Saving Seafood

That giant trash patch in the middle of the ocean is getting bigger. Here’s what’s happening

November 9, 2021 — In the Pacific Ocean, two massive floating islands of trash extend for hundreds of miles, together making up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The pervasive vortices of human-made garbage damage marine life, as well as the environment, and can even exacerbate human-caused climate change.

In August, the environmental nonprofit Ocean Cleanup deployed Jenny, its first large-scale cleaning system, which has since removed more than 63,000 pounds of trash. In October, Ocean Cleanup called that work the “beginning of the end of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” It’s a start. But the clumps of human-made trash are getting larger.

Ocean trash is only one area of focus as world leaders continue to meet for COP26 this week, the United Nations Climate Change Conference, which lasts through Nov. 12. At the summit, roughly 200 nations are meeting in Glasgow, Scotland, to negotiate an updated agreement of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in an attempt to keep temperatures from rising 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

Plastic pollution and microplastics have been shown to contribute to climate change, since heat can cause them to release greenhouse gases. Addressing the climate crisis requires reducing pollution in the oceans, which collect 8 million tons of plastic yearly.

Read the full story at CNET

 

New Global Biodiversity Agreement: China to Host a Two-Part Summit on Nature

August 18, 2021 — The following was released by the Convention on Biological Diversity:

Decisive in-person meetings on a highly-anticipated new UN agreement on biodiversity have been paused for a few more months by the coronavirus pandemic.

Host country China and the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) today announced dates for the UN Biodiversity Conference, which includes the 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP-15), www.cbd.int/meetings/COP-15, to be convened in two parts, the 10th meeting of Parties to the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety (CP-MOP 10) and the 4th meeting of Parties to the Nagoya Protocol on Access to Genetic Resources and the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits Arising from their Utilization (NP-MOP 4).

From Monday 11 to Friday 15 October 2021, an official opening will take place online, followed by final negotiations on the post-2020 global biodiversity framework during face-to-face meetings in Kunming, China, Monday 25 April to Sunday 8 May 2022.

The opening meeting will address agenda items essential to the continued operations of the biodiversity convention and its two Protocols. It will also include a High-Level Segment to be held on 12 and 13 October and expected to produce a Kunming Declaration adding political momentum to the Framework negotiations.

Read the full release here

Somalia plans to streamline fishing permits to fight IUU

July 28, 2021 — Somalia, plagued with persistent incidents of piracy and rampant illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing, is aiming to tighten its fishing licensing regime in order to end loopholes that result in illegal activity.

Amid claims of deep-rooted corruption within Somalia’s fishing industry, the country’s Ministry of Fisheries and Marine Resources (MFMR), under the leadership of Minister Abdillahi Bidhan Warsame, plans to eliminate uncertainty brought about by each federal state in the country issuing separate fishing permits that other federal states do not recognize – creating loopholes for IUU fishing operators to thrive along the Somalia’s 3,330-kilometer coastline.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

ROSAMOND NAYLOR: Making blue foods central to global food systems

July 19, 2021 — A friend used to tell me “something’s a-fish” when things were off kilter. Today, the global food system is not just “a-fish”; it’s failing billions of people.

Hunger, malnutrition and obesity coexist in rich and poor countries alike, often in the same town or even in the same home. Diabetes, heart disease, coastal dead zones and other social burdens connected to our food system continue to rise. In recognition of this urgent challenge, the United Nations will hold a global summit in September for government, business, nonprofit organizations and civil society leaders to map a more sustainable, healthy and equitable food system.

Transforming our food system will require a new mind-set and more careful consideration of blue foods — aquatic animals, plants and algae cultivated and captured in freshwater and marine environments.

Until now, the movement to build productive and sustainable food systems has focused on transforming land-based crops and livestock, largely overlooking the critical role that fish and other aquatic foods play in nutrition, livelihoods and ecosystems around the world. That role will increase as food production becomes increasingly vulnerable to climate change.

