The United Nations has launched a far-reaching initiative that could
give U.N.-sponsored authorities sway over the biological resources of
the high seas—all the waters that lie outside national territories and
economic zones.
The potential shift in power involves
multi-trillion-dollar issues, such as whether large areas—conceivably,
as much as 30 percent-- of the world’s international waters should be
designated as no-go areas to protect biological diversity; whether and
how to require elaborate “environmental impact assessments” for future
ocean development projects; and how to divide up the economic benefits
from the future development of “marine genetic resources.”
Eden Charles, a diplomat from Trinidad and Tobago who
is serving as the chairman for a U.N. preparatory committee that began
the discussions this week underlined to Fox News that the talks are at a
“very, very preliminary stage.”
Overall, the hoped-for treaty will cover “two-thirds
of the oceans, almost half the planet,” says Lisa Speer, a senior
official of the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), which is in
turn a lead member of a squadron of 33 environmentalist groups banded
together as the
High Seas Alliance to lobby for protectionist measures during the talks.
The rationale behind the discussions: easing the
rising pressure on the world’s undersea biodiversity wrought by
over-fishing, pollution, the drainage of nutrients and other substances
from surrounding lands, disturbance of underwater seabeds, and fears of
even greater threats from underwater industrial technology, including
underwater exploration for hydrocarbons.
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In U.N. terms, the discussions are proceeding at
something like flank speed—that is, a lot slower than a melting iceberg
bobbing in the north Atlantic. They began with the initial meeting on
March 28 of the preparatory committee-- “prep-com” in U.N.-speak--of
nations to discuss preliminary ideas until Friday, April 8. Another
two-week prep-com session will take place in August, and two more next
year.
These are expected to result by the end of 2017 in
draft language for a planned oceans treaty that could then be chewed
over for another year or two in broader international sessions.
The agreement that ensues from
those discussions,
however, is seen by some involved in its hoped-for creation as the
salt-water equivalent of the Paris Agreement on climate change, which
will be formally signed at an April 22 ceremony in New York—a global,
permanent and legally-binding deal for the management of Earth’s last
frontier, which will spawn further layers of regulation in years to
come.
“The climate negotiations showed the possibilities for us to come together,” Speer told Fox News.
Like the climate treaty, the intended oceans treaty
envisages transfers of marine technology and investment to developing
nations as part of the deal , along with some still far-from-specified
portion of the wealth derived from marine biological discoveries,
including genetic breakthroughs.
“One of the things we are looking at is how marine
genetic resources will be conserved, sustainably used, and how the
dividends will be shared,” says Speer.
One of the biggest backers of the preliminary talks
is the Obama Administration. Even though the U.S. has never ratified the
1982 U.N. Law of the Sea Convention—the new talks are aimed at creating
an “implementing agreement” under the Law of the Sea umbrella—the
Administration is deeply involved in the negotiations, as are some of
the world’s most powerful environmental organizations.
The U.S. also has a legal precedent for its
involvement: its ratification in 1996 of another “implementing
agreement” under the Law of the Sea Convention that orchestrated the
activities of a variety of regional fisheries management organizations
across international waters, allowed for international enforcement, and a
variety of other measures.
Ocean bio-preservation is also one of the 17 nebulous
Sustainable Development Goals endorsed by all the world’s governments, including the U.S. last September.
“The United States strongly supports conservation and
sustainable use of the ocean and its resources, both within and beyond
national jurisdiction,” a State Department official told Fox News.
That included “increased cooperation and coordination
among states, international bodies, and relevant stakeholders to
achieve better conservation and management of high seas resources,” not
to mention “better management and planning for multiple uses and
activities where they occur in areas beyond national jurisdiction.”
The Administration has already anted up domestically
on some of the big-ticket possibilities under discussion, with, among
other things, its huge expansion by executive order in September 2014 of
the Remote Pacific Islands National Marine Monument in the central
Pacific Ocean into a half-million-square-mile oceans preserve.
U.S. environmental groups are lobbying now for
additional marine monument areas off the coast of New England, site of
some of the U.S.’s most important Atlantic fisheries.
Such preserves—known as marine protected areas or
MPAs, in Law of the Sea jargon—are a major focus of attention for the
U.S.-based Pew Charitable Trusts, which has been lobbying governments
around the world for years to create them.
So are environmental impact assessments, or EIAs,
which are a focus for the High Seas Alliance as well—a bid to create not
only environmental protection standards but also public review
processes that will give non-governmental environmentalists a greater
voice in what would pass muster as acceptable future ocean resources
development.
Pew is the organization lobbying most loudly for a 30
percent set-aside of the high seas for preservation purposes—“although
not completely no-take, no-use areas,” according to Elizabeth Wilson,
director of the non-profit organization’s international ocean policy
program, who attended several days of the New York meeting.
Pew has also been funding pilot projects for
satellite observation of protected zones as an efficient means of
supporting law enforcement in the vast reaches of ocean that would be
involved, as well as financing research that offers backing for the
preserve concept.
As the first prepcom session neared its end, Wilson
said the diplomatic talks “had gotten a lot further into the details
than we expected it to do at this stage,” and that “people were feeling
pretty comfortable” with the concepts involved in the mammoth ocean
discussions.
Comfort with concepts, and agreement on terms, however, are still two greatly different things.
Participants in the meeting were divided over such
questions as whether a new accord would create a new international
oceans authority to administer the exploitation of the world’s undersea
biological resources, or whether ways could be found to expand existing
authorities such as the regional fisheries management organizations and
the International Seabed Authority, a U.N.-sponsored creation that is
currently supposed to regulate undersea mining.
One of the “most animated” areas of discussion,
prep-com chairman Charles told Fox News, was how the rewards of the
world’s undersea bio-heritage could be shared. “We do not yet have a
legal code for their exploitation,” he declared.
Some countries were arguing that all such resources
be considered the “common heritage of mankind,” a code term for a
socialist-leaning vision of shared international ownership.
Other countries were emphasizing traditional “freedom
of the seas,” which apparently would leave more room for private
initiative.
In the case of MPAs, he said, “some member states say
we first need to take stock to determine if the need for an MPA is
there,” while others “say not in all circumstances.” There is also
conceptual disagreement on whether such protections always need to be
permanent, he said.
According to some scientific experts, there is also
reason to question whether the undersea set-aside approach was really
going to be all that effective in dealing with some of the world’s most
pressing ocean problems, such as over-fishing.
Ray Hilborn, an internationally known fisheries
expert at the University of Washington in Seattle, is one of the
skeptics. Co-author of a recent study that is the groundbreaking effort
to estimate the historical extent of global fish stocks, he told Fox
News that while over-fishing is a serious issue, “in the a big picture,
we are not close to calamity at all.”
The study he co-authored shows that “about 20 percent
of the globe’s fish stocks are over-fished,” he said, and stocks of
many of the major species that are commercially exploited “are in better
shape than smaller fish stocks, essentially because they are better
managed.”
Many of the worst problems are in Pacific fisheries
exploited by Asia, where the bigger issue is getting countries such as
China and Korea to honor existing fisheries management organizations.
While reforms of fisheries management are needed,
the study says, “recovery can happen quickly, with the median fishery
taking under 10 years to reach recovery targets.”
Closed-off ocean areas, Hilborn says, “are the
crudest possible tool for fishing management. All it does is move boats
somewhere else.”