NAN-F-12
Environment
Sydney (Australia), Oct. 25, 2016 (dpa/NAN) The success of ongoing negotiations to create large marine sanctuaries in the waters surrounding Antarctica depends on Russian cooperation, environmentalists said on Tuesday.
The environmentalists said more than 24 nations plus the European Union are currently in Hobart, Australia.
The meeting is holding in order to negotiate the creation of marine protected areas as part of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR).
In 2015, all participants except for Russia agreed to one of the deals.
“We know that domestically, Russia has taken significant decisions for environmental protection,’’ Mike Walker, the Project Director of the Antarctic Ocean Alliance, said.
He said the U.S. Secretary of State, John Kerry, and Russia’s Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov,
discussed marine protection in the southern waters.
The waters surrounding Antarctica are one of the areas in the world least affected by humans and are home to thriving populations of species such as krill, fish, whales and penguins.
Last month, the Russian Federation voted to increase marine protected area coverage to 30 per cent of the ocean by 2030 at the World Conservation Congress.
Russia had now declared 2017 as the Year of Ecology and recently significantly increased the size of the protected marine area around Franz Josef Land in the Arctic.
The size of one of the proposed protected areas, home to more than 14,000 unique species, is approximately 5-6 million square km,” Carl Lundin, the Head of the Global Marine Programme said.
The landmass of Antarctica is already a designated protected area.
However, the Antarctic waters have long been an area of dispute for conservationists and commercial fishing interests.
Earlier proposals for broader protected areas have been repeatedly blocked due to lack of consensus among member states.
A single veto can block the deal.
Lundin said some of the countries want “limited amount of time for the protection.
“Conservationists are “hesitant because it’s a fisheries management tool, not for marine protection.
“All scientific and anecdotal evidence show that marine protection works best when it is a fixed, large area.”
Meanwhile, scientists said more species would move toward the Antarctic as the water got warm, making no-take marine reserves important.
Also, reserves would act as ‘climate refuges’ for marine life as species struggled to adapt to warming waters so as not to put fishing under extra pressure.
Antartica’s penguin population is among those vulnerable to climate change in the region, as the reduction of ice cover diminishes their habitat, while fishing poses threat to their food source.
“Protected areas also help to create resilience among species and from overfishing, Sharks live a very long life but they have low reproduction,’’ an environmentalists said, adding that sharks are easy to fish and wipe out quickly.
“These are the types of species we will be protecting, most of this fishing is for luxury food dishes,” he added. (dpa/NAN)
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(Edited by Damilola Oyewole/Hadiza Mohammed-Aliyu)