An Inconvenient Truth for the Oceans

Editor's Note: This post is written by guest blogger Sebastian Losada, Senior Policy Advisor with Greenpeace International, focused on oceans issues. Greenpeace is a long-time DSCC coalition member.


I recently read a very comprehensive, just published, scientific paper, Sustainability of Deep-sea Fisheries, in preparation for a Greenpeace contribution on the United Nations Deep Sea Fisheries Workshop this week. The paper provides an excellent overview of the issues surrounding the exploitation of deep sea fish stocks and particularly why the ecology of the deep sea – fish with a late maturity age, low fecundity and a low productivity environment – makes most of them unsuitable for sustainable exploitation. In other words, the only way to exploit most of these long-lived species in a profitable manner is to deplete them. This raises the question: should we interpret the activity as deep-sea fishing or deep-sea mining?

The authors of the paper point out that such low productivity is an inconvenient truth for managers, countries, regional fisheries organizations and UN bodies themselves and ask whether they will choose to overlook such an inconvenience.  A clear answer must be found between now and November, as members of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) negotiate a new resolution on sustainable fisheries. In doing so, they will have to review whether fishing States who are bottom fishing on the high seas have implemented the measures that the UNGA called for in two previous resolutions agreed in 2006 and 2009.

Deadlines have not been respected. The 2006 Resolution called on States to take concrete actions to ensure the sustainability of deep sea fisheries by 31 December 2008 at the latest. These actions were far from sufficiently taken and the 2009 resolution called again on countries to apply the measures.

Yet, here we are again, learning that most countries still haven't done what they agreed to do and deep-fish populations are increasingly depleted. You can find details of this failure here.

The simple reality is that since 2006 we have continued to lose genetic diversity of great value and habitats that took thousands of years to form. We’ve been hearing from scientists that it will take decades or centuries for impacted deep-sea ecosystems to recover. And some may never recover!

Some high seas bottom fishing nations and the fishing industry have explained this morning how – in their own view – they have already accomplished a great deal and that much progress has been made in regional fisheries management organizations (‘RFMOs’). But in reality, these organizations are composed of fishing States which means that getting them to agree to a precautionary approach to fishing is like getting the driver of a Ferrari to be happy with a maximum speed limit of 50 kilometers per hour!

Responsible deep-sea fisheries management may be possible in some cases, however, the  very limited progress that has been made to date is mostly the result of the pressure generated by the resolutions adopted by the UNGA. Without it, our high seas' biodiversity would be in worse shape. The high seas are part of our collective global commons so they don't belong to a single country. As such, their future should not be in the hands of just a few countries with an economic interest in their exploitation—just 10 nations are responsible for 80% of the high seas deep-sea bottom fishing! (1)  Thankfully, these 10 states  have to face a second inconvenient truth – that we all have a say in who fishes and how they fish in the global commons.

I hope and urge the UNGA to call on all countries to ensure the sustainable exploitation of deep-sea fisheries or otherwise immediately cease their fishing activities. To help us achieve this, you can sign the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition petition. Given the multiple threats the oceans are subject to, be it overfishing, oceans acidification, climate change or pollution, the UNGA oversight is crucial. Hopefully delegates will send a strong message that the UN agreements on the deep sea have to be respected. It would be a strong signal from the international community and a strong precedent to further the work to protect our oceans.

Notes:

(1) A great deal of deep-sea fishing is what is called 'high seas bottom fishing'.  High seas bottom fishing States include, among others, Australia, China, France, Iceland, Japan, New Zealand, Portugal, Spain, the Russian Federation and South Korea.

Put the brakes on deep-sea fishing

(Amplify'd from the Washington Post) 

Deep below the ocean surface lies a cold, hostile environment where the light of day cannot penetrate. The life-forms inhabiting this murky world grow slowly, mature late and take time to reproduce. Many species live 30 years or more, some up to the grand age of 150. Most have not yet been defined by science.

This dark void, which lies beyond any country’s national jurisdiction, is in trouble.

The world’s deep-sea catch is steadily declining, and the high vulnerability of these fish populations and diverse marine ecosystems is well documented. Last year, officials from the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea declared that in the Northeast Atlantic, 100 percent of all targeted deep-sea species have been fished “outside safe biological limits.” Yet the fishing continues, via trawlers dragging enormous weighted nets that, in a single pass, scrape clean the ocean floor.

This week, the United Nations will conduct a review of high-seas fishing practices that could ultimately help save deep-sea ecosystems. Since 2004, a series of resolutions has been negotiated and approved, outlining a plan to safeguard the biological diversity of the deep ocean. Now fishing countries will once again be assessed to see if they have done what they pledged to do: protect deep-sea life while fishing in a sustainable way.

