Nations call for 'quieter' ocean to help marine life
underwater noise pollution
.
The din created by shipping and other human activities is rising at an alarming rate, marine conservation groups say, a major problem for sea life reliant on sound below water to survive.
Whales and dolphins use clicks and whistles to communicate with their young, navigate the oceans and warn of danger and hunt for food.
"Human noise pollution is drowning out these vital sounds," said Carlos Bravo from OceanCare, a marine conservation group.
In a step toward a quieter ocean, 37 countries led by Canada and Panama have launched a new effort to reduce harmful underwater noise pollution.
At the UN Ocean Conference in Nice, France, ministers from these countries committed to advancing quieter shipping design and including noise reduction protocols in their marine protected areas.
"Too often, the issue of
ocean noise
has been sidelined in global environmental discourse," said Panama's environment minister Juan Carlos Navarro.
"With this coalition, we are committing to act decisively to protect marine biodiversity from this invisible yet powerful threat."
Whirling propellers from shipping, sonar from navy vessels and construction noise from offshore industry all emit sounds that can travel vast distances underwater, WWF says.
Beluga whales can detect sounds from icebreaking ships up to 85 kilometres (52 miles) away, causing panic and flight, it added.
Other marine mammals change their behaviour under acoustic stress, while smaller prey for these bigger ocean dwellers can also be scared off by human-made noise.
One of the biggest contributors to underwater noise is cargo vessels, and cutting the acoustic footprint of the global shipping industry could have a major impact.
Despite this, global efforts to reduce ocean noise "have been limited and fragmented", the coalition said.
Bravo said this new coalition had taken a "crucial step towards giving marine life back their voice in the blue planet's symphony".
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Hindustan Times
3 days ago
- Hindustan Times
Protector of the realm: If there is a ‘father of conservation policy', it is Julian Huxley?
Call it the butterfly effect. Huxley expanded the meaning of the word 'heritage', and this laid the ground some of the most powerful initiatives of the otherwise largely ineffective United Nations. (Wikimedia) If there are rare fish protected in certain oceans, and unique lepidoptera still flitting about in certain patches of rainforest, they can in many ways be traced to a single person. In 1946, just after it was announced that he would be the first director-general of a new UN agency called Unesco (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), Julian Huxley wrote UNESCO: Its Purpose and its Philosophy, a manifesto for the body. Its mission, the evolutionary biologist said, would be two-fold: to protect, preserve and present existing elements of world heritage, and to actively conserve nature and 'its living beauty'. Huxley's manifesto was typical of the man: ambitious, far-sighted, daring, and rooted in his idea of an evolutionary humanism. His mission statement would expand the meaning of the word 'heritage', and in doing so would yield some of the most powerful initiatives of the otherwise largely ineffective United Nations. One of these would be the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN, founded in 1948), whose Red List shapes wildlife conservation around the world. Another would be CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora), born in 1975. Huxley was born in 1887 in London. His paternal grandfather was Thomas Henry Huxley, the scientist and educator who coined the word 'agnostic' and was known as Darwin's Bulldog for his fierce defence of the theory of evolution. His maternal great-grandfather was Thomas Arnold, the godlike headmaster of Rugby School (immortalised in the Thomas Hughes novel, Tom Brown's Schooldays). One of Julian Huxley's siblings was Aldous Huxley, the writer, philosopher (and teacher at Eton, where he taught French to George Orwell); another, his half-brother Andrew Huxley, won the Nobel Prize in Medicine, in 1963. In many ways, Julian Huxley represented the best of the classic British University tradition: a deep specialisation (in biology), a strong grounding in the classics and, according to one of his teachers, 'an instinct for the right word and the right cadence'. He even won the prestigious Newdigate Prize for poetry, previously won by Matthew Arnold and Oscar Wilde. It was this ability to write well that made him one of the great popularisers of science in the 20th century. In 1923, he published Essays of a Biologist, a popular collection of writings on evolution, heredity and human society. He worked with HG Wells and his son GP Wells, to write The Science of Life (1930), an ambitious attempt to make biology and evolution accessible to the layman. His Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (1942), combined genetics, systematics (understanding the evolutionary relationships between different species), palaeontology, embryology and comparative anatomy into a single sweeping framework, and yet remained accessible to the lay person. Huxley was a committed eugenicist, believing that some people were genetically unfit for certain roles. In his words, '...a considerable percentage of young men have to be rejected for military service on grounds of physical weakness or mental instability, and… these grounds are often genetic in origin.' His ideas of eugenics, however, were never rooted in race. In his book, We Europeans: A Survey of 'Racial' Problems (1935), he argued that genetic and statistical findings confirmed that variations between individuals from within the same race were greater than the differences between races. In his 50s by the time of World War 2, he criticised Nazi ideas of race purity, calling them a cover for a vile political agenda. As effective as he was as a scientist and communicator, his lasting legacy has been elsewhere. 