This is a crisis. We need a ban on bottom trawling now – the practice of dropping fishing nets with heavy weights onto the ocean floor is disastrous for the planet.
Shocking new research in the journal Nature, conducted by 26 marine biologists and climate experts, has revealed that the carbon emissions released from ancient sea-bed stores into ocean waters from bottom trawling fisheries reach a billion tonnes every year – 47.7 million tonnes of which comes from trawling in UK waters.
The worst offenders, with the largest carbon emissions due to bottom trawling, are China, Russia, Italy and the UK. In Britain, bottom trawling emits the equivalent of 13 per cent of UK total terrestrial emissions, based on the emissions total of 350 million tonnes in 2019. UK emissions for agriculture, in comparison, including all livestock and crops in the UK, were 5.7 million tonnes of Co2 in the same year.
The implications of this explosive new research is dire for the bottom trawling industry. The addition of 47.7 million tonnes to the carbon footprint of fish, potentially moves it from a relatively low carbon food source to an extremely high one.
By coincidence, just as the sensational Netflix documentary Seaspiracy was launched, exposing the calamitous impacts of industrial marine wildlife-hunting, I had already submitted a query to key UK decision-makers on whether they supported an urgent ban on UK and global bottom trawling.
Seaspiracy dramatically exposed how cruel global industrial fishing is to ocean wildlife, a large amount of which is “by-catch” – species caught unintentionally by trawlers. Estimates of killed by-catch average 10 per cent globally, but can be as high as 55 per cent for shrimp trawling.
Seaspiracy revealed that the nets used for bottom trawling can be so huge that they can accommodate up to 13 jumbo-jets and the metal-weights dragged along the seafloor can weigh up to five tonnes. They scoop up everything in their path, turning teeming ocean-floor sea-forests into dead mud sea-deserts.
Nature’s research estimated that an area of 1.9 million square miles is bottom trawled each year – that’s 230 times the size of Wales.
https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/uknews/bottom-trawling-must-be-banned-immediately-it-s-destroying-our-oceans/ar-BB1fIvji?ocid=msedgntp
