A group of leading world experts has met to discuss the state of the world’s oceans.
Their findings, surprising even to them, are that the oceans of the world are under more severe stress than already understood.
Conditions are now being created that are the same as all five mass-extinctions in the past 600 million years.
That means that if we continue on the current trajectory we can expect a mass extinction of (nearly all) marine species by the end of the century. These would be widespread, throughout the oceans.
Morally this is ecocide, far worse in scale than the concentration camps of the 1940s.
Purely practically, it would remove fish as a food source for people. More seriously it would have serious impacts for many if not all land-based life forms and ecosystems: not only those that get their food from the oceans (directly or indirectly). But also because the oceans play a major part in regulating our atmosphere.
The conditions being created in our oceans now are similar to those which have been “a pre-requisite for all the five global extinction events of the past 600 million years.”
Action needs to be taken now.
You can read more here:
http://www.stateoftheocean.org/ipso-2011-workshop-summary.cfm
A short version of the meeting’s report is here:
http://www.stateoftheocean.org/pdfs/1806_IPSOshort.pdf
A longer version is here:
http://www.stateoftheocean.org/pdfs/1906_IPSO-LONG.pdf