Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Archives for September 1, 2005

Let Them Eat Fish

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On 4th July last year the area zoned ‘Green’, and thus off-limits to commercial and recreational fishers in Great Barrier Reef (GBR) water, was increased from 4.5 per cent to 33.3 per cent of the total GBR area. This was the culmination of a hard fought campaign spearheaded by World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

There had been limits on the number of commercial licenses and numbers of fish that could be caught – but this 33.3 per cent represented a massive increase in the actual area off-limits to fishers.

The Federal Government had promised compensation to assist fishermen, related businesses and communities affected by the implementation of the new zoning.

Just yesterday, commercial fishermen said the compensation bill resulting from closures on the Great Barrier Reef could top $100 million. According to ABC Online:

The Federal Government has announced it has already spent more than $40 million buying out fishing licences and supporting businesses affected by the fishing bans.

The Commonwealth says 120 applications have been processed so far and it believes there could be 300 more by the end of the year.

Greg Radley from the Queensland Seafood Industry Association says the total compensation bill will be expensive.

“I would assume that it was somewhere between $60 and $70 million at this stage,” he said.

Alexandra de Blas (ABCRadio National Earthbeat) report in January 2003 that:

Alexandra de Blas: So it’s worth about $50 million in Australia now; what fish do we supply, and to where?

Geoff Muldoon: Since the advent of the trade in 1993, the export of live reef fish from Australia has comprised almost entirely of coral trout. Somewhere between 90% and 95% of all fish that are exported live are coral trout. The trade has increased from around about 100 tonnes per year to about 1200 tonnes per year of coral trout. We’ve seen basically a fishery that was primarily selling frozen fish shift almost entirely to supplying live reef fish. The overall catch of coral trout on the Great Barrier Reef hasn’t actually increased very much at all, in fact it’s remained relatively stable since about the mid ’90s.

Alexandra de Blas: How do our practices here in Australia compare with the practices in Asia and the Pacific?

Geoff Muldoon: Our practices compare very well. Within Australia, fishermen are only permitted to remove coral trout by hook and line techniques, that is, a hook on a handline will be baited with a pilchard, hung over the side of the vessel and the fish will be brought up by the fisherman, kept alive in tanks on the boats, which contrasts very strongly with the cyanide and dynamite fishing and gill net fishing and trap fishing approaches adopted in sort of less developed countries of the world.

Alexandra de Blas: Jeffrey Muldoon, from the International Marine Life Alliance. His organisation and others, are working to ensure that Australia’s standards are adopted around the world.

Australia exports all its fish by air, which reduces mortalities to 2%, a huge reduction on the 50% losses recorded on the transport boats used in Asia.

Australia has traditionally imported relatively large volumes of low value fish and exported small volumes of high value fisheries products, see http://www.abareconomics.com/outlook/PDF/abare_seafood.pdf .

Coral trout are the most heavily line fished species on Australia’s GBR. The annual yield (total line fishery) for the entire GBR (before the increase in Green zone area) had been calculated at 17 kg/km2 by Walter Starck, see http://ipa.org.au/files/IPABackgrounder17-1.pdf, pg 4.

This is very low relative to other Pacific Reefs which average 7,700 kgs/km2 with a sustainable yield calculated at 10,000 kg/km2, see comparison and http://ipa.org.au/files/IPABackgrounder17-1.pdf, pg 5.

I tend to think that government is paying off and retiring fishers who could be out catching fish.

Is Siberia Melting?

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Last Saturday in Sydney, Alexandra de Blas, one-time ABC Radio National Earthbeat Presenter, told everyone at that conference which I attended at the NSW State Library that Siberia’s permafrost was melting.

According to de Blas this was yet another sign of catastrophic global warming – the end is nigh etcetera.

de Blas had probably been reading New Scientist (http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18725124.500):

THE world’s largest frozen peat bog is melting. An area stretching for a million square kilometres across the permafrost of western Siberia is turning into a mass of shallow lakes as the ground melts, according to Russian researchers just back from the region.
The sudden melting of a bog the size of France and Germany combined could unleash billions of tonnes of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere.

The news of the dramatic transformation of one of the world’s least visited landscapes comes from Sergei Kirpotin, a botanist at Tomsk State University, Russia, and Judith Marquand at the University of Oxford.

Kirpotin describes an “ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climatic warming”. He says that the entire western Siberian sub-Arctic region has begun to melt, and this “has all happened in the last three or four years”.

The fellow who sat beside me on the Virgin Blue flight to Sydney also told me that “Siberia was melting”. He was terribly worried.

But according to the official Russian news agency (http://en.rian.ru/analysis/20050822/41201605.html):

The Russian Academy of Sciences has found that the annual temperature of soils (with seasonable variations) has been remaining stable despite the increased average annual air temperature caused by climate change. If anything, the depth of seasonal melting has decreased slightly.

“Unscrupulous scientists are exaggerating and peddling fears about permafrost thawing and swamp methane becoming aggressive,” said Professor Nikolai Alexeyevsky, Doctor of Geography and head of the land hydrology department at Moscow State University. “Siberia has vast natural resources, oil and gas above all. The article aims to set public opinion against Western Siberia and discourage investment in its industry, oil and gas. They are saying, “Swamp methane poses a global threat, so don’t touch Siberia.” They are deliberately trying to cause panic.

Alexeyevsky says that permafrost has a natural cycle of change, and that it advanced and retreated in the pre-industrial era as well.

Interestingly Russia has a whole academy dedicated to the study of the permafrost (http://www.sitc.ru/ync/ync_eng/ice.htm ).

Who should I believe?

de Blas went on to tell the crowd at the NSW State Library that global warming would destroy the Great Barrier Reef. Now that is plain wrong, see https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/blog/archives/000762.html .