https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/05/alarming-scale-of-marine-sand-dredging-laid-bare-by-new-data-platform
UN-developed Marine Sand Watch estimates 6bn tonnes dug up a year, well beyond rate at which it is replenished
For those who like me are wondering why folk are sucking sand out of the sea in the first place - the TL;DR bot missed this bit:
"Sand and gravel makes up half of all the materials mined in the world. Globally, 50bn tonnes of sand and gravel are used every year – the equivalent of a wall 27 metres high and 27 metres wide stretching round the equator. It is the key ingredient of concrete and asphalt.
“Our entire society is built on sand, the floor of your building is probably concrete, the glass on the windows, the asphalt on roads is made of sand,” said Peduzzi. “We can’t stop doing it because we need lots of concrete for the green transition, for wind turbines and other things.”"
The problem is that desert sand is pretty much useless for concrete since it is too round.
In some places entire beaches disappear overnight.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
One million lorries of sand a day are being extracted from the world’s oceans, posing a “significant” threat to marine life and coastal communities facing rising sea levels and storms, according to the first-ever global data platform to monitor the industry.
The platform has identified “hotspots” including the North Sea, south-east Asia and the east coast of the United States as areas of concern.
“This data signals the urgent need for better management of marine sand resources and to reduce the impacts of shallow sea mining,” he said.
Developed by GRID-Geneva, a centre for analytics within Unep, Marine Sand Watch has trained artificial intelligence to identify the movement of dredging vessels from its AIS data.
Peduzzi said the platform was not set up to “name and shame” companies, but to “make the invisible visible” and to highlight the scale of the problem.
While international practices and regulations vary, some countries, including Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam and Cambodia, have banned marine sand export.
The original article contains 733 words, the summary contains 162 words. Saved 78%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Meanwhile, the Dutch continues to bulldoze the oceans for their bicycle lanes and tulips.