The answer, according to experts and environmental organizations around the world, is no.

After nearly a decade of talk, scientists and conservationists are asking the United Nations to take action and declare that any deep-sea fishing that doesn’t meet the terms of these resolutions is illegal, unregulated and unreported, and must be stopped.

While enforcement of these regulations is critical, what makes the destruction of the deep sea truly senseless is its cost — which is paid for by public money. Fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly and economist Ussif Rashid Sumaila of the University of British Columbia examined subsidies to international bottom-trawl fleets and found that governments around the globe pay $152 million per year to prop up these fisheries.

Government subsidization of fishing is not new. But without substantial taxpayer support, these operations would incur losses of $50 million annually. In addition to the waste and cost, deep-sea catches are also relatively insignificant as money-earners for major economies. The European Union, for example, has one of the world’s largest deep-sea fishing fleets, yet its catches represent just 2 percent of the total value of all E.U. fisheries in the Northeast Atlantic. Meanwhile, the destruction from the deep-sea trawlers is irreparable.

Bottom fishing on the high seas is a global activity carried out by a small number of countries. A technical paper prepared for the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimated in 2008 that 285 vessels worldwide are engaged in these high-seas operations and are registered to 27 flag states. The European community has the largest number of vessels (103), with the majority flagged to Spain. Other flag states with a relatively large number of vessels include New Zealand, South Korea, Russia and Australia. Deep-sea fish products are typically consumed in Europe, the United States and Japan.

We are spending millions in public funds to wreck seascapes that take millennia to form. Governments must realize that deep-sea fishing not only wastes taxpayer dollars but that destroying the unique marine life in the deep sea for a relatively small catch of slow-growing fish is a bad investment.

Karen Sack is director of International Ocean Conservation at Pew Environment Group.

Not All High Seas MPAs Are Created Equal

A major goal of the marine conservation community is to see that more marine protected areas (MPAs) are established because they have been found to be highly effective to protect ocean ecosystems.  The international community has even gone so far as to include a goal under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) to establish MPAs in 10% of the world’s marine areas by 2020. 

That’s a huge amount of ocean to be protected – 36 million square kilometers.  Unfortunately, the world is not on-track to meet the 2020 goal.  Only 1.31% of the world ocean is covered by MPAs and few are on the high seas because of the legal complexities.

Now we are learning that some high seas MPAs are not very effective.  According to Jeff Ardron, Director of the High Seas Program at the Marine Conservation Institute (MCI) some MPAs have been developed according to science, but other MPAs have been created less systematically—sometimes with the intention of not protecting the most vulnerable areas!  Jeff and his colleagues at MCI are presently studying these inconsistencies in high seas MPAs around the world. 

Watch the video below for Jeff’s take on the problem:

Interview with an Expert: Susanna Fuller on the Implementation of the UN Resolutions

The main challenge to deep-sea conservation on the high seas is the fact that a handful of deep-sea fishing countries is not following the rules. Recently, this fact was further explored by the DSCC in the preliminary findings from its third comprehensive review of the implementation of UN General Assembly resolutions calling for protection of the deep sea. (The full report is forthcoming.)

Recently, the DSCC was able to discuss this problem with Susanna Fuller, the Marine Conservation Coordinator at the Ecology Action Centre in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Among the topics discussed are:

• Partial implementation of UN resolutions by the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization (NAFO) [0:31]
• The behavior of countries' fleets on the high seas and, in particular, their inconsistency in implementing their obligations across different ocean regions [2:52]
• Preparing for the UN's review of the implementation of its resolutions in September this year [4:11]

Speaking for the Deep Sea at the United Nations

Editor's Note: This post is written by guest blogger Matthew Gianni, co-founder and Policy Advisor of the DSCC.  Matt has over twenty years' experience working in international ocean conservation and has actively participated in fisheries and oceans related negotiations at the UN General Assembly, the UN FAO, Conferences of Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity and elsewhere. 

