Goodbye 2015. Welcome 2016.
From EcoWatch by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, Waitt Institute
Overfishing,
climate change, habitat destruction and pollution remain major threats to the
world’s ocean.
But amidst all that there is some seriously good ocean conservation
news worth celebrating.
So, to continue the tradition started last year
with listing
14 Ocean Conservation Wins of 2014, here’s a rundown for 2015 that will hopefully fill you with
#OceanOptimism.
These wins represent the diligent efforts of organizations and
individuals too numerous to list, so let’s just start with a blanket
shoutout to all of
#TeamOcean for a great year.
1. More than 2 million square kilometers of ocean was protected in big new marine reserves. Marine reserves are areas completely closed to fishing, and 2015 saw
more ocean protected in a single year than ever before.
Chile created
Desventuradas Marine Park (297,000 square kilometers) and
Easter Island Marine Park (631,000 square kilometers).
New Zealand created
Kermadec Ocean Sanctuary (620,000 square kilometers), Palau created
Palau National Marine Sanctuary (500,000 square kilometers), the UK announced the
Pitcairn Island Reserve (833,000 square kilometers), and protected areas are
in the works for Patagonia.
However, there is a
broad consensus that 30 percent of the ocean should be fully protected in reserves, and these new designations
only get us up to 1 percent—but we’ll take it!
2. New technology is being developed to combat illegal fishing.
Designating all these new reserves means little without enforcement,
and we can’t enforce unless we know what’s happening out on the water.
One big tech effort launched this year is
Global Fishing Watch, a partnership between
Skytruth,
Google and Oceana to track fishing vessels and identify illegal
fishing.
Another similar program is the Pew Charitable Trust’s
Virtual Watch Room.
These technologies are in prototype phase and need significant
improvement before they live up to expectations, but it’s a promising
and exciting development.
3. Illegal fishing boats are being chased down and caught!
Sea Shepherd chased a pirate fishing boat
on Interpol’s most wanted list for 10,000 miles, until the boat sank
(potentially on purpose to drown the evidence of illegal fishing).
Another boat was chased for four days, caught, and
fined $2 million for illegally fishing in the Phoenix Islands Protected Area.
The Black Fish and
Environmental Justice Foundation have also been stepping up to make sure enforcement happens, but hopefully we can soon rely on
law enforcement organizations, not environmental groups, to do this work.
4. Ocean conservation is one of the UN’s new sustainable development goals.
These goals set the UN’s agenda for the next 15 years, and it wasn’t
clear the ocean would make the cut, but (voila!) Goal 14 is to “
Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources.”
Specific targets include, by 2020, conserving 10 percent of the ocean
(but see #1 above for how far we have to go and whether 10 percent is
even enough), halting overfishing and illegal fishing, and ending the
subsidies that encourage them.
Addressing marine pollution and ocean
acidification, and supporting small island states and small-scale
artisanal fisheries are also priorities.
5. The Port State Measures Agreement is close to being ratified.
Another one from the UN, this is an agreement aiming to “to prevent,
deter and eliminate illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing
through the implementation of robust port State measures.”
In other
words, boats have to come into port eventually, so it’s important to
have international cooperation in place to prosecute the bad guys when
they come ashore.
IUU fishing
is a major issue, representing ~$20 billion annually, and this measure
will greatly increase enforcement capacity.
The agreement will enter
into force after 25 countries ratify it—nine more ratifications to go,
all expected in 2016.
6. The ocean is getting some good ink and screen time.
Racing Extinction premiered in theaters, bringing the issues of trade in endangered species, overfishing and
ocean acidification to the big screen.
The Discovery Channel
promised
to stop with all the fear-mongering and straight up fake documentaries
during Shark Week.
Richard Branson’s philanthropy launched
Ocean Unite, to pull together and support the ocean conservation community on communications. And see #6 below.
7. Sustainable fishing became understood as a human rights issue.
Reporter Ian Urbina produced
a slew of impressive investigative articles exposing the widespread human trafficking, slave labor and other horrors associated with major fisheries.
Upworthy produced a
series of
pieces to get this info to a broader audience.
Greenpeace has been fighting for fishers’ rights, teaming up with five of the largest labor unions.
The “
Statement of Solidarity With Greenpeace Campaign to Reform the Tuna Industry”
begins: “We know that environmental and social justice issues are
absolutely intertwined and increasingly solutions that protect workers
are the same solutions that safeguard the environment and natural
resources.”
Hear, hear! And if you eat shrimp, unless you’re paying like
$20 a pound, it’s
totally unsustainable and
slaves probably peeled it for you, so please find something else to dip in cocktail sauce.
