Some six billion tonnes of sand and other sediment is extracted from the world’s seas and oceans every year, the UN said Tuesday, warning of the devastating toll on biodiversity and coastal communities.
Launching the first-ever global data platform on sediment extraction in marine environments, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), warned that the scale of dredging was growing, with dire consequences.
“The scale of environmental impacts of shallow sea mining activities and dredging is alarming,” said Pascal Peduzzi, who heads UNEP’s analytics centre GRID-Geneva.
He pointed to the effects on biodiversity, as well as on water turbidity, and noise impacts on marine mammals.
The new data platform, Marine Sand Watch, uses artificial intelligence to track and monitor dredging activities of sand, clay, silt, gravel and rock in the world’s marine environment.
It uses so-called Automatic Identification System (AIS) signals for ships combined with AI to identify the…
Source: Vanguard Newspaper