Read the full story at the Los Angeles Times

The WTO is negotiating to solve a global fisheries crisis. Here’s what’s at stake.

July 16, 2021 — Trade ministers are meeting virtually at the World Trade Organization this week seeking agreement to eliminate fisheries subsidies that contribute to overfishing. The 2015 U.N. Sustainable Development Goals identified such an agreement as an urgent international priority. Amid a global fisheries crisis, many experts feel a successful agreement would be a “triple win” for trade, development and the environment.

The WTO originally planned to reach a fisheries pact by the end of 2020, but that deadline passed without agreement. Sharp divisions among countries and a lack of leadership have hampered negotiations.

Fisheries subsidies is one of the few active areas of multilateral negotiations within the WTO, and many experts see securing an agreement as a key test of the organization’s ability to deliver new global trade rules.

Read the full story at The Washington Post

Global Deal on Harmful Fishing Subsidies Could Be in Reach

July 1, 2021 — The world cannot afford to further delay action to protect the ocean, governments and conservationists agreed this month at a series of UN conferences. They called for “transformative” and actionable solutions following delays and cancellations caused by the pandemic last year.

The UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 14 (SDG 14) lists targets to reduce pollution, protect marine ecosystems, tackle illegal fishing and overfishing, and oversee sustainable resource use. But progress so far has been limited.

Only eight percent of the ocean is currently protected, a third of fish stocks are overexploited, and climate change is increasing ocean acidification and deoxygenation. This not only threatens marine biodiversity, but also the livelihoods of millions of people who rely on ocean resources.

“Clear transformative actions to address the ocean crisis must be found and must be scaled up. Our relationship with our planet’s ocean must change,” Volkan Bozkir, president of the UN General Assembly, said at a high-level debate on the ocean and SDG 14 in New York on June 1.

The event sought to maintain momentum ahead of the 2nd UN Ocean Conference, which was postponed due to the pandemic and is now expected to take place next year in Lisbon, Portugal. Bozkir said the pandemic revealed an “appetite for change” as people do not want to live in a world of “one crisis after the next.”

Read the full story at The Maritime Executive

From Maine’s warming waters, kelp emerges as a potentially lucrative cash crop

June 28, 2021 — One bright, brisk morning last month, Colleen Francke steered her skiff a mile off the coast of Falmouth and cut the gas. A few white buoys bobbed in straight lines on the water. Francke reached down and hoisted a rope.

She has been lobstering for a decade and a half, she says, but as climate change warms local waters and forces lobsters northward, she’s been finding it harder to envision a future in that industry.

So, for the last two years, she’s been developing a new source of income. Heaving the rope aloft, she showed off her bounty: ribbons of brown, curly sugar kelp, raised on her 10-acre undersea farm.

Kelp, a seaweed more often thought of as a nuisance by fishermen, is emerging as a potentially lucrative crop, hailed for its many uses as a miracle food to an ingredient in bioplastics to a revolutionary way to feed beef cattle. And Maine officials, confronting a likely decline of the state’s iconic lobster fishing industry in coming decades, are now looking to kelp farming as a possible economic and environmental savior.

The state is working with local institutions to support training and grants for entrepreneurs such as Francke willing to move into kelp farming or other aquaculture ventures. It also labeled kelp a “natural climate solution” in its recently-released Climate Action plan. The goal, officials say, is to dramatically expand kelp farming as part of a reinvention of Maine’s seafood industry — and imagining a future in which kelp from Maine is held in something akin to the esteem that Maine lobster is now.

Read the full story at The Boston Globe

Aquaculture advocates want to bring more Oregon-grown fish from farm to table

June 22, 2021 — While the word “farm” might conjure visions of corn planted in neat rows, Luke Fitzpatrick’s acreage looks, feels and functions more like wetlands. Chirps and squawks emanate from the ponds covering his patch of land just a short drive from Salem.

