Virtual world vs. real world - What really counts?

Apparently, Antonio Guterres, the new UN Secretary General-Elect, has no Twitter account. The two accounts I could find under his name are unofficial, and opened only a few hours or days ago. One (with 27 tweets to date) may have been opened by friends or fans of his (with or without his knowledge), the other one (1 tweet) could have been created by anyone who had nothing better to do.

So, were the other candidates campaigning for the UNSG post via Twitter wasting their time? Obviously, the P5, the permanent members of the Security Council were not impressed.

Persistent

I posted this on my Facebook, on 11 March around midnight, a few hours before leaving Tokyo.


It is past midnight in Tokyo, and today the country will mark the 5th anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami, and of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear catastrophe that struck Japan on 11 March 2011. 

As I was walking the street after a meeting at the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries in Tokyo yesterday morning and passed the Ministry of Energy, Trade and Industry (the famous METI), I spotted the anti-nuclear tent installed there and maintained by Japanese activists for 1643 days (if my calculator is correct, that's 4.5 years).

I stopped and chatted for a few minutes with the activists on shift.


This action alone is not going to resolve the issue it addresses (of course). 

But one thing you can say of anti-nuclear activists is that they are as persistent as Plutonium. 

And this is good.

The Climate N Test

Photos: Courtesy Oceana 2011 (c)

News from  Moscow and St.Petersburg has it that the launch of the first Russian floating nuclear reactor in the Arctic is now approaching. 

Announcements have also now been made in Canada and China that these two countries also want to build and operate floating nuclear reactors, 

And now we know that the main reason to invest in this is to supply the energy needed to drill for oil and other minerals in the Arctic and other deep oceanic regions.

It would be good to know what the conventional nuclear industry thinks of this. We have all seen in the last two decades the nuclear industry putting itself forward as solution to climate change (notwithstanding unresolved issues of nuclear safety, radioactive waste management, non-proliferation, liability and other costs). But of course, using nuclear technology to extract oil from the deep ocean, including the Arctic, fatally undermines all nukes claims of climate-friendly credentials.

So, I think it'd be interesting to ask nuclear power plant operators like Electricité de France, Areva, Tepco (Japan, of Fukushima fame/shame), Electrabel,  Iberdrola, Endesa, or E.On (to only name a few), and nuclear technology suppliers like Siemens, Toshiba, Mitsubishi, Suez, or Bouygues (to only name a few, again) what they think of that floating reactors business; and to challenge them to say all with one voice: "we don't like that oil drilling and seabed mining business; the global climate system cannot afford Arctic oil drilling; it's a recipe for disaster; the risks are too high; we won't put our fingers in it; we ask our colleagues from the nuclear sector in Russia, Canada and China to drop it".

Paris, the centre of climate policy this year (and also to a large extent the nerve centre of the nuclear industry worldwide -- 80% of the electricity consumed in France comes from nuclear reactors) could be a good place to launch this Climate N Test.

The big deal

  Night-long BBNJ negotiation  last week-end - (C)  IISD/ENB Dan Birchall

I was in New York last week at the meeting of the UN Working Group on Biodiversity in Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction, known to Ocean policy nerds (such as me) as the "BBNJ", and which was open to all UN Member States. This group has been meeting for nearly a decade, since 2006, to discuss whether a supplementary agreement (known as an "implementing agreement" in legal jargon) to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) should be adopted to protect the high seas. The high seas, or areas beyond national jurisdiction, are the portion of the global ocean that lies beyond the Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) of coastal States (generally beyond 200 nautical miles).  This may sound boring or complicated to laypersons, but you'll realize it's a very big deal when you know that the high seas represent 64% of the global ocean, and...no less than 45% of our entire planet!

Humankind has been interacting with the high seas for a long time, but our impact has increased in recent times.

We've been sailing and shipping stuff across the high seas since time immemorial, but with the contemporary trends in economic globalization, ocean-based international trade has now grown at a scale that was unpredictable not long ago. Now, more than 90% of all the goods we purchase are moved about the planet by ships.

We've also used the high seas as a waste dumping ground until this practice was banned permanently in the early 1990s. However, pollutants from land-based activities have not abated, quite the reverse, which dramatically affect the high seas. While floating plastics are the most visible ones and the most in the public eye, micro-plastics (small particles of plastic) are the most pervasive, and have been found in every corner and crevice of the ocean, If that was not enough, there are also high concentrations in the ocean of pesticides and other organochlorine compounds, radioactive substances, and heavy metals.

