Greenpeace has just released their report titled, “In Hot Water” which they call for immediate and urgent action for our ocean protection. Their message is clear, we have only 10 years to avoid crossing the 1.5°C threshold.
The report involves the work of more than 11,000 scientists from 153 countries, which said, “Without swift action, ‘untold human suffering’ is unavoidable.”
They warn about the rising sea levels that are sure to happen across the globe, which will cause coastal flooding along with permanent inundations to the coastlines. They have called the recent research published in the academic journal Nature Communications, devastating, which nearly triples the amount of people that will be at risk.
The increasing levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) into our atmosphere are causing large amounts of carbon dioxide to be dissolved in the oceans, which causes a huge increase in oceanic carbonic acid. Our Earth’s oceans are now 25% more acidic than they were pre-industrial revolution. This leads to ocean heating, deoxygenation and throws off the entire ocean chemistry and circulation process.
In their report, they talk about the importance of protecting our oceans and the need to create an area of ocean sanctuaries that would cover 30% of the oceans. These areas will be off-limits to humans, so nature can help to rebuild itself and the “blue carbon” stores. Blue carbon ecosystems make up the largest reservoir of stored carbon on Earth. It has more than 50 times the amount of carbon than the atmosphere and more than 10 times the amount of soils, terrestrial vegetation and microbes combined.
Greenpeace Campaigner, Louisa Casson, from the UK said:
The climate crisis is an ocean crisis. The ocean is fundamental to keeping our planet healthy, but for too long we have treated marine protection as a separate issue to the climate crisis. We must protect our ocean, the biggest carbon sink on earth, and stop burning fossil fuels. From mangroves and seagrass meadows to whales and krill, the ocean’s biology is one of our best allies in the fight against climate change. But overexploitation and our addiction to fossil fuels has pushed our ocean to the brink of collapse. We need urgent, concerted action on a global scale to properly protect at least 30% of our ocean and safeguard its vast stores of blue carbon. Ocean protection is climate action, and if we can save our ocean, it can save us.
We are coming up on a very important event, the Convention on Biological Diversity, that will be happening in October, of 2020 in China. Between now and then, governments must come up with a solid plan to help this planet and do whatever is necessary to protect our oceans. The report highlights the areas for the governments to focus on and the best plan of action. As for the rest of us, let’s keep the pressure on to see this happens.
