Global Ocean Commission

February 2012

Charting the Right Course for the High

Seas in the 21st Century

Global Ocean Commission

B

Contents

Introduction 1

The State of the High Seas 2

The Impacts of Fishing 3 The State of High Seas Governance 5

Why the High Seas Need 9 a Global Ocean Commission

Commission Mandate 10

Project Summary and Update 12


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1GLOBAL OCEAN COMMISSION - CHARTING THE RIGHT COURSE FOR THE HIGH SEAS IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Introduction

The goal of the Commission will be to identify the main threats to the high seas and to develop recommendations for addressing them. It is hoped that the Commission will help galvanize the development and implementation of a cost-effective system for managing the world’s high seas in ways that will reverse the decline of fisheries and other living marine resources, and protect the habitats in which they live.

From the polar seas to the underwater abysses to the wide-open sweep of the Pacific, the ocean plays a vital role in the processes that regulate the world’s climate and sustain life. Tens of millions of people depend directly or indirectly on fishing for their livelihoods. For more than a billion people, fish is the main source of protein.

The immense growth in demand for natural resources – from fish products to natural gas and rare earth metals — coupled with huge strides in fishing technology and deep-sea mining and drilling, have made it possible for extractive industries to penetrate deeper beneath the surface than ever before, and to expand their reach far beyond the 200-nautical-mile limit from shore that defines a country’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). This area of the world’s ocean, exploited by all but protected by none, is known as the high sea.

This new frontier, covering almost half of the Earth’s surface yet less studied than the solar system, is virtually devoid of effective governance. Its exploitation epitomises what is known as the “tragedy of the commons”, when a resource is used freely by all but owned and protected by no one.

There is an increasing need for an effective management system for the high seas, one that will ensure the sustainable use of resources without compromising the health of the marine environment. International law governing the use of the high seas is imperfectly formed, poorly applied, and inadequately overseen. The most comprehensive legal framework for the management of the high seas, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS 1982), has been ratified by more than 160 nations but has not succeeded in protecting this massive part of our planet.

Overfishing, destructive fishing methods and pollution are taking a terrible toll on ocean life. When combined, however, with the twin impacts of climate change – acidification and rising sea temperatures — the potential effects are far worse, threatening to push our ocean ecosystems to a tipping point, beyond which they may not recover.

Regrettably, the causes and consequences of ocean decline are not well-understood by decision makers and the public at large, although there is some cause for optimism. Over the past decade, there has been increased attention paid to the problems affecting the world’s marine environment, and a growing sense of urgency for these to be addressed before they get worse.

In an effort to direct greater attention to problems affecting ocean health, while simultaneously attempting to develop and promote solutions to these problems, the Pew Environment Group, Somerville College at the University of Oxford, the Adessium Foundation, and the Oceans5 Funders Collaborative are proposing to establish a Global Ocean Commission, made up of internationally recognised leaders in the fields of government, marine science, business, conservation and civil society.

For most of human history, exploitation of high seas resources was beyond our reach. Over the past 100 years, however, rapidly evolving technology has made it possible to extract resources from areas that were previously inaccessible. Indeed, there are extremely few places in the ocean that are so remote, so deep, or where conditions are so extreme, that it is not possible to locate, pursue, and catch fish. We have arrived at a point in maritime history that is comparable to the last buffalo hunt on land.

GLOBAL OCEAN COMMISSION - CHARTING THE RIGHT COURSE FOR THE HIGH SEAS IN THE 21ST CENTURY2

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The State of the High Seas More than a billion people depend upon fish as their major source of food, yet evidence shows that the ocean has been fished to dangerously low levels and some fish populations are at a tipping point, beyond which they might not recover. As coastal stocks are depleted, industrial fishing is expanding farther into the high seas and penetrating deeper than ever before. Attempts to reduce overfishing have resulted in a huge increase in illegal fishing activities, known as IUU (illegal, unreported, and unregulated) fishing, which is estimated to be netting up to 20 per cent of the global catch.

In areas beyond national jurisdiction, species hitherto thought to be unusable, such as Antarctic krill, are now being pursued for both food and biomedical use. At the same time, there is increasing interest in the potential of new elements of living resources, including highly specialised microbes and chemosynthetic organisms, to supply future human needs for medicines and food supplements.