We've been laying underwater cables since the middle of the 19th Century, first to send telegrams, then to make telephone calls and now to send data through the Internet. Those of you who are not at this time in mainland Europe (where I am as I type) are reading this blog after it swam under the ocean. 

We've also fished the high seas for some time. Until the 1950s most fish stocks were still in reasonably good shape (putting the commercial whaling episode aside -- whales are not fish). Things started to go wrong soon after with the decrease of fish resources in coastal waters, within EEZs, triggered by increased demand which lead to overfishing to meet that demand. Fishing fleets supported by rich government subsidies acquired the capacity to catch, package and freeze their prey in the high seas. That was the beginning of what some called the "cold rush" for fish in the high seas.  Environmentalists often quote a report published by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) which estimated that 80% of fish stocks had been fully exploited, overexploited, depleted or were recovering from depletion. Others dispute this figure, but the truth is that it would already be alarming even if it was the case for only 50% of fish stocks.

The most recent and still emerging chapters of human exploitation of the high seas concern mineral and genetic resources.

Mineral resources found on and under the seabed have been for the mining industry in the last decades a sort of Holy Grail which is now apparently starting to become technically feasible, but it's unclear whether seabed mining is another bubble. Both economic and environmental aspects remain untested with the potential damage and equity issues causing concern. According to UNCLOS, mineral seabed resources found on and under the seabed of the high seas are part of the common heritage of humankind, and their exploration and exploitation are regulated by the International Seabed Authority (ISA) headquartered in Kingston, Jamaica. In recent years, ISA has granted exploration licenses to a number of consortia, and - should exploitation begin - ISA is meant to equitably distribute any arising benefits. But equity concerns are not limited to the distribution of benefits; they also include the impact of mining on legitimate uses of the sea such as fishing or genuine scientific research.

Unlike mineral resources, the living resources found in the high seas' water column are not considered part of the common heritage of humankind under UNCLOS. Fishing in some high seas areas is regulated internationally by Regional Fisheries Management Organizations (RFMOs) but they distribute quotas, not benefits to third parties. The ownership of marine genetic resources found in the deep ocean is subject to debate. Genes from the deepsea, especially the precious few that have been looked at so far,  are known to have important value for the medical and biotechnology sectors (hence for future human health). However, their exploitation (and even their existence) had not been envisaged when UNCLOS was drafted and negotiated in the 1970s and 80s. Developing countries (the so-called Group of 77 plus China) vehemently consider that marine genetic resources are part of the common heritage and they warn against what they consider biopiracy in the high seas. Hence it was agreed in 2011 that the sharing of the benefits resulting from the exploitation of deepsea genetic resources would be addressed, as part of a package of issues that would be taken into consideration if/when negotiation of a high seas legal instrument would take place.

The Nagoya Protocol, a recent supplementary agreement under the UN Framework Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) is meant to guard against biopiracy, but it does not apply to high seas resources. The principle of access and benefit sharing enshrined in UNCLOS (for mineral resources) and in the CBD (for genetic resources within national jurisdiction) is what's behind the US pharmaceutical and biotechnology corporate lobby's aggressive campaign  which to date has prevented the US Congress from ratifying both treaties. By the same token, it's the explanation of  the US' long standing opposition, until early hours of Saturday morning (24th January), to the proposed High Seas Implementing Agreement.

After dragging their feet for nearly a decade, UN member States reached consensus at the eleventh hour and negotiations will begin in earnest next year. Other elements of the 2011 package include rules to designate and manage marine protected areas in the high seas [to date, only 1% of the world's ocean is fully protected], a mechanism to conduct environmental impact assessments in the high seas like on the rest of the planet, and provisions for capacity building and information exchange, A study commissioned by the Global Ocean Commission last year has shown that life in the high seas is providing irreplaceable "ecosystem services", including mitigating human-induced climate change by taking up 500 million tonnes of atmospheric carbon per year. That alone makes high seas protection a big deal.

The high seas are often described as the Far Wild Wet or a lawless zone. Frankly, it's a bit of an exaggeration, because certain activities in the high seas are regulated internationally, such as shipping by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) or fishing by RFMOs in certain areas of the high seas (but enforcement of fisheries regulations remains weak, particularly in the high seas). The problem with high seas governance, outlined in the recent report of the Global Ocean Commission, is a mixture of gaps and fragmentation (both geographic and sector-wise). This is what the Implementing Agreement is meant to address and resolve.

