Latest / Saving the World From Bad Ideas / Bad Idea #12 "There’s nothing down there" with Callum Roberts

Transcript

Bad Idea #12 "There’s nothing down there" with Callum Roberts · Saving the World From Bad Ideas

• 0:00
  Obviously terrestrial mining does have very serious and
• 0:03
  significant impacts, but largely speaking, they are much more
• 0:06
  controllable in a terrestrial setting.
• 0:09
  They're much more visible so that third parties can verify
• 0:13
  them, whereas they would be far harder to see and verify and
• 0:17
  attribute to individual mines in the deep sea.
• 0:20
  Why should we let companies go out there and undertake
• 0:24
  activities that will enrich themselves at the cost to huge
• 0:28
  impacts that spread across the ocean, which cannot be
• 0:32
  controlled by them or remediated by them?
• 0:35
  We bottom trawl using mobile Nets that are dragged behind
• 0:39
  boats down to depths of 1500 to 2000 meters deep.
• 0:46
  But much below those depths the the density of marine life is
• 0:51
  too low for it to be really economically viable.
• 0:53
  And those fisheries are only economically viable because
• 0:56
  they're receiving huge amounts of taxpayer money in the way of
• 1:00
  subsidies. They have been uncovering all
• 1:02
  sorts of horrors in the seafood supply chains and one of the
• 1:06
  things that that is showing is that bonded labour and
• 1:09
  essentially slave labour is rampant in these fisheries.
• 1:15
  Welcome to saving the world from bad ideas.
• 1:17
  I'm Mark Linus and I've had a few bad ideas in my time.
• 1:21
  I used to go out in the night time to destroy GMO crops and I
• 1:24
  also opposed nuclear power. But then when I looked at the
• 1:26
  science, I found I got it wrong. Oops.
• 1:29
  I've learned the hard way that none of us are right all the
• 1:31
  time. So now I'm here to challenge the
• 1:33
  assumptions that we all too often take for granted because
• 1:36
  the future depends on us getting it right.
• 1:39
  Hello, and welcome to Saving the world from bad ideas.
• 1:42
  I'm Mark Linus and with me today is Callum Roberts, an old friend
• 1:46
  and a professor of marine conservation at the Centre for
• 1:50
  Ecology and Conservation at the University of Exeter, a world
• 1:54
  expert on the impact of fishing on marine life.
• 1:58
  And his book The Unnatural History of the Sea wasn't such a
• 2:03
  good book that I've lent it out and I can't find my copy.
• 2:08
  The, well, I do have a copy though, Callum, of your book
• 2:10
  Reef Life, which was I think the most recent one and told the
• 2:13
  story of your, of your work on coral reefs over the years.
• 2:16
  And we're both on the board of the Maldives Coral Institute,
• 2:19
  aren't we? We are indeed.
• 2:21
  Did I get? Did I get that right?
• 2:22
  You've. Got it.
• 2:22
  All right. Thank you, Mark.
• 2:24
  OK, well, very nice to have you. The producer, Rob, just reminded
• 2:28
  me that I forgot to mention the bad idea then last in the last
• 2:32
  episode. So straight up front, the bad
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  idea that you could be tackling today, Callum, is that we're
• 2:40
  talking about the high seasons. The bad idea is there's nothing
• 2:43
  down there. It's just an empty space.
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  It's a void. We might as well go in there
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  and, and, and fish it and miners and all of that.
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  And I've heard that from a number of people who probably
• 2:51
  should know better, including, I'm told that James Cameron, you
• 2:56
  know, the director of Titanic said as much.
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  I mean, at least he knows there is something down there.
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  There's Titanic down there, but there's also a lot of, there's
• 3:03
  also a lot of marine life, I think.
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  So, you know, tell us before we get into that, tell us what the
• 3:08
  high seas are. Give us a definition and give us
• 3:10
  a sense of just how big and how significant this area is.
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  So the high seas is a colloquial name given to that part of the
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  planet which is beyond the limits of national laws and
• 3:22
  jurisdiction and ownership. And the the countries of the
• 3:27
  world own the waters of the sea out to 200 nautical miles
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  offshore. And so those are those are the
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  exclusive economic zones that they have.
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  Outside of that, there is this body of water which is between
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  all the nations and that is the high seas, areas beyond national
• 3:47
  jurisdiction. And so this is the, the common
• 3:51
  heritage of humankind and it's it, it, it belongs to nobody,
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  but it also belongs to everybody.
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  So this is a common space on the planet, just as we used to have
• 4:03
  the Commons, which were areas of, of habitat there or you
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  know, grazing areas that people would commonly use for, for
• 4:11
  their animals in, in villages and societies in the past.
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  Yeah. And and how how much area is of
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  is this of the ocean? It's absolutely vast.
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  In fact, 61% of the area of the ocean is high seas, so it's not
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  under any individual country's jurisdiction.
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  And if you take into account that the sea covers 71% of the
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  surface of the planet, that means the high seas cover 43% of
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  the surface of the planet. So it is a really vast space.
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  And, and the other thing to bear in mind about the high seas is
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  that they are they, they have a third dimension obviously, which
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  is depth. And the average depth of the
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  high seas is is 4.1 kilometres and the average depth of the
• 4:57
  ocean is 3.8 kilometres. So they're deeper on average
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  than the the rest of the sea because mostly they're far
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  offshore. And so if if we take those two
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  things together, the high seas occupy approximately 2/3 of the
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  living space on planet Earth, which is a remarkably large
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  amount for an area which which is very poorly governed because
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  we are leaving things to international laws that are very
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  poorly defined, very poorly enforced.
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  Right. So we're recording this now
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  because you're the lead author of a Nature, a paper in Nature,
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  a commentary paper, I think, which is published in time for
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  the UN Oceans conference. And it's well, actually, and I'm
• 5:40
  a co-author. So I'm in full agreement with
• 5:42
  you on the paper because I helped you with it to a small
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  extent. But it's calling for a step
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  change on our approach to to the conservation of the high seas
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  and calling for them to be protected, fully protected in
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  their entirety. So what's the give us a, you
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  know, a summary of the scientific case that you're
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  making in this paper? So the paper is is really
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  bringing together a number of different strands which have
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  been kept separate for a long time.
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  So there there are arguments raging about whether we should
• 6:11
  go mining in the deep sea for critical minerals.
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  There are arguments about how we can make high seas fishing more
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  sustainable and more equitable. That high seas fisheries are
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  currently mostly conducted by a handful of nations that can
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  afford to build the fleets necessary to access these really
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  remote waters and to subsidise the activities of the fishing
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  fleet. Because it's generally not
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  economically viable for them to fish without governmental
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  support. Because the fish are are quite
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  widely dispersed and occur at very low abundance across that
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  high high seas expanse. Another one is that there is a
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  huge amount of marine life that lives in the twilight zone
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  between about 200 meters deep and 1000 meters deep.
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  And that twilight zone is full of what is known as mesopelagic
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  life, which is a mix of kind of zooplankton and squid and
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  octopus and so on. And many, many fish.
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  And they migrate up and down throughout the day and night.
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  And they, they migrate to shallow waters during the night
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  where they feed. And then they migrate back down
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  to deep waters by day where they, they rest and, and they
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  poop and then they, they repeat the whole thing.
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  This is the largest migration on Earth.
