The Oceans in the Anthropocene
For the vast majority of human history people have believed the oceans to be endless and inexhaustible. As late as the 17th century it was assumed that the seas could never be emptied of fish and that shipping exerted no significant influence on the oceans (Vidas, 2010). Yet humankind actually began decimating marine life – initially on a localized scale – thousands of years ago (Census of Marine Life; McIntyre, 2010; Roberts, 2007). The extent of the damage caused by humans then reached a new dimension with the advent of industrialization. Humankind has become a dominant factor in the Earth system. Increasingly, therefore, the current industrial age is being regarded as a new period in the history of the Earth, as the ‘Anthropocene’ (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000). Humanity’s collective ability to cause changes on a planetary scale has already endangered vital natural life-support systems, so the Anthropocene is also ushering in a new era of responsibility. In many areas, critical developments are emerging that demand swift corrective action. Examples include water resources, soils, forests – and the overexploitation of the sea. In its 2011 flagship report, the WBGU described the need for society and the economy to undergo a Great Transformation towards sustainability, and based its analysis of the vision’s feasibility on the example of climate protection (WBGU, 2011). Central to this report is the idea of a new social contract that would enable governments and civil society to work together to shape this change process. The present report builds on the analysis from the 2011 report and focuses on the oceans. First, this report explores the role the use of the oceans plays in the transformation towards sustainability. To protect the climate, global emissions of greenhouse gases must be reduced to an absolute minimum in the decades ahead. This in turn necessitates a transformation of the world’s energy systems. Energy from the sea can play a part here and is therefore one of the two focal issues covered in the report. At the same time, as the WBGU showed in its report on the transformation (WBGU, 2011), sustainable land use is also of
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tremendous importance to the targeted transformation. Here too, there are interdependencies with ocean use via the human food system. Food from the sea is thus the other focal issue addressed by this report. Second, the question arises as to what sustainability means for the oceans:. What influence has humankind exerted on the oceans? What critical developments are to be averted? What sustainability goals should be pursued? The issues at stake include preserving ecosystem services, such as material cycles, flood protection and primary production, as well as the direct use of resources and spaces. Many threats to the oceans do not arise directly from human use. One example is the influence of climate change, whose interactions with the sea have already been discussed in detail by the WBGU in a special report (WBGU, 2006). Similarly, chemical run-off and waste discharge are only directly related with the use of the oceans to a small extent. However, one of the biggest problems – the dramatic and virtually global depletion of fish stocks – is almost exclusively caused by overexploitation. Against better knowledge, overfishing is still common in many regions and will, sooner or later, deprive itself of its basis. As in the case of climate protection, so here: there are plenty of well-known solutions, and both political and economic tools are available but there is a lack of implementation. No consistent answers have yet been put forward to the question of how we really want to use and, perhaps, shape the oceans in the Anthropocene. What is lacking, therefore, is a generally accepted, realizable, positive vision of sustainable human interaction with the oceans – both with respect to using the sea itself and in other areas that impact on the sea. The key question addressed by this report is therefore: what might sustainable interaction with the oceans look like in the context of the Great Transformation towards sustainability? Maritime laws have been around for centuries. In the 17th century, the rise of the great seafaring nations’ merchant shipping fleets, the conquest of fishing grounds and the exploitation of mineral resources created the
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