UNCLOS is often described as the Constitution of the Ocean, and there is no doubt that it represents a milestone in international governance. But it was adopted in 1982 after a decade-long negotiation, and it entered into force in 1994. The political, social and economic contexts and the environmental landscape have changed immensely since that time, and in ways that no one could have predicted. Concepts like biodiversity, sustainable development, the ecosystem approach were in their infancy, let alone our understanding of climate change. The upcoming negotiation of the High Seas Implementing Agreement is the opportunity to bring UNCLOS into the 21st Century. A big deal!

Merde!

Arrgh! As I was preparing a new post (soon to come), and I was disrupted by a domestic affair, and inadvertently wiped out my "Good Mourning" piece about Charlie from earlier this month. Merde!

Seal pup on the sand

When I decided to spend a few days this month in Samos, the Greek island in the Agean Sea closest to the coast of Turkey, I knew that it was one of the very last Mediterranean monk seal breeding grounds, but I was not expecting to see any.

I knew a few basic things about the Mediterranean monk seal: it is one of the most threatened marine and European mammals; there are only about 50 of them left in the Agean Sea (and there are very few left in the rest of the Mediterranean); and they stay away from humans, spend their days in underwater caves and go out for fish only at sunset. So, to expect a seal sighting in Samos was like planning a holiday in the Pyrenees and expect to encounter a bear, or to go to a fiesta in Andalucia and hope to run into a lynx. The odds were so slim, it was not even within my plans.

I had been marginally associated in the late 1970s in advocacy to protect the Mediterranean monk seals, but to say the truth, nearly fourty years later when we arrived in Samos by boat a week ago, I was not even quite sure whether decades of conservation efforts had borne fruit and whether there were any seals left in Samos.

So, when a local gave me a tip and told me that a seal pup had been sighted and reported as staying for several months not far from where I was staying, my mind was blown away. Although the explanation was vague, I decided to try and check it out for myself.

After getting lost a bit on the road, I made it and ran into the seal pup. Under the protection of Paulos Teka, a volunteer from Finland who works for the Archipielago Institute of Marine Conservation, a Greek NGO that works for biodiversity and ocean protection in the Greek islands, the orphan female seal pup has been spending most of her days on the same small beach since the month of March. Her behaviour is almost unheard of. What's most likely to have happened, Paulos explained, is that the calf's mother got caught as by-catch in a fishnet, and maybe it's a miracle the seal pup survived. So far.

With Paulos Teka (seal pup on the bottom right)

The future of the seal pup is uncertain. At first sight, one can see that she may be developing a skin desease (sunburns?). An Israeli vet has been able to examin her hearing functions, Paulos told me. But little can be done because the priority is to prevent interference from humans. So, during the summer months Paulos and his colleagues have fenced part of the beach area and, under a beach umbrella, their job is to maintain tourists at a distance.

Paulos confirms that normally Monk seals stay away and hide from humans. But now the Archipielago Institute is concerned that the pup is becoming used to the presence of humans. She even seems to look for it, and that can be a problem when (if) she grows up. Tourists brought by cruise liners take the sun and swim, most of them not knowing that it is a unique nature wonder they have alongside. "It's better this way", says Paulos, "we don't want the seal to become a sightseeing spot". Of course, and that's why I'm not giving details on where the pup is to be found.

Click here to support and donate to the Archipielgo Institute of marine Science.

One ocean

Today is June 8 - World Oceans Day on the United Nations calendar. A perfect day to revive my blog which I've kept sleeping for eight months.

My message to the UN on this day is "change the name". Today should be called World Ocean Day, not oceans. The ocean supplies the oxygen in every second breath we take; billions of us rely on it for food, fresh water, energy, medicine, transport and trade; it covers 70% of the Earth's surface and supports all life on Earth. If we want people to protect it and use it wisely, we've got to stop managing the ocean on a sectoral basis and modernize ocean governance to meet contemporary and emerging challenges. And this won't happen if we do not look at the ocean as one single interconnected system.

