America’s oceans are in serious decline due to decades of mismanagement, overexploitation, climate change, acidification, habitat damage, and pollution. Many marine species are threatened or endangered, and entire marine ecosystems (Arctic sea ice, coral reefs, mangroves, etc.) are seriously threatened. Ocean ecosystems will have increasing difficulty maintaining functional integrity during this century’s climate crisis, and these ecosystems urgently need the strongest protections we can provide.
We cannot afford to miss perhaps our last best chance to permanently protect our nation’s most critical ocean ecosystems in time to save them for the future.
Although President Biden’s laudable January 27, 2021 Executive Order “Addressing the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad” calls for conserving 30% of US land and water by 2030 (“30×30”), until now little has come of this promise.
So far, the administration has designated only one new National Marine Sanctuary (NMS) – Wisconsin Shipwreck Coast NMS in the Great Lakes (a freshwater archaeological site designated in 2014), while other designated marine sanctuaries await an uncertain, multi-year process more consideration.
Protections were restored for one small (5,000 mi2) Marine National Monument (Northeast Canyons and New England Seamounts), but the administration has not yet proposed or designated any new marine national monuments. And while the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) held a public comment period last year on the 30×30 ocean effort, the agency is now proposing to establish an advisory board on the issue, a process that only would further delay the substantive action.
On an issue as urgent and critical to our nation’s future as ocean health, the bureaucratic slowness of the Biden administration is unacceptable. We can expect the election of an administration in 2024 that supports ocean protection, but it would be foolish and dangerous to plan for that. Therefore, it is imperative that the administration expand and accelerate its ocean protection efforts immediately.
There’s no reason to wait until 2030 to secure urgently needed protections for US waters — the administration can and should act in the next two years to make that happen, a “30×24” goal. And many believe the administration should expand the 2030 target from 30 percent to 50 percent, a “50×30” target.
Internationally, while the administration just announced at the UN COP27 climate conference its new “Ocean Conservation Challenge,” this initiative calls on countries to commit to a 30×30 goal only in domestic waters within their exclusive economic zones (EEZs), ignoring international waters (“Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction”). When it comes to protecting international waters, which cover nearly 60% of the global ocean, the Biden administration remains either non-committal or strategically ambiguous.
The administration can and should finally accede to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and introduce both UNCLOS and the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (which the US sign, but did not ratify) for Senate ratification. . This would give the US a long-awaited full voice in international negotiations on ocean conservation. While it is not clear that enough Senate Republicans would accept US accession to these international conventions, it is time to try again.
For waters inside the US EEZ, a group of US marine scientists sent a letter to President Biden last year urging him to “go big” on ocean protection by designating new marine national monuments through executive authority. The letter is signed by more than ninety university deans, department heads, distinguished marine professors, agencies and independent scientists (including the legendary Dr. Jane Goodall).
A recent assessment by the Marine Conservation Institute found that virtually all US “strongly protected” marine areas are in the western Pacific (Papahanaumokuakea, Rose Atoll, Mariana Trench, and Remote Pacific Islands Marine National Monuments , covering a total of approximately 1.2 million mi2), but less than 1% of marine waters in the rest of the US are similarly protected. This staggering imbalance must be corrected.
In addition to the western Pacific protections, the administration must now strongly protect at least 30% of the productive and threatened waters within each of the other seven US marine management areas: North Pacific (Alaska), Pacific, Gulf of Mexico, South Atlantic, Mid-Atlantic, New England and the Caribbean.
Marine national monuments are the fastest, longest-lasting and strongest policy instrument available to achieve this goal of ocean protection. These should legally withstand any efforts by a future unsympathetic administration to weaken or remove them. Accordingly, marine scientists are calling on the Biden administration to designate large-scale marine national monuments in the Arctic Ocean, the Bering Sea/Aleutian Islands, the Gulf of Alaska, the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of Maine, the Caribbean and the Pacific and Atlantic coasts.
These new marine monuments must at least permanently prohibit all extractive activities (oil, gas, seabed mining), destructive fishing practices (bottom trawling, etc.), significantly reduce marine pollution ( plastic remains, oil, hazardous chemicals, underwater noise). , etc.), and manage other environmental risks. They should support low-impact sustainable recreation, tourism, livelihoods and scientific research. Most importantly, marine monuments must protect as much as possible the populations of marine mammals, seabirds, fish and all pelagic and seafloor ecological functions.
Who knows what kind of administration we will have after the 2024 election. If it is another administration like the last one, we lose another four years in this urgent effort. The Biden administration cannot afford to delay any longer and must act now to secure these ocean protections by 2024.
In speaking of the “fierce urgency of now,” Martin Luther King Jr. warned that “there is one thing that is too late”. In terms of protecting the oceans, we are almost there.
We cannot afford to miss perhaps our last best chance to permanently protect our nation’s most critical ocean ecosystems in time to save them for the future.