About 80% of all traded goods are shipped over the ocean 7 and nearly 30% of the world’s oil is produced in offshore fields and distributed worldwide 8. More than one billion people depend on the ocean for their primary source of food 1, 2, 3, with 260 million employed by global marine fisheries alone 6. Our map of ocean industrialization reveals changes in some of the most extensive and economically important human activities at sea. Offshore wind is growing rapidly, with most wind turbines confined to small areas of the ocean but surpassing the number of oil structures in 2021. By contrast, transport and energy vessel activities were relatively unaffected during the same period. Globally, fishing decreased by 12 ± 1% at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and had not recovered to pre-pandemic levels by 2021. We also find that 21–30% of transport and energy vessel activity is missing from public tracking systems. We find that 72–76% of the world’s industrial fishing vessels are not publicly tracked, with much of that fishing taking place around South Asia, Southeast Asia and Africa. We combine satellite imagery, vessel GPS data and deep-learning models to map industrial vessel activities and offshore energy infrastructure across the world’s coastal waters from 2017 to 2021. The world’s population increasingly relies on the ocean for food, energy production and global trade 1, 2, 3, yet human activities at sea are not well quantified 4, 5.
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