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Deep-sea ecosystems still under threat despite UN protection


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Deep-sea ecosystems still under threat despite UN protection

By Fred Pearce

Bottom trawler scrapes the sea bed
 
Not good for the sea bed

Brian Skerry/National Geographic

They aren’t the most famous ecosystems. Few people hit the streets to protect the Louisville ridge, the Josephine seamount or the Flemish Cap – the ecological marvels found on the floor of the deep ocean.

But being out of sight doesn’t mean they are out of harm’s way.  These wonders of the deep are threatened by a new generation of fishing trawlers that scrape nets along the deep-sea floor – a process that destroys deep-sea species and ecosystems – and the failure of international pledges over the past decade to keep these sites off-limits.

Next week the UN General Assembly will meet in New York to assess progress on implementing resolutions passed since 2004 to stop deep-sea fishing fleets damaging sea-floor ecosystems.

 

The UN resolutions were intended to protect the high seas – vast swathes of ocean that fall outside national control – and to be implemented by international fisheries organisations.

But while some progress has been made, a new study finds that many rich ecosystems on the sea bed are still under threat from trawling.

“Vast areas of the ocean remain unprotected,” says Matthew Gianni, one of the study’s authors based at the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, a Dutch-based NGO set up in 2004 by Greenpeace, WWF and others to monitor progress of the UN resolutions.  The coalition’s report finds that while some progress has been made, there are still vast areas that aren’t getting the protection they deserve.

Unprotected corals

Among the richest places in the world for cold-water corals are the Southwest Rockall Bank and Southern Hatton Bank in the Atlantic Ocean west of Scotland. Yet they remain unprotected, despite recommendations from scientists at the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea.

Further south, the Josephine seamount between Madeira and Portugal is a marine protected area. It has a “high incidence of rare and previously unknown species as well as commercial fish”, according to an atlas prepared by the Marine Conservation Institute. But a dispute over whether it is within Portugal’s waters means it remains unpoliced, says Gianni.

Scientific advisors for the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization say that more than a third of sponges and corals, and almost two-thirds of sea pens, remain at risk from bottom trawlers on the Grand Banks and Flemish Cap, two important fishing grounds outside Canadian waters, because the organisation continues to allow fishing there.

“Only about 6 per cent of the international waters of the Grand Banks and Flemish Cap shallower than 2000 metres depth have been closed to bottom fishing,” says Gianni.

Things are no better in the South Atlantic. Under European Union regulations, EU fleets no longer trawl most of the Patagonian shelf off Argentina, another rich fishing ground. But other nations that fish this region are yet to follow suit.

And in the south-west Pacific, New Zealand fishers continue to catch orange roughy and other fish from the Louisville ridge, a long chain of underwater mountains. Rich biodiversity, including rare bioluminescent bamboo coral, was recently found here by Malcolm Clark at New Zealand’s National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research.

Original artikkel

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