By Matthew Gianni

Since its beginning in 2004, the DSCC’s objective has been to secure permanent protection for vulnerable deep‐sea ecosystems and species from deep-sea fishing on the high seas. We started off at the United Nations because the UN is the world’s highest political authority when it comes to protecting international waters. Some of us ‘fossils’ working with the DSCC go back a lot further than that, to the early 1990s when the UN General Assembly adopted a moratorium on high seas driftnet fishing and then, as a result of the 1992 UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, negotiated a new international treaty for high seas fisheries. But that’s a story for another day…

Since 2004, we’ve had quite a bit of success. Our work and the efforts of concerned scientists and a number of governments – amongst the earliest supporters were Costa Rica and Palau - resulted in the General Assembly adopting a series of resolutions calling for urgent action to protect deep-sea ecosystems from destructive fishing practices. We were instrumental in the unanimous adoption of UN General Assembly resolution 61/105 in December 2006 which committed high seas fishing nations to managing deep-sea fisheries responsibly by the end of 2008 or else stop fishing. And in 2009, our work led to the adoption of UN General Assembly resolution 64/72, which reaffirmed and strengthened the 2006 resolution, again calling for countries (so-called “flag States”) to ensure that their vessels do not bottom fish on the high seas if the terms of the resolution had not been met.

And what are the terms of the agreement by which deep-sea fishing can take place as far as the UN is concerned? Well, pretty straightforward

First, if a country wants to deep-sea fish on the high seas (or, more to the point – allow its “flagged” vessels to deep-sea fish on the high seas) it has to first conduct an environmental impact assessment to find out what’s down there in the area it intends to fish and what impact the fishing is likely to have. If the impact would be “adverse” and there is no way to manage the fishing to prevent “significant adverse” impacts - then the country is not supposed to allow the fishing to occur.

Secondly, countries agreed to close areas of the high seas to bottom fishing where vulnerable species and ecosystems are known or likely to occur, unless fishing in the areas can be managed to prevent damage to such species and ecosystems. Note the use of the term “likely”. This is important because the reality is that very little of the deep-sea has actually been studied. So, areas need to be closed to fishing where it is likely that these ecosystems occur.

Of course, we would have preferred an even more precautionary approach but there are ways – using biogeographical information and predictive modeling for example – of getting a pretty good idea where say cold-water coral reefs, sponge beds, tripod fish or xenophyophores are likely or at least might occur.

Finally, high seas fishing countries committed to ensuring that deep-sea fishing would be sustainable; that is, not deplete the species targeted in the fisheries for their commercial value not those that are caught incidentally as bycatch. Unfortunately this is a serious problem in deep-sea fisheries, both on the high seas as well as in national waters. Most deep-sea fish are so-called low productivity species. They grow slowly, don’t reach sexual maturity until their teens or twenties in some cases, and often live to a ripe old age – a roundnose grenadier or an orange roughy can live to 80 and 150 years respectively.

Fisheries for deep-sea species are often referred to as ‘serial depletion’ fisheries because vessels and fleets move from one concentration or aggregation to the next, fishing them out and then moving on to find more. The deep-sea is a big place but life there happens in the slow lane and it is easy, in fact generally a lot easier than in shallower coastal waters, to deplete a species of fish in the deep-sea. Once depleted it may take the species a long time to recover.

Unfortunately, vulnerable deep-sea marine life on the high seas is still largely unprotected. The problem, however, is not the UN resolutions. Rather, it’s the implementation.

We did a review of what countries have and have not done in 2009 and again in 2010. As the DSCC demonstrated, in some cases there have been some real protections agreed to or adoted by regional fisheries treaty organizations. Bottom trawl fishing has been banned around Antarctica but, in many high seas areas the Implementation of the UN General Assembly resolutions has been patchy and poor. For example, no environmental impact assessments have been done for any of the high seas, deep-sea fisheries in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

This year we’re preparing another report for release. Yet another report you say? But why?

Well, getting regulations in place on the high seas to protect the deep-sea is a work in progress although progress has been slow, excruciatingly slow in some areas… more on this in future blogs. In the meantime, most governments simply don’t know what has been done or not been done – only a relative handful of nations have vessels deep-sea bottom fishing on the high seas according to a recent FAO report – and most of the countries at the UN General Assembly with an interest in this issue look to the DSCC, amongst others, for unbiased information on what has been done.

Which brings us to the UN. The DSCC has already this year advocated for strong deep-sea conservation measures the BBNJ working group meeting, and we will continue our work at the upcoming UNICPOLOS meeting and a very important review running September through December. This review will focus specifically on what states have done to implement the UN resolutions and how the international community might improve implementation.

All in all, it will be a busy year for us at the UN. We very much hope that our early success will continue!

(Image: Author, Matthew Gianni; Credit: iisd reporting services)

Interview with an Expert: Matt Gianni on the United Nations

Recently we were able to spend some time with Matt Gianni, the Policy Advisor for the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition. In the interview that follows, Matt explains what the DSCC is doing at the United Nations, the role for the UN in deep sea conservation, the state of protections today, and what we hope to come out of the BBNJ meeting.