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  There's an estimated 10 billion tons of fish that live in this
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  zone. But these are not really
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  exploited at the moment. And there are proposals to open
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  this up to to fishing, particularly the European Union,
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  Norway have been funding research to investigate how to
• 8:03
  exploit the fish in this twilight zone.
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  But that that would be a very bad idea, many people think,
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  because they're critical in the planet's carbon cycle and in
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  shuttling carbon from the atmosphere down into the deep
• 8:17
  ocean where it's out of harm's way.
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  So there's another argument there, which is, which is sort
• 8:24
  of raging around whether we should or shouldn't exploit
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  these mesoprologic fish. And then there's a, a, a,
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  another strand which is about oil and gas exploitation.
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  Obviously there are some people who want to exploit oil and gas
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  out on the on the high seas, but that that hasn't happened.
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  And we look at whether it should happen in this paper, and our
• 8:51
  our answer is no. So what what we're doing is
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  we're bringing together these various arguments about why it's
• 8:58
  important to protect the high seas.
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  And in considering each one on its own merits, we've come to
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  the conclusion that actually the best thing to do for the planet
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  and for those who occupy the planet is to protect all of the
• 9:14
  high seas in its entirety from extractive use forever.
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  And to maintain this for its its functions in supporting the the
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  the habitability of the planetary biosphere.
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  Right. And in, in saying the talking
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  about the planetary biosphere, maybe give us a sense of how
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  important this ecosystem is in, in the whole of the Earth
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  system, that of the high seas, because, you know, as I
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  understand, it's the biggest carbon sequestration.
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  Well, so most of the carbon that gets sequestered into the Earth
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  system goes into the deep ocean, right.
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  And it also produces most of the oxygen, takes up most of the
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  heat. I mean, it's it's a yeah, we're
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  doing nothing seemingly to protect it.
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  So give us a sense of how how critical the high seas are in
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  the in the Earth system as a whole.
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  Well, the ocean as a whole is really important in the Earth
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  system. And anybody who's watched the
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  the latest David Attenborough movie Ocean will be well aware
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  that he, he now thinks that the ocean is probably the, the most
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  important part of the planet. And, and that's true because it
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  occupies this huge amount of the living space on the planet.
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  Taken together, the whole of the ocean occupies about 90%,
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  ninety, 7% of the volume of living space on Earth.
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  So, you know, compared to that, the terrestrial fraction is
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  fairly trivial. That means that the, the ocean
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  itself is fundamentally important in the processes that
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  keep the planet habitable. And that includes things as, as
• 10:45
  you mentioned, like primary productivity.
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  The, the, the plants in the ocean, most of which are
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  microscopic plankton, are generating a huge amount of
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  productivity, which is important to sustaining ocean food webs.
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  It's important for the capture of carbon from the atmosphere
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  and then that some of that carbon is transferred into the
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  deep ocean out of harm's way as far as climate change is
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  concerned. It's also very important for
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  oxygen production. And, and there are various
• 11:17
  estimates, most of which put the fraction of oxygen that is
• 11:20
  produced in the ocean above half of the oxygen that is produced
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  on Earth. So it's profoundly important to
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  the habitability of the planet. And of course, the, the those,
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  those biological processes are very vulnerable to human impact.
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  You also mentioned that the the the ocean captures a great deal
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  of the heat that is on Earth and, and that is absolutely
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  true. The ocean is the the planetary
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  air conditioner, if you like, and the quantity of heat that is
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  added to the ocean every year as a result of greenhouse gases
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  trapping heat from the sun. The the amount of heat that is
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  absorbed by the ocean is about 93% of that heat trapped.
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  And put it into terms that you can understand, it's equivalent
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  to something between 3:00 and 5:00 Hiroshima sized atomic
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  bombs being exploded into the ocean every second, which is an
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  unbelievable sort of figure. It equates to about 1/4 of a
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  million atomic bombs worth of heat energy being exploded into
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  the ocean every day. And that that gives you a sense
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  then of how much heat is being added to the planet all the time
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  as a result of our greenhouse gas emissions.
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  The ocean, by trapping that heat, has done us an enormous
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  favour. If it hadn't, it's been
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  estimated that the the the atmospheric temperatures
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  wouldn't be just 1 1/2°C higher than they were in pre industrial
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  times. But 36°C higher.
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  So we would all be those of us who are left would be enduring
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  Death Valley conditions all of the time if that was case.
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  So the ocean has been profoundly important in that protection of
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  the high seas will not change the amount of heat that is being
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  absorbed by the ocean, but it will give the the biological
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  part of the ocean, the the the plant community, the animal
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  communities, a better ability to tolerate that added heat because
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  that added heat has implications, some of them
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  profound, for the survival of life in the sea.
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  Right, because obviously the bad idea is that there's nothing
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  down there, right? You've, you've obviously there's
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  life at the surface because that's the photic zone and
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  you've got phytoplankton producing photosynthesizing
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  from, from sunlight and that's obviously the base of the food
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  chain. You've got the Mesa pelagic, the
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  sort of mid middle zone where you've got life that comes up
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  and feeds and then goes down again at night and so on.
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  But perhaps the naysayers are right that there's nothing down
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  there at the bottom of the ocean, which is a bit that they
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  want to mine and we'll talk about the impacts of mining in a
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  minute. But is that a bad idea?
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  Or is it fundamentally true that literally there's, there's
• 14:18
  really not much down there. There's just some some, you
• 14:20
  know, layers of silk between thousands of meters down in the
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  in the in the dark. It, it is true that life
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  attenuates as you go down in terms of its abundance.
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  And so, you know, the, the actual thronging zones of the
• 14:35
  ocean are really in those upper sunlit layers and just below.
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  And that, that that's because that's where most of the food
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  is. And deep sea life tends to live
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  on table scraps that are are drifting down and and falling as
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  marine snow. It's called, this is kind of
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  organic matter that is trickling down to the, the bottom of the,
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  the deep dark sea. And of course it's very, very
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  stressful down there for for various reasons, one of which is
• 15:05
  the enormous pressures at the bottom of the ocean.
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  So there's there's one atmosphere of pressure for every
• 15:13
  10 meters that you go down in the ocean.
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  So we've got 11,000 meters down there.
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  So we're sort of looking at 1100 atmospheres of pressure down at
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  the the very deepest part of the ocean, which means that anything
• 15:28
  that lives there is going to have to be incredibly good at
• 15:31
  dealing with extreme conditions. The temperature is also very
• 15:35
  low. So that means that, you know,
• 15:38
  we're looking at 2-3 degrees of of Celsius at the bottom of the
• 15:44
  deep sea. And that means that they the,
• 15:47
  the, the pace of life is positively glacial down there as
• 15:52
  well. And of course, it's permanently
• 15:55
  dark. In fact, one of the oddities of
• 15:59
  thinking about life in the sea is that because the ocean
• 16:03
  occupies most of the living space in the planet and the
• 16:07
  ocean is is virtually solidly dark from a depth of about 1000
• 16:11
  meters down. That means that most of the
• 16:16
  space for living on the planet is permanent in permanent
• 16:19
  darkness. And we don't think about that,
• 16:22
  you know, living in our beautiful sunshiny surface layer
• 16:25
  of the world. But so down there, you know,
• 16:29
  things live in a different way. They have to live in a different
• 16:32
  way. And so as you go deeper and
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  deeper down, there are fewer and fewer things that that live
• 16:40
  there. However, the thing about when
• 16:43
  you, when you get down there is that there is an enormous
• 16:46
  variety of life, a truly unexpected diversity of life.
