Typical of us humans – we never miss anything until it’s gone. That’s probably why most of us have barely noticed the major crisis happening beneath the world’s seas.

For many years now, fish populations have been fighting a losing battle with one of earth’s deadliest predators – humans. In fact, it’s so bad that we can expect to say goodbye to the bulk of our seafood species by the year 2048.

We don’t know about you, but we can’t quite imagine an Abu Dhabi without lavish seafood buffets starring the nation’s favourite, the hamour. And hamour, aka orange spotted grouper, is just one of eight species described as heavily overfished in the UAE.

So we can count ourselves lucky that the Environment Agency – Abu Dhabi (EAD) is on the ball with various programmes and campaigns, sponsoring legislation capping the number of fishing licenses issued and traps used per vessel, and rescuing and releasing juvenile fish. And we can count ourselves lucky that they’re working together with the Emirates Wildlife Society to raise awareness on overfishing to corporate companies, restaurants and consumers through the brilliantly executed Choose Wisely campaign that we feature this week.

We can wipe the sweat from our brows in relief knowing that these organisations are on the case like salmon on rice at a sushi joint. But it’s not just down to them; this is one thing that’s in our hands too. The figures are mammoth but the solution is small. Most of the world’s problems are too big for the individual to make a real difference; this is one where we can actually do something.

All we have to do is become aware which species are endangered, and choose something else. By putting a little more thought into what we put into our shopping carts and our mouths (salmon rather than hamour, orange spotted trevally instead of golden trevally) we could help to save our finned friends.