Some six billion tonnes of sand is being extracted yearly from the ground of the world’s oceans, inflicting irreparable harm to benthic life, in keeping with a brand new international knowledge platform on sand and different sediment extraction within the marine atmosphere.
The brand new knowledge platform, Marine Sand Watch, has been developed by GRID-Geneva, a Centre for Analytics inside the UN Surroundings Programme (UNEP). It’s out there at: https://unepgrid.ch/en/
The platform will monitor and monitor dredging actions of sand, clay, silt, gravel, and rock on the planet’s marine atmosphere, together with hotspots just like the North Sea, Southeast Asia, and the East Coast of the US, a press release by the UNEP stated September 5, 2023.
It’ll present data on areas used for sand extraction (sand concessions), areas of capital and upkeep dredging, sand buying and selling ports/hubs, variety of vessels and operators, and extraction of sediment and different forms of actions by nations with Unique Financial Zones.
For this, it is going to use Computerized Identification System indicators from vessels and Synthetic Intelligence to determine the operations of dredging vessels.
The platform has estimated that between 4 and eight billion tonnes of sand are being dredeged from the ocean ground yearly. Much more alarmingly, this quantity is anticipated to rise to 10 to 16 billion tonnes per 12 months, which is the pure replenishment charge or the quantity that rivers have to preserve coastal and marine ecosystem construction and performance.
The extraction of sand will increase the turbidity of water. It modifications nutrient availability and causes noise air pollution, thus affecting marine organisms tremendously.
Not simply benthic organisms, folks residing in coastal communities will even be severely affected by this magnitude of sand dredging, in keeping with the UNEP assertion:
Shallow sea mining for sand and gravel is central to varied development actions. It poses a risk to coastal communities within the face of rising sea ranges and storms, as marine sand might be wanted to construct coastal defences, and help offshore power infrastructure comparable to wind or waves generators…
