Urgent action needed to save our oceans

Dan Laffoley and Sylvia Earle, Business Times 14 Feb 09;

COULD the oceans become the place where humanity finally gets its act together, or will we become the victim of many environmental threats coming together at the same time? Already over-fished and used as a garbage dump, the oceans now face the risks posed by climate change - rising levels, coral bleaching and ocean acidification, to name a few.

If the oceans were a human patient, we'd be saying that it is suffering from a severe burn-out. The critical question now lies in whether we believe we have enough information to act.

As a species, we have a seemingly endless quest for knowledge, which builds generation upon generation. Yet we appear at times to be incapable of acting on that information.

There are exceptions to this, but too few of them. In 2004, an expedition of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to the Marianas region in the Pacific Ocean used a robotic system to bring pictures of amazing undersea volcanoes and smoking chimneys rising out of the inky depths.

Unknown at that time, this work contributed data that resulted a few weeks ago in the new marine monument declaration by outgoing President George W Bush, pushing the scale of maritime protection up a notch.

It is still striking, though, that after so many decades of effort to protect the seas, the area under protection rose from just 0.65 per cent to 0.80 per cent of the total ocean area.

Future action will depend on how, and how quickly, we use the information we have about our seas to good effect.

Despite hundreds of years of map-making and more recent advances - increasingly good acoustic mapping at affordable prices, for example - which have improved our knowledge of the oceans, today the ocean area mapped by humans still stands at only about 5 per cent of the total.

Protecting our ocean world for the future requires a rapid evolution in thinking and action. Three years ago, almost 200 countries made a commitment to increase the protected area of the oceans by 700 per cent by 2012. That would cover 10 per cent of all ocean areas under national jurisdiction.

The protection has increased since then, but at a fraction of the pace needed if we are to meet this target. Since the end of 2005, the total global marine protected area has increased from 2.2 to 2.9 million square kilometres - a huge achievement, representing a 30 per cent increase, but simply not enough. More than 99 per cent of the world's oceans are completely unprotected.

If we act only where we have ample data, the action will always be too little, too late when viewed against the vastness of the ocean realm and the consequences of human use. Countless species and habitats will be lost before they are even discovered and described.

Our future strategy must play to current strengths, but also protect us from our ignorance. As we consider how to increase the protection of our oceans, we need to move beyond individual habitats and species to ecosystem and marine 'landscape' scale actions.

While we do have more than 4,500 individual marine protected areas across our oceans, it is striking that 10 of these cover 74 per cent of the total area of protected ocean.

The US declaration on marine national monuments is a significant step in the right direction, yet, another 28 countries need to do the same in the next three years if we are to meet our modest target of protecting 10 per cent of ocean areas under national jurisdiction.

The American initiative encapsulates the approach developing in several areas around the globe. 'Going large,' either through very large individual marine protected areas or through networks of smaller ones, is the most efficient way to secure the wildlife and a renewed stream of benefits that we can use - be it tourism or sustaining local communities and industries.

In short, the network of marine protected areas - both large and small - needs to grow, and it needs to grow fast.

A renewed interest in large-scale marine mapping and making the most of new technologies is one of the best ways to help us decide where and what to protect, especially the areas of ocean outside the jurisdiction of any individual country - the High Seas.

We also need expeditions to study and document new habitats and species. We need initiatives to complement the mapping to make oceans more 'visible' to the public. More and better information about our oceans can only help make better decisions about their future.

The recent launch of Ocean in Google Earth is a major step in this direction as it provides a highly accessible, visual and user-friendly source of information on how we have used and abused the seas, and how we can better manage and protect them.

The use of new communication technology illustrates how our impact on our oceans is reaching a tipping point, at which the conditions that nurtured and supported life on Earth over the millennia change to something far less desirable.

Now is the time to implement large-scale protection that many countries have already agreed to and should be delivering by 2012.

However disconnected you may feel from the oceans, remember that every breath you take, every sip of water you drink and even the very balance of salt in your blood ties you and every one of us to the fate of our oceans and seas. -- IHT

Dan Laffoley is marine vice-chairman of IUCN's World Commission on Protected Areas and one of the advisers for Ocean in Google Earth.

Sylvia Earle is explorer-in-residence at the National Geographical Society, founder of the Deep Search Foundation and lead adviser for Ocean in Google Earth.