BBP in Brief, Issue 8, Spring 2007

The IUCN Marine Protected Area Summit Calls for Dramatic Increase in Ocean Protection Jennifer Stenzel (AMNH-CBC), excerpted from an IUCN News Release, Washington, D.C., April 13, 2007

The Earth’s oceans are being destroyed at a much faster rate than they are being protected, concluded the world’s leading marine experts at the end of the World Conservation Union (IUCN) Marine Protected Area Summit. Organized by IUCN’s World Commission on Protected Areas, the Summit spanned April 10-12 in Washington, D.C. and focused on developing a strategy for protecting oceans from increasing pressures such as climate change, ocean acidification, and overfishing.

To save the oceans, participants urged governments, along with business and civil society, to rapidly increase the area under protection and to step up measures to help make marine environments more resilient in the face of climate change. The high seas – oceans beyond national jurisdiction – are particularly threatened. “Entire ecosystems in the high seas are being damaged and lost before we have even acted to protect them,” reads the summit’s closing statement.

“Summit participants urge governments to establish marine protected area networks by 2012, and to protect at least 10 percent of oceans under national jurisdiction as decided under several legally binding agreements,” said Dan Laffoley, Marine Vice Chair of IUCN’s World Commission on Protected Areas. “With the current pace of action, the targets will not be met.” Currently, only one percent of the oceans are protected, compared to over 12 percent of the Earth’s land surface.

Marine protected areas have been proven to allow threatened fish stocks to recover – and to increase the fishing yield in adjacent areas. For example, in the Egyptian Red Sea, five years after the establishment of marine reserves, fishing increased by 66 percent in neighboring areas.

To ease the impacts of climate change on oceans, other stress factors, including pollution and overfishing – which are more immediately in our power to control – need to be reduced in marine ecosystems such as coral reefs. “Climate change makes oceans warmer and more acidic, which causes corals to bleach and erodes their ability to build reef skeletons. But corals can adapt and survive if they are healthy and don’t suffer from sedimentation or disruptive fishing practices,” said Carl Gustaf Lundin, Head of IUCN’s Marine Programme.

Better management of marine environments will also serve to buffer humans from the impacts of accelerated climate change. Today, oceans are the world’s largest carbon “sink,” absorbing around 50 percent of atmospheric carbon dioxide yearly. However, continued discharges of carbon dioxide and poor marine management may turn oceans from a carbon sink into a major carbon source, releasing vast stores of carbon into the atmosphere, thus exacerbating climate change.