Nations will start talks to protect fish of the high seas

Critically important fisheries face widespread population declines while fishing pressures continue to increase.

Together we must take action towards managing fishing sustainably.

From NYTimes by Somini Sengupta

More than half of the world’s oceans belong to no one, which often makes their riches ripe for plunder.

Now, countries around the world have taken the first step to protect the precious resources of the high seas.
In late July, after two years of talks, diplomats at the United Nations recommended starting treaty negotiations to create marine protected areas in waters beyond national jurisdiction — and in turn, begin the high-stakes diplomatic jostling over how much to protect and how to enforce rules.
“The high seas are the biggest reserve of biodiversity on the planet,” Peter Thomson, the ambassador of Fiji and current president of the United Nations General Assembly, said in an interview after the negotiations.
“We can’t continue in an ungoverned way if we are concerned about protecting biodiversity and protecting marine life.”
Without a new international system to regulate all human activity on the high seas, those international waters remain “a pirate zone,” Mr. Thomson said.

Lofty ambitions, though, are likely to collide with hard-knuckled diplomatic bargaining.
Some countries resist the creation of a new governing body to regulate the high seas, arguing that existing regional organizations and rules are sufficient.
The commercial interests are powerful.
Russian and Norwegian vessels go to the high seas for krill fishing; Japanese and Chinese vessels go there for tuna. India and China are exploring the seabed in international waters for valuable minerals.
Many countries are loath to adopt new rules that would constrain them.

And so, the negotiations need to answer critical questions.
How will marine protected areas be chosen?
How much of the ocean will be set aside as sanctuaries?
Will extraction of all marine resources be prohibited from those reserves — as so-called no-take areas — or will some human activity be allowed?
Not least, how will the new reserve protections be enforced?

Russia, for instance, objected to using the phrase “long term” conservation efforts in the document that came out of the latest negotiations in July, instead preferring time-bound measures.
The Maldives, speaking for island nations, argued that new treaty negotiations were urgent to protect biodiversity.

Several countries, especially those that have made deals with their marine neighbors about what is allowed in their shared international waters, want regional fishing management bodies to take the lead in determining marine protected areas on the high seas.
Others say a patchwork of regional bodies, usually dominated by powerful countries, is insufficient, because they tend to agree only on the least restrictive standards.
(The United States Mission to the United Nations declined to comment.)

The new treaty negotiations could begin as early as 2018.
The General Assembly, made up of 193 countries, will ultimately make the decision.

A hint of the tough diplomacy that lies ahead came last year over the creation of the world’s largest marine protected area in the international waters of the Ross Sea.
Countries that belong to the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, a regional organization, agreed by consensus to designate a 600,000-square-mile area as a no-fishing zone.
It took months of pressure on Moscow, including an intervention by John F. Kerry, then the United States secretary of state.

The discussions around marine protected areas on the high seas may also offer the planet a way to guard against some of the effects of global warming.
There is growing scientific evidence that creating large, undisturbed sanctuaries can help marine ecosystems and coastal populations cope with climate change effects, like sea-level rise, more intense storms, shifts in the distribution of species and ocean acidification.

Not least, creating protected areas can also allow vulnerable species to spawn and migrate, including to areas where fishing is allowed.

For over 4000 years fishermen have been catching tuna during their migration through the Mediterranean. During the antiquity they were hailed as the "manna of the oceans".

We take a look at the long journey of the tuna to its mating grounds and witness their struggles including massive amounts of hunters and the strong presence of fishing boats.

 

Fishing on the high seas, often with generous government subsidies, is a multibillion-dollar industry, particularly for high-value fish like the Chilean sea bass and bluefin tuna served in luxury restaurants around the world.
Ending fishing in some vulnerable parts of the high seas is more likely to affect large, well-financed trawlers.
It is less likely to affect fishermen who do not have the resources to venture into the high seas, said Carl Gustaf Lundin, director of the global marine program at the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
In fact, Mr. Lundin said, marine reserves could help to restore dwindling fish stocks.
High-seas fishing is not nearly as productive as it used to be.
“It’s not worth the effort,” he said.
“We’ve knocked out most of the catches.”

