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A new study in the Journal of Science Advances concludes that the “drowning” of the roughly 15,000 square kilometers of remaining marshland in the Mississippi River Delta of Louisiana is “past the tipping point” and now “probably inevitable,” according to The Washington Post.
Why This Matters: Louisiana has already lost one-fourth of the land in the Delta at the beginning of the last century.
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With supermarkets running low on meat, seafood is a healthy option, and sales of frozen seafood like shrimp and canned seafood (much of which is imported) are up over last year, according to some retailers. Most of the domestic seafood landed and sold in the U.S. comes from small fishing businesses and goes to restaurants and those sales are down as much as 95% across the country.
Why This Matters: Congress provided $300m for fishers in stimulus funding, but it is only a “drop in the bucket” of what is needed to keep fishers afloat said Alaskan commercial fisher Julie Decker on Tuesday at a forum convened by the Ocean Caucus Foundation.
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Peru is the second-largest fishing nation in the world after China, and home to one of the world’s largest single stock fisheries – the anchoveta. In 2018, after a shift to rights-based management, its industrial fishery was one of the first in the world to make its vessel location (VMS) data available to the public in order to root out illegal fishing and improve management.
Why This Matters: Peru may be a small country, but its fisheries are significant globally and the introduction of greater accountability for both large and small fishing vessels is a sign that better management is possible even as the national government struggles to overcome a series of corruption scandals.
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A new study that was published last week in Science Advances, says that satellites were not able to fully detect oil in large areas of the Gulf of Mexico during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, and posits that “invisible and toxic oil” made the spill as much as 30% larger than some experts have estimated.
The United Kingdom is threatening to close its waters to fishers from other countries in Europe once it leaves the European Union next week, and if it does, the impact would be immediate and severe on fishing communities in neighboring nations that are now seeing their local fish stocks decline due to climate change.
Why This Matters: One of the key issues in the Brexit negotiations that will begin after the U.K. formally leaves the EU on Friday is bound to be fisheries – right now all EU nations have free access to the U.K.’s lucrative fishing grounds.
Continue Reading 562 wordsSeveral U.S. environmental organizations with the support of large philanthropic organizations are working to help countries around the world achieve better fisheries management, and increasingly they are using smartphones and technological innovations to empower fishers to decide where and when to fish in order to get the best price.
Why This Matters: Here, with the help of technology and the support of U.S. NGOs, fishermen and consumers are benefitted by technology that is now readily available on smartphones.
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A new report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released last week as part of a Congressionally-mandated review of ocean acidification, states that increasing acidity in the U.S. ocean waters could cause “billions of dollars in damage to the U.S. economy,” with detrimental impacts on Alaskan fisheries and tourism due to degraded coral reefs in Florida and the Caribbean.
Why This Matters: Climate impacts are costing our economy already due to severe weather events such as wildfires and hurricanes. Even though increasing ocean acidification may not be visible to the eye, its costs are just as devastating.
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The UN climate meeting currently underway in Madrid, Spain, known as COP25, is being called the Blue COP, to highlight its focus on oceans and the climate. Oceans play an outsized role in regulating our climate and 2020 presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren took the opportunity to release a Blue New Deal–her plan to address ocean […]
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The largest study of its kind has concluded that oxygen levels in the world’s oceans declined by roughly 2 percent between 1960 and 2010. Sixty-seven scientific experts from 51 institutes in 17 countries, came together for the largest peer-reviewed study conducted so far on ocean deoxygenation for the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). […]
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The Washington Post’s excellent series entitled “2 Degrees: Beyond the Limit” by Max Bearak and Chris Mooney with amazing photos by Carolyn Van Houten has highlighted the many ways that the climate crisis is already causing great hardship around the globe. The most recent installment tells the story of Tombwa, Angola — a small fishing village of […]
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Our Daily Planet was fortunate to catch up with Former Secretary Kerry as the 6th Our Ocean Conference in Oslo, Norway was drawing to a close. ODP: Since launching the Our Ocean Conference five years ago, this meeting has resulted in 1,370 commitments from governments, the private sector, philanthropies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and academia valued […]
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Tuna is a popular fish, from lunchtime sandwiches, to trendy poké bowls Americans are eating a lot more seafood and the mighty tuna may be at risk. A new study, published in Fisheries Research has found that the amount of tuna being fished in the world’s oceans has increased by a staggering 1000% over the past 6 decades–a rate that scientists are calling unsustainable.
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