The main reason why I've been very lazy with my blog in the last eighteen months, and completely silent for eight months has been my current responsibility as Deputy Executive Secretary of the Global Ocean Commission. In that capacity, I had to write extensively with incredibly tight deadlines, first taking the lead to prepare the Commission's Policy Options Papers and other documents, and since the month of March preparing the Commission report which will be made public in New York on 24 June. So much to do, I completely ran out of steam for the blog. On Friday we were able to put the report to rest, which goes tomorrow to the printer and translators.

The adjective "global" in Global Ocean Commission does not only refer to the widespread geographical representation of the commissioners. A key message we're trying to convey is that there's only one "global ocean".

If you think that talking of  "one ocean" will cost you a bit at the beginning, a very practical thing you can do is update your spell check programme, so that it automatically removes the s in the ocean.

Dima

Together with Peter Willcox who is known for having been for the captain of the Rainbow Warrior when we were victims of the French Secret Services bomb attack in Auckland New Zealand in 1985, Dima Litvinov is the other "Greenpeace Arctic 30" that I know personally. The Arctic 30 are the Greenpeace crew currently jailed in Northern Russia for staging a peaceful protest against a Gazprom oil drilling platform in international waters near Russian waters in the Arctic Ocean.

I worked with Dima in Russia two decades ago. First in the late 1980s during the Perestroika when the country was still called the USSR, and we continued in the early 1990s after the country imploded and had become the Russian Federation. Together we uncovered the illegal dumping of radioactive wastes in the Kara Sea and the Sea of Japan. It took us several years of John Le Carre-style campaigning to collect all the evidence, which I distilled each year with official submissions at the meetings of the London Convention, the international treaty that regulates the dumping of wastes at sea, at the Headquarters of the UN’s International Maritime Organization (IMO). All the delegates of the countries members of the London Convention were stunned each time we brought more evidence from Russia. The Soviet/Russian delegation maintaned for several years that we were fabricating the data, but after sometime President Boris Yeltsin ordered an official investigation that concluded we were right. All the data we’d collected were validated by the Kremlin!

At the time, there was a worldwide moratorium on the dumping of radioactive wastes at sea. I’d worked intensely for a whole decade first to get that moratorium adopted, and then to turn it into a permanent ban, and the evidence we collected with Dima was very important to bring the radioactive waste dumping issue on top of the international agenda. In November 1993, exactly 20 years ago now, our campaign bore fruits and the Parties to the London Convention agreed to ban permanently the dumping of all radioactive wastes at sea worldwide. This permanent prohibition is legally-binding on all the Parties to the London Convention, as well as all the Parties to the Law of the Sea Convention (UNCLOS). In other words, the ban applies to all countries in the world, even to the Russia Federation who lifted its initial formal objection in 2005.

Dima’s father Pavel has just written a beautiful piece in the Washington Post in which he explains that Dima is the third Litvinov generation to end up in a Russian jail for political reasons. Some of the most vivid memories I have from my time in Russia is the excitement and enjoyment of the young Dima for being able to return to his homeland from which he’d been expelled when he was 10 after his dissident father was freed from the Gulag, something he couldn’t have dreamt before Gorbachev started with his reforms. It was a time of optimism for the Russian diaspora to which Dima belonged; he reunited with relatives who’d staid in the USSR while he lived in exile in the US, and he was happy and proud to join Russia’s emerging civil society. Most people don’t know this, but Greenpeace was the very first international NGO to take the risk to settle in the USSR as soon as the Perestroika began. Dima moved to Moscow with his family for several years, and there he helped build Greenpeace Russia. Dima was a Russian/US hybrid, and it was amazing to watch him operate, and to watch how Soviet/Russian citizens were reacting to him.  [Dima’s family name added to the confusion: Dima’s great grand-father was Maksim Litvinov, a hero of the October Revolution and Foreign Affairs Minister in the early times of the USSR, who was replaced and sent in disgrace by Stalin before the USSR-Germany Pact of non-aggression of 1939].

It is sad to see how the wind of optimism that was blowing two decades ago in Russia and elsewhere vanished (remember everyone talking of the “dividends of Peace”?). The return to a Russian jail of a member of the Litvinov family summarizes it all.

Beyond the environmental aspects, behind the fate of the Arctic 30 there is a wider right-to-protest and freedom-of-speech issue. If you agree, you can sign up to the Hands Up for the Right to Peaceful Protest Facebook page. 

My thoughts of course also go to the beautiful Pussy Riot which to my mind is the most important music group/movement of the decade.

