Coral-rich Greek archipelago hopes to gain from trawler ban
By AFP
June 2, 2025
Workers handle a fishing net near a trawler docked at the port of Nea Michaniona, in northern Greece - Copyright AFP Sakis Mitrolidis
Vassilis KYRIAKOULIS
As a reddish dawn broke over the tiny, coral-rich Greek archipelago of Fournoi, Manolis Mytikas’s wooden fishing boat slowly glided home, his nets almost empty.
The modest catch nevertheless quickly drew several islanders in search of fresh fish, a rarity in past years in this island chain in the northeastern Aegean Sea, which has fewer than 1,500 inhabitants in total.
“Today, there were two of us heading out to sea, and we caught some fish by chance,” said the 76-year-old fisherman, his skin deeply tanned by the Mediterranean sun.
“Yesterday, we earned 30 euros ($34). The day before yesterday, not a penny. Sometimes, we don’t even have enough to eat,” he told AFP.
But things could be looking up for this small corner of the Aegean Sea.
Last month, the Greek government banned bottom trawling in the waters around the archipelago, to protect a recent discovery of exceptionally rich coral reefs.
Greece is also outlawing bottom trawling in national marine parks by 2026 and in all protected marine areas by 2030, the first country in Europe to take such a step.
Fishing is generally allowed in protected marine areas worldwide, often even by trawlers, which scrape the seabed with a huge funnel-shaped net.
“Finally!” Mytikas exclaimed when told of the ban. “They’ve ravaged the sea. They plough the seabed and destroy everything.”
At the island port, his colleague Vaggelis Markakis, 58, compared trawlers to “bulldozers”.
“If we stop them from coming here, our sea will come back to life,” Mytikas said. “The sea will be filled with fish again.”
Research conducted in this archipelago by the conservation groups Under the Pole, which organises diving expeditions in extreme environments, and Archipelagos, in collaboration with European scientific institutions, has highlighted the existence of major underwater animal populations.
At depths between 60 and 150 meters (around 200 to 500 feet), scientists have documented over 300 species living on the seabed under minimal light.
– ‘Underwater forests’ –
“What we discovered is beyond imagination — vast coral reefs dating back thousands of years, still intact,” gushed Anastasia Miliou, scientific director of Archipelagos.
The sea floor-dwelling species discovered include vibrantly red gorgonians (Paramuricea clavata) and black corals (Antipathella subpinnata).
“When these organisms occur at high densities, they form true underwater forests,” said Lorenzo Bramanti, a researcher at the CNRS Laboratory of Ecogeochemistry of Benthic Environments.
But these habitats are extremely sensitive.
“A single trawl pass is enough to raze them,” warned Stelios Katsanevakis, professor of oceanography at the University of the Aegean.
And the damage can be potentially irreversible, added Bramanti.
“Once destroyed, these forests may take decades or even centuries to recover,” said the marine scientist, who has worked on corals in the Mediterranean, Caribbean and Pacific.
“No one doubts that cutting down a forest is an ecological disaster. The same is true for animal forests,” Bramanti said.
– Setting an example –
By banning bottom trawling around Fournoi, Bramanti hopes Greece will set an example for other Mediterranean countries, he said.
“We must act quickly, because these are among the last ecosystems still untouched by climate change,” given that they are located at depths greater than 70 meters, he said.
“And we risk losing them before we even truly understand them.”
But the measure has left industrial fishing professionals fuming.
There are around 220 bottom trawlers in Greece, and sector representatives complain restrictions on their activity are excessive.
“We were not invited to any kind of discussion on this matter,” said Kostas Daoultzis, head of the trawler cooperative at the northern port of Nea Michaniona, one of the country’s main fish markets.
Daoultzis said the decisions were “based on reports from volunteer organisations… lacking scientific backing”.
He said trawlers already avoid coral areas, which can damage their equipment.
Fournoi fishermen counter that trawlers do fish in their waters, but turn off their tracking systems to avoid detection.
Under pressure globally, trawling is likely to be on the agenda at a United Nations Ocean Conference next week in the French city of Nice.
Daoultzis said he fears for the survival of his profession.
“Our fishing spaces keep shrinking. Our activity is under threat, and consumers will suffer — fish prices will skyrocket,” he warned.
