Halting the decline in fish stocks

ACHIM STEINER of the UN Environment Program and JOSHUA REICHERT of the Pew Group state that the high seas containing the largest reservoir of Earth's biodiversity was under strain with the UN estimating that 85% of the world's fish stocks were fully exploited in the run-up to Rio+20 summit in June 2012, being held 20 years after the landmark Earth summit in Rio in 1992.

In their op-ed for the Project Syndicate, "Fixing Our Broken Oceans", they state that fragmented marine management practices, lack of high-seas governance, and over-subsidies for fishing that have resulted in twice as many industrial fishing vessels catching fish as the oceans can sustain.

They advocate an investment of $110 billion over the coming years in strengthened fisheries management including the establishment of marine protected areas, decommissioning and reduction of fleet capacity of industrial-scale large vessels, retraining of workers impacted by job losses, and policy measures to enable a recovery of fishery stocks.

Pole positions in clean-energy

The Pew Environment Group led by Director JOSHUA REICHERT analyze trends in the clean energy sector within the G-20 economies over the past 5 years and are sanguine about the sector that is forecast to grow by 25% to $200 billion in 2010 on the back of a prioritization on clean energy funding by the G-20 governments. In a report titled “WHO’S WINNING THE CLEAN ENERGY RACE? Growth, Competition and Opportunity in the World’s Largest Economies”, they state that nations such as China, Brazil, U.K, Germany and Spain with their strong, national clean energy policies were leading the clean energy economy sweepstakes and other countries would need to more actively evaluate policies to stimulate clean energy investment and compete effectively for clean energy jobs and manufacturing.