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  And we find that the distribution of animals down
• 16:56
  there is is, is finely textured on a geographic basis.
• 17:00
  So there are many organisms if you were to dive in the Eastern
• 17:04
  Pacific that you wouldn't find in the North Pacific or South
• 17:07
  Pacific or the West Pacific. And so as as you move across
• 17:13
  bigger and bigger areas of the deep sea, you accumulate more
• 17:16
  and more species. And, and looking at samples that
• 17:20
  have been taken of mud and sifting through them and finding
• 17:23
  out all the worms and the various other organisms that are
• 17:26
  living in those mud samples. We find hundreds and hundreds of
• 17:29
  species down there. And that accumulates to
• 17:32
  thousands and then 10s of thousands of species when you
• 17:35
  when you start sampling wider and wider areas.
• 17:39
  So there is a really remarkable diversity of life in the deep
• 17:43
  sea. And uncertainties about just how
• 17:46
  many species live down there have led to a really large
• 17:50
  uncertainty about the overall number of species that live on
• 17:55
  the planet. You know, there are some
• 17:57
  estimates that range up to even 100 million species.
• 18:01
  And they're based in part on this, this finding that, you
• 18:05
  know, the more you sample, the more new things you come across
• 18:08
  in the deep sea. It it's probably not that high,
• 18:11
  but certainly we are finding that the deep sea is immensely
• 18:15
  diverse, unexpectedly diverse. It sort of runs contrary to to
• 18:20
  some of the ecological theory that has been developed in a
• 18:25
  sort of terrestrial and shallow ocean context where we expect
• 18:29
  that barriers are key to generating new species.
• 18:34
  So if you have a mountain range between two valleys, then you'll
• 18:39
  get those populations are isolated, let's say, of a snail
• 18:43
  that lives in one valley and a snail that lives in the other.
• 18:45
  And they evolve into two different species because of
• 18:49
  that barrier. But in the deep ocean, you know,
• 18:52
  there are very few barriers. One of the biggest habitats on
• 18:55
  Earth is the abyssal plain, which is just, you know, a
• 19:00
  zillion miles of mud down there at the bottom of the ocean.
• 19:03
  And how is it that there is such diversity down there despite the
• 19:07
  apparent lack of barriers? And that's something which is
• 19:10
  still puzzling and perplexing us right now.
• 19:13
  Wow. So the big issue now is mining.
• 19:17
  And a lot of, you know, environmentalists, including
• 19:20
  people I know, are sympathetic to this argument that the mining
• 19:25
  of the deep sea potentially is less impactful than, you know,
• 19:28
  stripping the rainforest from Indonesia to together these
• 19:32
  critical minerals, which are so important for the clean energy
• 19:35
  transition. And So what we're talking about,
• 19:38
  there's all these nodules lying around, right?
• 19:40
  And they've got cobalt, manganese, copper and nickel and
• 19:44
  they're just lying around in the billions on this abyssal plane
• 19:48
  waiting to be to be hoovered up. And I looked at the Metals
• 19:52
  Company website this morning. That's one of the companies
• 19:56
  which is proposing to go down there and mine these nodules on
• 20:01
  a large scale. And if I quote from them, they
• 20:04
  say using nodules to create EV batteries is expected to
• 20:08
  generate on average 90% less CO2 equivalent emissions than using
• 20:12
  ores from land based mines. Nodule exploitation also means
• 20:15
  no disruption to indigenous communities, no deforestation
• 20:18
  and no child labour. During the mining phase.
• 20:21
  So, deep sea mining, what's not to like?
• 20:26
  Well, this is basically a lot of hot air and hype that has been
• 20:32
  put out by a company that is determined to try and exercise
• 20:37
  its its desire to exploit minerals on the deep sea floor.
• 20:42
  And you know, none of very, very few of those, if any of those
• 20:48
  statements stand up to scrutiny. And so one of the things that
• 20:54
  they sort of talk about is lower impacts.
• 20:56
  Well, what what would be the impact of mining in the deep
• 20:59
  sea? The if if you read what the
• 21:04
  would be mining companies are putting out, it would be very
• 21:07
  trivial. You know, you're simply
• 21:10
  excavating a very small amount of resource from off the surface
• 21:14
  of the deep sea. And this will be a very kind of
• 21:18
  precision clinical exercise. I, I once heard about a mining
• 21:23
  executive who was proposing mining on the slopes of deep
• 21:27
  seamounts. There are cobalt crusts that
• 21:30
  form over millions of years on the surface of deep seamounts.
• 21:33
  And, and they said, well, it would be, it would be just like
• 21:38
  scaling a tooth if you were a dentist.
• 21:40
  You know, we're simply scraping off that outside surface.
• 21:43
  The seamount will still be there.
• 21:45
  Everybody's happy, except that, of course, all of the marine
• 21:48
  life lives on the surface of that seamount.
• 21:51
  So all of the marine life would be scraped off as well and would
• 21:54
  be destroyed. And because we know that those
• 21:57
  seamounts sustain very important and more prolific sort of oases
• 22:06
  and marine life in a deep sea context than surrounding waters
• 22:10
  do. We know that they're profoundly
• 22:11
  important. We know that they're a unique
• 22:13
  species that live on those, we know that they would be lost or
• 22:17
  or destroyed by the mining process.
• 22:19
  So it is not a benign activity. The other thing to understand
• 22:22
  about these polymetallic nodules which occur across vast areas of
• 22:26
  the abyssal plain on the, on the, on the surface of that mud
• 22:30
  in places like the Eastern Pacific is that these, these
• 22:34
  resources are very thinly spread compared to terrestrial
• 22:40
  resources. And so the, the, the metallic
• 22:43
  polymetallic nodules are in a layer which is about sort of 10
• 22:47
  to 15 centimeters deep across the surface.
• 22:50
  The the equivalent resources in terrestrial settings are, are
• 22:55
  sort of 10s of meters deep, if not hundreds of meters deep.
• 23:00
  In many cases the the amount of resource there is far greater,
• 23:04
  far more concentrated. If you were to exploit the
• 23:07
  equivalent amount of material from these polymetallic nodules,
• 23:12
  you'd have to mine over thousands of square kilometres.
• 23:16
  Whereas terrestrial mines are very concentrated, very compact
• 23:19
  by comparison. Even even the large open cast
• 23:24
  mines that you see in in places like Southeast Asia or
• 23:27
  Australia, those are very compact by comparison with the
• 23:31
  mining footprint that that would be in terms of the deep sea bed.
• 23:36
  And and the other thing is that the mine is always sort of
• 23:38
  downplaying how much disturbance and damage there would be in in
• 23:42
  extracting those nodules. You're extracting large amounts
• 23:45
  of mud too. What would happen is that a lot
• 23:49
  of that mud would be released not just at the sea floor, but
• 23:52
  across the whole water column as those materials are taken up to
• 23:56
  the ship tailings have brought back down to the bottom.
• 24:00
  So we're seeing this sort of downplaying of impact those
• 24:04
  those plumes, because they're made-up of incredibly fine muds
• 24:10
  would drift for thousands of kilometres and they would be in
• 24:14
  suspension some of those materials for for months or
• 24:19
  years. And so effectively the the
• 24:21
  footprint of mining then is far larger.
