By JESS BIDGOOD and KIRK JOHNSON13 September 2012 BOSTON – The Commerce Department on Thursday issued a formal disaster declaration for the Northeastern commercial groundfish fishery, paving the way for financial relief for the battered industry and the communities that depend on it. To many here, the declaration underscored the urgency of a groundfish depletion […]
Futurist Daniel Rirdan’s passionate appeal to save what’s left of Earth’s biosphere: (www.getreal.info) This is the formation of an action-oriented movement with an actual plan to avert an eventual collapse of the various ecosystems and also, indirectly, the manmade world. Also, check out his well-researched book: The Blueprint: Averting Global Collapse. The most important call […]
By Miguel Llanos7 September 2012 (NBC News) – Reefs in the Caribbean and Florida Keys have lost most of the colorful corals that feed a rich ecosystem and made the region a diving and snorkeling mecca, a major conservation group reported Friday. On average, reefs have live coral on just 8 percent of their surface […]
By PETER ALLEN 18 July 2012 Paul Schneidereit’s July 10 column “Humans’ love affair with fossil fuels won’t end anytime soon” slammed soothsayers who supposedly predicted doom because we would run out of oil. One such soothsayer was King Hubbert, a geophysicist who worked for Shell Oil and the U.S. Geological Survey. In 1956, he […]
By ROGER BRADBURY13 July 2012 It’s past time to tell the truth about the state of the world’s coral reefs, the nurseries of tropical coastal fish stocks. They have become zombie ecosystems, neither dead nor truly alive in any functional sense, and on a trajectory to collapse within a human generation. There will be remnants […]
Discards, the proportion of total catch that is returned to the sea (in most case dead, dying, or badly damaged), represent a significant part of the world’s marine catches and are generally considered to be a wasteful misuse of marine resources. The first global assessment was published in 1994 and it identified a total discard […]
By Miguel Llanos, msnbc.com5 July 2012 Coral reefs along Panama’s Pacific coast completely collapsed for 2,500 years due to natural climate cycles, researchers reported in a study Thursday, adding that there’s a lesson in the data for man-made climate change: ease up on greenhouse gasses and reefs will restore themselves. “We can prevent coral reefs […]
The expansion and impact of world fishing fleets in a) 1950 and b) 2006. The maps show the geographical expansion of world fishing fleets from 1950 to 2006 (the latest available data). Since 1950, the area fished by global fishing fleets has increased ten-fold. By 2006 100 million km2, around 1/3 of the ocean surface, […]
NEW YORK, New York, 22 May 2012 (ENS) – Oceans cover about 72 percent of Earth’s surface area and there are an estimated 250,000 marine species. “Yet, despite its importance, marine biodiversity has not fared well at human hands,” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said today in his message to mark the International Day for Biological […]
8 May 2012 (MCCIP) – The Marine Climate Change Impacts Partnership (MCCIP) launched its latest Report Card [pdf] today at the World Fisheries Congress in Edinburgh. It focuses on how climate change is affecting the fish and shellfish we find in our seas, providing both opportunities and threats, and what the social and economic consequences […]