By AFP
June 2, 2025
Workers handle a fishing net near a trawler docked at the port of Nea Michaniona, in northern Greece - Copyright AFP Sakis Mitrolidis
Vassilis KYRIAKOULIS
As a reddish dawn broke over the tiny, coral-rich Greek archipelago of Fournoi, Manolis Mytikas’s wooden fishing boat slowly glided home, his nets almost empty.
The modest catch nevertheless quickly drew several islanders in search of fresh fish, a rarity in past years in this island chain in the northeastern Aegean Sea, which has fewer than 1,500 inhabitants in total.
“Today, there were two of us heading out to sea, and we caught some fish by chance,” said the 76-year-old fisherman, his skin deeply tanned by the Mediterranean sun.
“Yesterday, we earned 30 euros ($34). The day before yesterday, not a penny. Sometimes, we don’t even have enough to eat,” he told AFP.
But things could be looking up for this small corner of the Aegean Sea.
Last month, the Greek government banned bottom trawling in the waters around the archipelago, to protect a recent discovery of exceptionally rich coral reefs.
Greece is also outlawing bottom trawling in national marine parks by 2026 and in all protected marine areas by 2030, the first country in Europe to take such a step.
Fishing is generally allowed in protected marine areas worldwide, often even by trawlers, which scrape the seabed with a huge funnel-shaped net.
“Finally!” Mytikas exclaimed when told of the ban. “They’ve ravaged the sea. They plough the seabed and destroy everything.”
At the island port, his colleague Vaggelis Markakis, 58, compared trawlers to “bulldozers”.
“If we stop them from coming here, our sea will come back to life,” Mytikas said. “The sea will be filled with fish again.”
Research conducted in this archipelago by the conservation groups Under the Pole, which organises diving expeditions in extreme environments, and Archipelagos, in collaboration with European scientific institutions, has highlighted the existence of major underwater animal populations.
At depths between 60 and 150 meters (around 200 to 500 feet), scientists have documented over 300 species living on the seabed under minimal light.
– ‘Underwater forests’ –
“What we discovered is beyond imagination — vast coral reefs dating back thousands of years, still intact,” gushed Anastasia Miliou, scientific director of Archipelagos.
The sea floor-dwelling species discovered include vibrantly red gorgonians (Paramuricea clavata) and black corals (Antipathella subpinnata).
“When these organisms occur at high densities, they form true underwater forests,” said Lorenzo Bramanti, a researcher at the CNRS Laboratory of Ecogeochemistry of Benthic Environments.
But these habitats are extremely sensitive.
“A single trawl pass is enough to raze them,” warned Stelios Katsanevakis, professor of oceanography at the University of the Aegean.
And the damage can be potentially irreversible, added Bramanti.
“Once destroyed, these forests may take decades or even centuries to recover,” said the marine scientist, who has worked on corals in the Mediterranean, Caribbean and Pacific.
“No one doubts that cutting down a forest is an ecological disaster. The same is true for animal forests,” Bramanti said.
– Setting an example –
By banning bottom trawling around Fournoi, Bramanti hopes Greece will set an example for other Mediterranean countries, he said.
“We must act quickly, because these are among the last ecosystems still untouched by climate change,” given that they are located at depths greater than 70 meters, he said.
“And we risk losing them before we even truly understand them.”
But the measure has left industrial fishing professionals fuming.
There are around 220 bottom trawlers in Greece, and sector representatives complain restrictions on their activity are excessive.
“We were not invited to any kind of discussion on this matter,” said Kostas Daoultzis, head of the trawler cooperative at the northern port of Nea Michaniona, one of the country’s main fish markets.
Daoultzis said the decisions were “based on reports from volunteer organisations… lacking scientific backing”.
He said trawlers already avoid coral areas, which can damage their equipment.
Fournoi fishermen counter that trawlers do fish in their waters, but turn off their tracking systems to avoid detection.
Under pressure globally, trawling is likely to be on the agenda at a United Nations Ocean Conference next week in the French city of Nice.
Daoultzis said he fears for the survival of his profession.
“Our fishing spaces keep shrinking. Our activity is under threat, and consumers will suffer — fish prices will skyrocket,” he warned.
