We Need Better Southern Ocean Protection: Reducing Climate-related security risks while ensuring a healthy planetary ecosystem

art by Lynn Finnegan (Ireland)

James Nikitine (Blue Cradle Foundation); Karen Scott (University of Canterbury)

There is an urgent need for more marine protected areas in the Southern Ocean to protect ecosystems and species, boost climate change resilience, and ensure the planetary oceanic system continues to function.

Context

The Southern Ocean is the southernmost ocean in the world, with a surface of 20 million km2. It circles the entire Antarctic continent and is home to a very large number of marine species, including mammals, penguins, and thousands of seabirds.

Its waters are highly productive, with deep, cold currents, and melting ice boosting nutrient production and supporting large populations of phytoplankton and krill. It performs a key role in regulating our climate by absorbing carbon dioxide as well as heat from the atmosphere and cooling the global ocean through its circulation patterns. Over the last century, however, the Southern Ocean has also been heavily exploited through industrial fishing, as many nations have plundered its highly sought-after natural resources, including seals, whales, and finfish. Today, rapid climate change, bringing warming waters and ocean acidification, threatens marine ecosystems and species. In 2020, the World Meteorological Organization recorded a temperature of 18.3C on the Antarctic Peninsula, the hottest temperature on record.

The Antarctic continent and waters below 60° South are governed under the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, the 1991 Environmental Protocol, and the 1980 Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR). The CCAMLR Commission was established under the Convention; its objective is “the conservation of Antarctic marine living resources.”

To protect the Southern Ocean, area-based management tools, including marine protected areas (MPAs) and other area-based effective conservation measures (OECMs) impose some restrictions on industrial fishing and mineral extraction in areas of significant ecological value. In 2009, the first CCAMLR MPA was declared around the South Orkney Islands Southern Shelf, an area of 94,000km2. This was followed by the Ross Sea MPA in 2016, now the largest high seas MPA in the world at 1.55 million km2, of which 1.12 million km2 is fully protected, with designated fishing zones for “special research” and krill research.

What’s been done

MPAs or OECMs bring an array of ecological, social, and economic benefits, and are used widely by governments and fisheries organizations to meet global biodiversity conservation targets under the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and Sustainable Development Goal 14 (Life Below Water).

However, in areas beyond national jurisdiction (ABNJ), the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) does not expressly provide for area-based management tools such as MPAs. This is being addressed in an Intergovernmental Conference through the negotiation of an international legally binding agreement instrument under UNCLOS for the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity of ABNJ.

While the South Orkney Islands Southern Shelf MPA and Ross Sea MPA are good examples of high seas area-based protection, the process through which they were created was fraught with geopolitical tensions. Both original MPA proposals were watered down during negotiations through a reduction in the no-take area, and, in the case of the Ross Sea MPA, time-limited duration of 35 years for the General Protection Zone, and 30 years for the Special Research Zone.

Looking ahead

There are currently several other proposals for new MPAs under CCAMLR, such as the Weddell Sea and the Antarctic Peninsula region in East Antarctica. These have been under negotiation for some years.

However, in 2021, the status of existing and future MPAs is in jeopardy. The consensus decision-making model of CCAMLR allows individual states to veto new measures and there are tensions over the meanings of ‘conservation’ and ‘rational use’ in its mandate.

In this context, we call on CCAMLR members to accelerate the process of MPA creation to promote ecosystem resilience in the face of climate change. In addition, we call on the signatories of the Antarctic Treaty to create protected areas under the 1991 Environmental Protocol which entered into force in 1998, and to take other measures to explicitly support CCAMLR MPAs, and to implement an ecosystem approach to Southern Ocean protection.

We believe that collaboration between Antarctic Treaty and CCAMLR states and partners will achieve a greater level of protection of Southern Ocean marine biological resources.

As the world is embattled with multiple global crises, we want to highlight the importance of the commitment to peace and science in the Antarctic and Southern Ocean region. We would like to remind the world that there is no better place to start creating new international and fully protected marine protected areas than in the Southern Ocean global ocean common regions, places that we rely upon for life on our planet to continue to thrive.

Ultimately, in anticipation of a newly agreed legally binding framework to designate marine protected areas in the global ocean commons areas of the high seas, we can be grateful that CCAMLR and the 1991 Protocol to the Antarctic Treaty are paving the way as viable forums for diplomacy and environmental peacebuilding. However, although we encourage global commons environmental protection through multilateralism and dialogue, as our crises accelerate, we need urgent political leadership and decisive action sooner rather than later.