Currently, a small but growing portion of the ocean is set aside as reserves.
Most of them have been designated by individual countries — the latest is off the coast of the Cook Islands, called Marae Moana — or as in the case of the Ross Sea, by groups of countries.
A treaty, if and when it goes into effect, would scale up those efforts: Advocates want 30 percent of the high seas to be set aside, while the United Nations development goals, which the nations of the world have already agreed to, propose to protect at least 10 percent of international waters

Current Marine Protected Areas
by The New York TimesSource: World Database on Protected Areas

Why is such a treaty necessary?
At the moment, a variety of regional agreements and international laws govern what is permitted in international waters.
The countries of the North Atlantic must agree, by consensus, on what is allowed in the high seas in their region, for instance, while the International Seabed Authority regulates what is allowed on the seabed in international waters, but not much more.

That patchwork, conservationists argue, has left the high seas open to pillage.
Enforcement is weak.
Elizabeth Wilson, a project director at the Pew Charitable Trusts, wrote in a recent paper that they “lack the coordination to protect and conserve their immense but fragile biodiversity.”
Pew offers a list of fragile high-seas ecosystems that should be protected.
At the top of the list is the Sargasso Sea in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, which is under increasing pressure from fishing trawlers, Ms. Wilson writes, and home to 100 species of invertebrates, 280 species of fish and 23 types of birds.

Links :

• GeoGarage blog : Future of Antarctic marine protected areas is at risk / The race for vast remote 'marine protected areas' may be ... / Researchers propose high seas fishing ban / Nations negotiate fishing in Arctic high seas / Getting serious about overfishing / The high seas are too precious to be left to plunderers ... / Can technology end pirate fishing?World's largest marine park created in Ross Sea in ...
• Bloomberg : Overfishing
• Greenbiz : A high-tech solution to end illegal fishing

Why it's not surprising that ship collisions still happen

From BBC by Chris Baraniuk

The ocean may be huge, and navigation technology may be advanced – but the conditions are still in place for ocean collisions like the one between a tanker and US navy destroyer this week.
What can be done to prevent future disasters?

It happened in the middle of the night, off the coast of Malaysia.
A large tanker filled with nearly 12,000 tonnes of oil smashed into the side of US Navy destroyer the John S McCain, named after the father and grandfather of US senator John McCain.

The US Navy destroyer USS John S. McCain with the damage to its port side last Monday.

It was involved in a collision with oil tanker Alnic MC.

Five sailors were injured and another 10 went missing.

Two bodies have been found.

Photo : Desmond Foo

Ten sailors from the McCain are missing but the vessel is now at Changi Naval Base in Singapore. It’s an extraordinary and tragic collision, but all the more-so because a remarkably similar accident happened just two months ago.
The USS Fitzgerald was struck by a large container ship off the coast of Japan. Seven US sailors died.

 video courtesy of VesselFinder

The ships involved in these recent incidents are large and well-fitted with radar and navigation systems.
There are also GPS tracking, automatic identification systems (AIS) and radio communications.
How could such collisions have happened?
And what can be done to prevent them happening again?

“Provided you are keeping a radar watch and a visual lookout, then collisions are avoidable,” says Peter Roberts, directory of military sciences at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).
We don’t know the details of the latest collision, but sometimes it is left to the instruments to warn of impending collision, rather than members of the crew.
Roberts says he has travelled on commercial ships where sometimes there is no-one on the bridge at all.
“An alarm is going off on the radar and they’re reliant on that alarm waking whoever is on watch,” he says. Still, two major accidents involving navy ships in as many months is extraordinary, he adds. “It’s very, very rare,” he says.
It could, of course, just be a deeply unfortunate coincidence.

But some are asking whether foul-play or sabotage was involved – were navigation systems hacked to increase the likelihood of a collision, for instance?
There has been at least one report of potential GPS position spoofing affecting ships in the Black Sea in recent months, which has led to concern among a few observers that some nation states may be hacking ships in an effort to throw them off course.
There is no evidence yet for this being a factor in the USS Fitzgerald or John S McCain cases – despite the conspiracy theories floating around the web.
But Roberts says that the scenario is worth considering.
“You’ve got to keep every possibility open at the moment,” he says.

