We tend to think of the ocean as infinite. It covers 72% of the planet. It takes hours to traverse, even by plane. It’s depths have yet to be plumbed. So we naively assume mere humans can’t hurt something so unfathomable. And yet, as researchers from the University of California at Santa Barbara have revealed, we are hurting the ocean. And our impact on the ocean from economic activity will double by 2050.
An article in the UCSB newspaper The Current reveals that researchers at UCSB’s National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) project that the cumulative impact of human activities in the marine environments will double in the next 25 years.
“It’s sobering,” marine ecologist and NCEAS director Ben Halpern, who led the study, was quoted as saying in the article. “And it’s unexpected, not because impacts will be increasing — that is not surprising — but because they will be increasing so much, so fast.”
Ships crossing the ocean bringing food, fuel and goods and cruise ships create 3% of global emissions, are responsible for some 20,000 whale deaths annually, and often spill substances dangerous for the ocean, from oil to nurdles–tiny plastic beads that fish confuse for food. Ninety percent of the heat and 30% of the CO2 created by climate change is absorbed by the ocean and throws off the pH balance, creating ocean acidification that–among other things–makes it hard for corals and shellfish to create their protective structures. Runoff from chemical plants, farms and sewers create algae blooms that cut off oxygen and kill fish as well as threatening human health. Plastics and other pollutants fill the oceans and get into the bloodstream and bodies of sea creatures and humans alike. And more and more sophisticated fishing technologies means fishers can take vast amounts of fish in one trip, much of which is bycatch and is thrown back after it dies on the vessel. This is only some of humans’ impact on the ocean from economic activity.
The sustainable blue economy is about companies trying to function differently, to switch ships to sustainable fuels; possibly reduce the CO2 in the ocean with emerging technologies; clean up the plastics before they reach the sea…. Those efforts are growing but the investment and activity lags behind the pace of destruction.
The research team, which includes collaborators from Nelson Mandela University in South Africa, finds that ocean warming and biomass loss due to fisheries are expected to be the largest overall contributors to future cumulative impacts and that the tropics and the poles will experience the fastest changes in impacts. Their research is published in the journal Science.
Until recently Halpern said, studies looked at the impact of individual industries on ocean health, but not the entire ocean economy. “People tracked one issue at a time, but not everything together,” Halpern said. “More importantly, there was a pervasive sense that the ocean is so huge the human impacts couldn’t possibly be that bad.”
In 2008 the team synthesized 17 global data sets to map the intensity and extent of human activity on the world’s oceans. That initial view revealed startling results: No place was untouched, and 41% of the world’s marine environments were heavily impacted.
“The previous paper tells us where we are; the current paper tells us where we are headed,” Halpern told The Current.
