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Australia pushes for Antarctic protection

Emperor penguin

The protected areas are designed to protect the foraging areas of penguins, seals, and whales, and nursery areas for krill and toothfish(Source: National Science Foundation/Wikimedia commons)

News analysis Australia and France hope to win support this week from 23 other nations for a unique system of new marine protected areas in eastern Antarctica.

The proposal, endorsed by the EU, comprises seven zones covering 1.9 million square kilometres of the Southern Ocean off eastern Antarctica.

Dr Tony Fleming, head of Australia's delegation to the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR), says it will be the first time the Commission has considered a system of marine protected areas for the Southern Ocean.

Unlike other marine parks that are established by individual states and nations, the Antarctic marine protected system would be governed by an international body under the Antarctic Treaty system.

"This is pretty unique, because we have marine protected area proposals that have to be endorsed by all 25 participants, and they will then be governed by the Commission," says Fleming.

"It operates by consensus, and if all countries from CCAMLR endorse this proposal, then all countries will be committed to ensuring the proposal is a success."

Seven zones

The protected areas are in seven zones that radiate from half the coastline of Australian Antarctic Territory, between points due south of Tasmania and South Africa (see map in image gallery above). The three largest areas reach right down to the sea floor and extend 1000 kilometres offshore from east Antarctica.

Dr Andrew Constable, Australia's representative to CCAMLR's scientific committee, says the areas are large because the ecology of the Southern Ocean works at a large scale.

"In Australia we think of large systems as being the Great Australian Bight or the Gulf of Carpentaria, but in Antarctica the ecosystems operate at a bigger scale than that."

"For example, penguins and marine mammals forage over a much wider area in Antarctica than they do around Australia."

"If we're trying to capture ecosystem processes that can act as reference areas and for sustaining themselves, then they need to be big to capture the scale of those processes," says Constable.


Fishing still allowed

Although CCAMLR first established a no-take marine protected area over the southern shelf of the South Orkney Islands in 2009, the new proposals will not prohibit fishing.

"We're content that there will be some sustainable fishing inside these marine protected areas, so long as that fishing is consistent with their objectives and protects the values for which they are being formed," says Fleming.

Fleming says the protected areas will act as reference areas to help scientists understand the effects of fishing pressure or climate change in the Southern Ocean.

"CCAMLR wants to make sure their catch limits are sustainable, and using these reference areas is one way to make sure that we can assess the catch limits against where there's no fishing activity."

Although the new areas seek to protect feeding areas for whales, CCAMLR is not a manager of whales and is a separate entity from the International Whaling Commission.

Non-government environmental organisations in the Antarctica Ocean Alliance believe 40 per cent of the Southern Ocean warrants protection in a network of protected areas and large no-take marine reserves.

The Alliance has released a report that backs Australia's plan, while urging its expansion to cover 2.5 million square kilometres and prohibit fishing.

Australia is also supporting proposals from other countries for marine protected areas in the Ross Sea (US and New Zealand) and around the Antarctic Peninsula (Britain).

The CCAMLR process to consider the proposals draws from years of research into "the key physical processes that drive evolution and ecology in the Southern Ocean", says Constable.

"Twenty years ago, many scientists thought that the biology was more or less in concentric rings around the Antarctic, whereas now it's much clearer to us that in fact you see differentiation around the continent."

"The Ross Sea is very different from the Weddell Sea, and even in eastern Antarctica you can tell there are differences in the biota as you move along the coast," he says.

CCAMLR begins its annual meeting in Hobart today.

Tags: environmental-management, oceans-and-reefs, marine-parks