AFP

Despondent Sunday anglers watch crestfallen as a trawler winches an enormous net out of the waters of the Bosphorus.

“Clear off!” they shout from the shore, impatient to get their hooks back into the depths of the strait that runs through Istanbul.

“I have been here since 6 am but a trawler came and dropped its nets. That blocked us completely,” grumbled Mehmet Dogan, fed-up at only having caught one fish all day, a 40-centimetre (16-inch) bonito.

It is high season for the popular variety of tuna, with shoals teeming through the Bosphorus on their way from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean.

But pulled taut across the strait are fishing nets more than a kilometre (3,280 feet) long.

Anglers like Dogan who cram shoulder to shoulder along the banks say the nets leave them with little chance — and the fish with even less.

Fish stocks in the Bosphorus have plummeted, according to Saadet Karakulak of Istanbul University. In the space of a few years, hauls have fallen from 500,000 to 600,000 tonnes a year to 328,000 tonnes, she said, saying it is “proof that stocks are diminishing”.

“Because of these boats, the fish can’t enter the Bosphorus,” rued angler Murat Ayhanoglu, standing at Kirecburnu cove on the European side. “They can’t leave their eggs here.”

Nearby on the Gorenler II, a 35-metre trawler, the crew heaved in a net weighed down with fish.

There’s no chance of catching anything when boats like that are here, said Ayhanoglu, as he reeled off a list of fish getting ever rarer in the Bosphorus — horse mackerel, anchovy, picarel and bluefish.

– ‘Race to overfish’ –

But the dramatic fall in stocks didn’t stop the government trying to close the strait to traffic for half a day this month to give free rein to commercial fishing boats. 

The transport ministry later backed down after protests from scientists and campaigners about the “race to overfish” what they term is a biologically important “corridor”.

“You can’t do that. Stocks are in danger… We need sustainability,” said Bayram Ozturk, head of the marine biology department at Istanbul University.

He said it was high time for quotas on some species, with the anchovy currently threatened.

Plastic waste, pollution and heavy maritime traffic are also blighting fish stocks in one of the world’s business shipping lanes, warned Ozturk, who is also director of the Turkish Marine Research Foundation.

From container ships to tankers to bulk carriers transporting badly needed Ukrainian cereals to world markets, more than 200 ships a day pass through the Bosphorus.

With the strait only 760 metres wide at its narrowest point, Ozturk said fish stocks need to be managed by the region’s nations.

“Fish don’t have a passport. They spawn on the Ukrainian side (of the Black Sea), travel to the Turkish side”, he said, and might end up being eaten on Greek island.

– ‘We have to make sacrifices’ –

Competition between trawlers is “ferocious”, said captain Serkan Karadeniz as his boat waited to leave the quay to fish for bonito, having chased them all the way from its home port of Samsun on Turkey’s northern coast. 

The Gorenler has come from all the way from Canakkale on the Aegean Sea.

“October to November is when the fish migrate the most, to the Marmara and Aegean” seas, said Erdogan Kartal, head of Istanbul’s fishery cooperative.

The 60-year-old, who has been fishing since he was a lad, said fish “are getting smaller and smaller. 

“We have started to catch fish that have never had the chance to spawn, which is dangerous.”

He no longer sees the mackerel that were once so abundant.

“Where are the beautiful mackerel that we used to eat every day?” Kartal lamented, saying quota and size limits had to be set.

“We have to make some sacrifices,” he said. “If we let the fish pass, they will return.”

Lina Ghotmeh has pegged her career on sustainable construction.

The French-Lebanese architect wants to see her industry transformed by drastically reducing the use of concrete — a major CO2 contributor — using more local materials and reusing existing buildings and materials.

“We need to change our value system,” the 42-year-old told AFP last month.

The aim is to reduce the carbon footprint of the construction industry and create buildings that can better resist the impacts of climate change.

But it’s not an easy battle.

The industry accounts for almost 40 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the United Nations.

Ghotmeh, who designed the Estonian National Museum and taught at Yale University, doesn’t advocate for fewer buildings — she knows that’s an unrealistic goal in a world with a growing population.

“That would be like saying ‘stop eating,'” she said.

– ‘Don’t demolish’ –

Instead, we should “keep what already exists, don’t demolish,” but refurbish and retrofit old buildings in a sustainable way where possible.

Building a new detached house consumes 40 times more resources than renovating an existing property, and for a new apartment complex that rises to 80 times more, according to the French Agency for Ecological Transition (Ademe).

And where new constructions are needed, local materials and design should be used in a way that incorporates natural surroundings and saves energy.

Ghotmeh used more than 500,000 bricks made from local dirt for a new Hermes building in France, expected to open early next year.

The bricks also regulate the building’s temperature and reduce energy needs.

The building will produce as much energy as it consumes, by being made energy efficient and using geothermal power.  

– ‘Circular thinking’ –

Architects must, early in the project process, “think in a circular way,” Ghotmeh said, choosing reusable organic or natural materials like wood, hemp, linen or stone.

This shouldn’t stymie the design process either, she insists.

“In Canada, we build wooden towers, in Japan too. It’s a material that is quite capable of being used for tall buildings,” added Ghotmeh, who will build a wooden tower in Paris in 2023.

Another key approach is to build lighter, using less material and fewer toxins.