Fitzpatrick called out avian creatures by name as he maneuvered an off-road vehicle around the farm on a sunny Thursday this spring. Stilt sandpiper. Cinnamon teal. Western meadowlark, Oregon’s state bird.

He pulled to a stop, got out and dipped into a duck blind filled with decoy mallards and rolling desk chairs to gaze out over his crop growing beneath the glassy surface of the water.

“I’m tied to the land,” he said. “I love it out here.”

Fitzpatrick is a fish farmer. He raises and sells warm-water species like bass, bluegill, crappie and catfish through a practice called aquaculture. It’s basically just farming in water, and it’s used to grow a variety of finfish, shellfish and aquatic plants.

Aquaculture has become a much bigger part of the global food system in recent years. The world now produces more seafood on farms than it catches wild, by volume, and the fish farming industry is still growing rapidly.

Read the full story at OPB

Hook to plate: how blockchain tech could turn the tide for sustainable fishing

June 9, 2021 — In recent weeks, a new $50m (£35m) hybrid vessel set sail from Mauritius and headed out into the Southern Ocean where the crew will spend three months longline fishing for the Patagonian toothfish. By the time the fish are brought back, processed and sent to customers, consumers will know where and when that specific fish was caught, which boat landed it, who processed it and which certifications have been met. The technology enabling this is blockchain.

“From the day it’s landed to when it ends up on someone’s plate, blockchain gives toothfish traceability right from the start,” says Steve Paku, captain of the Cape Arkona. “People can just scan the barcode and the whole story is right there in front of them.”

Blockchain is just one way that fisheries are trying to ensure better traceability from hook to plate but it is garnering a lot of interest. Blockchain cannot be tampered with and the data can be accessed by everyone along the supply chain, from certification schemes to the final consumer. Because it is digital, decentralised and updated in real time, a blockchain tag contains valuable information that a physical label never could. In combination with DNA testing to prove the specific species of fish, blockchain could play a role in reducing fraud in the seafood industry.

This also matters from a conservation perspective. More than a third of fish populations are overfished, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization(FAO). Guaranteeing where and how a fish has been caught can help ensure that the catch has been made in an area with sustainable fish populations. It can also help tackle the problem of bycatch. In degrading marine ecosystems, bycatch is detrimental to biodiversity and puts additional, unnecessary strain on marine wildlife. Young fish get caught up in nets with too small a mesh, turtles and dolphins can get entangled in gillnets, and seabirds, including endangered albatross, get injured by hooks unless deterrents are put in place.

Read the full story at The Guardian

MASSACHUSETTS: Here’s what local activists, experts say you can do to protect the ocean on World Oceans Day

June 8, 2021 — The ocean covers about 70% of the planet, produces at least 50% of oxygen and absorbs about 30% of human-produced carbon dioxide, according to the United Nations. It feeds the world and is expected to employ 40 million people in ocean-based industries by 2030.

For Greater New Bedford, the Atlantic Ocean and its coastal waters are the places where boaters recreate and local fishermen catch millions of pounds of fish, promising food and paychecks for countless people. The National Marine Fisheries Service last month announced New Bedford, for the 20th consecutive year, was the nation’s top-earning port.

While the ocean continues to support many industries and communities, it is also under significant threats due to climate change and other human activities.

The ocean covers about 70% of the planet, produces at least 50% of oxygen and absorbs about 30% of human-produced carbon dioxide, according to the United Nations. It feeds the world and is expected to employ 40 million people in ocean-based industries by 2030.

For Greater New Bedford, the Atlantic Ocean and its coastal waters are the places where boaters recreate and local fishermen catch millions of pounds of fish, promising food and paychecks for countless people. The National Marine Fisheries Service last month announced New Bedford, for the 20th consecutive year, was the nation’s top-earning port.

While the ocean continues to support many industries and communities, it is also under significant threats due to climate change and other human activities.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times