Filmworld
Need for new Ocean's Eleven? Climate change depleting fish stocks
By
By Rajendra Shende The title of 1960's film "Ocean's 11" starring Frank Sinatra and its
remake in 2001 as "Ocean's Eleven" starring George Clooney, has already
entered modern dictionaries. A project that is highly convoluted and
byzantine, requiring arduous planning and management - as done by 11
guys robbing a high security casino vault in the film - is now called
'Ocean's Eleven'.
The task of understanding the complex role of
oceans, which occupy 70 percent of the Earth's surface, has now become a
real 'ocean's eleven'. Oceans are where life on earth began. They are
termed the earth's heart that pumps fresh water into the atmosphere and
then back on the earth, carries nutrients for the marine life on which
depend billions of people for their food. Oceans not only gave birth to
life on the earth three-and-a-half billion years ago but continued to
feed it to date.
Come the emissions of human-induced green house
gasses (GHGs) and this smooth storyline becomes complex and the plot
turns into a cryptic puzzle. There is massive transformation taking
place of the oceanic life which scientists have just started
understanding. It is not only in terms of sea-level rise due to global
warming that is predicted to cause migration of millions of
climate-refugees away from their homes in coastal regions. Scientists
are now predicting the unprecedented migration of thousands of marine
species to higher latitudes away from warmer and more acidic sea water
in which the marine species cannot thrive. Many are predicted to die
during migration and the possibility of extinction of certain species is
predicted to accelerate.
New reports from NASA and the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) unfold such scenarios
based on the physical and chemical processes taking place on the surface
waters and deep in the seas. The findings go beyond the latest reports
of the fifth global assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) released in 2014. These shocking scenarios backed by
observations and related science were the central topics of the
discussions among scientists and policymakers in the Conference held in
Paris July 7-10 on "Our Common Future under Climate Change".
The
IPCC assessment reports released between September 2013 and November
2014 have stated with a high level of confidence that rapidly
accelerating human-induced atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide
and other GHGs will produce physical, chemical and biological changes
that pose serious risks to humans everywhere.
Till now, a rise in
sea level of about 0.5 to 1.0 metre by 2100 has been the predominant
topic of the global discussion in the context of climate change and
oceans. The depths of the oceans and their currents are however
revealing shocking stories hitherto unknown to mankind. The marine chain
is a complex flow of currents that bring nutrients to fish and other
marine species. Such flow of nutrients to more brighter and upper layers
of oceans, where half of the world's marine life flourishes, is slowing
down.
Coupled with reduced oxygen content due to higher
concentration of carbon dioxide in sea-water and rising acidity, the
devious plot of mass extinction of marine species has set in. The
present and predicted impact of those observations are severe and
irreversible - particularly to poor societies in developing countries
that depend on fisheries and marine products. Climate negotiators cannot
just ignore these new findings as they affect the survival of common
people whose votes are important for the negotiators' survival.
Scientists
are now fearing that our understanding of how ocean currents are
structured and how they transform due to warming (physical change) and
react due to increased acidity (chemical change) is in its infancy and
should now be the top priority for climate research.
The 'marine
robbery' line gets further entangled by the acute impact on coral reefs.
Increased acidification of the oceans reduces the calcification of the
marine organisms like coral on which 25 percent of the entire marine
life and nearly 4,000 species of fish survive. The fish that live on
coral reefs are a major source for over a billion people worldwide, of
whom 85 percent rely principally on fish as their major source of
protein.
Five hundred million people living within 50 km of the
coast and communities, particularly small-scale farmers in the Indian
sub-continent and Southeast Asian nations, are heavily reliant on fish
for their livelihood. Globally, the estimate of the services provided by
coral reefs, including fish supply as per NOAA, is $30 billion. These
numbers do not take into account the value of deep-sea corals which are
themselves home for many commercially valuable species and thus of
additional fisheries' value. These valuable corals in the safe-vault of
oceans are now open for robbery.
The observed slowdown of
nutrient flow, warming and acidification of sea-water, mainly in the
tropical region, is speeding up the destruction of coral reefs. As per
the latest report by the authors of IPCC chapters, it is almost certain
that coral reefs would disappear by 2050, just about 35 years from now,
putting the livelihood of hundreds and millions of people at risk.
Depleting
fish stocks are already forcing fishermen to go far from their coasts
to international waters and increasingly become prisoners of neighboring
countries as they enter their waters. The Somali pirates emerged mainly
due to ships of rich countries harvesting fish from their waters. "When
our cries for help went unheeded, pirates took the rules in their
hands," said a climate negotiator from Somalia at a recent meeting.
'Fishing conflicts' among countries like Somalia, Sri Lanka, Pakistan,
India, China and Japan have their origin in emissions of carbon dioxide
and climate change.
Calls for more research may sound hollow, as
by the time the research is over, the ocean's treasure will probably be
stolen. We need a smarter plan, like in "Ocean's Eleven".
(Rajendra
Shende, an IIT alumnus, and former UNEP director, is chairman of the
TERRE Policy Centre. The views expressed are personal. He can be
contacted at [email protected])