And then there’s concrete, the main material in so many modern buildings and perhaps the most challenging to move away from.

“We must drastically reduce the use of concrete”, she said, insisting it should only be used for essential purposes, such as foundations and building in earthquake-prone areas. 

Some 14 billion cubic metres of concrete are used every year, according to the Global Cement and Concrete Association.  

It emits more CO2 than the aviation industry, largely because of the intense heat required to make it. 

Alternatives to concrete already exist, such as stone, or making cement — a component of concrete — from calcium carbonate. There are also pushes for low-carbon cement made from iron and steel industry waste.

– Beirut inspiration –

Building more sustainably often comes with a higher price tag — it costs more to double or triple glaze windows and properly insulate a house — but the long-term payoff is lower energy costs.

For Ghotmeh, it’s an imperative investment in our future. 

It was her birthplace of Beirut that inspired her to become an architect, spurring a desire to rebuild the so-called “collapsed city” ravaged by war.

In 2020, she completed the “Stone Garden” apartment tower in the city, built with concrete covered with a combed coating, a technique often used by local craftsmen. She used concrete in the construction because of earthquake risks.

The building was strong enough to survive the port explosion in 2020 that destroyed a large part of the city.

And the city continues to inspire her today, even when it comes to climate sustainability.   

“Since there is practically only an hour of electricity per day, all the buildings have solar panels now. There is a kind of energy independence which is beginning to take place, by force,” she said. 

“Does it take a catastrophe like the one in Lebanon to make this transition?”

Experts and activists were hoping UN climate talks would end last week with a prominent mention of biodiversity in the final text. They walked away disappointed.

Some say delegates at the COP27 summit missed a key opportunity to acknowledge the connection between the twin climate and nature crises, which many believe have been treated separately for too long.

Failing to address both could mean not only further decimating Earth’s life support systems, but also missing the key climate target of limiting warming to under 1.5 degrees Celsius, they warn.

“We’re doomed if we don’t solve climate, and we’re doomed if we don’t solve biodiversity,” Basile van Havre, co-chair of the UN biodiversity negotiations, told AFP.

At the COP15 UN biodiversity talks next month, dozens of countries will meet to hammer out a new framework to protect animals and plants from destruction by humans.

The meeting comes as scientists warn that climate change and biodiversity damage could cause the world’s sixth mass extinction event.

Such destruction of nature also risks worsening climate change.

The oceans have absorbed most of the excess heat created by humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions and, along with forests, are important carbon sinks.

“(Nature) is up to a third of the climate solution. And it is a proven technology,” Brian O’Donnell, director of Campaign for Nature, told AFP.

He said oceans in particular are unsung “superheroes”, which have absorbed carbon and heat, at the cost of acidification and coral-killing heatwaves.

As the world warms, species and ecosystems can also play a crucial role in building resilience. Mangroves, for example, can protect against coastal erosion caused by rising seas linked to a warming planet.

– ‘Missed opportunity’ –

Perhaps the most attention on the natural world at COP27 came during a visit by Brazil’s president-elect Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who will take office in January.

He has vowed to halt the rampant deforestation of the Amazon seen under incumbent Jair Bolsonaro and announced during the climate talks plans to create a ministry for indigenous people, custodians of the rainforest.

The crucial “30 by 30” biodiversity target also got a boost when a bloc of West African nations vowed to adhere to the goal of protecting 30 percent of the natural world by 2030. 

Biodiversity received a nod in the final COP27 text, including in a paragraph calling for “the urgent need to address, in a comprehensive and synergetic manner, the interlinked global crises of climate change and biodiversity loss”.

But the upcoming COP15 meeting in Montreal — tasked with setting out an ambitious plan for humanity’s relationship with nature for the coming decades — did not get the encouragement many were hoping for.

“It is a missed opportunity that COP15, taking place just in two weeks’ time, did not get a highlight by COP27,” Li Shuo, senior global policy adviser at Greenpeace East Asia, told AFP.

But he cautioned it “should not be a deal-breaker, this should not be the end of the world”. 

For Zoe Quiroz Cullen, head of climate and nature linkages at Fauna & Flora International, it was “deeply concerning” that the text “fails to recognise the crucial linkage to COP27’s sister convention on nature,” the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).

“The twin climate and biodiversity crises are at risk from being considered and treated in silos,” she told AFP.

– ‘Subcategory’ –

While energy policy has dominated the climate talks, and plastic and pesticide pollution are more the preserve of the biodiversity talks, other issues — food production, indigenous land rights, protections of oceans and forests — are entwined with both.

The United Nations has traditionally treated the climate and biodiversity crises distinctly, each getting their own COP meetings (Conference of the Parties), and each managed by its own institution: climate by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and biodiversity by the CBD.

Most experts say the two crises are serious enough to warrant this separate treatment. But some complain that biodiversity has been seen as “just a subcategory of climate”, as O’Donnell put it.

“Decades of approaching these things in isolation still continues, unfortunately, too much to this day.”

In the long term, neglecting nature could mean the unabated destruction of ecosystems and species — and missing the Paris Agreement climate goals.

“We cannot meet the 1.5 degree target for climate without bold action on nature,” O’Donnell said.

“We need to solve them both if we want to have a liveable planet for future generations.”