November 2004 New York: Greenpeace visits the United Nations
Greenpeace campaigner Karen Sack addresses the united Nations General Assembly 2004
Security was tight and fidgety. The cameras were ready to record the moment. Our Greenpeace activist was camouflaged to blend in to her surroundings. She had borne witness to an environmental crime: the bulldozing of fragile ocean seamounts. And she was in the presence of people who could do something about it. At the appointed moment, she leapt into the spotlight to demand action, not words.
Had she been aboard our ship Esperanza in the North Atlantic the month before, or the Rainbow Warrior in the Tasman Sea a few months before that, she might have stopped a trawling vessel from ploughing over rare corals or delayed, at least for a few hours, the wholesale destruction of an irreplaceable deep sea habitat.
She was not at sea however - she was in the hallowed halls of the United Nations, where some countries with an interest in deep sea plunder strongly prefer words over action.
Her speech to the UN was on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea: one of the most important efforts at protection of the global commons ever achieved.
In the run up to the day's debate about how to better protect our ocean environment, Greenpeace and the other members of the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition showed graphic evidence -- in photographs, video, and scientific reports, that high seas bottom trawling is the most destructive practice impacting deep sea life.
High seas bottom trawling literally ploughs up the ocean floor for relatively few fish. The fleets often target seamounts - the least explored mountains on the planet, that rise more than a 1,000 metres from the ocean floor. Seamounts are teeming with deep sea life, some of which is undiscovered by science and much is unique to individual seamounts. We know more about Mars than we know about some of these habitats.
Yet our pleas were ignored. Instead an international call from the Convention on Biological Diversity to the UN for urgent action was watered down to a call for a review in two years time.
The interests of the few bottom trawling nations won out over science and common sense. There are deep sea species that are still unknown to science and yet the commercial interests of a few are considered more important. Who knows how many of those species could be wiped out while the politicians sit back reviewing.
But, while we didn't quite achieve all we would have liked, it's wasn't all doom and gloom. On the issue of bottom trawling, the actions agreed by the General Assembly are far better than those recommended by the June meeting of the UN Informal Consultative Process on Oceans and the Law of the Sea (UNICPOLOS). Amongst other things, UNGA has for the first time explicitly recognized that bottom trawling can have destructive impacts on seamounts, cold water corals and other vulnerable deep sea ecosystems. In doing so, the UNGA has called on member states to 'take action urgently', based on science and the precautionary approach, and consider interim prohibitions or moratoria on bottom trawl fishing on the high seas (that is, beyond areas of national jurisdiction, not where all the swashbuckling pirates are).
What UNGA said
The UNGA established an 'Open-ended Informal Working Group' to study issues related to the conservation and sustainable use of marine diversity on the high seas. The working group is likely to meet in early 2006.
Nonetheless, the UNGA resolutions still fall well short of an agreement for a global moratorium on bottom trawl fishing on the high seas to protect deep-water corals and biodiversity. It still leaves it up to countries individually and through regional fisheries management organizations (RFMOS) to take action to protect deep sea life from bottom trawl fishing.
Is leaving it up to individual countries really so bad?
So what's so bad using regional management, we hear you ask. Well for starters the evidence isn't encouraging: existing RFMOs, with the exception of the one for Antarctica, have done little to protect deep sea life from high seas bottom trawling.
There is a bit of light at the end of the tunnel: for example, the North-East Atlantic Fisheries Commission (NEAFC) recently held its annual meeting and agreed, for the first time ever, to close several small deep sea areas in international waters to bottom trawl fishing. A good start, but not nearly enough to protect deep-water corals, which are widespread throughout the region.
Also, it appeared that the EU was successful in preventing an agreement to close a sensitive deep sea area which is of interest to Spanish fleets fishing on the high seas.
Bottom trawl fishing is completely unregulated in many international waters. Other types of fishing are strongly regulated - so why not bottom trawling? But the UNGA resolution is quite weak on these areas and calls on states to either establish new RFMOs or expand the mandate of existing RFMOs to cover these high seas areas - a process that will take many years at best and in some cases ultimately may not be effective in the long term.
So who are the bad guys still?
In 2004 Costa Rica, Norway, Chile and New Zealand governments showed some leadership during the UN General Assembly negotiations. Iceland and the European Union, on the other hand, appeared to be the major obstacles to comprehensive protection of deep sea biodiversity.
