University of British Columbia Scientist Proposes Ocean Fishing Ban

Gotta save all that Carbon for Global Warming Climate Change, don't you know

Fish and aquatic life living in the high seas are more valuable as a carbon sink than as food and should be better protected, according to research from the University of British Columbia.

The study found fish and aquatic life remove 1.5 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year, a service valued at about $148 billion US. This dwarfs the $16 billion US paid for 10 million tonnes of fish caught on the high seas annually.

“Countries around the world are struggling to find cost effective ways to reduce their carbon emissions,” says Rashid Sumaila, director of the UBC Fisheries Economics Research Unit. “We’ve found that the high seas are a natural system that is doing a good job of it for free.”

Sumaila helped calculate the economic value of the carbon stored by life in the high seas by applying prices—which include the benefits of mitigating the costs of climate change–to the annual quantity of carbon absorbed.

The report argues that the high seas—defined as an area more than 200 nautical miles from any coast and outside of national jurisdiction–should be closed to all fishing as only one per cent of fish caught annually are exclusively found there.

“Keeping fish in the high seas gives us more value than catching them,” says Sumaila. “If we lose the life in the high seas, we’ll have to find another way to reduce emissions at a much higher cost.”

I'm going to bet he's vegan.

Fish, of course, pull absolutely zero CO2 from the ocean, that function is reserved to plants that use CO2 to make biomass.  Animals, like fish, eat that biomass, first-, second- or even more hand, and recycle most of that biomass back to CO2 by respiration while sequestering carbon in their biomass, until they too are eaten or die, and their bodies decay back into CO2.  I see no net sequestration in the long run, unless the biomass is buried to prevent its recycling. Some carbon (phytoplankton, feces and dead animals) does sink to sediment and becomes sequestered, but it is difficult to see how stopping fishing will significantly increase this small fraction:

If you're really want to increase carbon sequestration in the ocean, the solution is simple and tested. Add soluble iron, a necessary micronutrient in low concentrations in the ocean, which will encourage algae blooms, and biomass production a million times the mass of the iron added.  As an old (and now departed) colleague, John H. Martin once noted:

"Give me half a tanker of iron, and I'll give you the next ice age."

Of course, it turned out to be not so simple, because, as noted above, animals recycle most of it back to the water. But some will end up being sequestered.  And you can eat some of the extra tuna produced, too.

So eat the fish, and preserve the resulting shit, and you're still doing more for the atmosphere.