In a hotter future, what comes after coral reefs die?
By AFP
June 2, 2025
Corals bleach in warm ocean waters, making them particularly vulnerable as global temperatures rise due to climate change
By AFP
June 2, 2025
Corals bleach in warm ocean waters, making them particularly vulnerable as global temperatures rise due to climate change
- Copyright ${image.metadata.node.credit} ${image.metadata.node.creator}
Nick Perry
The fate of coral reefs has been written with a degree of certainty rare in climate science: at 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming, most are expected to die.
This is not a far-off scenario. Scientists predict that the rise of 1.5 Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) will be reached within a decade and that beyond that point, many coral simply cannot survive.
It is important to accept this and ask what next “rather than trying to hold onto the past”, said David Obura, chair of IPBES, the UN’s expert scientific panel on biodiversity.
“I wish it were different,” Obura, a Kenyan reef scientist and founding director of CORDIO East Africa, a marine research organisation, told AFP.
“We need to be pragmatic about it and ask those questions, and face up to what the likely future will be.”
And yet, it is a subject few marine scientists care to dwell on.
“We are having a hard time imagining that all coral reefs really could die off,” said Melanie McField, a Caribbean reef expert, who described a “sort of pre-traumatic stress syndrome” among her colleagues.
“But it is likely in the two-degree world we are rapidly accelerating to,” McField, founding director of the Healthy Reefs for Healthy People Initiative, told AFP.
When stressed in hotter ocean waters, corals expel the microscopic algae that provides their characteristic colour and food source. Without respite, bleached corals slowly starve.
At 1.5C of warming relative to pre-industrial times, between 70 and 90 percent of coral reefs are expected to perish, according to the IPCC, the global authority on climate science.
At 2C, that number rises to 99 percent.
Even with warming as it stands today — about 1.4C — mass coral death is occurring, and many scientists believe the global collapse of tropical reefs may already be underway.
– What comes next –
Obura said it was not pessimistic to imagine a world without coral reefs, but an urgent question that scientists were “only just starting to grapple with”.
“I see no reason to not be clear about where we are at this point in time,” Obura said. “Let’s be honest about that, and deal with the consequences.”
Rather than disappear completely, coral reefs as they exist today will likely evolve into something very different, marine scientists on four continents told AFP.
This would happen as slow-growing hard corals — the primary reef builders that underpin the ecosystem — die off, leaving behind white skeletons without living tissue.
Gradually, these would be covered by algae and colonised by simpler organisms better able to withstand hotter oceans, like sponges, mussels, and weedy soft corals like sea fans.
“There will be less winners than there are losers,” said Tom Dallison, a marine scientist and strategic advisor to the International Coral Reef Initiative.
These species would dominate this new underwater world. The dead coral beneath — weakened by ocean acidification, and buffeted by waves and storms — would erode over time into rubble.
“They will still exist, but they will just look very different. It is our responsibility to ensure the services they provide, and those that depend on them, are protected,” Dallison said.
– Dark horizon –
One quarter of all ocean species live among the world’s corals.
Smaller, sparser, less biodiverse reefs simply means fewer fish and other marine life.
The collapse of reefs threatens in particular the estimated one billion people who rely on them for food, tourism income, and protection from coastal erosion and storms.
But if protected and managed properly, these post-coral reefs could still be healthy, productive, attractive ecosystems that provide some economic benefit, said Obura.
So far, the picture is fuzzy — research into this future has been very limited.
Stretched resources have been prioritised for protecting coral and exploring novel ways to make reefs more climate resilient.
But climate change is not the only thing threatening corals.
Tackling pollution, harmful subsidies, overfishing and other drivers of coral demise would give “the remaining places the best possible chance of making it through whatever eventual warming we have”, Obura said.
Conservation and restoration efforts were “absolutely essential” but alone were like “pushing a really heavy ball up a hill, and that hill is getting steeper”, he added.
Trying to save coral reefs “is going to be extremely difficult” as long as we keep pouring carbon into the atmosphere, said Jean-Pierre Gattuso, an oceans expert from France’s flagship scientific research institute, CNRS.
But some coral had developed a level of thermal tolerance, he said, and research into restoring small reef areas with these resilient strains held promise.
