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ENVIRONMENT: Groups Press U.N. to Protect Deep Ocean Species

Haider Rizvi

UNITED NATIONS, Jun 8 2004 (IPS) - Alarmed by new studies indicating the possible extinction of thousands of species in the world’s oceans, international environmental groups are demanding the United Nations take the lead in banning bottom trawl fishing on the high seas.

The push to stop bottom trawling come as more than two hundred environmental and fisheries officials from around the world gather here to attend a series of U.N. meetings on the state of the world’s oceans.

"Bottom trawling is eliminating entire ecosystems and species," said Karen Sack of Greenpeace International, one member group of the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition.

The movement is demanding a moratorium on bottom trawling, the practice of scouring the ocean bottom for fish that have been "fished out" of the upper reaches of the seas. "In the past 50 years, we have already wiped out 90 percent of the top predatory fish species. We are now flirting with a global catastrophe," said Sack.

Bottom trawlers use nets equipped with steel nails and heavy rollers to drag as deep as the ocean’s floor, sometimes beyond one kilometre, gathering the increasingly elusive fish they seek to harvest along with fragile corals, sponges and other deep-sea species.

Environmentalists believe the procedure can destroy up to 95 percent of coral reefs in deep waters. Video images of affected areas and new scientific evidence on the age and slow growth rate of corals (underwater animals whose shells build upon old shells forming coral reefs) suggests their ecosystems can be hundreds or thousands of years old, and are usually damaged beyond repair by the trawling, environmentalists told a media briefing here.

"The deep seas are our planet’s last frontier," said Mathew Gianni, author of a new study on the impact of bottom trawling.

"The least-explored habitat on earth are not the Andes or the remote tropical rainforests of Asia – they are seamounts, deep sea corals, hydrothermal vents and other deep ocean features that are teeming with unique and important marine life. These areas must be protected before they are lost," he added.

The Gianni report, ‘High Seas Bottom Trawl Fisheries and their Impact on Biodiversity’, argues that a small number of countries are destroying the biodiversity of the world’s oceans for relatively insignificant economic gains..

The overall value of high seas bottom trawling is not likely to exceed 300-400 million U.S. dollars annually, or about 0.5 percent of the global marine fish catch, worth 75 billion dollars, it says.

Gianni estimates only 100-200 vessels are involved in bottom trawl fishing.

The report, which was co-published by the World Conservation Union, Natural Resources Defence Council, WWF International and Conservation International, identifies Spain, Russia, Portugal, Norway, Estonia, Denmark, Japan, Lithuania, Iceland, New Zealand and Latvia as "taking 95 percent of the fish caught in bottom trawl on the high seas."

According to Greenpeace International, among these countries, only Norway has taken some measures to stop the practice.

"It’s not right that a single method of fishing being practised by only a handful of nations could cause the extinction of species unknown to science and destroy any potential for sustainable fisheries," said Arlo Hemphill of Conservation International, another Coalition member.

"That is why it is incumbent on the U.N. to declare an immediate suspension of bottom trawling on the high seas."

The United Nations declared Tuesday "World Oceans Day".

Last year, realising the gravity of the threat to species in deep waters, the U.N. Informal Consultative Process on Oceans and the Law of the Sea and the General Assembly called for "urgent improvement in managing risks to the biodiversity of seamounts."

Volcanic in origin, seamounts are found around the world but are especially abundant in the Pacific Ocean, numbering perhaps 30,000. Described as oases of the deep seas, they are generally covered with deep-sea coral and are home to many unique species.

"The numbers are so uncertain, because we know more about the topography of Mars than we know the topography of the deep sea here on Earth," said Dr Elliot Norse, president of the U.S.-based Marine Biology Conservation Institute, who has spent many years studying the impact of trawl fishing.

"Seamounts are increasingly being raped by bottom trawlers."

About one-half of the world’s seamounts are located in international waters beyond individual nations’ jurisdictions. Marine biologists consider them ideal habitats for the evolution of new species.

"Seamounts harbour some of the planet’s richest biodiversity, an array of species that includes life forms thought to be extinct since the time of the dinosaurs, the deepest known plants and corals that are the longest lived animals on earth," said Dr Daniel Pauly, co-editor of a new study, ‘Seamounts: Biodiversity and Fisheries’, and a professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

Experts also believe marine life in deep waters has the potential to be an important source of medicine, as some deep-sea corals produce antibiotics and compounds used to treat asthma and heart disease.

Pauly’s study found that seamount species are more vulnerable to harvesting than any other type of fish, and that seamount fisheries are unsustainable, depleting their target species in a few years.

Gianni notes that deep-sea species are slow growing and slow to reproduce, yet global demand for fish – thus pressure on these species – mostly from developed countries, continues to increase.

"This is an issue about global equity," he says. "The biodiversity is a common heritage of the humankind. But the economic benefit is being gained by a small number of developed countries. They are taking the fish and no one else is getting these resources. But the damage they are causing is potentially huge."

NGO leaders said they hope the official delegates attending this week’s meeting will endorse the call for a moratorium on bottom trawl fishing and recommend to the General Assembly to adopt a similar resolution when its session beings in September.

"If the world cannot get it together to protect this biodiversity from a small number of vessels and the countries involved, we don’t have much hope to see protection for other major areas of the world’s biodiversity, such as tropical rainforests," said Gianni.