Living Blue Planet Report page 24
300%
Our ocean under pressure
50%
DESTROYED
Half the world’s corals and
a third of all seagrasses
have been lost (Hoegh-
Guldberg et al., 2015).3-5°C
ocean warming by 2100
+2 billion
The global population is
expected to grow by another
2 billion to reach 9.6 billion
people by 2050 – with a
concentration in coastal
urban areas (FAO 2014a).US$14-35 billion
Subsidies that encourage
overfishing, mostly in developed
countries, are worth an estimated
US$14-35 billion – even though
the global fishing fleet is 2-3 times
larger than the ocean can sustainably
support (Sumaila et al., 2010, 2013;
Nellemann et al., 2008).Ship traffic has quadrupled
over the past two decades,
with the largest growth in
the Indian Ocean and the
Western Pacific Seas
(Tournadre, 2014).Average per capita fish
consumption globally
increased from 9.9kg
in the 1960s to 19.2kg
in 2012 (FAO 2014b).x2
At current rates of temperature rise, coral
reefs will disappear by 2050 (Hoegh-Guldberg
et al., 2007; IPCC, 2013).For centuries, people have regarded the ocean as an inexhaustible
source of food and a convenient dumping ground, too vast to be
affected by anything we do. But in the space of just a few decades,
it has become increasingly clear that the ocean has limits and that
in many important parts of our seas the sustainability thresholds
have been well and truly breached. The data presented in Chapter
1 gives us a snapshot of an ocean in trouble: populations of marine
species have fallen dramatically and vast areas of vital habitats have
been degraded and destroyed, with implications that we are only just
beginning to comprehend.
Driving all these trends are human actions: from overfishing
and extractive industries, to coastal development and pollution, to
the greenhouse-gas emissions causing ocean acidification and sea
temperature rise. While these pressures are described separately
over the following pages, they also have a cumulative impact: for
example, an ecosystem degraded by pollution and fragmented by
development is likely to be slower to recover from the effects of
overfishing and less resilient to the impacts of climate change.