The mad man who thinks he owns the sun

Among many other memorabilia of the environmental movement, in the entrance to my office there is a poster in French called "Énergies Libres".  Dating back from around 1976 or 1977 and authored by Jean-Marc Reiser, one of Paris' leading underground artists of the time, the poster was made to promote one of the very first exhibitions displayed in the then brand new Pompidou Centre in the heart of Paris, dedicated to wind, solar and other alternative sources of energy -- pretty much a science fiction-like proposition at the time. Looking back nearly fourty years later, it was not only amazing that we, green pioneers, were already pointing to a future that has now become a reality, but also a daring sign that it was displayed in the museum named after President Pompidou, the very same who'd launched in 1973 (one year before his death) France's massive Tout Nucléaire programme. Of course, conventional wisdom at the time suggested that we were mad to believe that solar, wind and other alternative sources of energy would play a role in the future. But now, with France and the rest of the world desperately looking for the right energy transition path, we're paying a high price for the nuclear and fossil fuels addiction madness. Future generations will continue to pay forever for the decommissioning of nuclear installations, the storage of nuclear wastes, and the costs of climate change. As REN21, the global renewable energy multistakeholders platform points out in their Renewables Global Energy Futures report, "the future of renewables is a choice, not a foregone conclusion."

Looking at my old framed poster during a visit at my office this week, a Spanish University professor was interested to see that in the 1970s renewables were called "énergies libres"-- free energy. Free like in "good bye to the monthly invoice from your local electricity company", and also free like in "freedom, self-made, autonomy".  "That's why Rajoy has declared war against renewables!", he said, "he doesn't want people to be free!". The professor was referring to the latest of a series of measures taken or proposed by Spain's Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy to dismantle Spain's renewable energy sector, once one of the most flourishing worldwide.

In a surprise move last week, Spain's Industry Ministry announced that people and businesses producing their own electricity with photovoltaic cells would have to pay a toll 27% higher than the tax consumers pay for conventional energy. In the country that attracts millions of tourists every year with the slogan "Everything under the Sun", the Spanish Government's attempt to privatize sun rays only benefits a handful of electricity corporations and castigates small entrepreneurs and individuals who have invested in good faith to boost clean energy. This is madness. It doesn't make any economic sense in a country where more than 80% of energy needs are covered by foreign imports (fossil fuels and uranium) despite a high tech domestic renewables sector that instead needs enhancing public policies. It doesn't make environmental sense either, in one of the countries most vulnerable to climate change according the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and with an increasingly obsolete and aging nuclear park. As Teresa Ribera, a former Secretary of State for Climate Change Policy puts it, "charging a toll for self production doesn't make sense; it's like charging for lightening firewood."

I don't know if it's because he's caught a sun burn, but it looks like Prime Minister Mariano Fossil Rajoy has gone mad this summer.

News from Zaraland

When I read a few weeks ago that the local "government" of the Madrid region in Spain had signed a contract with a telecom company to change the name of Madrid's "kilometre zero" Puerta del Sol metro station, I thought it could only be a joke. It was near the time of April fools day I'd read the news, after all. For weeks I did not see any change at Puerta del Sol, so I'd got convinced that it was only a social media urban legend...Until I took this photo this week! I guess the contract between the government and Vodafone was becoming effective at 1st June.

So, if in Spain a local government can decide to change for money the name of its most famous metro station, what's the next step? Change the street names for brand names? [Avenida del GAP] The cities' names? [Toyota-City] And -- why not? -- the name of Spain? [Zaraland, Pepsi-Country, or Kingdom of Bankia].

Meanwhile, Madrid's public transport, and Spain's public health and education systems continue to deteriorate...

Hoovering the seabed

We'd heard about seabed mining plans and operations in Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Namibia, the Arctic and elsewhere before. We also heard this week that Japan was developping technology to trap methane hydrate near its coast. And now it looks like the deepsea mining race will soon become a reality. Lookheed Martin UK and the UK Government want a licence to hoover the seabed of a large area in the Pacific Ocean to grab valuable minerals. Russia, China and other countries are also on the go for what the British Prime Minister David Cameron describes as the new "global race".

We need a strong watchdog in place before it starts and irreversible damage could begin. 

Look at the social and environmental damage the mining industry has done on land. Do you think they will "behave" under the sea if no-one's watching and if there's no proper monitoring and accountability?

