An oil-covered bird suffering as a result of the Black Sea oil spill. Sergei Grits/AP
Images of oil from stricken tankers coating Europe's coastlines and seabirds appear with an uneasy regularity. Every incident reminds the public of the vulnerability of marine wildlife to pollution, but away from the media glare the public mistakenly believe that our seas are otherwise in good health.
The recent incident in the northern Black Sea has been accompanied by the <a href=""news that tens of thousands of birds have perished, affecting some already threatened populations. This has helped to highlight the importance of the region for wildlife, hosting as it does internationally-important populations of birds. There is no doubt that the consequences of the spill for the marine environment will be severe and long-lasting.
However, it is less widely known that the Black Sea - one of the world's largest inland marine environments - has suffered far more heavily over recent decades without any such attention being paid to it. Though traditionally rich in fish and other species, the Black Sea, like other marine environments around the world, has faced a daily combination of over-exploitation of resources, chronic pollution and threats from coastal development, so much so that it was declared "nearly dead", and labelled as "the toilet bowl for half of Europe" in the early 1990s.
Damming the Danube, coupled with massive levels of run-off of nitrogen and phosphorus fertilisers being pumped into the Black Sea, have led to proliferation of toxic algal blooms and unprecedented deterioration of the marine ecosystem.
The headline-grabbing oil pollution incidents only account for about one tonne out of every eight tonnes of oil that enters the world's seas every year. Furthermore, oil is not the only damaging pollutant having an effect on our seas; nor is pollution the only - or arguably even the most significant - threat that global marine ecosystems are confronted with.
Europe's seas and coasts - and their associated wildlife - face a raft of threats from ever-increasing and uncoordinated human activities, including: overexploitation of fisheries; other damaging effects of fisheries such as the bycatch of seabirds and other wildlife; development offshore of (for example) renewable energy; oil and gas exploration; and dredging up sand and gravel for use in construction.
The recent oil spills have quite rightly focused public attention on this part of the world. But in recognising the severity of these kinds of incidents, we must not forget the other, serious threats that our global marine environments face.
Rather than throwing our hands up in helpless despair when these accidents force us to recognise the vulnerability of our marine environments, we must work harder to safeguard these fragile ecosystems against routine destruction.
European seas are important for many species of seabird, supporting more than 95% of the global population of several species, including the European Storm-petrel and Manx Shearwater, as well as the entire global populations of Mediterranean Gull, Great Skua and the Balearic Shearwater, a critically endangered relative of the albatross which breeds in the Mediterranean and visits the UK in internationally important numbers.
· Dr Ewan Dunn is head of marine policy at the RSPB