Similarly, rapidly escalating demand for new and secure sources of hydrocarbons, minerals, and metals, including the rare earth elements needed to support new technologies, has spurred mounting interest in the exploitation of the seabed. All these activities impinge upon the health of marine life in the high seas. At present, few systems are in place to regulate and monitor them, and those that exist are, for the most part, inadequate and ineffective.


The Impacts of Fishing There are many reasons for the deteriorating health of the world’s oceans. Global climate change is causing them to warm and acidify, and this in turn threatens the life cycles of marine species as well as the condition of their habitats. Chemical and nutrient pollution and the introduction of exotic species also play a part. But the activity with the single biggest impact on ocean health, which can also be most directly regulated, is industrial fishing.

Industrial Overfishing

Each year global fishing fleets, now numbering more than 1.3 million commercial vessels, remove in excess of 85 million tonnes of fish and invertebrates from the world’s ocean. This catch contributes roughly 16 per cent of the total animal protein consumed around the globe.

Recent studies suggest that 90 percent of the world’s large fish (tuna and swordfish) have disappeared; that close to one-third of the world’s commercial fisheries have collapsed; and that, unless current trends are reversed, many of the world’s remaining commercial fisheries are likely to collapse within the next four decades.

Today, industrial fishing is a ubiquitous enterprise taking place throughout the world’s ocean. Ships operate as floating factories, containing fish processing and packing plants, huge freezing systems, and powerful engines that drag enormous fishing gear through the water column and along the seafloor. The reality of modern fishing is a level of industrialisation that far outstrips nature’s ability to replenish the life it removes.


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Recent studies suggest that 90 percent of the world’s large fish (tuna and swordfish) have disappeared; that close to one-third of the world’s commercial fisheries have collapsed; and that, unless current trends are reversed, many of the world’s remaining commercial fisheries are likely to collapse within the next four decades.


The State of High Seas Governance

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Habitat Destruction

Many scientists report that this level of exploitation is beyond what the marine environment can sustain. In addition, destructive fishing gear deployed by many vessels causes tremendous long-term damage to essential breeding, nursery, and feeding habitats for fish and other marine life.

Dragging nets the size of football fields that are weighted down by heavy steel doors and rollers, bottom trawls frequently destroy delicate cold-water corals that provide critical habitat for ocean life. Higher up in the water column, industrial vessels targeting swordfish, tuna, and other species leave a deadly wake. Armed with monofilament lines up to 65 kilometres long that are baited with hundreds or even thousands of hooks, these vessels indiscriminately remove life from the sea. In addition to the species they seek, seabirds, turtles, sharks, whales, and many immature fish are inadvertently caught and killed as collateral damage, a phenomenon referred to as bycatch.

The overall impact of these practices on life in the sea is staggering and has grown steadily worse over the past 50 years.

An Opportunity for Change

The inability to manage ocean resources in a sustainable and environmentally responsible manner stands as one of the great failures of international governance and cooperation. In many regions of the world, there is no effective management regime to impose limits on how many fish can be taken from the sea. And even regions with management systems lack adequate enforcement to ensure that they are actually implemented. This is particularly true for the world’s high seas.

This lack of effective management and enforcement endures even though the international community has spent several decades developing and implementing a comprehensive governance framework for the ocean, which includes the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS, 1982), a legally binding “constitution for the ocean” signed and ratified by 160 States and the European Union.


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Marine Reserves – A Way Forward

One of these measures is the creation of large ocean reserves on the high seas to preserve biodiversity and allow population structures to rebuild.

Only about 0.5 per cent of the global ocean is fully protected from exploitation in the form of no-take reserves, where no extractive activity is allowed, compared with some 12 per cent of land. A growing community of scientists, advocates, and officials is now in agreement that the high seas require a network of fully protected large-scale, no-take marine reserves — a series of marine refuges or “Yosemites of the sea” — that are off-limits to exploitation and where ocean life can recover and thrive.

At the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development, the international community made a commitment to establish a representative network of marine protected areas by 2012, but little progress has been made towards meeting this target, particularly beyond coastal areas. No legal mechanism is in place to establish high sea marine reserves, so achieving this goal in international waters, and enforcing the results, would require a high level of cooperation among governments and the smart deployment of resources.


