Leaders of the world’s small island nations have called for “immediate collective and concerted action” from the global community to address extensive threats to the world’s oceans.
Speaking at the recent World Oceans Summit in Singapore, President Anote Tong of the small Pacific island nation of Kiribati told a 300-strong group of scientists, policy makers, business leaders and environmental advocates that the world had no alternative but to find a way to reconcile economic growth and healthy oceans.
“There is simply no alternative,” he said, “Protecting the ocean isn’t just an issue of conservation, it is an issue of survival.”
Specifically, President Tong called for a network of marine protected areas similar to the recently established Phoenix Islands Protected Area (PIPA), a remote 408,250 square kilometre marine park with reefs resembling those from 1,000 years ago, before human impact.
To establish the park, Kiribati had to overcome resistance from local fishermen, who now receive compensation for the loss of revenue due to the new fishing restrictions. Some other challenges he identified included expectations from industries to mine the valuable minerals that were recently discovered in the islands.
With non-government organisations such as Conservation International (CI) and the New England Aquarium in the United States as partners, Kiribati aims to use the park to rebuild the fish populations that its people depend on for food and income.
The benefits of marine parks such as PIPA would be greatly increased if they were networked together, noted President Tong, who urged the global community to provide financial and planning support to create a network that would cover over 10 per cent of the world’s oceans.
Networked parks would not only cover a greater area, including some regions lying outside sovereign territories, they would also enable coordinated efforts to protect fish over migratory routes.
“Collaboration on this scale is unheard of, but it is indeed possible,” he said.
The success of such a collaboration would depend on a workable system to manage the oceans.
Traditionally, countries have managed the ocean areas close to their shores and no one manages the rest.
As noted by Singapore’s Deputy Prime Minister Teo Chee Hean in his keynote address at the inaugural summit - held at the Capella hotel by The Economist newspaper - until the establishment of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) thirty years ago, ocean governance was almost a ‘free-for-all’. Coastal states were making increasingly extensive claims to their rights to control sea routes and exploit resources.
The creators of UNCLOS had succeeded in “entrenching the concept of the common heritage of mankind” in international law and providing a system for dispute resolution, he said.
Mr Teo added that UNCLOS would be needed to deal with new pressures on the management of the ocean arising due to expanded fossil fuel production – about a third of the world’s oil and half of its natural gas are currently produced offshore – and increased access to the Arctic resulting from melting ice.
He urged policymakers to continue using UNCLOS, and to build on and improve it where necessary, to ensure fair discussions that will be respected by all participants.
“Getting buy-in from all parties will take time and effort, but the resulting framework will be more robust, long-lasting, and not easily undermined by any single dissenting party,” he said.
However, several policy experts and scientists at the summit said that UNCLOS had proven unsuccessful as a way to manage the health of ocean environments. They claimed that arriving at decisions through UNCLOS, which is based on reaching consensus from all participants, was too slow and cumbersome for the rapid actions required to save the oceans.
According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), 85 per cent of the world’s fish stocks have been fully or over-exploited. FAO has calculated that an estimated US$27 billion a year in fishing subsidies have resulted in a fishing capacity that is twice the level at which fish can reproduce.
Coastal habitats have been decimated by deforestation of mangroves, pollution, land reclamation and the pressures of development. In the past 50 years, roughly half of the world’s coral reefs have been destroyed by harmful chemicals and destructive fishing practices such as the use of dynamite to stun or kill schools of fish, said scientists at the summit.
Carbon emissions have also played a role in the degradation of ocean habitats. According to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), oceans have absorbed 530 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) – and in the process helped to slow the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere.
But there is a price to pay for that service. CO2 reacts with seawater to produce acid, and the result has been a 30 per cent increase in overall acidity of seawater. Without a reduction in atmospheric CO2 levels, by 2100 the Arctic Ocean will be acidic enough to dissolve chemically sensitive structures such as shells, predicted an IUCN report.
The same report noted that although ocean acidification is both better understood and nearer on the horizon than climate change, its exact effects on ocean habitats and the food chain are uncertain because the changes are happening much faster than any previously known natural processes. The current rate of acidification is 10 times faster than at any time since the mass extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
Panellist Stephen Palumbi, director of Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station, said that the news was not all bad.
“When we allow oceans to recover, they perform well,” he said, citing a study which found that when protected, some ocean eco-systems can increase their biomass – or total amount of plants and animals – by 300 per cent in a 20-year period.
Professor Palumbi ventured that when viewed as an asset, the ocean could provide an “incredible intrinsic rate of return” when well-managed.
However, he said, for now the ocean stock is in trouble because humans have diminished its asset value.
“Poor asset management is not good economics,” he added.
Bad economics, bad management
Current economic systems do not account for the value of the oceans to nations, industries and individuals, noted experts at the two-day event, who added that methods of measuring the value of oceans depended on having better information.