• 24:23
  There is no prospect of those mining companies being able to
• 24:27
  contain the impacts nearly to the extent that they can on
• 24:31
  land. Obviously terrestrial mining
• 24:33
  does have very serious and significant impacts, but largely
• 24:37
  speaking they are much more controllable in a terrestrial
• 24:40
  setting. They're much more visible so
• 24:43
  that third parties can verify them, can make sure that mining
• 24:47
  companies are adhering to mining codes, whereas they would be far
• 24:51
  harder to see and verify and attribute to individual mines in
• 24:57
  the deep sea. And so these these are
• 25:01
  essentially uncontainable impacts.
• 25:04
  Why should we let companies go out there and undertake
• 25:08
  activities that will enrich themselves at the cost to huge
• 25:14
  impacts that spread across the ocean, which cannot be
• 25:17
  controlled by them or remediated by them?
• 25:22
  Well, maybe because we desperately need these critical
• 25:24
  minerals for the clean energy transition and to save the
• 25:27
  planet from, you know, the impacts of accelerated climate
• 25:31
  change, which which is the argument I've heard.
• 25:33
  I mean, these, these 4 cobalt, manganese, copper and nickel
• 25:37
  seem to be pretty key for electric cars, you know,
• 25:41
  renewables, magnets, grid scale batteries and so on.
• 25:45
  So I guess the question here is whether and only whether you're
• 25:47
  an authority on this or not, but whether there's enough on land
• 25:51
  for us to be able to make this transition using terrestrial
• 25:56
  sources of these minerals or whether we, we'll simply have to
• 25:59
  go down to, you know, destroy the sea bed because because we
• 26:03
  just so desperately need them. Well this is another false
• 26:06
  industry narrative I'm afraid. I co-authored a paper last year
• 26:11
  on whether we actually need the the critical minerals from the
• 26:15
  deep sea floor and the answer is no, absolutely not.
• 26:18
  These, the, the proven resources on land are far in excess of the
• 26:24
  amount that we're mining right now.
• 26:26
  They are probably far in excess of the amount that we will need
• 26:30
  in the future. These, these resources are
• 26:32
  available to us in settings that are much easier to access and
• 26:37
  where we can contain the impacts to a much greater extent.
• 26:41
  And the, the minerals, the concentration in the minerals in
• 26:44
  the polymetallic nodules, for example, in the deep sea is that
• 26:47
  they're actually quite low grade.
• 26:50
  There isn't a very high concentration of them.
• 26:53
  And so there there isn't, you know, comparing let's say nickel
• 26:59
  extraction in Indonesia that there are much richer sources of
• 27:03
  those minerals available than there would be in the deep sea.
• 27:08
  So we should concentrate on accessing those minerals in
• 27:12
  places where we can control the impacts to a far greater extent
• 27:16
  and mine with a far smaller environmental footprint.
• 27:20
  We we can power the green energy transition in terms of materials
• 27:25
  from terrestrial sources alone very easily.
• 27:29
  Yeah, I've seen the machines that they're looking to send
• 27:31
  down there. I mean, they're sort of like
• 27:33
  half bulldozer, half gigantic vacuum cleaner and they've got
• 27:37
  to operate several kilometers down in this incredibly high
• 27:39
  pressure dark environment, obviously all done remotely.
• 27:43
  I'm I'm surprised that it's even going to be commercially viable
• 27:47
  if if they're low grade minerals anywhere and they're scattered
• 27:49
  over such a such an enormously large area.
• 27:52
  But I presume they've done the studies, otherwise they wouldn't
• 27:54
  be proposing to exploit it. Well, one of the things that has
• 27:57
  held back deep sea mining for decades is that it isn't
• 28:01
  economically viable. The the the Russians and the
• 28:05
  United States were busily investigating deep sea mineral
• 28:10
  resources way back in the in the 60s.
• 28:13
  These polymetallic nodules excited a great deal of interest
• 28:18
  in those days and there was a lot of mining exploration going
• 28:22
  on. But over the years it's, it's
• 28:25
  they've remained on the seabed because it isn't economically
• 28:29
  viable to go and extract them. And the prices of those minerals
• 28:33
  has not been high enough or, or high enough consistently for
• 28:37
  long enough that it's worth the investment in the machinery and
• 28:41
  so on. And that's why the metals
• 28:43
  company share price has has sunk over the years, because, you
• 28:50
  know, the the prospects for deep sea mining seem quite bleak.
• 28:55
  And despite all of the hype about how it's essential and
• 28:59
  that hype changes over time, you know, depending upon what they
• 29:02
  think that the latest argument is that it will sway people.
• 29:05
  It'll be, you know, geopolitical security, There's will be the
• 29:09
  next thing because some of these critical minerals are in the
• 29:13
  countries in the wrong countries.
• 29:15
  And so, you know, I, I think whatever argument will when the,
• 29:20
  when the day for them is, is what they're prepared to put
• 29:23
  forward. And it's disingenuous.
• 29:26
  It is economically very, you know, unappealing to invest in
• 29:33
  deep sea mining at the moment. There are much more economically
• 29:37
  viable deposits on land. Yeah, because the CEO of the
• 29:41
  metals company, Gerard Barron, is it, Yes.
• 29:44
  Yeah. Asked President Trump directly
• 29:48
  to give permission to go out there and presumably outside the
• 29:51
  US waters. I don't know why this was in
• 29:53
  Trump's gift, but to ignore the International Seabed Authority,
• 29:58
  which is supposed to regulate this in the interests, I believe
• 30:01
  of all humankind. Like what's how would this even
• 30:04
  work? I mean is, is what is the sort
• 30:06
  of regulatory, international regulatory system that that that
• 30:09
  currently exists? So the International Seabed
• 30:12
  Authority, which you just mentioned, is constituted by the
• 30:15
  United Nations to regulate the access to and exploitation of
• 30:25
  seabed resources. And at the moment they have
• 30:29
  issued 31 exploration licences from a variety of different
• 30:34
  sites around the world. They include these polymetallic
• 30:38
  nodule fields, particularly in the Eastern Pacific.
• 30:41
  What's its? Own called in the eastern
• 30:43
  Pacific something. The Clarion Clippiton.
• 30:45
  Fracturing clippiton. That's it, I forgot.
• 30:48
  I can never remember that. But then there's also
• 30:52
  exploration licenses that have been granted on the Mid-Atlantic
• 30:55
  Ridge, which is an area of great volcanism.
• 30:57
  There's also a lot of hydrothermal vents.
• 31:01
  Hydrothermal vents are interesting because the hot and
• 31:06
  metal rich waters that have been percolating through active
• 31:12
  volcanic rocks in the deep sea then burst forth in Hot Springs
• 31:15
  and then precipitate around those vents and create these
• 31:21
  these mineral rich crusts which are of great interest to miners.
• 31:26
  And then I also mentioned the, the kind of cobalt crusts that
• 31:30
  form on seamounts as well. So those are resources that the,
• 31:35
  the, the deep seabed, the International Seabed Authority
• 31:39
  is managing the interest in. And what I've heard from them is
• 31:44
  that they're not interested in, in the any protected areas that
• 31:48
  are established in the high seas.
• 31:50
  That's outside they their remit. They are interested in simply
• 31:53
  licensing areas for exploitation and exploration.
