The Hindu Business Line : Oceans and Kerala

LAST weekend was World Environment Day, and today is World Oceans Day. This time round, both are linked by a common theme - the need to protect oceans. The World Environment Day's theme for 2004 is `Wanted! Seas and Oceans: Dead or Alive?'

According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), this year's theme exhorts that "we make a choice as to how we want to treat the Earth's seas and oceans." It also calls on each and every one of us to act. Do we want to keep the seas and oceans healthy and alive or polluted and dead?

World Oceans Day, June 8, was declared an international celebration a decade ago at the United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. This year's Oceans Day theme is `Discover the Ocean in Your Backyard'. The theme emphasises human beings' inextricable connection to the ocean, irrespective of habitat - inland or by the coast.

What we do in our backyard and community can have a positive or negative effect on our oceans. Water travels from the oceans to the atmosphere to land and back to the oceans again. Water resources are limited, and all of the water now present on Earth is all there is. Protection of our oceans starts with the protection of our watersheds, and protection of our watersheds starts with you, says Fisheries and Oceans Canada.

Kerala has a special reason to feel close to the interconnected themes of World Environment Day and World Oceans Day. With a coastline of around 600 km and an exclusive economic zone (the seaward stretch up to 200 nautical miles from the shoreline), spread over 36,000 sq km (almost the same size as the land area of the State), Kerala depends crucially on the health of the oceans, from an economic and socio-geographic point of view.

Further, Kerala has an extensive inland water spread of around 4 lakh hectares (ha). This is made up of 44 rivers, 30 major reservoirs, a quarter of a lakh of freshwater ponds and tanks, and 2.43 lakh ha of backwaters and brackish water area. All of them depend on the health of the oceans for their own health.

Another more tangible reason for protecting the oceans is that most Keralites rely on fish - still the sea's most valuable resource - for a significant portion of their daily protein needs. This is especially true for the less privileged sections of Kerala society, like the fishing communities, whose population is estimated to be 11 lakhs, of which slightly over 8 lakhs are in the marine sector. Of them, close to 2 lakh are active seagoing fishermen.

Clearly, therefore, Kerala has a stake in ensuring that the life-giving role of oceans is constantly reasserted and that oceans continue to remain healthy and vibrant. That is not easy since a plethora of problems plague the seas.

Increased pressures from over-fishing, habitat destruction, pollution and the introduction of invasive alien species are some of the processes that have combined in recent decades to threaten the diversity of life in estuaries, coastal waters and oceans. Add to that a new threat - global warming. Taken together, their collective impact could be devastating for life in the seas and oceans - and, by implication, especially for all those who depend on the seas and oceans for a livelihood.

As Klaus Toepfer, Executive Director of UNEP, says, "There was a time when humankind viewed the oceans and seas as vast and unchanging, able to absorb and dilute pollution, and provide seemingly limitless catches of fish and other marine living resources. Unlike the land, where concepts of ownership and management have been established for centuries, the oceans have been viewed as truly wilderness areas, owned by no one and free for all.

"That was fine in a world, now long ago, where a coastal mega-city might have been a few thousand rather than 10 million souls. But the growth in the global population, where more than 40 per cent now live by the coast, allied to our abilities to hunt faster and further for ever greater quantities of marine-living resources means we can no longer treat the seas and oceans as a free-for-all, uncared for and unmanaged," adds Toepfer.

That is a powerful call for action. As the pre-eminent coastal and fisheries-dependent State of India, Kerala should take the lead in ensuring healthy oceans for the generations to come.

The writer can be contacted at kg@tug.org.in

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