“How do we work in this space when you have this sort of big dark event on the horizon? It’s to make that dark event a little brighter,” said Dallison.
Nick Perry
The fate of coral reefs has been written with a degree of certainty rare in climate science: at 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming, most are expected to die.
This is not a far-off scenario. Scientists predict that the rise of 1.5 Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) will be reached within a decade and that beyond that point, many coral simply cannot survive.
It is important to accept this and ask what next “rather than trying to hold onto the past”, said David Obura, chair of IPBES, the UN’s expert scientific panel on biodiversity.
“I wish it were different,” Obura, a Kenyan reef scientist and founding director of CORDIO East Africa, a marine research organisation, told AFP.
“We need to be pragmatic about it and ask those questions, and face up to what the likely future will be.”
And yet, it is a subject few marine scientists care to dwell on.
“We are having a hard time imagining that all coral reefs really could die off,” said Melanie McField, a Caribbean reef expert, who described a “sort of pre-traumatic stress syndrome” among her colleagues.
“But it is likely in the two-degree world we are rapidly accelerating to,” McField, founding director of the Healthy Reefs for Healthy People Initiative, told AFP.
When stressed in hotter ocean waters, corals expel the microscopic algae that provides their characteristic colour and food source. Without respite, bleached corals slowly starve.
At 1.5C of warming relative to pre-industrial times, between 70 and 90 percent of coral reefs are expected to perish, according to the IPCC, the global authority on climate science.
At 2C, that number rises to 99 percent.
Even with warming as it stands today — about 1.4C — mass coral death is occurring, and many scientists believe the global collapse of tropical reefs may already be underway.
– What comes next –
Obura said it was not pessimistic to imagine a world without coral reefs, but an urgent question that scientists were “only just starting to grapple with”.
“I see no reason to not be clear about where we are at this point in time,” Obura said. “Let’s be honest about that, and deal with the consequences.”
Rather than disappear completely, coral reefs as they exist today will likely evolve into something very different, marine scientists on four continents told AFP.
This would happen as slow-growing hard corals — the primary reef builders that underpin the ecosystem — die off, leaving behind white skeletons without living tissue.
Gradually, these would be covered by algae and colonised by simpler organisms better able to withstand hotter oceans, like sponges, mussels, and weedy soft corals like sea fans.
“There will be less winners than there are losers,” said Tom Dallison, a marine scientist and strategic advisor to the International Coral Reef Initiative.
These species would dominate this new underwater world. The dead coral beneath — weakened by ocean acidification, and buffeted by waves and storms — would erode over time into rubble.
“They will still exist, but they will just look very different. It is our responsibility to ensure the services they provide, and those that depend on them, are protected,” Dallison said.
– Dark horizon –
One quarter of all ocean species live among the world’s corals.
Smaller, sparser, less biodiverse reefs simply means fewer fish and other marine life.
The collapse of reefs threatens in particular the estimated one billion people who rely on them for food, tourism income, and protection from coastal erosion and storms.
But if protected and managed properly, these post-coral reefs could still be healthy, productive, attractive ecosystems that provide some economic benefit, said Obura.
So far, the picture is fuzzy — research into this future has been very limited.
Stretched resources have been prioritised for protecting coral and exploring novel ways to make reefs more climate resilient.
But climate change is not the only thing threatening corals.
Tackling pollution, harmful subsidies, overfishing and other drivers of coral demise would give “the remaining places the best possible chance of making it through whatever eventual warming we have”, Obura said.
Conservation and restoration efforts were “absolutely essential” but alone were like “pushing a really heavy ball up a hill, and that hill is getting steeper”, he added.
Trying to save coral reefs “is going to be extremely difficult” as long as we keep pouring carbon into the atmosphere, said Jean-Pierre Gattuso, an oceans expert from France’s flagship scientific research institute, CNRS.
But some coral had developed a level of thermal tolerance, he said, and research into restoring small reef areas with these resilient strains held promise.
“How do we work in this space when you have this sort of big dark event on the horizon? It’s to make that dark event a little brighter,” said Dallison.
