Value of the High Seas for Life on Earth Highlighted in New Report
A comprehensive look at international waters nets some surprising results.
The economic and ecological role of the high seas should no longer be ignored, argues a new report.
The report also suggests that shutting down fishing on the high seas would help overfished stocks around the world—including tuna, sharks, and squid—to recover.
About ten percent of the global fisheries catch is taken from the high seas annually, says Alex Rogers, one of the report's co-authors and a marine biologist with Somerville College and the University of Oxford in the U.K. Closing off the high seas would give commercially valuable species a place to recover from intense fishing pressure, while keeping the majority of the world's catch available to fleets.
Not only do the high seas support a multibillion-dollar global
