The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) has urged governments to protect the world’s oceans as it hopes to finalize a long-awaited High Seas Treaty at the United Nations (UN) in New York next month.
In a video interview on Wednesday, WWF’s senior global ocean governance and policy, Jessica Battle said that the event which is expected to produce the first-ever treaty on high seas biodiversity would provide a globally recognized mechanism to designate marine protected areas, and is crucial in order to achieve the goal of protecting at least 30 per cent of the world’s oceans.
One of the main impacts of human activities on the ocean is fishing, Battle highlighted.
The WWF has already called on policymakers to accelerate global ocean protection from 8 per cent to 30 per cent within eight years at the Fifth International Marine Protected Areas Congress (IMPAC5) held in Vancouver, Canada, from Feb. 3-9.
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The event in March would also be a follow-up to the biodiversity conference held in Montreal last December where the goal of protecting and conserving at least 30 per cent of the world’s marine and coastal areas was adopted by 196 countries under the Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF).
“China played a very strong role at COP15, making sure that we did get an agreement by the 196 parties to halt and reverse nature loss by 2030,” said Battle, who will attend the negotiations in New York.
Recall that In a resolution in December 2017, the UN General Assembly decided to convene an intergovernmental conference to draw up the text of an international legally binding instrument on the conservation and use of marine biodiversity but the UN’s negotiations for a High Seas Treaty stalled last August as delegates said more time was needed to reach an agreement on a final text.
Battle called on governments to ensure that the ocean receives the level of attention and protection it needs in order to provide for the future as waters which lie beyond national jurisdictions, known as the high seas, comprise nearly two-thirds of the ocean’s area but have only about 1 per cent of it been protected, according to the WWF.
Battle said that the treaty would be ratified when 30 countries sign up for it after which it will be implemented into national legislation.
It is critical that the treaty should enter into force quickly, Battle said.
Meanwhile, the WWF has said that the ocean now faces new potential threats such as deep seabed mining, a nascent industry with the potential to cause irreparable harm to fragile deep-sea ecosystems.
“We are seeing a growing number of countries calling for a global moratorium … This will be agreed at the International Seabed Authority which meets three times a year in Jamaica,” Battle said. “We need to safeguard this very important environment in order to reach biodiversity goals, and also to safeguard the ocean as a carbon sink.”
Many ocean areas play a key role for important species of shark, tuna, whale and sea turtle, and they also support billions of dollars of economic activity annually, WWF has said.
In its “Reviving the Ocean Economy” report, the organization outlined that the goods and services that flow from the ocean and coasts are worth at least 2.5 trillion U.S. dollars each year, and the overall value of the ocean as an asset is 10 times more.
Story was adapted from People’s Daily Online.
