A Fishing Practice Called Bottom Trawling Releases Large Amounts of CO2 Into Earth’s Atmosphere
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Bottom trawling disturbs the ocean floor, researchers found. Critics question whether “trawl disturbance” is different from the carbon flux that naturally occurs in oceans.
January 18, 2024
The world’s oceans are massive and critical carbon sinks that absorb roughly one-third of the greenhouse gas emissions humans generate by burning fossil fuels and reshaping Earth’s landscape.
New research finds that a particular fishing method reverses at least part of that flow, and contributes to global warming.
For the first time, researchers have determined that bottom trawling, a fishing practice that yields about 25 percent of the world’s wild-caught seafood, releases a significant amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere—as much, potentially, as the greenhouse gases from the fuel combustion of the entire global fishing fleet each year.
Bottom trawling is an intensive fishing practice in which boats drag giant nets along the ocean floor to catch some of the most consumed species in the world, including shrimp and pollack—the stuff of fish sticks. A study published in Nature in 2021 found that this action of churning up the top layer of seabeds emits more carbon than the entire global aviation industry.
“But,” said Trisha Atwood, an associate professor of watershed science at Utah State University, “we didn’t know the fate of that carbon.”
So Atwood and a team of researchers attempted to figure it out, using ocean circulation models and marine vessel tracking data. And in a new study, published Thursday in Frontiers in Marine Science, they determined that as much as 60 percent of that carbon, and probably more, ends up leaving the oceans and entering the atmosphere—roughly 370 million metric tons.
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