BarentsPortal

The Barents Sea is strongly influenced by human activities. Historically, this involves fishing and hunting of marine mammals. More recently, human activities also involve transportation of goods, oil and gas activities, tourism and aquaculture. This chapter focus mainly on impact from human activities that occur today in the Barents Sea. Past harvest of populations which have had a lasting impact on the ecosystem are also described. Impacts from expected long term changes due to global warming and ocean acidification are described in chapter Some aspects of possible long-term future changes in the ecosystem. Impact from different types of human activities are addressed in separate subchapters. The state of the environment in the Barents Sea is ultimately dependent on the overall pressure and impact of all the different activities that take place both within and outside the Barents Sea. To assess the combined impact of all drivers is a complicated task that lies beyond the scope of this report and a challenge that needs to be addressed further when developing ecosystem based management (see chapter Summary and concluding remarks about ecosystem based management). However, some steps of such analyses are done in chapter Conclusions about state of the ecosystem, where conclusions are drawn about overall impact of human activities on current status in the ecosystem.