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Improving Monitoring

To better manage fisheries, we need to know how much of which species is being caught — whether targeted or bycatch — and by what means. Collecting this data is essential if scientists are to accurately assess the health of stocks and recommend catch levels that ensure sustainable fishing.

However, the requirements for reporting marine catch from high seas fishing grounds rely on outdated ways of defining fishing areas, which makes accurate data collection on the quantity and type of fish caught extremely difficult. One of the tasks of the Global Ocean Commission will be to assess how the gaps in fisheries monitoring can be filled.

Strengthening Enforcement

International fisheries crime is flourishing for two reasons:

• FlagStates(thecountrieswherevesselsareregistered)oftendonot fulfil their legal obligations to control the fishing operations of their vessels, or the companies or individuals that own them.

• PortStates(thecoastalcountrieswithportsusedbycommercial fishing vessels) do not have the legal capacity to stop such vessels from using their ports.

Illegal fishing vessels change their nationalities (their flags), change their names, and even repaint their decks to evade the law. Some regional fisheries management organisations (RFMOs) have set up “blacklists” to identify those vessels that have broken the rules. But these vessels can easily move to another area of the ocean and continue fishing, change their names and flags, or fish in an area of the high seas where there is no RFMO and no regulation.

Designing and implementing a cost-effective system to combat IUU fishing operations and close down avenues whereby IUU-caught fish get to market would have significant ramifications for the sustainability of high seas fisheries and improve the effectiveness of high seas marine reserves.


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Enhancing the Law of the Sea

UNCLOS provides a sound legal framework for managing maritime space but suffers from a number of problems. Because it is essentially sectoral in nature and based around the regulation of specific industries and activities such as fishing, shipping, and seabed mining, there is little interplay among the various sectors. This results in considerable inconsistency in the rules that are set and how they are applied. Even if all existing agreements were implemented and enforced, serious gaps in the ocean governance system would remain, especially with regards to the high seas. These gaps include:

• Noformalrecognitionoftheneedtoprotectbiodiversityonthehighseas and no mechanism with a mandate to do so, and no mandate for the protection of areas on the high seas for conservation purposes.

• Nointellectualpropertyframeworkforgeneticresourceson the high seas.

• Insufficientgeographiccoverageandlackofcompetent fisheries management.

• Emergingactivities,suchasbio-prospecting,whichremain outside the regulatory framework.

• Lackofregulationofoceannoiseanditspotentialimpacts on marine life.

• Patchyorlittleregulationofdeep-seafishstocks.

• Noconservationenforcementmechanismorcompetent enforcement body, and few or no sanctions against non-compliance.

Each gap adds to the overall systemic weaknesses of coordinating the conservation and protection of marine life and sustainable management of international waters. Tackling these larger issues is essential if we are to forge the institutional and legal reforms needed to ensure a healthy and sustainable ocean.


Why the High Seas Need a Global Ocean Commission

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A Global Ocean Commission has the potential to bring about a sea change for high seas ocean governance, initially by attracting the attention of the media, the public, and policy-makers to the problems affecting the world’s high seas, and then demonstrating the social and economic merits of addressing these problems before they get worse. Next, the Commission can bring to bear the influence of a group of prominent individuals from developed and developing countries, so that broader and more serious focus can be placed on this issue than has been the case previously. Finally, the Commission can develop a set of consensus-based recommendations for high seas governance and management that act as a blueprint for action, both for influential governments that are committed to change and for marine conservation groups working to see an effective, conservation-based management system in place for the high seas.

In this way, the Global Ocean Commission could help to place the management crisis of the high seas onto a specific to-do list for world leaders, and provide a channel through which the story of what is happening to an area covering almost half of our planet can be told. The Commission could also be a catalyst for meaningful improvements in ocean waters, improvements that are critical for a healthy marine environment worldwide and for the billions of people who depend on that environment for their livelihoods and well-being.

Significant deliberations affecting ocean governance will occur at international conferences over the next few years — and these will provide opportunities for both highlighting the problems facing our global ocean and vetting the Commission’s emerging ideas and recommendations. Chief among these opportunities this year will be the “Rio+20” U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development (Brazil, June); the IUCN World Conservation Congress (South Korea, September); and the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (India, October). December 2012 is also the 30-year anniversary of the signing of UNCLOS and offers an excellent opportunity to bring world attention to what is needed to update the Convention so that it can face the challenges of the 21st century.


