U.N. says world fisheries face collapse

A deadly combination of climate change, over-fishing and pollution could cause the collapse of commercial fish stocks worldwide within decades, said Achim Steiner, head of the United Nations Environment Program.

“You overlap all of this and you see you’re potentially putting a death nail in the coffin of world fisheries,” Steiner told reporters on Friday on the fringes of a climate conference involving more than 150 nations and 100 environment ministers.
Some 2.6 billion people worldwide depend on fish for protein, said a UNEP report “In Dead Water” published on Friday.

Climate change has compounded previous problems such as over-fishing, as rising temperatures kill coral reefs, threaten tuna spawning grounds, and shift ocean currents and with them the plankton and small fish which underpin ocean food chains.

“The question is not whether we should stop fishing but to address climate change, which is creating a degree of impact we’ve not seen before,” said lead author of the UNEP report, Christian Nellemann.

“We are getting more and more alarming signals of dramatic changes in the oceans. The recovery from the changes we’re making will probably take a million years.”

Reuters