One of the biggest factors of climate change is overfishing. The fishing industries are owned by major large scale corporations which reportedly caught over 22 million tons of different species of fish in 1999. More restrictive regulations in the U.S. have been put in place since then to decrease this number and it has been mostly successful within our own territory. However, other countries do not have these same regulations. China is responsible for the massive decline in sharks, overfishing them for their fins and throwing them back in the ocean. without their fins, they sink to the sea floor and die. This is another one of the many things that threaten the fragile ecosystem of our oceans.

Complete Decimation

The methods used to catch such large amounts of fish are extremely harmful to the ecosystem. Dredging and Bottom Trawl are the most ecologically damaging to the environment, and also happen to be the most common techniques used. These techniques use either a bar with teeth or a large mesh bag that is scraped along the sea floor and dislodges shellfish along with harming other sea life in the process. It has a very large impact on bycatch and seabed damage.

Bycatch

There is a lot of bycatch, which means fish that are “non target fish” that are discarded, die in the process, or thrown back into the ocean severely fatigued or hurt and close to death. These could be smaller fish, juvenile fish, protected fish, turtles, sharks, dolphins, whales, and more and more commonly sea birds.

The Greed Is Strong With This One

In 2016, the nation decided to sign the Paris Climate Agreement, an international treaty designed to scale up the worlds efforts and support actions to reduce emissions, put large restrictions on overfishing, and decrease vulnerability to the adverse effects of climate change. These efforts were short lived because In 2017, the new president decided the nation no longer supported these values and formally exited the agreement. He did not believe in government regulation and said it would cost jobs which is only true in the short term. However, in the long term it would create more green jobs by not only replacing the amount that was lost but exceeding that amount. Less fossil fuels being used means less money in large corporations pockets, which means less money in his pocket and others alike. On the day that President Biden was inaugurated, he signed an executive order to re-join the Paris Climate Agreement.

However, due to weak restrictions within some countries, and our own leaders decisions, the decimation of the oceans ecosystem and marine life continues.