A collapse of fishery stocks in the South China Sea due to overfishing and climate change could fuel serious tensions and even armed conflict, one of the authors of a new report on the topic has warned.
“The simmering conflict that we see in the South China Sea is mostly because of fish even though countries don’t say it out loud,” said Rashid Sumaila, a professor at the University of British Columbia in Canada, told RFA on Wednesday.
Sumaila, from the university’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries and its School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, has just co-authored a new report entitled “Sink or Swim: The Future Of Fisheries In the East And South China Sea.” In the report, he and other fisheries scientists and economists examine the impacts of climate change and overfishing in the region’s oceans.
The report says that under a scenario in which global temperatures rise by two-degrees Celsius by 2050 from current levels, the South China Sea is “likely to experience significant declines in key commercial fish and invertebrate species, placing many regional fishing economies at risk of devastating failure.”
Read more:
https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/southchinasea-fisheries-01052022141237.html