Why This Year Is Our Last, Best Chance for Saving the Ocean
Despite the ocean floor s proximity and essential role to human survival, we have
mapped less of its topography than the surface of Mars.
For Mick Baron, the giant kelp forests of Tasmania were a playground, a school and a church. The former marine biologist runs a scuba-diving center on the Australian island‘s east coast, and rhapsodizes about the wonders of the seaweed‘s dense habitats. "Diving in kelp is one of the most amazing underwater experiences you can have," he says, likening it to flying through the canopy of a terrestrial rain forest. "You won‘t find a single empty patch in a kelp forest… From the sponge gardens on the seafloor all the way up to the leaves on the surface, it‘s packed with life."
Or rather, it was. In late 2015, a marine heat wave hit eastern Australia, wiping out a third of the Great Barrier Reef, and the kelp forests Baron had been exploring f or most of his life. "We were diving in a nice thick forest in December," says Baron. "By end of March, it looked like an asphalt driveway." Marine temperatures on Australia‘s east coast are on average 2°C higher than a century ago, an increase scientists attribute to rising greenhouse-gas emissions. "The ocean is deceptively fragile," says Baron. "Two degrees doesn‘t sound like much, but not many species can handle that kind of temperature change."
Baron, a gregarious and perennially sunburned Australian, introduced generations of divers to Tasmania‘s kelp cathedrals. His own grandchildren, he says, will have to learn about them from his YouTube videos. Nearly 95% of eastern Tasmania‘s kelp forests are gone, a preview of what is to come for the ocean as a whole. "What is happening here is what will happen everywhere else in a decade or two," he says.
Human beings owe their life to the sea. Four in 10 humans rely on the ocean for food. Marine life produces 70% of our oxygen; 90% of global goods travel via shipping lanes. We turn to the sea for solace – ocean-based tourism in the U.S. alone is worth $124 billion a year – and medical advancement. An enzyme used for COVID-19 testing was originally sourced from bacteria found in the ocean‘s hydrothermal vents. The ocean also acts as a giant planetary air conditioner. Over the past century, the ocean has absorbed 93% of the heat trapped in the atmosphere by greenhousegas emissions.
Increased CO₂ levels in the atmosphere have made the ocean more acidic, threatening food chains. Warming waters are not only killing sea life, they are also changing currents and affecting global weather patterns. Meanwhile we dump 8 million tons of waste into the ocean a year, in addition to agricultural and industrial runoff that poisons coastal areas. At the rate we are harvesting fish, by 2050 there will likely be more plastic than fish in the oceans. A 2019 report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that without "profound economic and institutional transformations," there would be irreversible damage to oceans and sea ice.
A series of international policy meetings in 2020 was meant to set global targets for restoring biodiversity. Scientists and ocean advocates are working desperately to keep the momentum going, aware that this might be the last chance they have to reverse the tide. "As we restart the economy, this is the chance to reset our goals for a healthy ocean," says Carlos Duarte, a Spanish marine biologist at the King Abdullah University in Saudi Arabia. "We have a narrow window of opportunity where we can actually still be effective. Twenty years from now, it will be too late."
An international agreement to protect the oceans would be a huge step – but it is only one tool, and an expensive one. Establishing marine protected areas is like taking an aspirin for brain cancer, says Camilo Mora, a scientist at the University of Hawaii. "You think it‘s working because the headache goes away, but the tumor is still growing. Unless we cut greenhouse-gas emissions, the threat remains."
But the balance between sustainable use and conservation of the oceans is delicate and a bit complicated. Deep-sea mining in the Pacific Ocean, for example, could yield massive increases in cobalt, nickel, copper and other materials essential to meet the demand for clean-energy technologies and batteries. The mining industry is asking the environmentalists and biologists to look at the bigger picture. "There is a single deposit on the seafloor that can provide the minerals we need for a clean-energy transition, which will slow ocean acidification (...)," says Kris Van Nijen, director of Global Sea Mineral Resources, one of the companies vying for a permit. "Yes, it is an extractive industry, and yes, it is going to come with some impacts, but solutions to combat climate change will not fall from the sky. It‘s all about trade-offs."
The trade-offs work in both directions. If the ocean is to also become humanity‘s partner in combatting the twin challenges of climate change and a growing population, the era of limitless exploitation must come to an end. (…) Actions taken now will take decades to bear fruit, yet if nothing is done, the repercussions will be swift.
For far too long we have viewed the ocean, with its incomprehensible vastness, as a source of infinite bounty and too big to fail. Then, when the ocean – robbed of its fish, sickened by plastic and poisoned by pollution – started to decline, the problem seemed too big to fix. But ours is an ocean planet, and without it we won‘t survive. The truth may be dawning that the ocean, as marine ecologist Jane Lubchenco puts it, "is too big to ignore."
With reporting by MADELINE ROACHE/LONDON. BY ARYN BAKER | PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHRIS LEIDY. JULY 9, 2020. In: https://time.com/5863821/saving-the-oceans/ Acesso em: 15 jun. 2021. Texto adaptado.
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