 Singapore and Malacca Straits map

It’s important to remember that large ships do get involved in accidents from time to time, even though the cases are not always newsworthy enough to attract coverage.
Just a day or two before the McCain accident, for example, two cargo ships collided off the coast of Fujian in China and there are reports of seafarers having been killed as a result.
When such accidents occur, investigators often find that human error was the ultimate cause rather than anything more nefarious, says Henrik Uth at Danish firm Survey Association, a maritime surveyor contracted by insurers of ships.
He adds that his firm’s own investigations have found many instances in which the crew has actually helped to avoid dangerous near-misses.
“It’s easy to blame the captain for when it goes wrong, but we tend to forget to compliment him for all the times he saved the vessel from imminent danger,” says Uth.

It’s not just collisions that threaten ships and their crew, either.
Right now, a British ship, the MV Cheshire – loaded with many thousands of tonnes of fertiliser – is on fire and has been drifting in seas near the Canary Islands for days.
The crew had to be airlifted to safety.

The seas are becoming more and more crowded, and the global number of commercial ships continues to grow.
According to the UK government, there were around 58,000 vessels in the world trading fleet at the end of 2016.
The size of the fleet, if measured by weight, has doubled since 2004.

So are collisions only going to become more frequent?
Uth suggests that since the financial crisis of 2008, many shipping companies have faced tighter margins and may have underinvested in crews as a result.
“They need to find the right crew and retain them,” he explains.
“The crew has to get to know the vessel because it is a sophisticated piece of hardware.”
And on any large ship, a typical crew often comprises a mix of different languages, nationalities and safety cultures, he adds, making the job of keeping the vessel safe all the trickier.
One rising worry is modern sailors’ reliance on technology, says former navigator Aron Soerensen, head of maritime technology and regulation at the Baltic and International Maritime Council (Bimco).
“Instead of looking at the instruments, you have to look out the window to see how the situation actually evolves,” he explains.
“Maybe today there’s a bit of a fixation on instruments.”
Maybe today there’s a bit of a fixation on instruments instead of looking out the window – Aron Soerensen, navigator

The Dover Strait is the busiest shipping channel in the world,

used by more than 400 commercial vessels every day.

(Credit: Chris Baraniuk)

 

But he points out that maritime organisations have tried to come up with ways of reducing the likelihood of collisions happening.
One idea he mentions is the separation of traffic – neatly co-ordinating streams of vessels travelling through a busy strait, for example, by moving them into distinct lanes heading in the same direction.
The first such “traffic separation scheme” was set up in the Dover Strait in 1967 and there are now around 100 worldwide.
It’s in everyone’s interests to avoid a collision.
Not least because under international regulations, both parties share liability for such accidents. In other words, captains are obligated to avoid colliding with another vessel even if their own ship has every right to be at its current position.

While the recent accidents are troubling, there is good news from the industry too, Uth says.
He points out that the number of total losses – for example when a ship sinks – has been falling year-on-year recently.
According to data from insurance firm Allianz, there were 85 total losses of large ships recorded in 2016, a fall of 16% on the previous year.
Of all 85, just one total loss was the result of a collision.
There’s no doubt that technology has in many ways contributed to safety in the shipping industry – but life as a seafarer remains dangerous.
As more and more large vessels plough the world’s seas, the need to captain these behemoths has not evaporated, rather, it has grown ever more pressing.

Links :

• BBC : What it's like to sail colossal ships on earth's busiest sea / Could computers captain the world's cargo ships?
• Strait Times : US destroyer collision: Some answers to a mystery at sea
• NYTimes : Naval Vessels, Shadowy by Intent, Are Hard for Commercial Ships to Spot
• CIMSEAC : Why are our ships crashing ? Competence, overload, and cyber considerations
• US Naval Institute : Collisions: Part I—What Are the Root Causes? 