• 31:58
  And some of the with the world's first network of marine
• 32:03
  protected areas in the high seas was created in the North
• 32:06
  Atlantic in in 2010. And this was under OSPAR, which
• 32:11
  is a regional organization that manages the the open ocean in
• 32:17
  the Mid-Atlantic on behalf of nations of of the North
• 32:21
  Atlantic. And OSPAR created these
• 32:26
  protected areas, but the International Seabed Authority
• 32:29
  made it clear that they had no interest in in whether there was
• 32:32
  a protected area there or not. They, they would not heed that
• 32:37
  in whether or in considering whether or not to issue an
• 32:41
  exploration license for any given area of sea bed.
• 32:45
  So they're, they're sort of behind the curve because the
• 32:49
  world has decided that it is going to establish 30% of the
• 32:52
  ocean as marine protected areas by 20-30.
• 32:56
  The high seas is essential to meeting that target.
• 32:59
  There have to be high seas protected areas.
• 33:02
  Mining in protected areas is considered to be pretty much no
• 33:06
  go on land and likewise in the sea.
• 33:10
  So we need to sort of bring the International Seabed Authority
• 33:15
  to to greater understanding of the ecological impacts of mining
• 33:19
  and of its responsibilities to act in terms of protection as
• 33:24
  well as exploitation. That that message has not yet
• 33:28
  landed from the world community, although they have just
• 33:34
  established a new chair of the Seabed Authority who entered the
• 33:39
  role last year. And it is hoped that that there
• 33:42
  will be rapid reform under her leadership.
• 33:45
  But her having said that, you know, the International Seabed
• 33:49
  Authority is there to to on the one hand, regulate extraction,
• 33:57
  license extraction from the deep sea, but on the other hand, it's
• 34:01
  been acting as a promoter, which is a a conflict of interest
• 34:05
  really. You know, you can't be regulator
• 34:07
  and promoter at the same time. And that's one of the reasons
• 34:09
  why we're have been pursuing headlong towards, you know,
• 34:15
  trying to rush through a deep sea mining code, which has seen
• 34:21
  the with insufficient transparency, outside scrutiny
• 34:26
  or input. And countries within the
• 34:30
  International Seabed Authority have been aggressively pursuing,
• 34:34
  arguing that it must allow mining soon.
• 34:37
  So the international community is worried, but that is the
• 34:40
  legal framework that was established under the UN Law of
• 34:44
  the sea to oversee seabed resource use.
• 34:50
  And it is the international framework that all nations of
• 34:56
  the world, except for the United States and the Vatican have
• 35:01
  signed up to. And so the, the, the question
• 35:04
  is, you know, can the United States operate outside
• 35:10
  international law to extract mineral resources from the deep
• 35:16
  sea? It's not part of the UN law of
• 35:19
  the sea, but it has been respecting the law of the sea as
• 35:23
  customary law for a number of decades now.
• 35:27
  So in all aspects except it's signature and ratification, it
• 35:32
  is a party to the, the UN law of the sea.
• 35:36
  It would be a deeply, you know, unfortunate move to start
• 35:42
  exploiting outside that legal framework in order to accelerate
• 35:48
  extraction and use. It's it's sort of economic
• 35:52
  imperialism at a planetary scale.
• 35:55
  And I think it would be, you know, it just isn't somewhere I
• 36:02
  think the world community wants to be going.
• 36:05
  That kind of individualism, that national interest being played
• 36:08
  out at the expense of international partners.
• 36:13
  Yeah. I mean, I, I get a kind of, I
• 36:14
  mentioned James Cameron earlier. I get a kind of mental image of,
• 36:18
  you know, scenes from Avatar where you've got these enormous
• 36:22
  sort of bulldozery type things going in and just, you know,
• 36:25
  stripping the well, I mean, in terms of the the deep ocean, the
• 36:29
  last pristine, fully pristine ecosystem on Earth.
• 36:34
  It's, you know, it, it just seems that we have the
• 36:39
  opportunity to leave it alone still.
• 36:41
  We don't need it and it's it's currently relatively untouched
• 36:45
  and we know there's a lot of life down there, so why not?
• 36:48
  Why not just fully protected? I mean, are there other impacts
• 36:52
  from maybe fishing? I mean, I suppose it's too deep
• 36:54
  to troll, but are are there other ways in which humans have
• 36:58
  already been impacting the the deep oceans?
• 37:01
  Well, the deep ocean is is getting warmer, so human impacts
• 37:05
  are getting down there. One one of the unfortunate
• 37:09
  things that most confronts most in person deep sea explorers and
• 37:14
  and those using remote cameras too, is that they find on the
• 37:18
  bottom of the ocean. You know, you go down for
• 37:20
  through this endless dark water and then finally end up on the
• 37:25
  bottom of the sea. And what's the first thing you
• 37:26
  see? Well, it's a, it's a plastic
• 37:28
  Coca-Cola bottle or you know, a, a can.
• 37:32
  It, our rubbish is down there and of course invisible rubbish
• 37:36
  too. The deep sea and, and the
• 37:38
  sediments there have taken up a lot of plastics over the course
• 37:42
  of half a century or so. And, And so it isn't pristine
• 37:47
  down there. It's no longer untouched by
• 37:49
  people, but it is, relatively speaking, much less impacted by
• 37:55
  people than, of course, more or less anywhere on land.
• 37:59
  Right. But the is there any fishing
• 38:01
  pressure in in the high? Sea there is fishing going down
• 38:03
  to thousands of meters deep. There are tooth fish in
• 38:07
  Antarctica for example, which live down at depths of 1000
• 38:11
  meters or so and they are fished using long lines.
• 38:14
  That's that's quite a significant fishery.
• 38:16
  We bottom trawl using mobile Nets that are dragged behind
• 38:20
  boats down to depths of 1500 to 2000 meters deep.
• 38:27
  But much below those depths, the the density of marine life is
• 38:32
  too low for it to be really economically viable.
• 38:34
  And even even a depths of 1500 meters, you know, those
• 38:39
  fisheries are only economically viable because they're receiving
• 38:42
  huge amounts of taxpayer money in in, in the way of subsidies.
• 38:47
  Yeah, I can't quite understand why governments have an
• 38:50
  incentive to put taxpayers money into destroying the marine
• 38:54
  ecosystem. I mean, if these, if these
• 38:57
  fisheries aren't aren't commercially viable, So what?
• 39:00
  What? What kind of fisheries are going
• 39:02
  on in the high season? Who's doing it?
• 39:05
  Well, there are fisheries for fish that you would never see on
• 39:10
  your plate or you would never understand that what you were
• 39:14
  eating was a deep sea fish because it's been filtered and
• 39:18
  processed and it ends up just as a piece of of whitefish.
• 39:22
  And so things like round nosed Grenadier, which are rather
• 39:26
  peculiar looking animals with a very large head and a whip like
• 39:29
  tail, those are being exploited on deep ocean slopes.
• 39:36
  There are things called orange roughy which are sort of fairly
• 39:42
  large and waxy fish. Those also are being exploited
• 39:47
  for their relatively bland white flesh.
• 39:50
  And that's it, you know, used in stuff as mundane as as fish
• 39:56
  fingers. So although you don't
• 40:00
  necessarily know it, you you may have inadvertently eaten deep
• 40:03
  sea fish as a result. Have quite a long lifespan,
• 40:07
  right? I mean, they're quite.
• 40:08
  Different roughly you, you know, they're just unsustainable on
• 40:11
  any metric. They are a marine fish that
• 40:15
  grows very slowly. As I mentioned, the the deep sea
• 40:19
  is cold and dark and has low abundance of food.
