The meaning of sustainability – Part 2
While sustainability and sustainable development represent consensual values, their implementation is often subject to controversies. The U.N. system recognizes sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the needs of future generations. To achieve it, a balance between environmental integrity, social development and economic development must be found”.
Sustainable development of the global oceans and adjacent inland and coastal areas (more than 60% of the world’s population lives within 60 kilometers of the coast) includes pursuit of science and technology that support human development and sustainable fishing practices, and calls for a cross-disciplinary methodology.
One of the reasons for the fishermen-environmentalists hullabaloo is the pseudo-scientific and fallacious demonisation of fishing as “the sole cause of whatever is happening in the marine ecosystem”, while what is happening to fishing people and their communities is ignored. It’d be more constructive if the plight of oceans’ living resources would be represented in a more balanced and scientifically accurate way. The often ignored or obfuscated truth is that “marine ecosystems are affected by many factors; fishing being only one of them” and hardly always the most important.
Some examples
Last March, the Washington Post reported that a slowly killing mycobacteriosis epidemic affects the condition and size of the striped bass population and endangers the fishery, which fuels a $300 million industry in Maryland and Virginia. in the heavily-polluted Chesapeake Bay.
In its 2003 Yearbook UNEP says that the 150 dead zones in bays and semi-enclosed seas worldwide are a greater peril than overfishing, and scientists at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science wrote, “…oxygen depletion is likely to become the keystone impact for the 21st Century, replacing the 20th Century keystone of overfishing.” Some of these dead zones extend up to 27,000 square miles.
Kristin Kaschner, a marine biologist at the University of British Columbia, reported some years ago that the amount of fish eaten by marine mammals worldwide is estimated at roughly 10 times the worldwide ocean fish harvest.
A recent study of krill-salmon relationship in British Columbia carried out by Dr.Tanasichuk shows that it is the abundance of krill that’s critical for salmon abundance.
Climatic effects
The UNEP’s Global International Waters Assessment (GIWA) reported that decreasing river flows increases salinity in estuaries, depleting and displacing fish and aquatic plant species. The report considers climate variability the key controlling factor in fishing yields for about half of the world’s large marine ecosystems, including the East and West Greenland shelves, the Benguela Current off Southwest Africa, the Canary Current off Northwest Africa and the Humboldt Current off the west coast of South America.
Over the past decades, modes of climatic variability such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and the North Atlantic Oscillation have been related to shifts in ecosystem structure, species composition, distribution and biogeochemical processes. Pollution of rivers causes hypoxia in coastal waters, while the retreat of the polar ice-caps affects the marine habitats.
According to Prof. Yoon Jong-Hwa of the (international) Centre for the Research of East Asian Marginal Seas (CREAMS), there’s sufficient evidence that the Sea of Japan’s deep, cold currents, which circulate nutrients for surface plankton and life-providing oxygen underwater, are slowing and failing, and he associates shrinking of fisheries yields with this phenomenon.
No doubt, controlling fish harvests is not enough to ensure sustainable fishery and healthy ecosystems. The environmentalists’ and some scientists’ advice that only by controlling fishing can they achieve sustainability, is often counter-productive.
Changing views
Nowadays, however, more and more people and institutions seem to see the light. For example, the UN Atlas of Oceans reports on integration of upstream catchment and marine management: The ICRAN-Mesoamerican Reef Alliance (ICRAN-MAR) engages stakeholders in reef conservation, around three key components: Watershed (Catchment) Management, Sustainable Fisheries, and Sustainable Tourism.
In Europe, the condition of the Baltic Sea is mainly controlled by the catchment and river nutrient loads. In Australia, the Great Barrier Reef Protection Plan wants to “halt and reverse the decline in water quality entering the Reef within 10 years” while reducing the progressive pollution of the waterways entering the Reef and affecting its biota.
In most coastal areas, rehabilitation of marine habitats and restoration or protection of essential upstream environments and coastal hydrology functions are essential to future fisheries sustainability. The fundamental message is that for such sustainability we must restructure general coastal management. Environmentalist NGOs and everyone involved in trying to secure sustainability must realize that there has to be a balance between the needs of the people and the conservation of living resources, and both sides need to be prepared to compromise.
I think that the current positive development stems from the recognition that, climatic conditions permitting, sustainability can only be achieved by an integrated and balanced approach, involving upstream and downstream influences, fisheries, and any other human activities that affect coastal ecosystems. There is a growing understanding of the complexity of the systems to be managed and of the futility of simplistic approaches, such as those of the, recently less and less prevailing, fishery management science based on inadequate mathematical models.
In my view, scientists and environmentalists who want to assure sustainability by only controlling fishing are wrong, and their advice is counter-productive. It is quite frustrating that some scientists, such as Dr. Daniel Pauly for example, who, I’m sure, know better, keep talking of “saving the oceans” just by shutting down fisheries or by closing off major sea areas to fisheries, and hardly ever mention the whole set of other vectors, whatever may be their relative roles in each separate ecosystem.
I think it’s foolish not to consider physical, environmental factors, and it’s fishy to play down non-human predation, nowadays enhanced by protecting marine mammals, inshore habitat destruction, much of it caused by longshore development, and upstream and marine pollution from industrial, municipal, and agricultural sources.
Part 1 of this article was published in the May 2006 issue.
benyami@actcom.net.il
