If you randomly jumped in any point of the sea today, surely you would see something like this. No big fishes, no fishes at all because we have fished them quicker than they reproduce.
Today, I want to propose a strategy to save sea life and the idea has a lot to do with economics. In 1999, there was a little place called Cabo Pulmo in Baja California, in Mexico which was an underwater desert. Fishermen were frustrated by not having enough fishing. So, they decided to do something nobody expected. Instead of spending more time at sea searching for the last fish, they decided to stop fishing completely. They created a national park at sea, a marine reserve.
When we came back to Cabo Pulmo ten years later, this is what we saw. What had been an underwater wasteland had become a kaleidoscope of color and life. We saw it come back to its pristine state in just ten years including the return of the biggest predators such as groupers, sharks, horse mackerel... Wow! It's an extraordinary place.
If you scuba dive, go to Cabo Pulmo. Those visionary fishermen are now earning more money through tourism.
When we can align economic needs with conservation miracles can happen. And we have seen similar recoveries throughout the world. I spent 20 years studying human impact on the sea. But seeing with my own eyes the regeneration of places like Cabo Pulmo gave me hope, so I decided, ten years ago, to abandon my position as a university professor to dedicate my life to protecting more places at sea, like these. In the past ten years our National Geographic, Pristine Seas team have been exploring, studying, documenting the wildest places at sea and working with government to protect them. All these places are already protected, and they cover a total surface of the size of half Canada. These places are the Yellowstones and the Serengetis of the sea. They are places where you jump into the water and immediately are surrounded by sharks. And that's good, it's good! Because sharks are a sign of a healthy ecosystem. These places are time machines that show us the sea from 500 years ago, from 1,000 years ago. But they also show us how the sea of the future could be. Because the sea has an extraordinary regenerative capacity. We have seen incredible recoveries in just a few years. What we have to do is protect more endangered places so they can be wild and full of life again.
So, the question is: "Is there any way of accelerating sea protection?" Because today just the 2 percent of the sea is protected and that's not enough. Studies suggest that we need to protect at least 30 percent of the sea, not just to save sea life, but ourselves, too. Because the sea gives us food, and it gives us over the half of the oxygen we breathe. It absorbs much of the carbon pollution we release into the atmosphere. We need a healthy sea to survive.
So, is there a way to accelerate protecting the sea? I think there is. And one of the solutions involves looking at international waters. Coastal countries have the authority over 200 nautical miles from the coast. Everything beyond that is called international waters or the high seas, too, shown in dark blue on this map. It's two-thirds of the ocean. No country is in charge of the high seas, but everyone is. Since it's a bit like the wild west, a lot of stuff happens there, and nobody controls anything.
There are two kinds of fishing, mainly, at the high seas: at the bottom and at the surface. Bottom trawling is the most destructive practice on the planet. Supertrawlers, the biggest ships on the sea, have nets so large they can hold a dozen 747 planes. Those huge nets destroy everything in their path including deep-sea coral, which lives in submarine mountains and can be thousands of years old. Surface fishing focuses mostly on species that migrate from the high seas to the coastal waters, to the water of countries, such as tunas and sharks. Many of those are endangered species because they have been fished too much.
But who fishes them? Who fishes at the high seas? Until now, it was difficult to know it exactly. Countries have not been transparent concerning long-distance fishing. Today, however, satellite technology allows us to track ships individually. And this is a revolution. This is the first time we are presenting the data you're about to see. I'm going to show you the routes of two ships fishing throughout a year using an automatic satellite positioning system. This is a ship fishing tunas and sharks for months around the south coast of the African continent. A few months later, the ship goes to Japan to replenish supplies and a while after, it's fishing around Madagascar. This other ship is a Russian trawler that fishes cod in Russian waters and also in international waters in the North Atlantic. Thanks to Global Fishing Watch we have been able to track more than 3,600 ships from more than 20 countries that were fishing at the high seas. Global Fishing Watch uses satellite positioning and artificial intelligence to automatically detect whether a ship is fishing or navigating. Depending on the kind of moves, we also know what kind of fishing it is.