By AFP
June 1, 2025
The third UN Ocean Conference takes place in Nice, southern France, from June 9 to 13 - © AFP
Nick PERRY, with Antoine AGASSE in Brest
Nations will be under pressure to deliver more than just rhetoric at a UN oceans summit in France next week, including much-needed funds to better protect the world’s overexploited and polluted seas.
The third UN Ocean Conference (UNOC) seeks to build global unity and raise money for marine conservation even as nations disagree over deep-sea mining, plastic trash and overfishing.
On Sunday, hosts France are expecting about 70 heads of state and government to arrive in Nice for a pre-conference opening ceremony, including Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
Oceans are “in a state of emergency” and the June 9 to 13 meeting “will not be just another routine gathering”, said UN under-secretary-general Li Junhua.
“There’s still time to change our course if we act collectively,” he told reporters.
Most countries are expected to send ministers or lower-level delegates to the summit, which does not carry the weight of a climate COP or UN treaty negotiation or make legally binding decisions.
The United States under President Donald Trump — whose recent push to fast-track seabed mining in international waters sparked global outrage — is unlikely to send a delegation at all.
France has promised the summit will do for ocean conservation what the Paris Agreement did for global climate action.
Nations present are expected to adopt a “Nice Declaration”: a statement of support for greater ocean protection, coupled with voluntary additional commitments by individual governments.
Greenpeace has slammed the text — which was agreed after months of negotiation — as “weak” and said it risked making Nice “a meaningless talking shop”.
Pacific leaders are expected to turn out in force and demand, in particular, concrete financial commitments from governments.
“The message is clear: voluntary pledges are not enough”, Ralph Regenvanu, environment minister for Vanuatu, told reporters.
The summit will also host business leaders, international donors and ocean activists, while a science convention beforehand is expected to draw 2,000 ocean experts.
– Temperature check –
France has set a high bar of securing by Nice the 60 ratifications needed to enact a landmark treaty to protect marine habitats outside national jurisdiction.
So far, only 28 countries and the European Union have done so. Olivier Poivre d’Arvor, France’s oceans envoy, says that without the numbers the conference “will be a failure”.
Bringing the high seas treaty into force is seen as crucial to meeting the globally-agreed target of protecting 30 percent of oceans by 2030.
The summit could also prove influential on other higher-level negotiations in the months ahead and provide “a temperature check in terms of ambition”, said Megan Randles, head of Greenpeace’s delegation at the Nice conference.
In July the International Seabed Authority will deliberate over a long-awaited mining code for the deep oceans, one that Trump has skirted despite major ecological concerns.
That comes in the face of growing calls for governments to support an international moratorium on seabed mining, something France and roughly 30 other countries have already backed.
And in August, nations will again seek to finalise a binding global treaty to tackle plastic trash after previous negotiation rounds collapsed.
Countries and civil society groups are likely to use the Nice meeting to try to shore up support ahead of these proceedings, close observers said.
– Turning point –
Nations meeting at UN conferences have struggled recently to find consensus and much-needed finance to combat climate change and other environmental threats.
Oceans are the least funded of all the UN’s sustainable development goals but it wasn’t clear if Nice would shift the status quo, said Angelique Pouponneau, a lead negotiator for the Alliance of Small Island States.
“With so many competing crises and distractions on the global agenda, it’s hard to be confident that the level of ambition needed will actually show up,” Pouponneau told AFP.
Costa Rica, which is co-hosting the conference with France, said public and private commitments of $100 billion with “clear timelines, budgets and accountability mechanisms” could be expected.
“This is what is different this time around — zero rhetoric, maximum results,” Maritza Chan Valverde, Costa Rica’s permanent representative to the UN, told reporters.
Pepe Clarke, oceans practice leader from WWF, told AFP there was “an understandable level of scepticism about conferences”.
But he said Nice must be “a turning point… because to date the actions have fallen far short of what’s needed to sustain a healthy ocean into the future”.
Oceans feel the heat from human climate pollution
By AFP
June 1, 2025
A trail of oil leaked into the ocean. — © Asamblea de Tobago/AFP Handout/File
By AFP
June 1, 2025
A trail of oil leaked into the ocean. — © Asamblea de Tobago/AFP Handout/File
Benjamin LEGENDRE
Oceans have absorbed the vast majority of the warming caused by burning fossil fuels and shielded societies from the full impact of greenhouse gas emissions.