Commission Mandate

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The overall objective of the Commission is to formulate politically and technically feasible medium- and long-term recommendations to address three key threats facing the high seas:

• overfishing;

• large-scalehabitat/biodiversityloss;and

• thelackofcompliancewithandenforcementofinternationalrules on high seas fishing.


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To achieve this, the Commission will focus on four key areas of work.

1. Examine key threats, challenges, and changes to the ocean in the 21st century and identify priorities for action.

There is an abundance of background information and analysis available on the environmental, legal, political, and trade aspects of the current situation. Nevertheless, in order to support more convincingly the case for change and to raise global awareness regarding the severity of the crisis facing the high seas, the Commission will begin its work with a threat analysis focused on the biological, ecological, social, and economic consequences of a business-as-usual approach to managing the high seas.

2. Review the effectiveness of the existing legal framework for the high seas in meeting the unique challenges and threats of the 21st century and beyond.

The second major task of the Commission, to be completed during the first year of its work, will be to conduct a review of the effectiveness of the existing legal framework in meeting a series of key threats and challenges facing the high seas.

In the context of high seas fisheries, this means a special focus on the effectiveness of existing RFMOs, particularly with respect to their accountability, transparency, and performance.

3. Raise global awareness of the problems affecting the high seas and the on-going consequences if these problems are not addressed.

The Commission cannot carry out its work in isolation. A core part of its mandate is to raise global awareness about the threats to the high seas, and their potential impact on society. The Commission’s work must provide a window into the problems and challenges that inspire its work, and creative ways must be found to involve, engage, and communicate that work to a broader public audience.

4. Make recommendations regarding a cost-effective and pragmatic system of high seas governance, management, monitoring, and enforcement.

The most challenging part of the Commission’s mandate will be to formulate recommendations for reform that not only present a reasonable prospect of resolving the gaps and weaknesses that have been identified, but can also be effectively implemented.

Some recommendations may not necessarily require the adoption of new legal instruments. They may involve, for example, extending and strengthening existing global cooperative mechanisms for high seas management, especially for monitoring and tracking fishing activities. It would be a major advance if the Commission could also spur the establishment of new and vigorous forms of enforcement.

However, the Commission should also address the need for new legal instruments for improving accountability and strengthening the ability of nations to create and manage large ocean reserves on the high seas and to manage biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction. In addressing such needs, the Commission should also recommend a pathway by which these instruments could be proposed and adopted by the international community.


Project Summary and Update

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The Commission

The Global Ocean Commission will be composed of 12 to 15 members, all of whom will bring a significant public profile and strong credibility in their respective fields, both in their home countries and internationally. Members of the Commission will include former heads of state, former foreign and environment ministers, and high-level diplomats, along with world-class scientists and prominent individuals from industry and commerce, international law enforcement, food security, and conservation.

The Secretariat

The Commission will be supported by a technical secretariat, headed by an Executive Secretary. Given the scope of the Commission’s work, technical expertise likely to be required by the secretariat will include international law and policy, maritime policy, law enforcement, marine science, conservation, and communications. The Commission will operate as a fully independent entity. An agreement has recently been reached with Somerville College at the University of Oxford to host the Commission. This will provide a neutral base from which the Commission can operate and will lend the global prestige of a world-renowned academic institution.

Scope of Work

The Commission will operate for two and a half years. The first six months will focus on building the secretariat, identifying and recruiting a Chair or Co-Chairs, selecting the Commissioners, and undertaking necessary background work. The Commission’s actual deliberative efforts and fact-gathering will take place over a period of 18 months, during which a series of informative reports will be released and discussed with key stakeholders in a range of globally representative locations. A final Commission report will be released in the last quarter of 2013. The remaining six months will be used to actively disseminate the findings and recommendations of the Commission and to promote their implementation at high levels of government and through international organizations and processes.


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For more information, please contact:

Simon Reddy

Executive Secretary


email: [email protected]

Karen Sack

Director

International Ocean Conservation

The Pew Environment Group

Office: +1 202-540-6368

Mobile: +1 202-415-5403

email: [email protected]

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