KARACHI, Jan 9: Some 20,000 acres of coastal marshes, habitat for juvenile marine life, are wiped out every year because of sea pollution, a survey shows.
Conducted by NGO Shirkat Gah with the collaboration of Pakistan Mahigir Tehrik, the survey shows that over 70 per cent of the world’s marine fisheries are now either completely depleted or being fished beyond their sustainable limit.
Eighty per cent of pollution in the world’s oceans comes from land-based human activities. Since everything ends up in the oceans whether it is melted snow originating from the mountains and flowing into rivers or it is contaminated on the way by unregulated waste such as sewage, and agricultural and industrial run off containing fertilizer, pesticides and oil.
It is observed that river waters come down to deltas and estuaries where saltwater meets fresh water creating the unique environment of the mangroves which are nurseries of 85 per cent of commercial fish species including the shrimps in the tropics.According to the survey, business and industry also contribute to serious sea pollution. Plastics are an absolute curse at sea. Being light, plastic floats very far and wide and it kills up to an average of a million sea birds, 100,000 sea mammals and countless fish every year. While organic wastes eventually decompose, plastic waste does not, and the same floating waste can keep killing marine life as long as it is the water.
It is also worth remembering that toxic runoff has led to early 150 coastal “dead zones” in the world, the sizes ranging from one to two square kilometers up to as much as 70, 000 square km where there are no more fish.
The survey urged the government and commercial fisheries to realize the situation that the seas were not just fishing grounds but also the main source of water and earth’s life.
