The magical underwater world of coral reefs just got a lot deeper — about four miles, to be exact.
In a report unveiled here Friday by the United Nations Environment Program, scientists announced that cold-water coral reefs previously thought to exist only off of Norway and the British Isles are in fact being found all over the planet, from the coasts of Brazil and Indonesia to waters off of Angola and Spain.
However, no sooner are scientists learning about the fragile, three-dimensional lacework structures buried beneath the sea than they’re witnessing signs of their destruction and decline, scarred by the fishing ships that drag and scrape nets along the ocean floor.
It was a grim reminder on World Environment Day that humans have a long way to go to sustain biodiversity on earth — even in its darkest, least discovered places.
Coral reefs are the rainforests of the oceans, Klaus Toepfer, executive director of UNEP, said, and “there is nothing comparable now on the market.”
“The message of World Environment Day is simple: Act now to save our marine resources, or watch as the rich diversity of life in our seas and oceans declines beyond the point of recovery.”
Greenpeace activists in Barcelona also honored the day — celebrated every June 5 since the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment — by scaling Antoni Gaudi’s famous cathedral La Sagrada Familia and unfurling an enormous banner that read Save Our Seas. The organization has called for an immediate moratorium on deep-sea trawling.
Andre Freiwald, a geology professor at Erlangen University in Germany and the architect of the report “Cold-Water Coral Reefs: Out of Sight — No Longer Out of Mind,” said that scientists have known about the existence of cold-water reefs for several centuries, with evidence of the reefs dating back 65 million years to the time when dinosaurs went extinct. But only in the mid-1990s with the use of high-tech underwater cameras, robotic equipment and deep-sea vehicles were ocean specialists able to chart and explore the vast number of deep-sea, cold-water coral reefs they now see clumped around the world.
While coral reefs exist on only half of one percent of the ocean floor, scientists estimate that more than 90 percent of marine species directly or indirectly depend on them for life. Cold-water reefs grow slowly — just one-tenth as fast as tropical coral reefs — and so do the fish that live around them, like orange roughey, blue ling, and black scabbardfish, which reproduce at slower rates. Located off the coasts of at least 40 countries, usually at depths of between 200 and 1,000 yards — though scientists have found some as deep as four miles down — cold-water reefs also contain species such as snails and clams that paleontologists thought went extinct 2 million years ago.
Now, at the rapid rate the global fishing industry is wiping out those reefs with trawl nets that scrape at ever deeper levels along the ocean floor, the extinction of those rare species may be only a step away.
“It’s like picking apples from a tree by cutting the tree down,” said Simon Cripps of World Wildlife Fund, an organization that is working closely with the fishing industry to find non-damaging techniques of harvesting the deep sea. “You can count the number of animals that exist there, but it’s more about keeping the ecosystem healthy and diverse so it continues to produce in the future.”
It’s not as though human actions haven’t already wreaked havoc on the world’s oceans. Nitrogen runoff from agricultural fertilizers has created about 150 coastal “dead zones” worldwide. In the last decade, a yearly average of 600,000 barrels of oil has spilled from ships, or the equivalent of 12 disasters like the tanker Prestige, which sank off the coast of Spain in 2002. More than 30,000 whales, dolphins, and porpoises and 300,000 seabirds die each year as bycatch from the longlines, trawl nets, and gill nets used in commercial fishing.
Coastal development and pollution — not to mention a temperature increase due to global warming — have also played a role in coral-reef decline worldwide. Whereas bottom trawling has already wiped out half of the cold-water coral along the Norwegian Shelf, scientists say that nearly 60 percent of the world’s remaining reefs are at risk of being lost in the next three decades.
And experts assure us that the loss of reefs won’t affect plant and animal species alone. Forty percent of the world’s human population lives within 40 miles of the coast, and roughly 3.5 billion people depend on the ocean for their primary food source.
By protecting both warm- and cold-water coral reefs, humans could help increase fish size and quantity. But while half of the global fish catch is done on a small-scale, local level — 95 percent of it, or 80 million tons, comes from near-shore waters — illegal, unregulated, and subsidized commercial fleets are threatening the fish stocks for all.
What is needed, according to the U.N., WWF, and others who worked on the report, is an increase in governance and marine protected areas. But the high seas, which cover half the earth’s surface, fall beyond national jurisdiction and are therefore harder to conserve by law. In addition, subsides for large-scale commercial fishing range from $15 billion to $20 billion a year, encouraging rather than discouraging overfishing.
At the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, governments committed with time-bound targets to ending unsustainable fishing practices, restoring depleted fish stocks, and creating more marine protected areas.
Currently, less than half of 1 percent of marine habitats are protected, and 70 percent of the world’s fisheries are either being harvested at a maximum level or beyond their sustainable limit. In 1998, 75 percent of the world’s reefs were affected by coral bleaching.
In short, our global environment leaders are telling us that the situation is far from good.
“This is a wakeup call for the world,” said Cripps of WWF, “and we have to act now.”