Maybe someone should raise the issue (raise questions or raise hell?) in Sydney in the month of May when the Extractiive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) holds its Global Conference? I'm sure a lot of "reasonable" people will say "it's not on the agenda". Well, let's take over and set the agenda, then! [Ill send the link to this post to a few Sydney-based friends and colleagues -- like a bottle in the ocean which they might or might not pick up] 

I've just been confirmed as a "special guest" at the French Government conference The Hgh Seas, Our Future on 11 April in Paris. Another opportunity to bring up this issue maybe, don't you think?

Global Ocean Commission: Sexy and exciting?

I’m writing from London where I’m attending today the launch of the Global Ocean Commission, a project I’ve been working with in an advisory capacity since its inception more than two years ago.

Co-chaired by the former UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband, the former South African Finance Minister Trevor Manuel and the former President of Costa Rica José María Figueres, the Global Ocean Commission is made up of about a dozen former leaders from the five continents, augmented by business giants. Many are still active in national politics or branches of the UN system. At first sight it may not look like the most sexy international environmental initiative. It’s not the first commission to be set up when the international community faces obstacles in addressing an issue - one of the most pressing here being the sustainable use and conservation of marine biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction. And the recommendations these commissions come up with are too often ignored, albeit politely. So, what’s the big deal here? What’s the added value?

Focused mandate:

We’ve seen that one weakness of many past international commissions was a mandate that was too broad, resulting in a message that’s hard to get. For example, some commissions come up with over a hundred recommendations, so it’s hard for a key message to come across (apples and oranges). In contrast, the mandate of the Global Ocean Commission is straightforward: the conservation and governance of biodiversity and a remedy for overfishing on the high seas. The high seas is a very large area (nearly 50% of the surface of the planet), but there are commonalities that impact and concern every single one of us on this planet. The international community can do something there if it wants, because the high seas do not belong to anyone. It’s a question of political will. Overfishing and food security; illegal fishing, piracy and other security issues; human trafficking and other forms of social and labour abuse; unsustainable exploitation of fisheries, mineral and genetic resources and the unfair repartition of the benefits... Hopefully the sharp mandate can lead to sharp recommendations, easy for all to understand and sufficiently practical to make a difference. 

Not the usual suspects:

Environmental activists like me, lawyers, marine biologists and climatologists have been drawing attention for years to the fate of the high seas. For example, a decade ago I helped to create the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition (DSCC), and more recently I worked with the High Seas Alliance at the Rio+20 Earth Summit of June 2012. All that time (let alone previously in my 25 years in leadership positions within Greenpeace) we’ve done great work, and it’s true the state of the ocean and the rest of the planet would be much worse if we hadn’t taken action. But I think it’s meaningful that people such as Ratan Tata of India, Yoriko Kawaguchi of Japan and Pascal Lamy from France are willing to acknowledge the importance of the issues and lead an initiative to tackle them. These and the rest of the Global Ocean Commissioners are people who’ve had to deal with extremely complex issues throughout their careers, so it will be interesting to see what their collective expertise brings. People such as me who’ve  been “in that tunnel” since unmemorable times should be interested to see if and how the Global Ocean Commissioners  come up with new ideas that can bring a bit of fresh air to the debate. At the time of writing, the Commission hasn’t even been formally launched yet (it will take place at 1830 GMT on Tuesday), but already a glance at Google and Twitter indicates that that people are intrigued.

Independent and relevant:

As former leaders, all the members of the Global Ocean Commission have agreed to join in an independent capacity, regardless of other responsibilities they may hold within their government, parliament, party, organisation or corporation. This is important, because one lesson learned from past commissions and UN high level panels is that it’s important to be clear as to whether participants are there on their own behalf, as truly independent minds, or whether they’re just messengers. But even though many of the Commissioners are described as former, they’re still relevant: they’re people likely to continue to be active and influential in the future, which is important.

Time-bound:

The Global Ocean Commission and its Secretariat, established at Somerville College, University of Oxford, have been set up for a short period of time. The Commission will meet four times between now and March/April 2014 when it is scheduled to issue its final report. In other words it’s a biodegradable commission. Thus, if the recommendations are good, it can empower governments, academics, civil society and private sector organisations to get in motion and come to grips with key high seas governance issues, both existing and emerging. As the Co-chairs are already acknowledging, the Commission will need the input of all these sectors if it is to make balanced, pragmatic recommendations, and the support of all these sectors to turn them into reality.

