Topic > Global Marine Conservation - 1243

Marine ecosystems face many threats, primarily from overfishing, but also from pollution, shipping, offshore wind farms, climate change, eutrophication and more. Pressure on the oceans increases every year, while efforts to limit destructive impacts are disproportionate. Global marine conservation lags far behind land-based efforts. Marine Protected Areas, particularly when they form an ecologically coherent network, are considered one of the essential tools for ocean recovery. Currently, only about 1.5% of our oceans are designated as protected areas, with varying degrees of management, but even considering that the initial percentage of marine protected areas was 0.5% in 2004, there are some signs of improvement. Approximately 70% of marine protected areas production is used directly for human food and marine fisheries play an important role in food security. Part of the world's fish production is reduced to fishmeal and oil used for raising cattle, poultry and pigs and therefore used indirectly as human food. The capacity to catch fish is reflected in the growth of global fish landings, which peaked in the late 1980s at around 90 million tonnes per year. Global fisheries are living on borrowed time. The generally expressed goal of fisheries management: to obtain the maximum yield that a population can sustain. However, most stocks are removed faster than they can reproduce and are therefore actually mined rather than harvested. Coastal ecosystems produce more than 90% of the food provided by marine ecosystems. Coral reefs alone produce 10-12% of the fish caught in tropical countries and 20-25% of the fish caught in developing countries. Making overfishing one of the main problems related to the protection of the sea. Giant ships are now using… half the paper… and conditions to understand the range of applications of MPAs in marine conservation. (Web link) UK climate projections (UKCP09) showed an increase of around 2.5 ºC in annual mean sea surface temperature in coastal waters by 2080, compared to the 1961-1990 average. This increase would lead to an average annual sea surface temperature higher than the highest observations in the past. (http://www.mccip.org.uk/media/18758/mccip-arc2013.pdf) With your help the future could lie in participatory and inclusive decision-making; Since monitoring agreements is difficult, management decisions must have the broad support of most stakeholders, especially fishermen. An important start in this process is to find scientific prescriptions for fisheries management that can be accepted, understood and controlled. (Science and environmental decision making)