Mother Jones: This Commercial Fishing Technique Is a Climate Catastrophe. Globally, it releases as much CO2 as 320 million cars, a new study estimates.
Bottom trawling, a common fishing practice where large nets are dragged along the sea floor, is exacerbating the climate crisis, a new study has found.
Centuries of dead plankton, fish and marine mammals lie on the sea floor, their decomposed bodies locking vast amounts of carbon in the sediments beneath the waves. When those sediments are moved by giant trawl nets, the carbon they contain is released back into the ocean and atmosphere, say the team behind the research.
There’s quite a bit more carbon in the sediments than we (first) thought, said Boris Worm, professor of marine conservation biology at Dalhousie University and co-author on the study. “It’s, in fact, more than (is stored) on land—we did not know that.”
“We want to move away from protected areas as a feel-good measure to protect areas that actually do something for people and for nature, and, yeah, the west coast of Vancouver Island would be the region,” he said. The study also looked at how marine protected areas (MPAs) could bolster biodiversity and food production.