Under the Mediterranean waters off Tunisia, gently waving green seagrass meadows provide vital marine habitats for fish and an erosion buffer for the beaches.
Seagrass is such a key store of carbon and producer of oxygen — critical to slowing the devastating impacts of climate change — that the Mediterranean Wetlands Initiative (MedWet) calls it “the lungs” of the sea.
Named Posidonia oceanica after the Greek god of the sea, Poseidon, seagrass spans the Mediterranean seabed from Cyprus to Spain, sucking in carbon and curbing water acidity.
Photo: AFP
“Posidonia oceanica ... is one of the most important sources of oxygen provided to coastal waters,” MedWet, a 27-member regional intergovernmental network, says.
Tunisia, on the North African coastline, “has the largest meadows” of all, spreading more than 10,000km2, marine ecologist Rym Zakhama-Sraieb said.
The underwater flowering plants absorb three times more blue carbon — the term used to describe the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by the ocean and coastal ecosystems — than a forest, and can store it for thousands of years, she said.
“We need Posidonia to capture a maximum of carbon,” she said.
However, rampant pollution, illegal fishing that rips up the seagrass and a failure by people to appreciate its life-giving importance has put the plants at risk.
Tunisian marine biologist Yassine Ramzi Sghaier said the grass is crucial for a country gripped by a grinding economic crisis.
“All of Tunisia’s economic activity relies on Posidonia,” he said.
Once Posidonia and a wealth of marine species thrived there, but since the 1970s, phosphate factories have poured chemicals into the sea.
Fishing makes up 13 percent of Tunisia’s GDP, and nearly 40 percent of it is done around seagrass meadows — and fishers describe plummeting stocks.
“The sea has been destroyed,” said Mazen Magdiche, who casts his nets in Monastir. “Chemicals are dumped everywhere.”
Magdiche calculates his catch is three times less than what it was 25 years ago, but said that he has little alternative income.
“There are fewer and fewer fish,” he said. “You are not looking out for the interests of the sea, but to feed your children.”
Ben Hmida of the Tunisian Coastal Protection and Development Agency said the creation of four protected marine zones could help Posidonia, but that action is needed on a far wider scale.
“If nothing is done to protect the whole Tunisian Posidonia, it will be a catastrophe,” he said.
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