In a Hanoi conference scientists expressed that 75 percent of fish stocks are now fully exploited or depleted. According to them warming seas are bleaching corals, feeding algal blooms and changing ocean currents that impact the weather, and rising sea levels could in future threaten coastal areas from Bangladesh to New York.
Peter Neill, head of the World Ocean Observatory, told that the ocean is an essential part of our life and we depend on it for survival in different ways. At this Global Conference on Oceans, Coast, and Islands marine ecosystems and food security remain key concerns. Steven Murawski, fisheries chief science advisor at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), expressed that there is a race to fish, but in wild capture fisheries right now we can catch no more.
According to Murawski each year 100 million metric tons fish catch, and that’s been very flat globally. He added that sustainable aquaculture could help rebuild the stocks and make up the shortfall. Frazer McGilvray of Conservation International, opined that the current plunder is risking long-term sustainability with “too many fishing boats taking too many fish and not allowing the stocks to regenerate.
Neill is on a view that the West with their technology takes enormous amounts of fish and that only the high commercial product and they throw the bycatch overboard, which become extraordinary waste. Murawski explained that the marine life harmed by climate change, which could affect the productivity, the distributions, the migrations.
Ellik Adler of the UN Environment Programme, told that marine pollution has no political borders as the rivers of untreated sewage, factories, refineries, oil industry discharge their effluent into the marine environment, and this causes huge damage. According to him global network of marine protected areas should be set up to manage such disasters.
