UNITED NATIONS: The United Nations sounded the alarm over the health of the world's oceans yesterday, warning that aggressive fishing threatened little-understood corals that could hold the key to new medicines.
Oil exploration, waste-dumping and telecommunications cables pose further risks to mysterious cold-water corals, according to a report issued ahead of World Environment Day today which this year focuses on risks to marine life.
The corals, cousins of the creatures that build more famous tropical reefs, live in sunless waters up to 3.5 miles deep but are seriously threatened by deep-sea fishing, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) said in its report.
Particularly damaging is bottom trawling, which involves pulling huge weighted nets behind ships. The nets drag along the sea floor scooping up all the marine life in their way from valuable fish to inedible species and delicate corals.
"Arguably the biggest threat to both cold and warm-water corals is coming from unsustainable fishing," the head of UNEP, Mr Klaus Töpfer, said.
Environmentalists trying to persuade governments to cut back on fishing to protect reefs and precarious fish stocks are up against a formidable enemy, a voracious international appetite for seafood.
From sushi in Tokyo to fish and chips on Britain's beaches, consumer demand drives a massive market worth an estimated $75 billion a year and also supports jobs in coastal areas of many countries where other employment options are limited.
Fishing of more usual commercial species is depleting stocks at an alarming rate.
According to the United Nations, more than 70 per cent of the world's commercially important fish stocks are overexploited, depleted, fully fished or slowly recovering.
But tumbling numbers of traditional favourites like cod only encourage some fishermen to turn to more exotic deep-sea options such as orange roughey or blue ling.
The fate of these fish is intimately tied to that of the slow-growing cold-water corals they live in and around, and it can be hard to catch them without damaging or destroying the reefs.
Even if deep-sea fishing is scaled back, sea-bed telecommunications cables, waste-dumping and fossil-fuel prospecting would still threaten the fragile coral beds, which scientists say are more extensive than they originally thought.