Featured Image Credit: www.pm.gc.ca
By Adam Trautwig
On March 10th, President Barack Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau released a joint statement on climate, energy, and arctic leadership. Part of this statement was reaffirming the national goal of the U.S. and Canada to protect 10% of marine areas by 2020.
These goals are to be established in cooperation with invested stakeholders such as indigenous partners, state, territorial, and provincial governments.
The road ahead, however, looks dim. According to Dare To Be Deep, a report undertaken by the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society and the Marine Conservation Institute, less than 1% of continental North American oceans are currently protected.
Even more distressing is that only 0.04% of these oceans are in “fully protected areas.” This analysis incorporated nearly 6 million square miles encompassing some truly unique ecosystems.
The same press release emphasized that the governments of North America intend to not stop at the 10% goal that had been set. According to the Dare To Be Deep report this is of vital importance because it is unlikely that sweeping recovery of the oceans will be possible without at least 30% of our oceans being included in marine protected areas.
Marine protected areas go a step beyond the typical type of protection afforded to ocean preservation targets. Marine protected areas are more similar in function to national parks where rules for harvesting and use are more heavily regulated. Often they are considered “no take,” meaning harvesting of any kind is prohibited.
In continental North America there are 23 unique marine “ecoregions.”Of these, 18 contain marine protected areas and only 9 have more than 1% contained within a marine protected area.
Luckily, Dare To Be Deep had some aggressive strategies for meeting the requisite 10% by 2020. They suggest that all proposed and temporary marine protected areas be upgraded to marine protected areas. In addition, strict protection measures should be applied which includes “sufficient and consistent funding.”
The call for sufficient and consistent funding, in particular, strikes a timely chord. Just this week the journal Nature published an article entitled “Conservation: The seas cannot be saved on a budget of breadcrumbs.”
The problem of our insufficiently protecting our marine ecosystems extends farther than simply North America, it appears. UNESCO’s World Heritage Convention is also dismally unequipped. In this article the observation that funding for ocean conservation was put into more definite terms. Simply stated that, “with current funds, we simply cannot be everywhere.”
The joint press release by Barack Obama and Justin Trudeau can be found here.
The executive summary of Dare To Be Deep (which is really the meat and potatoes of the whole report) can be found here.
The timely Nature article mentioned above can be found here.