Photo: Mattias Klum
The world’s oceans are some of our premier natural assets and the last truly undiscovered wilderness areas left on the planet. Mankind has not appreciated and handled them properly. As many as 90 percent of all large predatory fish like tuna and cod have disappeared due to overfishing¹, 75 percent of all waters are either over exploited or fully exploited² and the global fishing fleets are 150 percent larger than the oceans can sustainably support.³ We are fishing too much and too fast. This does tremendous damage to the ecosystem of the earth and the billions of people that depend on it.
The Postcode Lottery Project Oceans is an international project to help save the world’s oceans. The Postcode Lotteries fund a total of 7 million Euros for projects that focus on the challenges the oceans are facing and how to meet them. WWF, Greenpeace and MSC have received funding from the project. The Postcode Lottery Project Oceans also aims at increasing awareness about the state of the oceans. The Project is coordinated by the Swedish Postcode Foundation.
Project Oceans is also the United Postcode Lotteries Commitment to Action 2010 at the Annual Meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative in New York. Read more in the press release: See when Bill Clinton presented the commitment: (6.22 into the clip)
The mission of the Postcode Lotteries in the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK is to raise funds for charities and to increase awareness for their work by organizing lotteries. A set percentage of the turnover goes to charity so the charities always win. Since the start in 1989, more than 3.8 billion Euros have been raised for hundreds of charities dedicated to building a better world for people, animals and nature. The Postcode Lotteries believe in the force of combining various sectors, both commercial and non-profit, and focusing on solutions, the will to act, and the possibility of change.
¹. Ransom A. Myers & Boris Worm, Rapid worldwide depletion of predatory fish communities, Nature, 15 May 2003
². The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture – 2006 (SOFIA) FAO Fisheries Department
³. Gareth Porter, Estimating Overcapacity in the Global Fishing Fleet (WWF 1998).
