Just 13% of ocean is still classed as ‘wilderness’

JUST 13 per cent of the world’s seas remain officially ‘the wilderness’ because of pollution and human activity.

Experts say there is now almost no marine wilderness in the northern hemisphere and that the growing tide of plastic waste is making things worse.

International researchers created a map of ocean wildernesses, which they defined as the areas least hit by 19 problems caused by mankind.

These include fishing, which creates huge amounts of plastic waste, commercial shipping, and fertiliser run-off from the land.

The results show what little wilderness remains is mostly in the Arctic, Antarctic and around some of the Pacific island nations.

Lead author Kendall Jones, of the University of Queensland, said: ‘We were astonished by just how little marine wilderness remains. The ocean is immense, covering over 70 per cent of our planet, but we’ve managed to significantly impact almost all of this vast ecosystem.’

The study follows research showing that more than five trillion plastic pieces weighing more than 250,000 tons are afloat in the world’s seas.

For more than a decade the Daily Mail has campaigned to stop plastic bags clogging the seas, choking turtles, killing sea birds, poisoning fish and threatening human health. Our Turn The Tide On Plastic campaign, introduced last year, stepped up calls for action to protect the oceans.

Professor Benjamin Halpern, of Imperial College London and the University of California, said the study did not look specifically at plastic, but more evidence is emerging of its threat to wilderness areas.

‘People define wilderness in different ways,’ he said. ‘To understand where it remains we looked at fishing, shipping, pollution and climate change.

‘We would have included ocean plastics, but currently there are not detailed global maps available.

‘But plastics are also invading the wilderness – people do not want to be sailing through oceans they thought were pristine and seeing plastics floating there.

‘It is a very visible sign of the disappearing wilderness.’

The wilderness map, published in the journal Current Biology, show there is almost none around coasts where fishing damages wildlife.

The report’s co-author Dr Alan Friedlander, from the National Geographic Society, said: ‘We didn’t look at plastics as part of this analysis, but in my work with National Geographic Pristine Seas we have examined microplastics and found them even in remote ocean sites like the South Pacific and Cape Horn. This is important, because microplastics disrupt the food chain, can help to transfer diseases and pose a risk to animal health and seafood safety.’

On land, rapid loss of wilderness is well documented, but less has been known about the oceans. Scientists say wilderness areas are important because they have a third more biodiversity than the rest of the sea.

The researchers mapped areas of marine wilderness in 16 ocean ‘realms’ by identifying areas showing 10 per cent or less impact from 19 marine ‘stressors’, which include overfishing and pollution.

While more than six million square miles of wilderness remain in the Warm Indo-Pacific, accounting for 8.6 per cent of the ocean, less than 0.3 per cent of the Temperate North Atlantic is wilderness.

Temperate Southern Africa has less than 800 square miles of marine wilderness – just 1 per cent.

The Mail’s long-running campaigning against plastic waste has played a major role in prompting action to end the worldwide scourge.

Supermarkets and other large retailers imposed a plastic bag levy in October 2015 following our successful Banish the Bags campaign.