Some “Crib Notes” on Defying Oceans End
Prepared by the Steering Committee for Changing Currents
“Scientists are realizing that we have a fairly narrow window of opportunity of less than a
generation to protect ocean life and health – a window of opportunity we will likely never
have again” (Defying Oceans End)
Key Issues
Fisheries
Commercial Fishing
• Uncontrolled open access allows free competition to take catches beyond
economic or sustainable yields
- Bycatch
- Bottom Trawling
• Unregulated bottom-trawl fishing poses a significant threat to both the
commercial fish stocks and their supporting benthic communities
• Shrimp bottom trawling in Gulf of California destructive and economically
inefficient
• Damage to ocean floor, destroy s portions of bottom-dwelling plants and
animals
- High Seas/Deep Seas/Seamounts
• Principle of open access to high seas marine life and other non-living resources
• Open for use by all nations = no nation may claim sovereignty or jurisdiction
over resources
• No comprehensive list of high seas freedoms
• Incomplete information on ecosystem structure and function
• No baseline data to use as reference point to measure impact of fishing
especially bottom trawling
• No international law pertaining specifically to the conservation of seamount
ecosystems
- Subsidies
• One of the most destructive measures in terms of supporting overfishing and the
destruction of fish stocks
• Government subsidies exacerbate open access problems
Habitat Destruction
- Mangrove areas - negative effects on coastal processes, productivity and fisheries
Marine Pollution
• 75% of pollutants originate on land; toxic waste (pesticides, fertilizers), nutrient
pollution (sewage), pathogenic disease -causing bacteria
• Sedimentation and solid waste (from rivers – affects estuaries, coral reefs)
• Deep ocean impacts – POPs, most from ocean dumping sewage sludge
• Growing problem of coastal dead zones , eg from application of fertilizer,
pesticides and herbicides in agricultural areas upstream from coast
• Algal blooms and dead zones from nitrogen and other enrichment washing into
coastal waters
• Ballast water dumping adds solid waste, nutrients, toxins and invasive species
Aquaculture
• Monocultures of salmon and shrimp have caused localized negative impacts
• Impacts on habitat critical to productivity of many marine species
Ocean-use planning and governance
• Currently under-developed, sector-specific, inconsistent, conflicting or nonexistent, especially for ocean space forming the high seas beyond the limits of
national jurisdiction
• Sector-based governance is incompatible with ecosystem-based management
and does not address the complex nature of issues that need to be integrated
• There are unregulated ‘orphan’ activities on the high seas (deepsea fishing,
bioprospecting, commercial energy/sequestration projects and scientific
experiments, including large-scale ecosystem ecosystem manipulation) for
which there is no environmental impact assessment carried out
Protected areas/reserves
• Lack of sufficient management plans or implementation protocols
• Many parks exist as ‘paper’ parks - must improve their level of funding,
equipment and staffing
• Biodiversity hotspot approach as been overemphasized
• Scale is too small
Communication and education
• Polling data shows that people know very little and are often misinformed about
oceans issues - but they care about the health of the oceans and support the idea
of taking action
International
• Few governance principles have achieved the status of customary international
law
• International law obligations to consult and cooperate have not been
implemented effectively
• FAO Code but no prioritization among agenda items; need terms reinforced by a
declaration of implementation
Climate Change
• Rise is sea surface temperature has led to widespread coral bleaching
• Rise in CO2 interferes with productivity (especially corals and pelagic primary
producers)
• Thermal expansion of ocean and consequent rise in sea level
Solutions/Recommendations/Actions
General
• Must work together on annual reviews of progress toward the global goals
• Marine community must take the next steps to more closely coordinate their
collective plans into a global agenda for action
• Need a rigorous estimate of new approaches for addressing sustainable
development in communities that rely heavily on marine resources for their
livelihoods
• Recommendations must be pursued collectively by governments, communities,
financial providers, universities and conservation organizations
• Need an enhanced business plan that includes a detailed analysis linking
terrestrial and marine ecological services to innovative scientific and economic
approaches
• Get beyond awareness and address behaviour
• Communicate the urgency of the situation and convey that the time to act is now
• Dispell myths that the ocean is vast and its resources limitless
• Convey personal benefits that individuals receive from healthy ocean
ecosystems
• Usually not simple solutions – requires coordination of effort across broad
spatial scales and across societal sectors
• Building of local capacity for SD and management
• Establish global standards – a Code of Conduct for the Stewardship of Coastal
Ecosystems
• Develop an incubator network that would demonstrate how the principles of
coastal ecosystem stewardship are being made operational in a wide diversity of
settings
Fisheries
- Fishing capacity
• Reduce fleet by legal buyout – if effective means put in place to ensure no new