But this crucial ally has developed alarming symptoms of stress — heatwaves, loss of marine life, rising sea levels, falling oxygen levels and acidification caused by the uptake of excess carbon dioxide.
These effects risk not just the health of the ocean but the entire planet.
– Heating up –
By absorbing more than 90 percent of the excess heat trapped in the atmosphere by greenhouse gases, “oceans are warming faster and faster”, said Angelique Melet, an oceanographer at the European Mercator Ocean monitor.
The UN’s IPCC climate expert panel has said the rate of ocean warming — and therefore its heat uptake — has more than doubled since 1993.
Average sea surface temperatures reached new records in 2023 and 2024.
Despite a respite at the start of 2025, temperatures remain at historic highs, according to data from the Europe Union’s Copernicus climate monitor.
The Mediterranean has set a new temperature record in each of the past three years and is one of the basins most affected, along with the North Atlantic and Arctic oceans, said Thibault Guinaldo, of France’s CEMS research centre.
Marine heatwaves have doubled in frequency, become longer lasting and more intense, and affect a wider area, the IPCC said in its special oceans report.
Warmer seas can make storms more violent, feeding them with heat and evaporated water.
The heating water can also be devastating for species, especially corals and seagrass beds, which are unable to migrate.
For corals, between 70 percent and 90 percent are expected to be lost this century if the world reaches 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming compared to pre-industrial levels.
Scientists expect that threshold — the more ambitious goal of the Paris climate deal — to be breached in the early 2030s or even before.
– Relentless rise –
When a liquid or gas warms up, it expands and takes up more space.
In the case of the oceans, this thermal expansion combines with the slow but irreversible melting of the world’s ice caps and mountain glaciers to lift the world’s seas.
The pace at which global oceans are rising has doubled in three decades and if current trends continue it will double again by 2100 to about one centimetre per year, according to recent research.
Around 230 million people worldwide live less than a metre above sea level, vulnerable to increasing threats from floods and storms.
“Ocean warming, like sea-level rise, has become an inescapable process on the scale of our lives, but also over several centuries,” said Melet.
“But if we reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we will reduce the rate and magnitude of the damage, and gain time for adaptation”.
– More acidity, less oxygen –
The ocean not only stores heat, it has also taken up 20 to 30 percent of all humans’ carbon dioxide emissions since the 1980s, according to the IPCC, causing the waters to become more acidic.
Acidification weakens corals and makes it harder for shellfish and the skeletons of crustaceans and certain plankton to calcify.
“Another key indicator is oxygen concentration, which is obviously important for marine life,” said Melet.
Oxygen loss is due to a complex set of causes including those linked to warming waters.
– Reduced sea ice –
Combined Arctic and Antarctic sea ice cover — frozen ocean water that floats on the surface — plunged to a record low in mid-February, more than a million square miles below the pre-2010 average.
This becomes a vicious circle, with less sea ice allowing more solar energy to reach and warm the water, leading to more ice melting.
This feeds the phenomenon of “polar amplification” that makes global warming faster and more intense at the poles, said Guinaldo.
Oceans have absorbed the vast majority of the warming caused by burning fossil fuels and shielded societies from the full impact of greenhouse gas emissions.
But this crucial ally has developed alarming symptoms of stress — heatwaves, loss of marine life, rising sea levels, falling oxygen levels and acidification caused by the uptake of excess carbon dioxide.
These effects risk not just the health of the ocean but the entire planet.
– Heating up –
By absorbing more than 90 percent of the excess heat trapped in the atmosphere by greenhouse gases, “oceans are warming faster and faster”, said Angelique Melet, an oceanographer at the European Mercator Ocean monitor.
The UN’s IPCC climate expert panel has said the rate of ocean warming — and therefore its heat uptake — has more than doubled since 1993.
Average sea surface temperatures reached new records in 2023 and 2024.
Despite a respite at the start of 2025, temperatures remain at historic highs, according to data from the Europe Union’s Copernicus climate monitor.
The Mediterranean has set a new temperature record in each of the past three years and is one of the basins most affected, along with the North Atlantic and Arctic oceans, said Thibault Guinaldo, of France’s CEMS research centre.
