Media releases: Healthy Oceans
Australians love their coast. More than 85 per cent of Australians live near it, and the number is steadily increasing. But we are now in danger of losing the very thing we love.
ACF's Healthy Oceans campaign is working towards a national network of large marine sanctuaries, an Australian oceans act for effective oceans planning, and the sustainable harvesting and production of seafood. An what we do in the oceans need to be integrated with what we do to look after our coasts.
more »Imagine a world without seafood: 18 March
Trevally. Image by George Evatt.
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Out of sight, out of mind: The Kimberley oil spill
A gigantic oil spill from from Wollongong to Port Macquarie? From Wilsons Promontory to beyond the NSW ...
Garrett gets message on our marine life
Western Australia’s marine life is unique but less than 1% of it is protected. Australians want that changed. In their thousands they have been signing postcards and online petitions to send a message to Environment Minister Peter Garrett.
Coral Sea: A step towards protection
Conservation groups have welcomed the announcement by Environment Minister Peter Garrett to establish a conservation zone over the entire Coral Sea within Australian waters.
Protecting Western Australia’s big blue backyard
It might be globally significant, of critical importance to Australia and vital to the lifestyle of Western Australians, but the marine environment off the south-west coast of Australia has been forgotten.
BayMonitor report on seagrass abundance
The Australian Conservation Foundation has released a provisional report to keep the community informed of the BayMonitor Program’s monitoring of the health of Port Phillip Bay.
BayMonitor reports on satellite analysis
The first provisional BayMonitor report, examining satellite analysis of the dredge plume from the channel deepening project in Victoria’s Port Phillip Bay, is out now.
Calls from the deep to protect ocean life
The discovery that blue whale calls are becoming deeper-pitched again shows that commercial whaling should never return to the world’s oceans.
Why we need sustainable seafood
When the cod fishery collapsed around Newfoundland and Nova Scotia in 1992, more than 40,000 people lost their jobs and the Canadian government had to provide close to two billion dollars in community support to hundreds of devastated coastal communities.
With 28 per cent of the world’s fisheries overfished, the story of the disappearing cod is just one of many disturbing stories of fisheries, communities and marine life in trouble. They each show that ocean health is critical to human health and wellbeing.
Some of these stories can be told of Australian fisheries.
At last count there were 18 fish species in Commonwealth waters that are overfished. In South Australia there are four overfished species but this may increase with the next status report. There are also around 20 species under serious pressure in Western Australia and New South Wales.
Across Australia’s oceans there are many fish species being caught for which fisheries managers cannot say whether they are overfished or not.
Add this overfishing to the impacts from fisheries bycatch, land-based sources of water pollution, marine pests, habitat damage and climate change, and Australia’s ocean life is under threat.
And all the while the demand for seafood is growing.
To deal with these issues we need to protect our oceans and take from them sustainably.
To protect our oceans ACF is working with a number of environment groups to urge Australia’s governments to create a network of marine sanctuaries. You can find out more about these campaigns at Southwest Marine Sanctuaries, Coral Sea Heritage Park and East Coast Marine Sanctuaries.
To ensure that our take seafood from the oceans is sustainable, ACF has initiated a new and exciting sustainable seafood program.
The core of the program is a ground-breaking sustainable seafood assessment process that ACF has developed with a team of leading marine scientists and the University of Technology, Sydney. This is a first for Australia.
At the end of the assessment process, seafood products are given a colour grading: Green, Yellow or Red. This traffic-light system indicates how close the product is to sustainability, with Green the closest and Red the farthest.
A fourth grading, ‘Critical Conservation Concern’, is given to those seafood products which use or impact on threatened species. This would be identified at the time of the Panel’s preliminary investigation of the product and it would not proceed any further in the assessment process.
ACF is developing its program at a time when there are increasing calls from restaurants and consumers for information that will help them make sustainable seafood choices.
The seafood industry is also looking for ways to enhance the sustainability of its operations and assist the marketing of seafood products.
This sustainable seafood assessment process will reward, encourage, promote and guide the efforts of the seafood industry to enhance the sustainability of seafood products and improve sustainable seafood consumer choices.
Oceans and climate change
While most people have probably heard about the impacts that climate change will have on Australia’s iconic Great Barrier Reef, its indirect effect on our very way of life due to rising ocean temperatures and changes to our coasts, fish stocks and marine life, may not be as widely know. more »