fishing permits are issued in future an action of this sort would allow the
negotiation of effective enforcement within existing no-take zones
• Reduce fishing effort to optimal economic levels
• Technical measures – restrictions on methods of fishing or types of fishing
gears, size limits; partial closure in protected areas
• Economic measures – removal of grants for new vessels or new gear, tax breaks
and cheap fuel; establish alternative incomes within fishing communities; buy
back fishing vessels, pay fishers subsidies not to fish; provide grants to set up
alternative businesses
- Commercial Fisheries Management
• Put in place Regional Fishery Management Organizations (RFMOs)
• Transfer some appropriate management responsibilities to RFMOs
• Area and time closures
• Good standing status for vessels abiding by fishing restrictions
• Prohibit fishing in spawning areas
• Tagging programs
• Strengthened regional fishing organizations
• Restrict access, give ownership to local communities
• Fishery controls - Output controls TAC - limits placed on size of catch= leads
to race to fish, discards; ITQs or TURFS, bycatch and discarding still, comanagement; input controls (management approach reduces fishing effort –
provision of property rights to stocks or fishing areas = owners have strong
incentive to manage resource sustainably and establish their own system for
restricting access
• Quota sharing arrangements
- Bycatch and discards
• Introduce better fishing gear with more efficient excluder devices
• Research on gear equipment and fishing techniques
• Set bycatch levels for fisheries and areas
• Minimize dead discards
• Governments should make information on bycatch levels, both limits set and
actual catches, available to the public before and after landing
- Bottom trawling
• Use modified bottom-trawling equipment that is less harmful to the environment
• Restrict bottom-trawling in the critical areas for biodiversity conservation
• Regulate and restrict the total area open to trawling
- High seas/deep seas
• Compulsory registration of fishing vessels engaged in high seas fisheries
• Additional multinational treaties to manage high seas open-access ocean areas
- Seamounts
• Mapping – but limitations in all available methods of mapping and measuring
underwater features
• Seamounts Online (web-based) project - creating a database of all known
biological sampling on seamounts
• Monitor presence of fishing vessels over seamounts with satellite sensors
• Install acoustically triggered underwater monitoring devices that report the
presence of vessels that report the presence of vessels within a given range of
seamounts via satellite
- Enforcement and compliance
• Scientific observer schemes
• Adopt compulsory vessel monitoring systems linked to central processing
systems
• Expand and coordinate intelligence collections, VMS, fishery protection, portState inspection, catch documentation and vessel blacklisting
• License only compliant vessels, linked to appropriate incentives and training
schemes
- International
• Eliminate IUU fishing – implement the FAO draft international plan of action
for IUU with mandatory as well as voluntary measures
• Outlaw ‘flags of convenience’ and improve flag-State controls for fishing
• Mother ships and at-sea processing used in industrial-scale fishing require
regulation
• Establish a Global Fisheries Reform Fund – a revolving loan and investment
vehicle designed to improve economic and conservation performance
Tourism
• Reorient regional tourism toward low-impact, environmentally sustainable
resource use
Aquaculture
• Ecological aquaculture practices - mimic diversity of natural systems
Land-Ocean Interactions
• Regulate coastal development
• Articulate a common regional vision for development and build capacities for
regional management
• Develop a regional plan to regulate the use of land, coasts and watersparticipation of general public and local conservation alliances is critical
• Map human-use patterns
• Land use changes to reduce soil erosion, nutrient and pollution runoff from
urbanization, deforestation and agricultural activities
Marine Pollution
• Pollution taxes that are invested directly in environmental improvement
elsewhere
• No-net-loss schemes
• Consumer demand and consumer choice and market forces
• Raise levels of sewage treatment
• Reduce solid waste production and reduce damaging ocean dumping of wastes
Ocean-use planning and governance
• Implement ecosystem-scale
• Implement within defined large marine ecosystems (LMEs) spanning waters
both under national jurisdiction and on the high seas if a natural ecosystem
crosses these boundaries
• Country driven approach (e.g. Global Environment Facility of the World Bank)
– governments come together to assess the problems, define action plans, build
awareness and local capacity and set priorities for management
• Ocean zoning
• Zoning plan promulgated for trial period of five years followed by public review
and reauthorization
• Establish a World Ocean Public Trust : integrated governance regimes across
use sectors, level of government and land-sea boundary; build scientific and
policy capacity, especially in the less developed nations; apply principles
including best scientific evidence, precautionary approach, polluter pays
practices and public trust compensation (cost recovery and economic rent)
• Program would feature competitive bidding for seed money to support
innovative ideas - central goal to construct nested systems of governance that
