Reflection

From my experience I knew quite a lot of people who do overfish and soon realised I wanted to raise awareness of this concern. I wanted to investigate more about this, and noticed that it does have a major impact in New Zealand. I also knew that other countries are overfishing more than New Zealand so I wanted to interpret those countries/continents in my painting. Overfishing relates to climate change because of the disruption of food chains, loss of biodiversity, not only depletes resources but also escalates carbon emissions, another reason I found is that bycatch can contribute to overfishing and put protected species at further risk of extinction. New Zealand has more sea-birds than anywhere else on earth, but every year thousands of them are accidentally caught in fishing nets, and unintentionally die. If we don’t have these birds, plants/flowers could be extinct and would lead to a dead wasteland; the decrease in soil carbon may raise greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere. Therefore contributing to climate change. This journey got me interested in helping more with the overfishing issue and hopefully through my painting it will get others to contribute and to be more aware of this climate change issue.