• 40:23
  So the pace of life is glacial and and orange roughy grow very
• 40:28
  slowly. They mature at ages of about 25
• 40:32
  to 35 years old. They can live as long as 150 or
• 40:35
  even 180 years old. So if you're, if you're
• 40:39
  exploiting those en masse as as fisheries in Australia and New
• 40:44
  Zealand have, then you're essentially mining the resource,
• 40:48
  you're not exploiting it sustainably.
• 40:50
  They can't replace themselves fast enough that there is a, a,
• 40:54
  a sustainable biomass that can be taken.
• 40:58
  So this, this and other fish, you know, exploitation of the
• 41:02
  very deep ocean is also deeply unsustainable as well as being
• 41:08
  ecologically destructive. And that destruction is
• 41:13
  happening with top taxpayer subsidies.
• 41:15
  And you asked the question, well, why are we subsidizing
• 41:19
  access to the deep sea? In some cases, it's because we
• 41:22
  have depleted the resources in our own national waters and the
• 41:27
  government, rather than shutting the industry down and, and
• 41:31
  seeing all the jobs lost, decided that a better
• 41:35
  alternative would be to subsidise the construction of
• 41:39
  vessels to be able to access a new resource somewhere else.
• 41:42
  And so it was seen as a good thing to go fishing deeper
• 41:47
  rather than to go out of business and, and to help the
• 41:50
  industry transition. Then they, they got these
• 41:53
  subsidies and, and they're still dependent.
• 41:55
  They're hooked on subsidies in many of these fisheries.
• 41:58
  They demand cheap fuel, for example, with, with very large
• 42:02
  tax breaks on fuel, because without that they couldn't fish
• 42:07
  for long enough and deep enough that they'd be able to bring
• 42:10
  home enough fish that they could make a profit.
• 42:12
  So they're, they're actually totally unprofitable.
• 42:15
  We spend about three times more subsidizing deep sea fisheries
• 42:19
  than the fishing the fish themselves are worth, which is
• 42:22
  madness. There's another reason for
• 42:25
  subsidizing fishing in the high seas and that is, you know, sort
• 42:30
  of geopolitics. And we've seen that China, for
• 42:36
  example, has massively expanded its high seas fishing fleet over
• 42:41
  time. And one of the reasons for that
• 42:42
  is to expand the, the, the reach and the amount of, of food that
• 42:49
  is being brought back to China. China faces problems of feeding
• 42:53
  its own people. And so it is extracting
• 42:56
  resources both on land and, and at sea across the world to
• 43:01
  support its, its people. So geopolitics has dictated that
• 43:05
  they, they, they want to access these high seas resources.
• 43:09
  And therefore the Chinese state has built the boats and, and is,
• 43:14
  you know, supporting the, the the fisheries so that they are
• 43:18
  economically viable. And you also hear horror stories
• 43:21
  about slave labour and basically these, well, even illegal
• 43:26
  fisheries in the on the high seas being run by criminal
• 43:30
  gangs. I think C Shepherd's been doing
• 43:33
  a lot to try to draw attention to this and others have too.
• 43:37
  You know, what's the extent of that?
• 43:39
  And are, you know, could, could I as a consumer, ever have a
• 43:43
  illegal fish on serve to me in a restaurant or in fish fingers or
• 43:46
  something you mentioned? Does this is does this end up on
• 43:48
  our place? It does.
• 43:50
  There's been a, a very thorough and far reaching investigative
• 43:56
  journalism project led by Ian Urbino, which is called the
• 43:59
  Outlaw Ocean Project. And, and they have been
• 44:02
  uncovering all sorts of horrors in the seafood supply chains.
• 44:07
  And one of the things that that is showing is that bonded labour
• 44:11
  and essentially slave labour is rampant in these fisheries.
• 44:16
  And if you think about it, one one of the ways you can make
• 44:22
  your fishery profitable is to reduce your labour costs.
• 44:26
  And how do you reduce your labour costs?
• 44:29
  You know you can pay your your labour force badly and a lot of
• 44:34
  fisheries do that or you could not pay them at all and and
• 44:37
  simply have slave labour. So effectively, that's another
• 44:42
  means of subsidising the the fishery in the high seas is by
• 44:47
  is by having a, a human subsidy. And so, you know, that's
• 44:52
  propping up the the profitability of these these
• 44:55
  companies, but they're rogue companies that are operating in
• 45:01
  conflict with international human rights and with laws too.
• 45:07
  So it's easier to be out of sight and out of mind on the
• 45:12
  high seas. It's easier to keep your crew
• 45:16
  away from access to, to ports or, or police.
• 45:21
  It's easier to prevent them from escaping on the high seas.
• 45:24
  It's easier to Chuck somebody overboard if they make trouble
• 45:28
  on the high seas. And, and nobody ever knows it
• 45:30
  was an accident. You know, the, the, the murder
• 45:35
  on the high seas is unfortunately far more common
• 45:38
  than you and I would like, and I think that illegal side of
• 45:45
  things is, is coming to the fore more and more.
• 45:47
  But it's very hard to uncover those kinds of practices for the
• 45:50
  very reasons that it's very difficult to see what's going on
• 45:54
  at the high in the high seas. And because of the process of
• 45:58
  transshipment, many people are stuck on these boats for years
• 46:03
  at a time. The the boats unload to another
• 46:06
  boat in the sea. That boat then refuels and
• 46:09
  resupplies the boat in the middle of the sea.
• 46:11
  And so the poor crews are stuck there with no access to land, no
• 46:16
  access to legal representation, no possibility of escape.
• 46:21
  Wow. And just just to finish the
• 46:23
  point, what happens to those catches then?
• 46:25
  I mean, if they're fished illegally, how do they get,
• 46:28
  well, laundered effectively I guess, and become legalized so
• 46:30
  that they can actually be then then go into the food chain?
• 46:34
  Well, there are a lot of ports of convenience.
• 46:37
  We often hear about flags of convenience where ships are
• 46:41
  operating under the flag of a nation, let's say like Barbados.
• 46:48
  And those, those flags are sort of issued countries are supposed
• 46:52
  to regulate the activities of their own nationals in the high
• 46:56
  seas under international law. And if you if you sign up to a
• 47:01
  flag of convenience, then it's convenient that you you get very
• 47:05
  little oversight or scrutiny. You know, they're essentially
• 47:08
  selling the flag and your reason for buying it is because you
• 47:13
  will be subject to much lower scrutiny and regulation than if
• 47:17
  you were under your own national flag.
• 47:20
  So there's flags of convenience and then there's ports of
• 47:22
  convenience where you can essentially launder fish from
• 47:27
  illegally caught or unregulated and unreported fisheries into
• 47:32
  the legitimate supply chains. And big supermarkets may be
• 47:37
  duped into buying things if they're unaware of those of the
• 47:43
  provenance of some of the material coming into that.
• 47:46
  So there there are International Criminal gangs that are getting
• 47:50
  very good at laundering fish into the legitimate supply
• 47:55
  chains. And so it's very hard as a
• 47:56
  consumer to understand whether you're eating something which
• 48:01
  has been caught sustainably from well regulated fisheries that
• 48:08
  respect human rights or whether it's come from some rogue
• 48:11
  fishery which is operating under the radar far out at sea.