So, along with a group of international colleagues, scientists and economists, we decided to investigate who is fishing at the high seas and who benefits from it. My colleague Juan Mayorga from the University of California in Santa Barbara has produced detailed maps of fishing effort. Effort means how much time and fuel it takes to fish in each point of the sea. We have maps for each country that fishes in the high seas: China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea and Spain represent almost 80 percent of the fishing effort in the high seas. When we join all the countries, this is what we get: the global map of fishing effort. We know the identity of each ship on the database -- that's how we know the length of the ship, the tonnage, the engine power, how many crew members are on board... With this, we can calculate the staff cost, the fuel cost, etc. This is why, for the first time, we were able to calculate the costs of fishing on the high seas. The darker the red, the higher the cost.
Colleagues from the University of British Columbia have illustrated how much each country is fishing. We also know the price of the fish when it leaves the ship. Combined with the effort data, we have been able to calculate, also for the first time, the profit, the income from fishing on the high seas. We have cost and we have income, thus, for the first time, too, we were able to calculate the profitability of fishing on the high seas, the net economic profit.
I'm going to show you another map. The red color means that we are losing money by fishing in that area of the ocean. The blue color means that fishing is profitable there. There it is. It seems pretty profitable, right? But there are two important factors that we have to take into account. The first is: recent researches have revealed the use of forced labor or modern slavery on the high seas. Companies use modern slavery to reduce cost and get more profit. Secondly: each year, governments subsidize fishing on the high seas with over 4000 million dollars.
Let's go back to the profits map. If we pretend that there is no slavery, that people are paid minimum wage, and deduct the government subsidies from our calculation, the map becomes this. Half of fishing on the high seas is not profitable. In fact, subsidies are four times bigger than the benefits. What this economic analysis reveals is that, practically, the entirety of fishing on the high seas makes no sense. What country, what government in its right mind would subsidize and support an industry cling to exploitation and fundamentally destructive? And it's not that profitable either.
So... Why don't we close all international waters to fishing? Let's create a gigantic marine reserve on the high seas. Two thirds of the global ocean. Studies from the University of California suggest that such reserve would help the species in the high seas that migrate, such as tuna, and part of that growth in abundance would help to repopulate the coastal waters of the countries and the catch of those species would also rise, as well as the benefits, because the cost of fishing would decrease and the fish that large countries are now fishing in the wild west would be fished by the coastal countries. And well, the ecological benefits would be huge: to provide a refuge of two-thirds of the ocean for species of predators, such as tunas and sharks, which are essential to the health of the ecosystem.
So, protecting the high seas, the international waters, would have ecological, economic and social benefits. But, the truth is that most fishing companies don't care about the environment. They would earn more money if they didn't fish on the high seas. Moreover, this would not affect our ability to feed our growing population, because fishing on the high seas represents only 5 percent of global marine catch since the high seas are not as productive as the coastal waters. And the high seas catch is sold as high-standing products, such as the tuna sashimi and shark fin soup. The high seas catch does not contribute to global food security.
So, how are we going to do this? How are we going to protect the international waters? Right now, negotiators in the United Nations are starting discussions for a new treaty for the conservation in international waters. But this should not happen at closed doors. This is our big opportunity, and we all must ensure that our countries will support the conservation of international waters. There is a precedent. In 2016, 24 countries and the European Union agreed to protect the Ross Sea, the wildest place in the waters surrounding Antarctica, full of wildlife such as orcas, leopard seals, penguins, and those included fishing countries like China, Russia, Spain and Japan, but they decided that protecting that unique place was more beneficial than exploiting it for little profit. That is exactly the kind of international cooperation we will need. We can do it again.
If in 20 years our children randomly jumped in any place of the sea, what would they see? An underwater desert, like most of our ocean today, or an abundance of life? Our legacy for the future.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Thank you.
(Applause)
