Climate Change, Environment, Europe, Global, Global Geopolitics, Headlines

ENVIRONMENT DAY: Oceans at the Eye of the Hurricane

Tito Drago

MADRID, Jun 4 2004 (IPS) - The oceans and seas, which cover 70 percent of the planet’s surface area, are at the centre of a stormy debate that opened Friday in the northeastern Spanish city of Barcelona on the eve of World Environment Day.

Around 15 Greenpeace activists climbed the towers of the city’s landmark Sagrada Familia cathedral to string up huge banners reading ‘SOS’ and ‘Save Our Seas’ in English and Catalonian – the language of the Spanish province of Catalonia, where the city is located.

Their wake-up call echoed the World Environment Day message issued by United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan ahead of Jun. 5, which is commemorated since 1972.

”I urge governments, businesses and individuals everywhere to show renewed respect for the seas and oceans from whence all life on earth originated,” said Annan.

Eighty percent of the pollution of the seas and oceans comes from ”land-based activities”, and three out of four megacities are located near the sea, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) pointed out.

The head of the Greenpeace oceans campaign, Sebastián Losada, said ”the whole world knows that the oceans are in crisis, and we must not continue exploiting them to death.”

”We are in a race against time, and the United Nations must assume a real commitment to saving the oceans, involving all countries,” he added.

The international environmental watchdog is calling for an immediate moratorium on deep-sea drag fishing, which destroys underwater mountains by dragging heavily weighted nets that kill coral reefs that have taken hundreds of years to form, along with species that depend on them.

UNEP’s main World Environment Day event will be hosted Saturday by the Barcelona Forum 2004, a major international gathering promoting cultural diversity, world peace, sustainable development, intercultural dialogue and a more equitable globalisation process.

UNEP Executive Director Klaus Toepfer stated in his message to the Forum that the world’s oceans are still a great mystery, but that humanity’s ignorance of this fragile and finite resource has not prevented it from blindly exploiting the seas.

He noted, for example, that ”Nearly three quarters of world fish stocks are being harvested faster than they can reproduce.”

Besides predatory fishing, mainly by ”illegal, unregulated or unsubsidised commercial fleets,” the U.N. official stressed pollution as another major threat to the seas.

He mentioned pesticide run-off, untreated sewage, industrial and nuclear waste, oil spills, and ”nitrogen overload” from fertilisers carried into the oceans by rivers, that create ”dead zones” between one and 70,000 km in size in coastal waters, where ”algal blooms” consume the oxygen in the water.

In addition, discarded plastic products kill as many as one million birds, 100,000 marine mammals and countless fish every year, said UNEP, whose Jun. 5 theme this year is ”Wanted! Seas and Oceans: Dead or Alive?”

”Animals killed by plastic waste decompose, but the plastic does not. Instead it remains in the ecosystem to kill again and again”, Toepfer observed.

In addition, global warming caused by greenhouse gases threatens to destroy most of the world’s tropical reefs, UNEP added.

Urgent measures are needed to deal with the crisis, involving governments, international institutions, non-governmental organisations and society as a whole, said the U.N. agency.

At the World Summit on Sustainable Development held in South Africa in 2002, governments committed themselves to carrying out a regular global assessment of the marine environment, and to creating a network of marine protected areas by 2012.

Less than .5 percent of marine habitats are protected, compared to 11.5 percent of the global land area, and there are no deep-sea protected areas.

One of the criticisms raised at the Forum came from Greenpeace, which complained that the installation of a gas-fired boiler, held up by the Forum organisers as an example of sustainable energy, ”misled public opinion” because gas-fired power plants are a source of pollution and cause climate change.

Along with the burning of oil and coal, the combustion of natural gas is one of the main causes of the greenhouse effect, which scientists blame for global warming.

Emilio Rull, Greenpeace Spain’s spokesman on energy issues, said this southern European country ”has strong potential for renewable energy and should prioritise these instead of gas – which is imported – and close down the most heavily polluting gas-fired plants to make Spain a global leader in renewable energy.”

Activists underscored the need for governments to respect concrete measures like the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, the only international instrument aimed at curbing emissions of greenhouse gases, which has been blocked from going into effect by U.S. resistance.

The need to act is urgent, said U.N. officials and activists. Marine ecosystems are fragile, and will not be able to continue withstanding the dumping of toxic waste products.

”The best proof of that comes from the Indian ocean and Baltic sea, which are nearly dead, the North sea, whose fish stocks are tragically dwindling, the severely polluted Mediterranean, and coral reefs that are dying all over the world,” said Jorge Alvarez von Maack, the head of Peru’s National Institute of Maritime Archaeology.