Oceans report - The greatest challenge we face today

THE economic news has been so relentlessly disheartening for the last few years that it is understandable that our instinct is to turn away, to turn a deaf ear to the next set of predictions of doom, of pay cuts, job losses and the dismal “era of austerity” we know will follow.

We’ve all had more than enough of misery and deceit, enough worry and — to call it what it is — fear.

We all crave some cheering optimism, some good news, even if it is only about the wretched weather.

Sadly, but unavoidably, this week’s report from the International Programme on the State of the Oceans will only add to a growing sense of powerlessness in the face of a world that seems gone from our control on so many fronts. It predicts environmental catastrophe on a scale that makes Greece’s and, in turn, all of Europe’s terrible economic situation look little more than a moderately interesting but ultimately irrelevant adventure in international bookkeeping.

Scientists predict that life in the oceans is, in the relevant geological time-scale, almost immediately facing the worst spate of extinctions in millions of years, due to man’s intervention. Climate change and over-fishing are two of the primary destroyers but accelerating pollution is having an ever more disabling impact on the world’s blue heart.

As an island, we should be particularly alert to these warnings but because we are so small, so powerless in the great scale of humanity, we might wonder what we can do to confront these soon-to-be life-defining issues.

One of the contributors to the UN-sponsored report said the world’s oceans faced a “deadly trio” of threats of higher temperatures, acidification and lack of oxygen — anoxia — that featured in previous mass extinctions.

A build-up of carbon dioxide, blamed by the UN scientists on human use of fossil fuels, is heating the planet. Absorbed into the oceans, it causes acidification, while run-off of fertilisers and pollution causes anoxia.

Even though fish are the main source of protein for one in five of the world’s population, commercial exploitation of fish continues at unsustainable levels in many of the world’s maritime regions. Many of the species of fish targeted by commercial fishermen — and bought and eaten by us — are in great jeopardy.

As it is predicted that the world’s population will increase by something around 50% to nine billion by 2030 — not even two decades away — it is hard to see how we can support those numbers and reassert control over the activities that are so damaging our immediate environment and, in turn, the planet that supports all life as we know it. It seems unlikely that the developed world will be able to deny the developing world the technologies that have kept us out of poverty for generations either.

As we devote nearly all of our political energy to rebuilding economies it is very challenging to realise that this is so very much easier than undoing centuries of environmental damage.

Yet we must. We simply have no choice.