Impacts of Disturbance and Degradation
Pressures on coastal systems are growing more intense. As rapid development
and population growth continue in coastal areas, increasingly heavy demands
will be placed on the natural resources and remaining natural habitats along
the coasts. Unless corrective measures are taken, environmental degradation
and over-exploitation will erode marine and coastal biological diversity, undermine
productivity, and intensify conflicts over the increasingly scarce resources
of the coastal zone.
Some of the most important present and potential threats to marine and coastal
biological diversity are:
- alteration and loss of habitat,
- chemical pollution and eutrophication,
- global climate change,
- invasions of alien species, and
- over-exploitation of living marine and coastal resources - some species are
even in danger of becoming extinct.
Mariculture production, for example, is growing worldwide at the rate of about
5 to 7 percent annually. On an industrial scale mariculture may pose several
threats to marine and coastal biodiversity due to, for example, wide-scale destruction
and degradation of natural habitats, nutrients and antibiotics in mariculture
wastes, accidental releases of alien or living modified organism resulting from
modern biotechnology, transmission of diseases to wild stocks, and displacement
of local and indigenous communities. A precautionary approach should, therefore,
be applied to any mariculture development.
Based on: Convention
on Biodiversity Recommendation I/8
Scientific, technical and technological aspects of the conservation and sustainable
use of coastal and marine biological diversity