A study published by Current Biology revealed some pretty interesting insights about the ocean, Thursday. The report, titled The Location and Protection Status of Earth’s Diminishing Marine Wilderness, took a dive into just how far the reach of human life is on the natural environment by mapping all the ways we have changed the ocean, such as fishing, shipping, and pollution.
In the interest of not burying the headline with a build up, we’ll just look straight at two of the most glaring findings: We can now only classify “13.2 percent (∼55 million km2) of the world’s ocean as marine wilderness.” And less than five percent of marine wilderness is currently within marine protected areas, very little of which is in biodiverse ecosystems such as coral reefs. The mapping revealed that almost the entire ocean is in some way touched by, and impacted by, human life. And the very little bit of the ocean that isn’t affected by us is mostly in the deep seas. In fact, to be classified as “wilderness,” researchers simply defined the area as “mostly free of human disturbance.”
“Nowhere is safe,” James Watson of the University of Queensland, an author on the study, said in a video abstract for the report.
“To me it is depressing,” said Kendall Jones, lead author and conservation planning specialist at the Wildlife Conservation Society. “Often you have a picture in your head of these wild places where people don’t really go, and actually that’s not the case, we go really everywhere now. There is not much of the ocean that remains as it once was.”
Coastal areas are of course the most heavily impacted by humans. And if you’re looking for a place with the most “wilderness,” the study says places like New Zealand, Australia, and Chile have the lowest human impact, likely due to lower human populations. But the final nail in the coffin of mostly bad (but eye-opening) news from the report is that the analysis was actually run twice, once with “climate change stressors” and once without. Whenever the four defined climate stresses were included, every place on the planet is disqualified as “wilderness.”
“We really need to do something about climate change,” said Ben Halpern, an author of the study and a marine biology professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara. “Its fingerprint on the ocean is vast and pretty much everywhere, and that’s already creating all sorts of changes in the ocean that are having an impact, not just on nature, but on people too.”
