Fisheries & Marine Life

 

Advanced Technologies Might Help Promote Sustainable Fisheries. According to Los Angeles Times, “A major management consulting firm says the large-scale use of advanced data collection and analysis technologies might help promote sustainable fisheries and could address the growing environmental and other concerns about fisheries suffering from dwindling populations. Noting that ‘regulations alone cannot eliminate overfishing,’ the new report by the U.S.-based worldwide management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, ‘Precision fisheries: Navigating a sea of troubles with advanced analytics,’ says that satellite and drone sensors to collect data, improved data-transmission technologies, and massive computational power to analyze information using sophisticated algorithms offer fisheries a path toward sustainability that can also increase seafood supplies. As Environment Next has reported, the surge in advanced technologies is reshaping how environmental pollution and impacts are measured and managed, with digital technologies, artificial intelligence, satellites, direct air capture of carbon, citizen science, and other advances teeing up a major new approach to environmental protection policies. ‘Balancing fishery interests with environmental concerns is not easy,’ the report notes, but advanced analytics ‘might represent an untapped solution to this problem.’ Currently, fishing companies, regulators, and environmentalists apply such advanced tools, but usually only in small-scale pilots, the report says. However, it suggests that ‘we may have reached the point where advanced analytics will take off within the fishing sector.’” [Los Angeles Times, 1/22/20 (=)]

 

Ocean Health & Management

 

Scientists Investigate Ways To Refreeze Arctic Sea Ice. According to E&E News, “Arctic sea ice is steadily declining as the climate warms. Now, some experts say there may be a way to artificially refreeze it. By making the ice more reflective, using shiny synthetic substances spread across its surface, it could be possible to cool the Arctic climate, prevent the ice from melting and even allow more ice to grow back over time. At least, that’s the proposal touted by nonprofit Ice911 — an engineering organization researching ways to artificially safeguard Arctic sea ice in a warming climate. Ice911 has developed a special silica compound, similar in appearance to powdery, white snow, which it claims to be environmentally safe. The group suggests that dispersing this substance across the surface of melting sea ice could help reflect sunlight away from the Earth, cooling the ice and lowering temperatures across the Arctic as a whole. … ‘It’s specifically designed to have a very controlled environment that mimics exactly how sea ice performs in the wild,’ he said. ‘So this gives us the best shot at getting really good data and important information that we need for parameterizing the climate models we’ve had to date.’ For now, the organization is still trying to figure out how well the solution actually works. It doesn’t have any concrete plans to use the silica substance in the Arctic. That’s a decision for national governments, or potentially the United Nations, Sholtz noted. … ‘We don’t ever see ourselves as either operationally capable of doing that at scale, and also there are certainly moral issues, potentially, with a single NGO deciding to act on behalf of the world.’” [E&E News, 1/23/20 (=)]

 

 

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