Do the job the Greens should have been doing. Get your hands on the handlebars - be it a left or right wing bike and make sure the environment wins. More marine protection, more predator-free forests/parks please.
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Do the job the Greens should have been doing. Get your hands on the handlebars - be it a left or right wing bike and make sure the environment wins. More marine protection, more predator-free forests/parks please.
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Facebook TwitterGood fisheries management, no take zones, customary management tools such as mataitai and rahui, voluntary fishing accords, education programmes, all these things working together could achieve that.
A human side-benefit of no-take zones is they serve as a reminder what natural abundance looks like and how far we have come from it.
Since 2007 there has been an area four times the land mass of NZ closed to bottom trawling and dredging (known as Benthic Protection Areas), some 32% of the EEZ. (http://www.fish.govt.nz/en-nz/Environmental/Seabed+Protection+and+Research/Benthic+Protection+Areas.htm)
Current productivity may be a fraction of the unfished biomass, but it is vastly better than 30 years ago when the Quota Management System was introduced.
Great idea that policy development will be based on evidence rather than popular bias.
I have read that article and the good professor is simply lying in his back teeth – or else being massively misrepresented by Fox News (surprise!)
One of the main things that a marine protection area does is stop all bottom trawling – an incredibly destructive way of “harvesting” fish
Setting aside about 50% of the total area – especially the more productive nursery type areas leads to much higher availability of fish in the remaining 50%
Anybody doing any serious research in this area will know that the current productivity is a fraction of what used to be available – we now go a lot further for the same amount of fish
I recomend – The Unnatural History of the Sea
https://www.amazon.com/Unnatural-History-Sea-Callum-Roberts/dp/1597265772
So, yes make sure resource utilization is science based and sustainable. A good start would be managing recreational fishing well away from political lobbying.
I don’t know why this is even a question – Marine reserves BOOST the available output from the surrounding areas
The optimum condition for OUTPUT! – never mind conservation would be about 50% of our waters as conservation areas