This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience while browsing it. By clicking 'Got It' you're accepting these terms.
Most recent
Trending
Top Videos
The best of EcoWatch, right in your inbox. Sign up for our email newsletter!
A new study has unveiled humanity's sweeping impact on the world's oceans. Commercial fishing, climate change, agricultural runoff and other human-caused stressors have wiped out nearly 90 percent of Earth's marine wilderness, researchers from the University of California at Santa Barbara and the University of Queensland, Australia revealed.
Just 13 percent of the world's seas can be classified as truly wild, with most being located in the high seas, according to the study published Thursday in the journal Current Biology.
"Those marine areas that can be considered 'pristine' are becoming increasingly rare, as fishing and shipping fleets expand their reach across almost all of the world's oceans, and sediment runoff smothers many coastal areas," said Kendall Jones, researcher at the University of Queensland and lead author of the paper, in a press release.
What's more, less than 5 percent of the world's remaining marine wildness is protected.
"Improvements in shipping technology mean that even the most remote wilderness areas may come under threat in the future, including once ice-covered places that are now accessible because of climate change," Jones said.
To map out these areas, the research team used fine scale global data to analyze 19 human stressors on the seas, including industrial shipping, sediment runoff and several types of fishing.
The areas that were least affected by these stressors were classified as wilderness, amounting to 21 million square miles or 13.2 percent of the marine environment.
The study shows that most marine wilderness is located in the Arctic, Antarctic and in remote Pacific island nations with low human populations. Conversely, in coastal regions with intense human activities, very little marine wilderness remains. These coastal habitats are home to coral reefs, salt marshes and kelp forests.
The researchers said that preserving the ocean's remaining wilderness is more urgent than ever.
"We know these marine wilderness areas are declining catastrophically, and protecting them must become a focus of multilateral environmental agreements," James Watson, professor at the University of Queensland, director of science at the Wildlife Conservation Society and senior author of the paper, said in the press release. "If not, they will likely disappear within 50 years."
EcoWatch Daily Newsletter
In a new report about how the world's coral reefs face "the combined threats of climate change, pollution, and overfishing" — endangering the future of marine biodiversity — a London-based nonprofit calls for greater global efforts to end the climate crisis and ensure the survival of these vital underwater ecosystems.
The world is using up more and more resources and global recycling is falling. That's the grim takeaway from a new report by the Circle Economy think tank, which found that the world used up more than 110 billion tons, or 100.6 billion metric tons, of natural resources, as Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.
By Gero Rueter
Heating with coal, oil and natural gas accounts for around a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions. But that's something we can change, says Wolfgang Feist, founder of the Passive House Institute in the western German city of Darmstadt.
By George Citroner
- Recent research finds that official government figures may be underestimating drug deaths by half.
- Researchers estimate that 142,000 people died due to drug use in 2016.
- Drug use decreases life expectancy after age 15 by 1.4 years for men and by just under 1 year for women, on average.
Government records may be severely underreporting how many Americans die from drug use, according to a new study by researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and Georgetown University.
Trending
In a new nationwide assessment of drinking water systems, the Environmental Working Group found that toxic fluorinated chemicals known as PFAS are far more prevalent than previously thought.