address processes at the scale of large coastal ecosystems
• Provide regionally grounded, globally accessible knowledge management
systems that promote the dissemination of innovations and good practices
• Apply monitoring and trend analysis protocols that recognize outside influences
• Identity existing programs that are adhering to principles of sound ecosystem
management - assure they have minimal level of core funding
• Need supportive policy and legislative frameworks, surveillance, enforcement
and prosecution of illegal fishing; fishing gear changes, integrated coastal and
ocean management
Communication and education
• Work to change mindsets - concern and interest from the general public can be a
very powerful force leading to far greater changes in activities and behaviour
than could possibly be achieved through policy or legislative means alone
• Work to raise awareness, understanding and appreciation with a targeted drive
toward education at all levels and in all sectors
• Stimulate an emotional connection to the ocean and covey the concept of an
ocean public trust
• Develop a regionally grounded, but globally coordinated, public education
program that disseminates quality information on the societal behaviour changes
• Incorporate environmental issues into school curricula
• Outreach to communities
• Start with a value-based message, not an economic one
• Key is communicate globally and advocate regionally and locally
• Regional scale outreach – use culturally appropriate approach to link with local
conservation efforts
• Identify information needs of the decision-makers through focused research,
then specifically target those needs through communications (often financial
and policy objectives) to bring about required changes
• Key is know constituents’ needs and focus on those needs
• Tailor communications to reach target audiences in priority regions of the work
in both urban and rural areas
• Target audiences – understand the makeup, demographics and motivations
• Local scale – focus on capacity building
• Public information programs to inform consumers about the ecological danger
of deepsea fisheries
• Address international policy and consumption issues
• Use set of environmental communications tools to educate policymakers, build
constituency and enable reporters to cover complex environmental issues
• Need multi-stage communications efforts, allowing small behavioural
commitments to lead to larger ones after a comfort level is reached at each stage
• One major campaign a year to focus on thematic ‘hooks’
• Use mass-media outlets in a combination of earned media, paid media,
electronic media, issue-based website and public service announcements
• Participatory gatherings to define a common work plan and delegate
responsibilities
• Baseline study to determine the current status of target audience attitudes,
knowledge and behaviour
Integrate and Improve Existing Information
• Need an approach that statistically discriminates between regional human
impacts, global human impacts like climate change, and change in the system
not induced by humans
• Governments in high-priority coastal areas should implement a GIS assessment
of the costal marine resources of their EEZ including coastal lands, benthic and
water column communities and features such as river drainages and outflow
plumes, estuaries, currents, gyres, upwelling areas, ocean productivity patterns,
migrations routes, and feeding and breeding areas for marine organisms
• Governments should map how their EEZs are being used (eg shipping lanes and
ports, pollution sources, fishing areas, aquaculture areas, mining and MPAs
areas, tourist attractions)
• Free and easy access to existing information is crucial – should be standard
practice and prerequisite for funding to conservation projects
• Interpret information and present in format that is readily understood by
stakeholders
• Strengthen regional centres for data holding and dissemination
• Ensure project funding does not support ‘reinventing the wheel’ and that it
requires rapid and free dissemination of all results
• Expand the knowledge base in key areas, particularly deep-water ecology and
natural resource accounting
• Pull together and use existing information for priority setting and management
planning on a large (ecosystem) scale
• Need monitoring systems that provide rapid and detailed information flow about
the state of an ecosystem
• Collect geolocated multibeam sonar data to show the terrain in underwater
habitats
• Use remote sensing data to detail current patterns, temperatures, tides,
cholorphyll and other parameters
• Conduct benthic habitat surveys
• Use telemetry and tagging to study habits of species under water
• Use fibreoptic data transmission cables and HDTV cameras
• Collect fisheries data and monitoring data
• Use onboard observers or video systems
• Use satellite-linked tracking systems (VMS vessel monitoring systems)
• VMS needs to be operated centrally in real time, rather than through various
flag-States
• GIS analysis and assessment for current and potential future threats to marine
ecosystems (pollution, habitat destruction, invasive species, offshore oil and
gas, climate change)
• Use cooperative and community-based management systems
Examples of successful information programs in place
• New GIS portal specifically focused on marine species information
under CoML; OBIS is an information clearing house for marine species
information that includes a database-driven online mapping component.
