The newly invented trawl, so the peasants who petitioned the English king to ban it complained, “runs so heavily and hardly over the ground when fishing that it destroys the flowers of the land below water”. Technology and ingenuity in hauling fish out of the sea continue to advance in leaps and bounds. But so too does the collateral damage of depleted fish stocks and trashed marine ecosystems. As those peasants showed, humans can be losers too. The coming year will prove momentous: alliances of politicians, environmentalists and even the fishing industry will put forward proposals that for the first time hold out a chance of reversing the degradation and restoring the sea to better health.
The world’s total marine catch peaked in 1996, at 86.4m tonnes, and has gone down since, to 78.9m tonnes in 2011. The decline would have been sharper had not fishing fleets trawled ever farther and deeper in search of new stocks. Anyone for slimehead? You may be tempted if you see it on the menu as orange roughy. Yet the relentless hunt for fish means that the proportion of the world’s fish stocks that are overexploited or depleted has risen from 10% in 1974 to over 30% today.
Waste and destruction on a grand scale are involved in getting fish protein on to humans’ plates. Each day some 40,000 square kilometres (15,400 square miles) of seabed are scoured by bottom trawls, leaving dead zones which take decades to recover. Other techniques are not always better. In his book, “Ocean of Life”, Callum Roberts of the University of York describes the collateral damage involving longlines (marketed as being more sea-friendly than nets) for catching mahi-mahi off Costa Rica. In catching only 211 mahi-mahi for the American market, the longliners left a carnage that included 468 olive ridley turtles, 20 endangered green turtles, 408 pelagic sting rays, 413 silky sharks, 68 Pacific sailfish and a host of other species—and supposedly on turtle-friendly hooks, too. Nor is aquaculture necessarily the answer. Salmon farms pour as much nitrogen into Scottish seas as the untreated sewage of a city of 3.2m. More effluent flows into the East and South China seas from shrimp ponds than from industry. And most of the feed in aquaculture comes from grinding up hauls of wild fish.
About 12% of the earth is protected in some way. At sea, the figure is under 1%
The good news is the tremendous resilience of ocean ecosystems. Given the chance, fish stocks will rebound. With more careful management, more fish can be caught. In 2014 the pressure will grow to ban deep-sea bottom trawling—Iceland stymied such a move in 2006. In particular, the coming year will see a surge of initiatives for marine protected areas (MPAs). On land, about 12% of the earth is protected in some way. At sea, the figure is under 1%. Yet the proportion will grow fast, as public enthusiasm for ocean conservation increases and new MPAs are declared. Such areas are hugely beneficial when they protect places where fish come together, breed or raise their young. Most existing MPAs are small and near the coast, within countries’ 200-mile (370km) “exclusive economic zones”. More ambitious proposals will be for protection far offshore. In 2014 Britain will sign into law the world’s biggest MPA: 320,000 square miles around its tiny South Pacific dependency, Pitcairn (population, 55). More high-seas MPAs in the Antarctic will follow.
Sink or swim
Yet international co-operation over the oceans is held back by poor rules and governance. The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, now over three decades old, brought order out of legal chaos, argues Tommy Koh, one of its architects. But lack of compliance has led to “licensed illegality”, especially poaching, David Miliband, a British former foreign secretary complains. Regional fisheries managers lack enforcement powers on the high seas, and countries are often too weak or disinclined to police their own waters. Technology could help: for instance, by requiring fishing vessels to carry transponders that reveal their whereabouts. Another idea is to put bar-codes on fish when they are caught, so that shoppers know where they come from.
That will not be enough. For one thing, a healthy fish population does not guarantee a healthy ecosystem; yet the law-of-the-sea convention has no provision for biodiversity. And under the convention and the myriad agencies it has spawned (for regulating shipping, deep-sea mining, cable-laying and much more) consensus rules. Everything moves at the pace of a leaky barge.
<strong>Popes John Paul II</strong> and <strong>John XXIII</strong> are made saints
All the while, the demands on the oceans—everything from companies that want to bioprospect for new drugs to whale-watching tourists—are proliferating. Not all interests conflict: wind farms may make natural protected areas, for instance. But the management of overlapping interests is growing more complex.
Much is at stake. Hundreds of millions of people, notably in Africa and Asia, depend for their subsistence chiefly upon the sea. Meanwhile, says Lynne Zeitlin Hale of the Nature Conservancy, an American charity, the sea’s environmental importance is better understood: for instance, in regulating the climate, recycling oxygen and absorbing carbon dioxide. New rules and institutions are called for, in which the need for consensus on every issue does not hold back best practice. The Global Ocean Commission, of which Mr Miliband is a member, will put out wide-ranging proposals next year on governance and other ocean issues, aiming to straddle differences between rich and poor countries. The Economist is doing its bit to foster debate too, with a World Oceans Summit in San Francisco in February. Given the chance, the oceans themselves will do the heavy work of restoring themselves to health.