8. Small island states are leading the way and getting support on ocean management.
Not only did small island states come together as a powerful voice at COP 21 in Paris, this year also saw the launch of
Blue Guardians at the
Clinton Global Initiative.
This new partnership that includes a broad collaboration of organizations (
SIDS DOCK,
Digital Globe, The Nature Conservancy, World Bank,
Clinton Climate Initiative,
Waitt Institute and others), and is focused on simultaneously
protecting oceans and supporting coastal economies in the context of a
changing climate.
9. A nonpartisan coalition is bringing ocean issues into the 2016 U.S. elections.
The
Sea Party Coalition was launched
by Blue Frontier, with tea party and liberal Congressmen, environmental
NGOs, an evangelical minister, climate activists, ocean scientists and
philanthropists participating.
The hope is to use the crosscutting
sentiments for ocean conservation and against offshore drilling to get
some traction for ocean issues in the 2016 elections.
NASA releases new high-resolution image :
just an unbelievable new image of the Earth rising over the Moon
10. Anonymous is hacking for ocean conservation.
The hacking collective claims credit for
shutting down government websites of Japan and Iceland in retribution for their whaling.
Both countries continue to kill whales via
a loophole in the International Whaling Commission agreement that allows whaling for “scientific research.”
11. Oil companies may be giving up on drilling in the Arctic.
Greenpeace activists
suspended themselves from a Portland bridge
for two days attempting to block a Royal Dutch Shell icebreaker from
heading to the Arctic.
This year also saw the rise of “kayaktivists”
forming barriers to oil drilling equipment leaving port in Portland and
Seattle.
Shell has at least temporarily
ceased oil exploration in Alaska, and,
though the fight isn’t over, the Obama administration has put
a two-year ban on drilling there.
Greenpeace has shared the inside story of the
#ShellNo protests in “
People vs. Shell.”
12. Ocean zoning continues to gain traction as a key policy approach.
The
Waitt Institute’s zoning-focused
Blue Halo Initiative has
been scaled up from the pilot project in Barbuda to launch two
new partnerships, with the governments of Montserrat and Curaçao.
Perhaps more importantly, at least a dozen other island nations are
interested in developing similar comprehensive, science-based,
community-driven sustainable ocean management plans for their waters.
13. Plastic microbeads are getting banned.
New research
shows that there are at least 15 trillion pieces of plastic in the
ocean, at least three times more than previously thought.
Plastic
microbeads, the sneakiest tiny bits of plastic, are in all sorts of
toiletries (like face scrubs and toothpaste).
They end up in the ocean
in droves, then in creatures’ bellies and gills, and cause
all sorts of problems.
The good news is the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives
have passed bills that will ban the use of microbeads.
Fear not!—there are plenty of non-plastic, non-toxic ways to exfoliate.
14. An end to subsidies for unsustainable fishing is gaining steam.
Much of the world’s
overfishing and illegal fishing is financed
by government subsidies.
But now, in a
WTO Ministerial Statement,
27 countries have committed to ending subsidies “that negatively affect
overfished fish stocks” or that support IUU fishing. This is also a
target of the UN’s new ocean goal (see #2 above).
15. The COP 21 climate agreement mentioned the ocean.
Given
that the ocean is the majority of the planet and a lynchpin of the
climate system and carbon cycle, it’s a bit nutty that just getting the
ocean mentioned was something we needed to fight for.
However, the ocean
was not originally included in the agreement’s text, and it is due to
strong collective presence of the ocean community at
COP 21 that the ocean got mentions in the final document.
Yet, note
this analysis
of how the agreement is not nearly as lovely, equitable, and
transformative as most reporting would have you believe, and that it’s
certainly
insufficient for saving coral reefs.
Other good oceany things happened this year too.
The U.S. and Cuba
agreed to collaborate on management of marine protected areas.
XPrize launched a $7 million
ocean exploration prize competition.
Adidas and Parley teamed up to launch 3-D
printed shoes made of plastic ocean trash.
World leaders gathered at the
Our Ocean conference, which is becoming a key annual diplomatic event.
Citizen science is
on the rise.
And Atlantic salmon just spawned in Connecticut
for the first time since the 1700s.
There are invariably other wins I’ve missed—please shout them out in the comments!
If this trend of
ocean wins from last year
and this year continues, we may well avoid the most dire predictions of
ocean ecosystem collapse.
To maintain this positive inertia, we must
keep coming together and collaborating, and draw others into the fold to
ensure (as we say at the
Waitt Institute)
sustainable, profitable and enjoyable use of the ocean for this and
future generations.
Hopefully 2016 will be the year of really coming to
grips with how to use the ocean without using it up.
Happy new year!
Links :