• Pilot program TOPP (Tagging of Pacific Pelagics) – part of CoML
(ocean profilers may also be able to provide data about the water
column)
• The Group of Earth Observation (GEO) and the Global Earth
Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) is the Global Ocean
Observing System (GOOS)
• Reefbase – online information systems concerning coral reefs and
provides information services to coral reef professionals involved in
management, research, monitoring conservation and education
Economic incentives
• Natural resource accounting (take into account depletion of natural resources over
time)
• Support regional certification schemes for fisheries, tourism and marine aquarium
trade
• Global Fisheries Reform Fund – provide low-interest loans and investment capital
aimed at specific fisheries with good potential for economic and environment –
structured to recover outlay with return on capital
• Coastal communities, cooperatives or fishermen’s unions granted management
responsibilities, including authority to set, enforce and implement rules to ensure
sustainability.
• Reporting requirements for trade by exporters of frozen stocks
• Trade sanctions
• More trade control over illegally harvested marine species through application of
1973 CITES
• Use catch documentation, certification schemes, import bans and VMSs
• ‘Sale’ of ecosystem ‘services’ in protected areas (e.g. providing credits for the
reduction of greenhouse gases)
• Need new revenue streams that go beyond single-issue projects and focus on
reducing or mitigating multiple threats to marine areas
• Reallocation of global annual fisheries subsidies - incentives to restore degraded
areas, improve profits due to better management and reduce overall costs
Protected Areas
• Need comprehensive set of reserves to protect representative seamount habitats
throughout the world ocean
• Need systematic reviews of how reserves can be incorporated into management
systems and approaches
• Need long-term monitoring and assessment of MPAs, including mapping and
use of GIS tools to facilitate adaptive management
• Develop fiscal incentives such as conservation concessions
• Demonstrate fishing benefits to coastal communities
• Develop cost benefit analyses such as comparing revenues from dive tourism
versus revenues from fishing
• Design ‘control’ areas for scientific comparison with less protected areas
• Improve management of regional marine and coastal protected areas
• Once established efficacy must be vigilantly assessed and success or failure
made clearly attributable to specific management actions
• Give equal weight to the overall ecological functioning of a site, not just its
levels of species diversity
• Technology transfer from maritime industries and the military into marine
environmental applications that are both effective and cost-effective (e.g.
microsensors and telemetry)
• Enlarge to allow for protection of spawning aggregation areas an critically
endangered ecosystems such as seamounts, lagoons, coral and rocky reefs,
estuaries and marine mammal habitats
• Attention should be paid to physical and biological connectivity between areas,
ecosystem function and species protection
• Develop comprehensive plan to manage and protect priority coastal wetlands
International Approaches
• Need for best-practice standards of governance and management to prevail
throughout all oceans
• Need to harmonize and streamline international agreements, conventions and
range of international and intergovernmental organizations dealing with
environmental issues
• Collaboration should include besides government, NGOS, stakeholder
organizations, scientists and funding agencies
• Need annual reporting requirement by member States
• New legislation to support exploration and protection of the living resources of the
continental margins with national EEZs
Current examples of international approaches
• Pacific Islands Forum and Association of Southeast Asian Nations
(ASEAN)– effectively address regional issues and develop and
implement international policies and conventions
• Pacific Islands Ocean Policy (2002) – plans for implementation being
developed by the Council of Regional Organizations of the Pacific
(CROP) (2004 Summit – proposed that ocean policy and associated
implementing framework be submitted to the ten-year review of the
Barbados Program of Action
• Marine Resource Division - Oceanic Fisheries Program (1980) –
funded by EU, Australian Agency for International Development,
FAO – works to monitor fish stocks and provide statistical analysis of
stock populations and catches, acquire information on the biological
and ecological parameters that may impact productivity and make
available the information necessary to model stocks an assess
population status.
