‘Growth’ is a compelling goal indeed. Any uptick in annual statistics, whether they refer to inbound tourists, properties, vehicles or boats being registered and sold or even the number of university or MCAST graduates, is also met with elation by politicians, given that numbers provide a rapid stock-take of success and we all love comparisons.
The COVID pandemic has re-defined the baseline, providing a fresh yardstick to gauge success with through the provision of pre-COVID and post-COVID targets.
‘Tourist arrivals have recovered to 80 per cent of pre-COVID times’ was a blaring headline the other day. Capitalist economic models hinge on unidirectional growth, irrespective of the impacts this growth will have on the depletion of the same resources supporting such growth.
It did not take long for the unsavoury aspects of unbridled growth to emerge, with the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ paradigm, referring to the unrestricted access to a common resource (fish, groundwater) which, in turn, fuels a rat race to exploit and deplete the same resources, being formulated by Garrett Hardin in 1968.
The 1970s saw the fledgling sustainability movement come to the fore, with the first Earth Summit being held in Stockholm in 1972 and the coining of the term ‘sustainable development’. This soul-searching led to a rekindling of concepts which had previously been considered as obsolete, including the ‘carrying capacity’ one. Although the exact origins of this concept are unknown, its implications are far-reaching as they preach caution as opposed to inveterate growth.
Within the realm of environmental science, the carrying capacity of an environment is the maximum population size of a biological species that can be sustained by that specific environment, given the food, habitat, water and other resources available.
The carrying capacity is defined as the environment’s maximal load, which, in population ecology, corresponds to the population equilibrium, when the number of deaths in a population equals the number of births (as well as immigration and emigration).
There are different definitions of carrying capacity from the realms of sociology (demographics), fisheries and climate change but these all converge on one cardinal point: the resource being exploited will at one point be exhausted unless its use is regulated, so as to ensure the safety of future provisions of the same resource, since there is a maximum exploitation threshold which can be supported rather than incessant growth or increase in exploitation.
Global wild fisheries catch provide the best evidence for this maxim. For instance, these peaked in 1996, with a total of 95.16 million tons of fish being caught globally (excluding the fish caught through illegal, unregulated and unreported [IUU] fishing, naturally), with this maximum not being breached since then.
This extended preamble leads us to the Maltese case study, which provides countless examples of unregulated growth, ranging from annual tourist volumes to the number of sealed property deals and the every-burgeoning volumes of vehicles and boats on our roads and in our seas, respectively. While reams of articles have been penned on the unsustainable exploitation of resources on Maltese land, unregulated activities persisting within our seas rarely come to the fore.
Anchoring, for instance, might potentially be the single most nefarious pressure on the marine environment, locally, courtesy of a considerable upsurge in local boat ownership (the COVID pandemic might have contributed to this too) in recent years but also courtesy of the ubiquitous shipping sector, a kingpin amongst local maritime sectors.
Numerous countries and territories abroad have applied the carrying capacity mindset in a variety of ways, for instance, spots cherished by tourists in the Dolomites are regularly closed off to vehicles on a daily basis by local authorities as soon as the maximum quota for the day is reached. The Balearics in Spain have recently forbidden all forms of anchoring on seagrass meadows.
Limit the number of vessels which can visit particular areas on a daily basis- Alan Deidun
However, such measures are completely absent on these islands.
Way back in 2017, I, along with a number of colleagues, was tasked with quantifying the carrying capacity of Comino, both in terms of vessels and in terms of visitors on land.
The same study documented the extensive damage being wrought to the seabed within four different embayments on Comino, including the Blue Lagoon, Santa Marija Bay, San Niklaw Bay and Crystal Lagoon, largely through random and haphazard anchoring by a flotilla of vessels on seagrass meadows still colonising the same bays.
The evidence we provided was unequivocal, with shoots of detached Neptune Grass floating around in the water column as a result of the same lackadaisical approach to regulated anchoring.
Five years down the line, the authorities have still to act on the outcomes and recommendations from the same report.
Similarly, at Mġarr ix-Xini, despite talk of the possible installation of eco-mooring facilities being on the cards for eons now, any visit to the once idyllic creek amounts to a test in dexterity, snaking in between the rows of recreational vessels hogging every inch of the same embayment, with boat anchors peppering the seabed and with regulation being just an elusive mirage.
Hence, while the Graffitti intervention on Comino so as to restore the public’s access to the foreshore is highly commendable, it should not restrict the discussion to above-water regulation of human activities only.
The real opium dogging the Maltese populace – partisan politics – precludes any politician from biting the bullet and pulling the brakes, from being bold enough to declare ‘enough is enough’ and from ushering in a system of quotas and, where necessary, even moratoria.
The effects of such boldness might expose the same politician/s to flak from industry operators but would, at the same time, greatly benefit our bedraggled marine environment.
Limit the number of vessels which can visit particular areas on a daily basis, introduce fish conservation measures so that our marine protected areas (MPAs) can finally take off the blocks, introduce ecological moorings within popular embayments, limit to daily quotas the exploitation of popular species such as sea urchins and whatnot.
There are so many measures that can be introduced in a piecemeal fashion so as not to subject our ingrained mindsets to shocks.
If we are serious about safeguarding the marine environment, we should definitely start from now.