• 48:16
  And what's the, what's the bycatch issue here?
• 48:18
  I mean, when I think a lot of it's long lining or using fish
• 48:21
  aggregation devices, I mean, is that affecting sharks,
• 48:25
  albatrosses and turtles and other marine life which isn't
• 48:28
  specifically targeted by the fisheries?
• 48:31
  So one of the things that you see in fishing over the course
• 48:35
  of decades and centuries is that as fishing, you know, individual
• 48:42
  fishermen innovate so that they can catch more for less effort.
• 48:46
  And so, you know, they'll, they'll invent new ways of
• 48:49
  catching fish and, and that helps them to be more profitable
• 48:54
  than their competitors. Of course, those innovations
• 48:57
  then start to have an impact on the, on the fish populations.
• 49:02
  And so fish populations decline, thereby forcing people to
• 49:07
  innovate more and the process ends up in something called
• 49:11
  technological creep, which is increasing efficiency of fishing
• 49:15
  gears over time. And, and the rate of
• 49:18
  technological creep has been estimated between about a three
• 49:22
  and a 5% increase in efficiency every year of operation.
• 49:27
  And, and, and sometimes this goes in jumps.
• 49:30
  You know, there'll be a, a new innovation that enables you to
• 49:33
  access fish in a new way, which makes suddenly your fishery much
• 49:38
  more profitable. You're talking about the open
• 49:41
  ocean tuna persane fisheries. A persane is a a same net which
• 49:46
  is set around a Shoal of tuna and and then a draw string is
• 49:52
  pulled from the bottom which closes the net at the bottom,
• 49:54
  thereby completely enclosing the the Shoal of tuna.
• 49:58
  And then they're all scooped out and the the boat goes on to find
• 50:02
  the next school. Well, to begin with, for decades
• 50:05
  people pursued free swimming schools of tuna because you know
• 50:10
  when you, when you'd see all these birds feeding from above,
• 50:13
  you'd know there was a Shoal of tuna and there's lots of
• 50:15
  splashing. So you'd set your gnat around it
• 50:18
  and you'd catch the tuna. But somebody discovered that
• 50:22
  actually another way of catching these these fish is that they
• 50:24
  like to aggregate around floating objects.
• 50:27
  So if there's a a big tree trunk that was floating out there,
• 50:30
  then there would be a lot of marine life aggregated around
• 50:33
  that. And so people started to set
• 50:37
  their Nets preferentially around floating objects because there
• 50:40
  would there would always be a good catch around them.
• 50:43
  Trouble is that those floating objects aggregate lots of other
• 50:48
  marine life as well as tuna. And so they're surrounded by
• 50:52
  turtles, whale sharks, manta rays, and all sorts of other
• 50:57
  life. And so you catch that at the
• 50:59
  same time as the tuna and that is destructive.
• 51:03
  Then, you know, people decided there aren't, there aren't
• 51:05
  enough floating objects around. And it's a bit chancy whether or
• 51:08
  not we come across 1. So let's let's create floating
• 51:11
  objects and we'll put these fish aggregation devices out, which
• 51:15
  is like a floating raft with this long curtain of was netting
• 51:21
  and, and other materials down into the ocean.
• 51:24
  And so the fish and the turtles and the manta rays would all
• 51:28
  aggregate around these fish aggregate aggregation devices.
• 51:32
  And then they added satellite trackers to them.
• 51:34
  And those satellite trackers mean that you can now track, you
• 51:37
  know, 30-40 fifty different fish aggregation devices at the same
• 51:42
  time. So this is a, this is a total
• 51:46
  game change for the open ocean and it's causing massive
• 51:50
  depletion of marine life, massive collateral mortality in
• 51:54
  capturing tuna. And it's also not good for tuna
• 51:56
  fishing because a large number of the fish that aggregate
• 52:00
  around these fish aggregation devices are actually juvenile
• 52:04
  tuna. So you're catching them before
• 52:05
  they're at the the best size to be commercially marketable and
• 52:09
  at their most productive. So we, we've just learned
• 52:14
  through a a study that was published in the last month that
• 52:19
  about 120,000 drifting fish aggregation devices are being
• 52:24
  set in the world oceans. Every year up to 90% of them are
• 52:29
  lost or abandoned at sea and they carry on fishing and having
• 52:33
  their impacts or they break up and they cause pollution
• 52:36
  problems. They are fishing over a
• 52:39
  cumulative footprint of something like 37% of the area
• 52:43
  of the ocean, much of it in the high seas.
• 52:46
  And this is causing immense and lasting damage to the
• 52:51
  environment and ecology of the open ocean.
• 52:53
  And that's why we believe it should be stopped.
• 52:56
  And well, maybe we should just stop eating tuna, stop eating
• 52:59
  fish overall. I mean, is that, is that
• 53:01
  something you're advocating? Well, it's not what we're
• 53:04
  advocating because fish is actually a very good source of
• 53:07
  animal protein. Many societies depend on fish
• 53:11
  for their, their nutrition and livelihoods.
• 53:14
  And we're, we're, we're not about stopping fishing.
• 53:19
  But one of the things about high seas fish is that most of the
• 53:22
  species, the vast majority of the species that we exploit in
• 53:25
  the high seas also migrate in and out of national waters in
• 53:30
  the exclusive economic zones of countries.
• 53:33
  There could be fish there under greater scrutiny with fewer
• 53:37
  impacts on human rights and more sustainably than if they're
• 53:41
  being exploited on the high seas.
• 53:44
  And so in fact, we we've estimated in a separate study
• 53:48
  that this would potentially increase the amount of fish that
• 53:51
  could be caught by at least 20%. Some estimates go up to about
• 53:55
  45% because protection of the stocks across the high seas
• 53:59
  would make the fishery more productive and more sustainable,
• 54:03
  and there would be greater catches that would result, but
• 54:08
  this time not at the cost of the stock, but sustainably harvested
• 54:13
  rather than extracted in this appalling way.
• 54:18
  Well, I think you mentioned sustainably harvested as a as a
• 54:21
  concept. There is a Marine Stewardship
• 54:23
  Council which certifies what it considers to be sustainable
• 54:27
  fisheries, I guess on in in national waters as well as in
• 54:30
  the high seas. What's your take on that?
• 54:33
  Well, the Marine Stewardship Council has some very good
• 54:37
  fisheries that it certifies. They are sustainable, they're
• 54:40
  low impact and consumers can eat those fish with a clear
• 54:45
  conscience. But they also certify a lot of
• 54:48
  very problematic fisheries, including some tuna fisheries,
• 54:53
  for example, in the Indian Ocean, where those tuna are
• 54:56
  being caught using fish aggregation devices at a very
• 54:59
  high cost, but UN unrecorded and poorly monitored cost to the
• 55:04
  environment and endangered, threatened and protected
• 55:08
  species. So those fisheries should never
• 55:10
  have been certified in the 1st place.
• 55:12
  It's greenwashing the industry to have that certification and
• 55:16
  it undermines the Marine Stewardship Council's brand and
• 55:20
  other certifications, the legitimate ones, to have that
• 55:23
  fishery as part of it. Yeah, I've, I've, I've long
• 55:26
  thought that we, you know, we moved away from hunter gathering
• 55:29
  and terrestrial ecosystems. Why are we still essentially
• 55:33
  hunter gatherers that see removing wildlife from the
• 55:35
  oceans? You know, may, may we should
• 55:37
  surely make a transition to aquaculture.
