Managing the world’s oceans

By Jainarine Deonauth

The world’s oceans and coastal areas are the source of a variety of life-sustaining goods and services – including food, transport, oil and gas, tourism, and minerals.  Marine and coastal resources directly provide at least US$3 trillion annually in global economic output, according to the United Nations.
“Oceans are an integral part of life on earth, regulating our climate and producing oxygen for the planet, yet they are under serious threat due to pollution, over-exploitation, habitat loss, invasive species, and climate change,” says Andrew Hudson, Head of the UN Development Programme (UNDP)’s Water and Ocean Governance Programme. According to projections by the UN, there will be nine billion people on earth by 2050, a 30 per cent increase in the world’s population. The UN also estimates that food production will need to increase even further, by 70 per cent, to meet a forecasted increased demand for food.
Oceana, which has done a tremendous amount of work on protecting the world’s oceans, reminds us that this dramatic growth in people and demand for food is, unfortunately, occurring when the terrestrial resources – arable land and fresh water – needed for food production are becoming increasingly scarce. At the same time, overfishing is limiting the oceans’ ability to help solve the global hunger crisis. Fish stocks have been exploited to the point that they can’t recover on their own. As a result, global fish catch has been in decline since the late 1980s, despite better technology and more boats on the water.
As rightly pointed out by Oceana, there are two diverging lines: human population on a steady ascent and global fish catch on a steady decline. Therefore, if there is no drastic change as to how our fish stocks are managed, the oceans will continue to decline, and as a result it would even be more difficult to alleviate world hunger.
So where does the solution lie? A report issued last June by Oceana says that, because the majority of the world’s marine fishes are caught in the national waters of only 25 countries, policy solutions that protect wild fish stocks can be applied on a country-by-country basis – without requiring action by more complicated international bodies or laws. These same 25 countries are also home to over half the world’s people suffering from hunger.
Further, Oceana points to case studies which show that science-based management can allow fish stocks to rebound. If this type of management is implemented in the top 25 countries, the organisation believes that “the result can be an increase in global fish stocks, making wild fish more accessible to artisanal fishermen and hungry people around the world, while also providing protection for important ocean ecosystems, habitats and biodiversity.”
Just recently, at the launch of a new report on how strengthened markets and policies can better protect oceans and coastal areas, UNDP and Global Environment Facility (GEF) experts were quoted as saying that concrete actions must begin now to mitigate or reverse grave threats to the world’s oceans. The report, “Catalysing Ocean Finance,” shows how sustainable ocean management could become a legacy of today’s decision-makers, if proven ocean planning and policy instruments are scaled up.
“It is very reassuring to learn from this report that an initial public investment on the order of $5 billion over the next 10 to 20 years could be sufficient to catalyse many hundreds of billions of dollars in public and private finance,” said Dr Naoko Ishii, chief executive officer and chairperson of GEF. “We now have the right tools to identify and remove those market and policy failures which have unfortunately sped up the degradation of marine environments.  Our goal is to help both the public and private sectors create clear incentives and policies which will serve to protect the world’s oceans,” he added.
These market and policy failures have led both the private and public sectors to under-invest in environmental protection measures, such as wastewater treatment and coastal habitat protection, and over-invest in activities detrimental to the marine environment, including over-fishing and chemically intensive agriculture. Both Oceana and UNDP/GEF have issued timely warnings that ocean degradation threatens the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people, primarily in the world’s least developed countries, hence the need to improve the way oceans are managed.