'One of the greats' There are many people who can claim the title of 'mother / father of conservation': Aldo Leopold, the American naturalist and author of A Sand County Almanac; Gifford Pinchot, the American forester and politician; Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan founder of the Green Belt Movement, among others. Huxley could well lay claim to being the father of conservation policy. As head of Unesco, he hosted meetings and invited natural scientists to explore how this body could coordinate a global conservation effort. He used his vast personal network of scientists, museum directors, naturalists and colonial administrators, many of whom had been active in the pre-war International Office for the Protection of Nature, to create what would become the framework for IUCN. That wasn't his first such achievement. Huxley, a passionate birder, co-founded the British Trust for Ornithology, in 1933. He was also instrumental to the formation of the UK's Council for Nature, in 1958. A series of articles he wrote for The Observer led directly to the formation of the World Wildlife Fund (now the World Wide Fund for Nature) in 1961. Incidentally, he also narrated David Attenborough's first nature documentary, Coelacanth (1952), on the rediscovery of the prehistoric fish. Huxley proposed border-defying World Parks, which today include the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, established in 2002 across parts of Mozambique, Zimbabwe and South Africa. His push for a centralised, science-based system to track endangered species laid the groundwork for the IUCN Red List, which was born in 1964. When he died in 1975, aged 87, John Owen, Tanzania's former director of national parks, called him 'one of the world's great men'. People may be more familiar with the works of his more-famous brother, but Julian Huxley's imprint on our world is an indelible, and even more important, one. (K Narayanan writes on films, videogames, books and occasionally technology)
&w=3840&q=100)
Business Standard
3 days ago
- Business Standard
Why India still remains in a state of confusion when it comes to GM crops
For now, India's GM crop landscape remains one of promise stalled by policy inertia, while scientific, commercial, and global trade pressures continue to mount Sanjeeb Mukherjee New Delhi Listen to This Article A lesser-known chapter in the life of MS Swaminathan, the chief architect of India's Green Revolution, is his role in nudging the Vatican towards supporting genetically modified (GM) crops as a tool to fight global hunger. As narrated in a recent biography by his niece Priyambada Jayakumar (MS Swaminathan: The Man Who Fed India), Swaminathan, while serving with the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), met Pope John Paul II privately in 1982. The pontiff, deeply troubled by drought-induced hunger in Africa, backed FAO's efforts to tackle the crisis. His successor, Pope Benedict XVI, invited Swaminathan to the Vatican to
Indian Express
07-08-2025
- Indian Express
Delhi Confidential: Saying It With Smile
Congress MP Shashi Tharoor was at the receiving end of jibes from his colleagues on Thursday. At the Makar Dwar, two senior MPs — RSP's N K Premachandran and Congress' Benny Behanan — told him that they have come up with a new slogan to raise inside the Lok Sabha — 'Pradhan Mantri Sadan mein aao, Tharoor wapas UN jao (PM come to House, Tharoor go back to the UN)'. The Thiruvananthapuram MP took the comment sportingly and smiled. Premachandran continued to take a swipe at him saying, 'He (Tharoor) is such an obedient party MP that he did not even table the papers listed against his name today.' Tharoor quickly responded that the Opposition has 'double standards' when it comes to laying papers in the two Houses. 'In Rajya Sabha, the Opposition MPs are allowed to lay papers on table if their name is listed,' he said, referring to CPI(M) MP John Brittas tabling the Standing Committee report on External Affairs. In the Lok Sabha, BJP MP Arun Govil tabled the same as Tharoor, whose name was listed, was not allowed to lay the papers. Senior BJP leader and former Rajya Sabha MP Vinay Sahasrabuddhe is making efforts to generate interest among party MPs about new technological developments. Sahasrabuddhe, who is the vice-chairman of Rambhau Mhalgi Prabodhini, a centre linked with BJP-RSS and designed to 'produce trained, ethical, and responsible leaders', invited some MPs on Thursday for a session to understand the impact of Artificial Intelligence on society and economy. AI experts from Bharat Gen, a government initiative at IIT Mumbai, briefed the parliamentarians. For those who attended the session, the most interesting aspect was the Indian language tools developed by Bharat Gen, a government-funded AI based multimodal LLM.
