February 22, 2008--UN says warming threatens fish stocks (New York Times)
Major world commercial fish stocks could collapse within decades as global warming compounds damage from pollution and overfishing, U.N. officials said Friday. A U.N. Environment Program report details new research on how rising ocean surface temperature and other climate changes are affecting the fishing industry. It says that more than 2.6 billion people get most of their protein from fish. ''You overlay all of this and you are potentially putting a death nail in the coffin of the world fisheries,'' Achim Steiner, head of the program, said in a telephone news conference from Monaco. The research sheds new light on an undersea flushing mechanism that helps renew fish stocks in three-quarters of the world's primary commercial fishing grounds. Report author Christian Nellemann said global warming is disrupting this circulation. ''If this mechanism stops, we may risk a collapse in major fishing grounds'' in the coming decades, he said.
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