Environment

 WhoWhatWhy - In the search for winning climate solutions, the world’s oceans are an undisputed powerhouse. Oceans absorb around 31 percent of our carbon dioxide emissions, and hold 60 times more carbon than the atmosphere. Critical to this valuable carbon cycle are the billions of sea creatures who live and die underwater — whales and anchovies alike. Yet our ever-growing global appetite for fish threatens the oceans’ climate power. So much so that researchers in Nature argue there is “a strong climate change case” for putting a stop to overfishing.

Even though there is fairly widespread agreement on the need to end this practice, there is virtually no legal authority to make it happen. Still, if the planet could figure out a way to stop overfishing, the climate benefits would be enormous: 5.6 million metric tons of CO2 per year. And bottom trawling, a practice akin to “rototilling” the sea floor, increases emissions from global fishing by over 200 percent, according to research from earlier this year. To store the same amount of carbon using forests would require 432 million acres.