• Reef Fisheries Observatory
Successes
• International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling – global ban on whaling
• London Convention (1979 – 1987 – significant reduction in industrial waste
disposal at sea from 17 million tonnes to 6 million)
• Consumer awareness campaign – dolphin-safe tuna
• Convention on Conservation and Management of Highly Migratory Fish Stocks
in the Western and Central Pacific Ocean – creates a practical regime for the
conservation and management of migratory fish stocks that is applicable
throughout the range of the fish; provides detailed framework t o regulate
fishing and protect marine environment; incorporates a strong compliance
mechanism designed to be effective on the open ocean away from traditional
national enforcement capabilities; incorporates additional legal instruments
including VMS and placement of observers on board
• Sea of Cortes – local artisanal fishers working with local researches to
understand the phenomenon of spawning aggregations to identify and protect
reproductive areas; result Loreto Bay now a marine park
• Abalone and lobster cooperatives of the Pacific coast of Baja - long-term
sustainable use – no support from govt, established strict rules for resource
extraction and have developed their own law enforcement system
• Sardine fishery in Mexico
• Noroeste Sustentable Inciciativa (Sustainable Northwest Initiative) – promote
sustainable use of the resources in the Sea of Cortes – an action and opinion
group organized by a group of concerned business leaders working with NGOs;
through high level regional agreements between government and business.
• The Global Environment Facility (GEF) of the World Bank – provides funding
to countries for planning and implementation of ecosytem-based management of
marine resources and environments focused on LMEs
• Australia’s Great Barrier Reef
• Europe’s Wadden sea
• Chesapeake Bay
Major Knowledge Gaps
• Need to increase the level of research on seamounts to discover and document
unique habitats and their species and to consolidate new and existing data in
publications, maps and online data sources
• Long-term and medium-term changes in physical environment
• More systematic monitoring of key areas to identify changes in the biological
composition of communities as well as changes in environmental conditions
• Ecosystem functioning – multidisciplinary approach
• Science to assess Totally Protected Marines Reserves (TPMRs)
• Contribution of watershed dysfunction to degradation in nearshore marine
communities
• Control studies for marine protected areas
• For most unknown habitats we lack enough species-level data to evaluate what
qualifies for endangered species listings (eg for Red List for IUCN)
• Habitats identified for research priority: open-ocean water column; deepsea
benthos; ridge and vent ecosystems; polar seas and ice-edge zones; fronts and
upwelling regions and prokaryote communities
• Anchialine habitats - underwater caves and blue holes
• Top to bottom sampling to study the entire seamount community
• Time-series monitoring to assess how seamount environments and communities
change over time
• Develop new tools for exploring and sampling remote, deep and difficult to
access seamounts
• For deep and shallow reef need survey programs and catalogue, identify,
annotate and enter into centralized databases
• Information on diverse environments of the continental margins, canyons, cold
seep habitats
• Baselines in EEZs globally and several long-term series stations or center for
study of ecological processes in the deepsea
• Areas of active oil exploration or mining should become priority research areas
• Training of the next generation of deepsea taxonomists – use of new genomic
methods to study seep organisms, especially seep microbial communities
• Research to define limits on fishing of deepsea species
• Expand the capabilities and scope of the Ocean Biogeographic Information
System (OBIS) of the Census of Marine Life Program
• Build the OBIS databse
• Establish new taxonomic authority groups for marine species as needed
Big Ideas
• Large Marine Ecosystem (LME) approach
• Environmental Town Halls – functions in information flow and social
integration among all of participants and beneficiaries in the ocean estate
(centres for public outreach, data management, training, research and
development, restoration, policy, long-term planning and administration Scientists, stakeholders and decision-makers would periodically gather to
observe the results of the adaptive management experiments and produce new
policy based on what has been learned.
• Create a World Advertising Council – a global agenda-setting tool that would
raise the saliency of ocean issues and set the stage for other communications
tools to ring about specific changes in behaviours – could be key to creating a
global ocean ethic
• Ocean Communications Fund – a unified coalition of organizations and
individuals using communication methodologies under one strategic umbrella would catalyse communications campaigns in critical regions, responding to
key threats, building on sound science and securing measurable marine
conservation outcomes
• World Ocean Public Trust (WOPT) – would lead to effective implementation of
governance principles currently developed under international law and to the
widespread adoption of a new ocean ethos for the protection of ocean space and
marine life
• High Seas Marine Protected Areas network