Pavan Sukhdev, chief executive of environmental advisory firm GIST and a consultant to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) on its ‘Green Economy’ initiative, said in a panel discussion that the traditional lack of global ocean policies has caused the world to underestimate the sheer scale and resources of the ocean. As a result, the ability of economists to make realistic estimates of its value was limited.
“To be honest, the state of science and economic analysis leaves a lot to be desired,” he said regarding ocean resources. He added that the oceans were the least represented ecosystems in the 450 studies done for a recent project to quantify the economic value of ecosystems – called The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) project.
Icelandic President Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson agreed, noting that policy makers and industry should remember that scientists are only beginning to understand ocean science and its effects on the rest of the world.
“We certainly lack sufficient awareness of how (aggressive human development) is challenging the sustainability of the oceans,” he added.
Policymakers also need to have greater awareness of how ocean policies can affect human development, said experts.
For instance, tackling overfishing is not simply a matter of banning or limiting fishing, which will throw families into destitution in some areas, explained Professor Palumbi.
An FAO report has found that in 2008, about 540 million people, or 8 per cent of the world population, relied on the fishing industry for their livelihoods. The largest percentages of fishermen and fish farmers, over 85 per cent, are in Asia.
Threats to fish stocks put their livelihoods at risk and also endanger a key source of protein for much of the population. According to the World Health Organisation, about a billion people – many of them in coastal areas – rely on fish for their primary source of animal protein.
The availability of fish also has a significant impact on the world economy. A 2009 FAO report valued global fish imports at nearly US$100 billion and found that for some smaller Pacific island nations, fishing and fishing licenses make up a significant portion of national budgets.
With so many depending on a healthy supply of fish, protecting fisheries has risen up the international agenda.
President Grímsson of Iceland noted that his country’s fishing policies – in which fishing quotas are strictly regulated by agencies that are guided by scientists rather than politicians – have created a strong industry that is economically successful and also protects the fish stocks crucial to its survival.
But as he put it: fish do not respect national boundaries. The migration of fish and the inevitable impact of pollution and bad management beyond territorial waters can cause conflict.
The international community could resolve these problems by adopting a quota system similar to Iceland’s, he suggested, adding that technology to track the world’s 4.3 million fishing boats and labeling on consumer seafood products would help enforce quotas.
Other panellists countered that such technology would be less effective in developing parts of the world where much of the fishing was done by poor fishing communities with small boats.
Businesses also have a role in ocean conservation, said experts. NGOs, in particular, often seek private sector dollars and influence for conservation projects.
GIST’s Mr Sukhdev said, “Governments are not great at listening to scientists, but they do listen to corporations.”
Chief executive of Conservation International Peter Seligmann noted that CI had altered its conservation strategy to include the needs of businesses and communities in long-term plans to protect natural areas.
The NGO’s original strategy of preserving natural resources by restricting access was not working. Despite protecting hundreds of millions of acres of land in its first two decades, CI’s efforts to preserve to them were losing to the pace of development - ‘the most powerful driving force on earth’, he said.
He further noted that getting the public and business sectors to understand the value of the ocean’s resources was essential to preserving it, and that progress was being made.
The conservation movement had reached a turning point, with both government and business leaders taking positive actions, said Mr Seligmann.
“And it is not philanthropic; it is enlightened self-interest,” he added. But there is a caveat to this, warned several panellists.
The head of sustainability for global consultancy PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PWC) Malcolm Preston explained that business dollars would not flow unless project managers could make a solid business case for conservation.
Businesses want to do the right thing, but they are beholden to their shareholders and their actions must be economically logical, he said.
For example, the North Asia chief executive of global shipping firm Maersk Line, Tim Smith, said that many of the environmental improvements the shipping industry could make, such as improved energy efficiency, provided costs savings and had a clear business case.
In one instance, Maersk had fitted vessels with a US$10 million technology that turned waste heat into energy, which increases energy efficiency and reduces carbon emissions by about nine per cent. Depending on the price of oil, the company estimates it would recoup its investment in five to 10 years.
But other improvements such as anti-pollution measures would be a struggle - even for large companies with economies of scale such as Maersk - because they provide no cost savings to offset the investment, he said.
For those environmental improvements that are not economically logical, Mr Smith told Eco-Business on the sidelines of the summit, regulators should set the bar high, but give companies plenty of time to implement changes.
The summit was one a growing number of efforts to focus global attention on better managing ocean resources.
Another effort, announced by World Bank president Robert Zoellick on the second day of the event, is the Global Partnership for Oceans. The partnership will coordinate the funding and activities of a wide range of existing ocean conservation projects to make them more effective.
The new project is meant to fix a problem highlighted during a panel session by Singapore’s Ambassador-at-large Tommy Koh, who chaired UNCLOS during its initiation.
The institutions and agreements are in place, he said, referring to the international agreements that established United Nations agencies such as FAO, International Marine Organisation and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), but everyone is operating in silos.
“We need to treat the ocean as one integrated, ecological whole. If we don’t do a better job managing the ocean, we will in turn endanger the earth itself,” he said.