Marine heatwaves have doubled in frequency, become longer lasting and more intense, and affect a wider area, the IPCC said in its special oceans report.
Warmer seas can make storms more violent, feeding them with heat and evaporated water.
The heating water can also be devastating for species, especially corals and seagrass beds, which are unable to migrate.
For corals, between 70 percent and 90 percent are expected to be lost this century if the world reaches 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming compared to pre-industrial levels.
Scientists expect that threshold — the more ambitious goal of the Paris climate deal — to be breached in the early 2030s or even before.
– Relentless rise –
When a liquid or gas warms up, it expands and takes up more space.
In the case of the oceans, this thermal expansion combines with the slow but irreversible melting of the world’s ice caps and mountain glaciers to lift the world’s seas.
The pace at which global oceans are rising has doubled in three decades and if current trends continue it will double again by 2100 to about one centimetre per year, according to recent research.
Around 230 million people worldwide live less than a metre above sea level, vulnerable to increasing threats from floods and storms.
“Ocean warming, like sea-level rise, has become an inescapable process on the scale of our lives, but also over several centuries,” said Melet.
“But if we reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we will reduce the rate and magnitude of the damage, and gain time for adaptation”.
– More acidity, less oxygen –
The ocean not only stores heat, it has also taken up 20 to 30 percent of all humans’ carbon dioxide emissions since the 1980s, according to the IPCC, causing the waters to become more acidic.
Acidification weakens corals and makes it harder for shellfish and the skeletons of crustaceans and certain plankton to calcify.
“Another key indicator is oxygen concentration, which is obviously important for marine life,” said Melet.
Oxygen loss is due to a complex set of causes including those linked to warming waters.
– Reduced sea ice –
Combined Arctic and Antarctic sea ice cover — frozen ocean water that floats on the surface — plunged to a record low in mid-February, more than a million square miles below the pre-2010 average.
This becomes a vicious circle, with less sea ice allowing more solar energy to reach and warm the water, leading to more ice melting.
This feeds the phenomenon of “polar amplification” that makes global warming faster and more intense at the poles, said Guinaldo.
World coming up short on promised marine sanctuaries
By AFP
June 1, 2025
Conservation groups want to see no-fishing bans imposed over marine protected areas - Copyright AFP/File BEN STANSALL
A global target of having 30 percent of the oceans become protected areas by 2030 is looking more fragile than ever, with little progress and the United States backing away, conservationists say.
“With less than 10 percent of the ocean designated as MPAs (marine protected areas) and only 2.7 percent fully or highly protected, it is going to be difficult to reach the 30 percent target,” said Lance Morgan, head of the Marine Conservation Institute in Seattle, Washington.
The institute maps the MPAs for an online atlas, updating moves to meet the 30 percent goal that 196 countries signed onto in 2022, under the Kunling-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.
The ambition is notably at risk because “we see countries like the US reversing course and abandoning decades of bipartisan efforts” to protect areas of the Pacific Ocean, Morgan said.
That referred to an April executive order by President Donald Trump authorising industrial-scale fishing in big swathes of an MPA in that ocean.
Currently, there are 16,516 declared MPAs in the world, covering just 8.4 percent of the oceans.
But not all are created equal: some forbid all forms of fishing, while others place no roles, or almost none, on what activities are proscribed or permitted.
“Only a third of them have levels of protection that would yield proper benefits” for fish, said Joachim Claudet, a socio-ecology marine researcher at France’s CNRS.
Daniel Pauly, a professor of fisheries science at Canada’s University of British Columbia, said “the marine protected areas have not really been proposed for the protection of biodiversity” but “to increase fish catches”.
A proper MPA “exports fish to non-protected zones, and that should be the main reason that we create marine protected areas — they are needed to have fish”, he said.
When fish populations are left to reproduce and grow in protected areas, there is often a spillover effect that sees fish stocks outside the zones also rise, as several scientific journals have noted, especially around a no-fishing MPA in Hawaiian waters that is the biggest in the world.
One 2022 study in the Science journal showed a 54 percent in crease in yellowfin tuna around that Hawaiian MPA, an area now threatened by Trump’s executive order, Pauly said.
