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Published in Summer 2005
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Scientists identify priority areas in Pacific
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By Jamie Bowman
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Click on map
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Marine conservation efforts took a significant step forward recently with the release of the world’s first continent-long catalogue of coastal ocean areas considered most in need of conservation.
Five years in the making, Marine Priority Conservation Areas: Baja California to the Bering Sea details 28 areas along the Pacific coast considered critical to preserving the diversity of plant, bird and marine wildlife in the entire region, and summarizes why each area is a high-priority.
The collaboration of hundreds of scientists—from government, academia and nongovernmental organizations in Canada, Mexico and the United States—was unprecedented.
"The most important aspect of this is that we’ve gone beyond our national boundaries and established, as far as I know, the world’s first continental-scale conservation vision," said Lance Morgan, chief scientist at the Marine Conservation Biology Institute (MCBI), in Sonoma, California.
The CEC, in partnership with Packard Foundation, served as both catalyst and funder for the massive undertaking, initiating a series of trinational scientific workshops and reviews of technical knowledge, engaging MCBI for data collection and integration, analysis and writing. The CEC and MCBI then co-published the vivid and compelling book, and an accompanying map, in time for World Oceans Day on 8 June.
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News Update—On 7 June 2005, Mexican government officials announced nine new protected areas in ecologically significant regions of the country. Three of the newly protected areas, Bahía de los Ángeles, Marismas Nacionales and Islas del Pacífico, are within five of the priority conservation areas identified for Mexico in the CEC’s new Baja California to the Bering Sea book. |
"The marine environments of Canada, Mexico and the US are intimately inter-dependent," said Hans Herrmann, the CEC’s head of Conservation of Biodiversity program. "In order to protect these natural linkages, we need to foster international cooperation."
In the past, conservation efforts have most often focused on individual species, with relatively small areas protected.
"But outside small, isolated reserves, contamination and fragmentation of ecosystems and the death of individual [species] occur daily," said Morgan, one of four authors of the report. "Thus, we should look to maintain ecological processes and natural linkages across the entire seascape."
The chain of "marine priority conservation areas" begins in the Bering Sea ecoregion and ends in the Islas Marías in the southern end of the Gulf of California. Some of the marine priority conservation areas are particularly unique, such as Hecate Strait’s sponge reefs, the extinct volcanoes of the Patton Seamounts complex in Alaska, where isolation has produced many endemic organisms, and the Upper Gulf of California, the only home of the vaquita marina, the world’s smallest and most endangered cetacean. Other marine priority conservation areas are important as migratory corridors or centers of biological diversity, but all are deemed ecologically significant.
The areas cited for priority conservation are not contiguous and represent only 10 percent of Canada’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ), the term for the jurisdiction of a country over its adjacent ocean. In Mexico, the marine priority conservation areas take up seven percent of its EEZ and in the United States, the figure is eight percent.
Protecting marine biodiversity has become increasingly important, following a series of fishery collapses and serious concerns about over-fishing raised by the UN’s Millennium Ecosystem Assessment.
"Ninety percent of all the large fish of the world’s oceans are gone; we’ve fished them out," says Sabine Jessen, conservation director of the British Columbia chapter of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society.
"All through the 1980s, the world very naively thought that the oceans were some sort of vast and robust resource with a very high potential for growth, as was realized on land," says Ernesto Enkerlin Hoeflich, president of the Mexican government’s Comisión Nacional de Áreas Naturales Protegidas, an agency involved in the project.
Since then, it has become "very clear" that the oceans are not only quite fragile and quite limited in productivity, but also "critical to maintaining planetary processes on which the welfare of humans and the rest of biodiversity depend," he said. "If we do not have sustainable oceans, we definitely can’t have a sustainable planet."
However, getting governments to act on the priority protection proposals will take much more research and data on a macro-regional scale, predicts Miguel Cisneros, a former Mexican government 0fficial and now the World Wildlife Fund’s coordinator of eco-regional programs in the Gulf of California.
"In my country, it is certainly going to be a challenge to convince the decision-makers, the users and theprivate sectors," said Cisneros. "It’s going to take a lot of resources to fund the robust studies necessary. The law (in Mexico) is very specific about what needs to be done to set up protected areas."
While Cisneros believes the book is "a very good step" in the right direction, he says the need for action is paramount. "Marine resources are not infinite; we can deplete them. And we are seeing signs, worldwide, that we had better start conserving them now."
Jessen, who in 2000 originated the idea of a Baja-to-Bering conservation corridor, says all the scientists involved would agree protection action must come soon.
"If you look at what’s happening to the world’s oceans, moving forward is incredibly important and urgent."
The marine priority conservation areas publication should boost preservation efforts at the community level, with activists able to show that their nearby marine ecosystem has continental significance, she said.
"The experience worldwide has been that local support and local champions are really vital to success," she said.
The CEC sees the book as a strong first step toward a continental conservation strategy, enabling capacity among individual governments, nongovernmental organizations and local environmentalists, according to Herrmann.
Apart from the results, the "documenting process has been invaluable as an archetype for other groups of countries to follow," says Joe Uravitch, director of the National Marine Protected Areas Center in the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which provided technical expertise during the entire process.
"The efforts taken by the CEC and the MCBI to gather together scientists in expert workshops, and to amass and unify data from numerous sources, should provide a model for how to successfully assemble individuals from different organizations and countries to create a unified perspective on the potential conservation needs of a continent," he said.
An online version of the book and map can be downloaded at www.cec.org.
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