Sir David calls for end to overfishing

● TV naturalist calls for global deal to prevent stocks being depleted

Television naturalist Sir David Attenborough has called for a global deal to tackle overfishing as he warned of three major challenges facing the world’s oceans.

The veteran presenter, whose new TV series Blue Planet II looks at sea life, said climate change and pollution were also having an impact.

Sir David said an agreement similar to that which outlawed most whale hunting was needed to prevent fish stocks being depleted.

Action could also be taken to combat the dumping of pollutants including plastic, but there was little that individuals could do to prevent the rise in sea temperatures.

“The sea is being hit in three different ways,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

“There’s nothing which we, or anybody listening to this, can do much about the raising of the temperature because the die is already cast. But we can do something about what we tip into the sea – there are some tragic stories to be told as to the effect this is having, not only to the creatures that live in the sea, but by the sea.”

He highlighted the plight of albatross chicks which were sometimes left starving as a result of their parents collecting plastic instead of food.

Their parents “come back after flying for a week or ten days with crops full of what they think is food and it turns

0 Overfishing is one of three challenges facing the world’s oceans according to Sir David Attenborough out to be plastic . The poor chick has been waiting there for days for food and is given nothing. That’s a very dramatic example but that sort of thing applies throughout the ocean.”

On overfishing, he said: “What you need is international agreements to deal with that. There is a precedent. The fishing nations of the world got together some years ago and decided that whales were on the way out because they were being hunted so intensively and agreed on a policy to stop hunting whales commercially, except for a very few exceptions.”

Sir David said he hoped that US president Donald Trump’s declaration that he would pull out of the Paris climate change deal would not turn out to be as dramatic as first thought.

He said: “We can’t give up hope, we’ve got to keep at it.

“There are signs that maybe that won’t be as black as it looked when Trump first said it.”

Findings from eight years of research highlighting the extent of the impact of ocean acidification – nicknamed “the evil twin of global warming” – will be provided to UN climate negotiators at their next annual conference in Bonn, Germany.

Around 30 per cent of the carbon dioxide put into the atmosphere by humans dissolves into the seas, making them more acidic and causing problems for many marine species, at the same time as warming temperatures also affect the oceans.

Research from the German research network Bioacid (Biological Impacts of Ocean Acidification) shows increased acidification and rising temperatures could hit many species such as molluscs and corals, with knock-on effects to creatures further up the food chain.