– Fishing bans –
For such sanctuaries to work, there need to be fishing bans over all or at least some of their zones, Claudet said. But MPAs with such restrictions account for just 2.7 percent of the ocean’s area, and are almost always in parts that are far from areas heavily impacted by human activities.
In Europe, for instance, “90 percent of the marine protected areas are still exposed to bottom trawling,” a spokesperson for the NGO Oceana, Alexandra Cousteau, said. “It’s ecological nonsense.”
Pauly said that “bottom trawling in MPAs is like picking flowers with a bulldozer… they scrape the seabed”.
Oceana said French MPAs suffered intensive bottom trawling, 17,000 hours’ worth in 2024, as did those in British waters, with 20,600 hours. The NGO is calling for a ban on the technique, which involves towing a heavy net along the sea floor, churning it up.
A recent WWF report said that just two percent of European Union waters were covered by MPAs with management plans, even some with no protection measures included.
The head of WWF’s European office for the oceans, Jacob Armstrong, said that was insufficient to protect oceanic health.
Governments need to back words with action, he said, or else these areas would be no more than symbolic markings on a map.
By AFP
June 1, 2025
Conservation groups want to see no-fishing bans imposed over marine protected areas - Copyright AFP/File BEN STANSALL
A global target of having 30 percent of the oceans become protected areas by 2030 is looking more fragile than ever, with little progress and the United States backing away, conservationists say.
“With less than 10 percent of the ocean designated as MPAs (marine protected areas) and only 2.7 percent fully or highly protected, it is going to be difficult to reach the 30 percent target,” said Lance Morgan, head of the Marine Conservation Institute in Seattle, Washington.
The institute maps the MPAs for an online atlas, updating moves to meet the 30 percent goal that 196 countries signed onto in 2022, under the Kunling-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.
The ambition is notably at risk because “we see countries like the US reversing course and abandoning decades of bipartisan efforts” to protect areas of the Pacific Ocean, Morgan said.
That referred to an April executive order by President Donald Trump authorising industrial-scale fishing in big swathes of an MPA in that ocean.
Currently, there are 16,516 declared MPAs in the world, covering just 8.4 percent of the oceans.
But not all are created equal: some forbid all forms of fishing, while others place no roles, or almost none, on what activities are proscribed or permitted.
“Only a third of them have levels of protection that would yield proper benefits” for fish, said Joachim Claudet, a socio-ecology marine researcher at France’s CNRS.
Daniel Pauly, a professor of fisheries science at Canada’s University of British Columbia, said “the marine protected areas have not really been proposed for the protection of biodiversity” but “to increase fish catches”.
A proper MPA “exports fish to non-protected zones, and that should be the main reason that we create marine protected areas — they are needed to have fish”, he said.
When fish populations are left to reproduce and grow in protected areas, there is often a spillover effect that sees fish stocks outside the zones also rise, as several scientific journals have noted, especially around a no-fishing MPA in Hawaiian waters that is the biggest in the world.
One 2022 study in the Science journal showed a 54 percent in crease in yellowfin tuna around that Hawaiian MPA, an area now threatened by Trump’s executive order, Pauly said.
– Fishing bans –
For such sanctuaries to work, there need to be fishing bans over all or at least some of their zones, Claudet said. But MPAs with such restrictions account for just 2.7 percent of the ocean’s area, and are almost always in parts that are far from areas heavily impacted by human activities.
In Europe, for instance, “90 percent of the marine protected areas are still exposed to bottom trawling,” a spokesperson for the NGO Oceana, Alexandra Cousteau, said. “It’s ecological nonsense.”
Pauly said that “bottom trawling in MPAs is like picking flowers with a bulldozer… they scrape the seabed”.
Oceana said French MPAs suffered intensive bottom trawling, 17,000 hours’ worth in 2024, as did those in British waters, with 20,600 hours. The NGO is calling for a ban on the technique, which involves towing a heavy net along the sea floor, churning it up.
A recent WWF report said that just two percent of European Union waters were covered by MPAs with management plans, even some with no protection measures included.
The head of WWF’s European office for the oceans, Jacob Armstrong, said that was insufficient to protect oceanic health.
Governments need to back words with action, he said, or else these areas would be no more than symbolic markings on a map.
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