• 55:39
  So to farming fish. This is, we farm livestock, you
• 55:43
  know, and so I started eating salmon from fish farms, but then
• 55:48
  apparently this isn't very sustainable either.
• 55:49
  So what you know is, is that a? Is that a solution potentially?
• 55:53
  Well, I think what, what what we found in the industrialization
• 55:56
  of agriculture after World War 2 is that there was huge problems
• 56:01
  with excessive use of agrochemicals, for example, with
• 56:04
  practices that led to huge amounts of soil erosion.
• 56:08
  And agriculture had to come under greater and greater
• 56:12
  regulation to bring it under control and to start thinking
• 56:15
  about ways of of controlling the impacts as well as enjoying the
• 56:19
  benefits from it. Aquaculture is in that kind of
• 56:24
  fast growth phase. It's been outpacing the, in
• 56:28
  terms of supply, the growth of the human population, so
• 56:31
  increasing the amount of seafood availability per person for the
• 56:35
  last 30 years or so. But that's coming at increasing
• 56:39
  environmental costs and regulators are playing catch up
• 56:42
  to try and reduce the impacts of that agriculture while
• 56:46
  continuing for us to to reap the benefits.
• 56:49
  So agriculture I think will gradually move towards greater
• 56:54
  sustainability in in the future. It needs to move more rapidly
• 56:58
  that way for some kinds of agriculture which are
• 57:01
  particularly damaging. And as as you mentioned, salmon,
• 57:04
  salmon is one of the kinds of agriculture that is associated
• 57:07
  with multiple different impacts on the environment from
• 57:11
  pollution to depletion of wild salmon stocks, pests, parasites,
• 57:16
  diseases, etcetera, spreading into wild populations.
• 57:21
  And those sorts of impacts need to be brought under control if
• 57:25
  you want to eat salmon with a clear conscience.
• 57:28
  Well and also the feed that the the farm salmon are fed on, does
• 57:32
  that still come from wild fish? In which case it sort of negates
• 57:34
  the point of it. A lot of salmon feed does
• 57:38
  include wild fish and and those wild fish are extracted in
• 57:43
  various ways from the environment and some of them
• 57:46
  were caught in the deep ocean. And the industry itself would
• 57:51
  love to have more sustainable sources.
• 57:54
  One of those sources is Antarctic krill, but that is
• 57:57
  also, as we're learning, coming with increasing impacts on
• 58:01
  Antarctic wildlife. So it it is a problem, we need
• 58:05
  to be feeding or we need to be farming fish that require much,
• 58:09
  much less in the way of wild fish in their diets.
• 58:13
  Yeah, I think we should probably leave the krill alone for the
• 58:16
  whale, you know, the humpback whales and all the other species
• 58:19
  that depend on it down in the Antarctic oceans.
• 58:23
  And I think there's a proposal for a marine protected area to
• 58:26
  focus specifically on the Antarctic, isn't there?
• 58:28
  There have been efforts over many years now to establish a
• 58:32
  network of marine protected areas in the Antarctic.
• 58:35
  They've been opposed. They've been blocked in
• 58:37
  particular by China and Russia. There's an impasse over
• 58:43
  Antarctic protection, you could say.
• 58:47
  How to break that impasse is the subject of many conversations in
• 58:51
  the United Nations, in the in Kamala, the Commission for the
• 58:56
  Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources.
• 59:00
  These are problems that stem from multilateralism in a
• 59:05
  fragmented world. How do we achieve consensus for
• 59:08
  ocean protection in a fragmented world?
• 59:12
  That is a challenge, of course, which we will face with this
• 59:15
  proposal to protect all of the high seas from all exploitation
• 59:19
  forever. There is no obvious mechanism by
• 59:23
  which it can be achieved at the moment, but we do think that
• 59:26
  it's worth putting that idea out there for people to think about,
• 59:31
  to contemplate, to ingest, to, to proliferate across the world
• 59:40
  and perhaps in some way that might increase our ambitions for
• 59:46
  ocean protection. Yeah, because I mean, all, all
• 59:49
  of the ocean conservation NGOs that I've spoken to are working
• 59:53
  on trying to get more countries to ratify the high Seas Treaty,
• 59:58
  so-called BBNJ. Was it biodiversity beyond
• 1:00:02
  boundaries of jurisdiction? Yeah, national jurisdiction.
• 1:00:04
  And they're, they're quite a way away from that.
• 1:00:07
  They were trying to get it done by you, not by the UN oceans
• 1:00:09
  conference, but that's not looking likely at this in June.
• 1:00:13
  And so and plus the high Seas treaty is only, well that's a
• 1:00:18
  mechanism potentially to protect the 30% that you talked about.
• 1:00:21
  Right. How does this square with, you
• 1:00:24
  know, your call to well, our call in this new paper to
• 1:00:27
  protect the entirety of the high seas.
• 1:00:31
  Well, every new idea will be disruptive in some way, I think.
• 1:00:36
  And the United Nations High Seas Treaty is working with the idea
• 1:00:43
  that we need to establish protected areas piece meal it.
• 1:00:48
  It's is confronted with the reality that the world has
• 1:00:51
  agreed to establish 30% of the ocean as protected areas.
• 1:00:54
  And, and so that is the limit of its ambition right now.
• 1:00:58
  I think we're we're trying to raise ambitions.
• 1:01:01
  We're trying to create an alternative option which would
• 1:01:06
  not necessarily stop us from pursuing 30% protection in the
• 1:01:13
  high seas under the High Seas Treaty, but it might then raise
• 1:01:16
  our ambition and gradually we achieve a move towards much
• 1:01:20
  greater protection for the high seas than that and and
• 1:01:23
  exploitation limited to national waters only.
• 1:01:27
  Well, fall protection is something I I have to say, I do
• 1:01:30
  enthusiastically support. There's been discussions about
• 1:01:34
  how we can, you know, get get really get a worldwide campaign
• 1:01:39
  off the ground using, well, we planet who I'm working with here
• 1:01:42
  or, or, you know, a number of other partners.
• 1:01:47
  And this is something that you're keen to push, right?
• 1:01:50
  It is. It is.
• 1:01:52
  Fantastic. Well, congratulations on the the
• 1:01:56
  paper. I hope it.
• 1:01:58
  Has to you, Mark. You are, as you say, an author.
• 1:02:02
  Well, yes, I did a very small proportion of the work.
• 1:02:04
  So very large part. But I think, I think it's the
• 1:02:09
  way to move the conversation forward, isn't it?
• 1:02:11
  Because you know, you're, you're trying to, you're asking for a
• 1:02:14
  paradigm shift really in how we think about ocean conservation
• 1:02:17
  and making the scientific case in terms of everything from from
• 1:02:20
  carbon to biodiversity. I think is is critical in
• 1:02:22
  underpinning that. So, so, so well done.
• 1:02:24
  And I think we'll come back to this because it's a it's a
• 1:02:27
  developing story as it's a news. So thanks.
• 1:02:29
  Thanks again, Professor Callum Roberts for for joining us in
• 1:02:32
  saving the world from bad ideas. And I hope to catch up with you
• 1:02:35
  again soon. It was a pleasure.
• 1:02:40
  Thanks so much for listening to Saving the World from Bad Ideas,
• 1:02:43
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• 1:02:45
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• 1:02:48
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• 1:02:50
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• 1:03:04
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