poorer countries

Having fished out their own resources, rich fishing nations are turning increasingly to the waters of poorer countries, which are often unable to effectively protect their fishing grounds. Many industrialised nations negotiate ‘sweetheart deals’ for their distant water fleets. Some offer debt ridden countries cash to open up their waters to the ruthlessly efficient operations of industrial fishing fleets.

The UN estimates that the EU is involved in about a dozen of the approximately 100 such agreements known to exist worldwide. Japan is involved in around 40 of these agreements, often misrepresented as ‘overseas development aid’. Modern fishing uses giant ships fitted with state-of- the-art fish-finding equipment that can pinpoint schools of fish quickly and accurately. They are like floating factories, not only catching the fish, but processing, packing and freezing them too. They are equipped with powerful engines to drag enormous fishing gear through the ocean. The fish don’t stand a chance.

Destructive fishing destroys entire ecosystems

Over-fishing affects entire marine ecosystems. Scientists warn that the oceans will suffer profound ecological changes as a result. A recent study suggests that jellyfish may come to dominate some heavily over-fished ecosystems. Destructive practices, such as bottom trawling, can destroy ancient habitats in a matter of minutes.

The wastefulness of modern fisheries is appalling. As much as a quarter of all the sea creatures caught in global fisheries are discarded thrown back in to the sea dead or dying because they are not the intended target. These innocent victims of destructive fishing methods are known in the industry as by-catch. They are also known as fish, whales, dolphins, porpoises, seals, albatrosses and turtles, to say nothing of the lesser known creatures killed in this way.

One hundred million sharks and some 300 000 cetaceans (whales, dolphins and porpoises) are discarded every year. Shrimp fisheries are particularly destructive. Shrimp trawlers in the American Gulf of Mexico alone throw away an estimated 480 000 metric tonnes of by-catch each year more than the total annual reported landings of Senegal.

Discarded catch often includes juvenile fish vital for future stock growth. Purse seining fleets fishing for skipjack tuna, for example, also indiscriminately take young endangered yellowfin tuna. Moreover, while such fish may not command high prices on the market, they could still provide food and income to the peoples of countries such as Tanzania, Somalia, Papua New Guinea and Tuvalu, whose seas are being systematically plundered by distant water fishing fleets.

Pirate fishing aggravates the crisis

Over-fishing and destructive fishing are made worse by illegal fishing, including unreported and unregulated fishing, collectively referred to in fisheries circles as IUU fishing.

The High Seas Task Force estimates that globally, pirate fishing is worth up to US$9 billion. Somalia loses US$300 million a year to the pirates; Guinea loses US$100 million. In the Western and Central Pacific, pirates steal fish with a value of up to four times what the region earns in license fees. Environmental destruction goes hand in hand with illegal fishing. Because pirates operate, quite literally, off the radar of any enforcement, the fishing techniques they use are destroying ocean life.

In 2001, Greenpeace estimated that there were at least 1 300 industrial scale pirate fishing ships at sea. The poorest countries pay the highest costs, through diminished resources and lost potential catches. As if illegal fishing weren’t bad enough, legal fleets practice their own brand of piracy by paying developing countries pitifully small fees for licenses to fish in their national waters. Pacific island countries, for example, get a mere 5% of the US$3 billion their tuna is worth each year.

Lack of funds makes it impossible for these countries to effectively police their own waters. The island of Kiribati, for instance, has an Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) of over 3 million square miles. Yet, they have just one patrol boat donated by Australia which frequently breaks down.

Closing off international water areas between EEZs is critical to the fight against pirate fishing and overfishing. Because these areas are far away from land and hard to monitor, they are all too often easy pickings for illegal fishing.

Pirates often fish in national country waters and then claim that the catch came from international waters. They also use these areas to trans-ship (offload catch) and refuel at sea. This makes it much easier to avoid regulation of how much they have caught, and how much time they have spent at sea. The Greenpeace ship ‘The Esperanza’ is currently in the Western and Central Pacific, challenging the over-fishing of tuna species and highlighting the urgent need for Marine Reserves in three key high seas areas known as the Pacific Commons.

Over-fishing and pirate fishing activities are driven by the growing demand for seafood around the world.

Marine reserves are a key part of the solution

Marine reserves work. In ocean areas that have already been protected, threatened species are returning and there is an overall increase in their variety. Numbers of fish increase and the individual fish live longer, grow larger and develop increased reproductive potential. If they are properly designed to cover crucial breeding and spawning grounds, marine reserves also work for highly migratory species, such as tuna.

Marine reserves are not just about over-fishing, they are increasingly seen as an essential global tool to protect the marine environment from a range of other human activities. They may well prove essential in the fight to help marine systems adjust to the impacts of climate change, and assuring future food security. In a warming world, maintaining ocean ecosystems in as near a natural state as possible makes them more resilient to change.

It is estimated that it would cost US$12 billion per year to create a network of marine reserves. It may seem like a lot of money, but it is equivalent to the amount spent on perfume in the EU and US each year.

Of course marine reserves are only one part of the fight to save our seas. Greenpeace campaigns for sustainable fishing and an end to destructive fishing. We have developed sound strategies to fight pirate fishing. These include calling for regulations to stop ports ‘laundering’ illegal fish, for full control of fishing boats by their host governments and for a ban on trans-shipments at sea. We challenge retailers to ensure they only sell fish caught from legal and sustainable sources.

Greenpeace calls for fairer access agreements for developing countries and for international aid and assistance to be given to these nations to protect their fishing grounds.

Creating marine reserves will do a lot to make these goals achievable. It’s not too late to save our oceans to shift the balance of human impacts from damage and harm to protection and conservation. But we must act quickly. If we want fish tomorrow, we need marine reserves today.