Ocean report is not all bad news

There are small glimmers of hope in an otherwise melancholy new report about the state of our marine environment. Fishing, for example, is performing better than it used to.

In these dark times for the environment, any small threads of good news are worth reaching for. Over the past decade, as the report produced by the Ministry for the Environment and Stats NZ tells us, New Zealand’s total commercial catch has remained stable, at less than 450,000 tonnes per year. In 2009, some 81 per cent of ‘‘routinely assessed fish stocks’’ were fished within safe limits.

Now that number has climbed slightly, to 84 per cent.

Seabed trawling and dredging have also decreased over the past two decades. And while 10 out of 45 species of marine mammals assessed in the report are threatened with or at risk of extinction, there are two whose status has improved since 2013. The New Zealand sea lion has moved from threatened (nationally critical) to threatened (nationally vulnerable). The southern right whale is doing even better, shifting from threatened (nationally vulnerable) to at-risk.

Should we celebrate that a species is merely at risk? Otherwise, the general picture is less positive, as you would expect.

The statistics pile up. Eighty per cent of our shorebirds are threatened or at risk of extinction, as are 90 per cent of seabirds and 22 per cent of marine mammals. And as native species are threatened, nonnative ones are on the rise.

There are now 214 identified here, up by three from 2016.

Some effects on the marine environment are direct and others indirect and cumulative.

The report reinforces the understanding that we are not separate from any part of our environment. As Dr Alison Collins, the ministry’s chief science adviser, puts it, ‘‘oceans are the ultimate ‘receiving environment’: they meet with the sky, and also with the land’’.

This view harks back to the dawning of environmental thought in the 1970s and a fresh understanding of the interconnectedness of a planet on which all our actions have consequences, no matter which physical environment we find ourselves in.

But the report sometimes takes what could be called an anthropocentric perspective.

In other words, it asks: what do oceans do for human civilisations? It answers ‘‘our oceans support us.

The marine economy added $7 billion to our economy in 2017 and employed more than 30,000 people. Healthy marine ecosystems provide essential benefits like taking up carbon dioxide, removing pollutants and providing kaimoana. In te ao Ma¯ ori (the Ma¯ ori world and worldview) the mauri, or life force, of a healthy moana enhances the mauri of those who interact with it.’’

Some diehard environmentalists will find it hard to embrace a perspective that interprets oceans according to their economic benefits and potential. Other trends are harder to determine. Coastal water quality is variable and, again, not all the news is bad.

If the report suggests a wider theme to the general reader, beyond a need for a greater consciousness of individual human effects on environments, it is that improvement is possible in relatively short timeframes and, more profoundly, how much more there is still to know.

Cumulative effects are complex and hard to measure and as the report makes clear, data is often patchy and scarce.

The true picture of our marine environment is beyond us, but this report seems to be a useful step along the way.