Michael Bloomberg donates $50 Million to help the global fishing industry.

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Bloomberg finds a new place to be philanthropic- at the bottom of the sea.

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Michael Bloomberg not even two months out of his office as mayor of New York City, has been focusing his activities on philanthropy and has uncovered a new and interesting angle on where next to invest-underneath the ocean waves.

Bloomberg Philanthropies have announced their plans to donate a  total  of $53 million to  help fund three non-profit organizations, Oceana, Rare, and EKOenergy   that  together will go to form  the Vibrant Oceans Initiative.

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The three groups that form the Vibrant Oceans Initiative will receive this funding over the next five years to help them to expand their activities in three global regions  that are already heavily involved in the fishing industry- Chile, Brazil, and the Philippines yet are still interested in expanding. Currently these three regions of the world contribute around seven  percent of the total global seafood catch.

These three expansive regions have long been regarded as conservative in their fishing habits, refraining more than any other regions of the world in a dangerous practice of overfishing. For that reason Bloomberg Philanthropies  have invested in the Vibrant Oceans Initiative to create an intensive study of the practices and hopefully be able to pass on information to other countries and regions who have been accused of overfishing in the past, the practice which is beginning to seriously deplete quantities of fresh fish.

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Among the practices that the Vibrant Oceans Initiative intends to reduce if not stamp out altogether is the imposition by local governments of inflated catch quotas allow industrial fishing fleets to take as many fish as is possible with a season, which causes almost completely erosion of vital breeding stocks, to a levels from which they cannot recover. Secondly the initiative aims to stamp out the practice used by large commercial fishing fleet known as bottom trawling, with huge nets are cast to the very bottom where they are liable to totally wipe out what should be safe havens  where baby fish are bred and grow.

The final pratice that the the Vibrant Oceans Initiative wants to stamp out is the practice of industrial fishing fleets  is the wholesale slaughter of huge quantities of rare fish,   sea turtles and even  dolphins which also become snagged in their nets, which if it continues, is liable to cause a growing ecological imbalance in the world’s oceans.

According to recent figures released by the  World Bank, if these unhealthy fishing practices  continue unabated, they will affect the global fishing industry to an extent that it might eventually cost as much  as $50 billion a year in reduced yields.

Estimates are that just over  one billion of the world’s population depend  on some part of the food of the sea as their primary source of protein, which makes protecting this food source increasingly vital, and Bloomberg’s $53 million donation, one of the largest the fishing industry has ever received a much more serious matter than it initially appears, as well as among its more humanitarian.

 Michael Bloomberg attended Johns Hopkins University, from where he graduated in 1964 with a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering, going on to study at the. Harvard Business School, where he gained a Master of Business Administration degree.

Bloomberg embarked on his professional career at the Wall Street investment bank and securities brokerage Salomon Brothers after graduating. In 1973, Bloomberg was appointed to the role of general partner, where he headed the equity trading department. In 1981, Salomon Brothers were taken over and Bloomberg was laid off , although handed a generous $10 million severance package,  enough to allow form his own company in which he spent the next twenty years as its Chairman and CEO, before stepping down to become Mayor of New York City.

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