Image of the week : comparative sizes of the world's 12 largest seas

based on IHO boundaries of the seas, and excluded the oceans

The trigonometry of sailing

If you want to sail upwind fast, you better understand Trigonometry.

Find out why in this video by Waterlust.

Russian tanker sails through Arctic without icebreaker for first time

A Russian tanker has carried a cargo from Hammerfest in Norway to Boryeong in South Korea in 22 days, about 30% quicker than the conventional southern shipping route through the Suez Canal

From The Guardian by Patrick Barkham

Climate change has thawed Arctic enough for $300m gas tanker to travel at record speed through northern sea route

A Russian tanker has travelled through the northern sea route in record speed and without an icebreaker escort for the first time, highlighting how climate change is opening up the high Arctic.

The $300m Christophe de Margerie carried a cargo of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from Hammerfest in Norway to Boryeong in South Korea in 22 days, about 30% quicker than the conventional southern shipping route through the Suez Canal.

The tanker was built to take advantage of the diminishing Arctic sea ice and deliver gas from a new $27m facility on the Yamal Peninsula, the biggest Arctic LNG project so far which has been championed by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.

The Christophe de Margerie carried a cargo of liquefied natural gas from Hammerfest in Norway to Boryeong in South Korea in 22 days.

On its maiden voyage, the innovative tanker used its integral icebreaker to cross ice fields 1.2m thick, passing along the northern sea section of the route in the Russian Arctic in a record six-and-a-half days.

“It’s very quick, particularly as there was no icebreaker escort which previously there had been in journeys,” said Bill Spears, spokesperson for Sovcomflot, the shipping company which owns the tanker.
“It’s very exciting that a ship can go along this route all year round.”

© Olga Maltseva/Pool Photo via AP

Environmentalists have expressed concern over the risks of increased ship traffic in the pristine Arctic but Sovcomflot stressed the tanker’s green credentials.
As well as using conventional fuel, the Christophe de Margerie can be powered by the LNG it is transporting, reducing its sulphur oxide emissions by 90% and nitrous oxide emissions by 80% when powered this way.
“This is a significant factor in a fragile ecosystem,” said Spears.

The northern sea route between Siberia and the Pacific is still closed to conventional shipping for much of the year.
But the Christophe de Margerie, the first of 15 such tankers expected to be built, extends the navigation window for the northern sea route from four months with an expensive icebreaker to all year round in a westerly direction.

In the route’s busiest year so far, 2013, there were only 15 international crossings but the Russian government predicts that cargo along this route will grow tenfold by 2020.
This link with the Pacific reduces its need to sell gas through pipelines to Europe.
“There has been a steady increase in traffic in recent years,” said Spears.
“There’s always been trade along this route but it’s been restricted a lot by the ice. It’s exciting that this route presents a much shorter alternative than the Suez route. It’s a major saving.”

Simon Boxall, an oceanographer at the University of Southampton, said that shipping companies were making a “safe bet” in building ships in anticipation that the northern sea route will open up.
“Even if we stopped greenhouse emissions tomorrow, the acceleration in the loss of Arctic ice is unlikely to be reversed,” he said.
“We’ve been able to sail through the north-west passage for several years now but the northern passage, which goes past Russia, has opened up on and off since 2010. We’re going to see this route being used more and more by 2020.
“The irony is that one advantage of climate change is that we will probably use less fuel going to the Pacific.”

While sea ice in the Arctic grows and shrinks with the seasons, there is an overall declining trend, as north pole has warmed roughly twice as fast as the global average.
In March 2017, the annual maximum extent of Arctic sea ice hit a record low for the third straight year, according to the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre.

The extent of Arctic ice fell to a new wintertime low in March this year after freakishly high temperatures in the polar regions, and hit its second lowest summer extent last September.

Links :

• BBC :  First tanker crosses northern sea route without ice breaker
• TASS : Christophe de Margerie LNG tanker covers Northern Sea Route in record 6.5 days
• NYTimes : Russian Tanker Completes Arctic Passage Without Aid of Icebreakers