Right timing:

At the Rio+20 Summit last year, governments already agreed that the session of the UN General Assembly that will begin in September 2014 will consider the issues the Global Ocean Commission is set to address. As a result, the timing of the Commission’s final report is optimum, six months before the UN General Assembly. It can be the curtain-raiser that all important debates need, to help governments get the right focus. So, there’s a good chance that the Global Ocean Commission report doesn’t end up buried under a thick layer of dust.

All the ingredients are there, it seems.

This blogpiece is also available in español, HERE (AQUÍ) on the website of the Spanish news agency EFE.

Poster Child

Mediterranean Bluefin tuna ranchers are believed to be at the origin of the publication by the Spanish newspaper El País two weeks ago of a draft report of the Standing Committee on Research and Statistics (SCRS) of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT). The SCRS report, the tuna ranchers said in a nutshell, shows that environmentalists had it all wrong: there are plenty of Bluefin tunas in the Mediterranean; so many that restrictions ought to be reviewed and fishing quotas increased at ICCAT’s annual meeting next month in Agadir, Morocco.

I’ve been following the work of ICCAT’s SCRS quite closely in the last few weeks, and I was at the experts meeting where the report leaked by the Bluefin tuna industry was drafted at the beginning of September, so maybe I can help throw some light on what’s actually going on.

Until 2009, the 48 member governments of ICCAT used to ignore the advice of their own scientists when setting Bluefin catch limits and quotas for the Eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean Sea. This led to the severe depletion of the species’ Eastern Atlantic stock which spawns in the Mediterranean Sea. That’s why the Mediterranean Bluefin tuna became the poster child of marine biological diversity loss. Bluefin tuna had become in the 1980s a high value commodity worth over one billion dollars annually on the international market, and a large network of tuna ranchers with tentacles in many Mediterranean countries (France, Spain, Libya, Turkey, Croatia, Malta, Tunisia, Greece, etc. and of course with links in Japan and other consumer countries) routinely extracted and towed millions of juveniles and adults from their spawning grounds into large cages to fatten and ship them to Japan and other countries.

As a regional fisheries organization set up to secure “conservation” of the species, ICCAT was put on the spot and – recognizing that the situation was out of control – in 2006 it said it would enact regulations to seek the recovery of the species by 2022. A reporting scheme known as the Bluefin Catch Document System (BCD) was set up by ICCAT after 2007 to track down how many fish are caught, and in 2010 quotas were set to 12,900 metric tons for the Eastern Atlantic (including the Mediterranean). As a result, there’s an overcapacity of the fleet of large purse seiners catching the fish in the Mediterranean spawning grounds; in only two to three weeks they normally fulfill their quotas. The Bluefin tuna purse seine fishing season every year in May looks like the gold rush, and there’s a strong industry lobby in Brussels and elsewhere to increase the catch limits.

It’s true that the SCRS believes that Bluefins in the Mediterranean are likely to be on their way to recovery. But what they’re recommending unanimously now is that the catch restrictions stay where they are – at least for now. Do not increase the quotas is the key message from the governments’ experts.

I’ve read this experts’ final report; in the Executive Summary alone (8 pages) I found the word “uncertainty” mentioned 18 times. We’re talking of very big fish but nevertheless it’s impossible to count them one by one even with spotter planes, photo or satellite tracking, so the experts are working with complex computer models fed with data which include assumptions which policy-makers need to take into consideration. In its conclusions the report says that there’s “at least a 60% chance” that the species is on its way to recovery.  This is why they’re calling for precaution and are asking governments not to increase the quotas, at least until a more complete assessment can be made in 2015. It would be wrong to relax the efforts now, just when they appear to start bearing fruits.

A key issue is whether the industry is actually respecting the catch limits. It’s widely known that the current manual Bluefin Catch Documentation system (BCD) adopted in 2007 is insufficient (there can be mistakes and errors, deliberate or not); in 2010 it was agreed to replace it by an electronic system (EBCD) that would allow ICCAT to track down in real time what’s going on. But this electronic system is not yet in place.

ICCAT has received in the last couple of years at least four studies comparing the reported catch data with international trade records, and there’s always a big difference that remains unexplained. According to these studies, quite a lot more fish is traded than officially caught. At the meeting I went to at the beginning of September, the SCRS formed a small working group to look at these reports in detail, and their recommendation calls for an independent review of the trade data. Under these circumstances, it’s no surprise that the SCRS unanimously believes that there should be no quota increase.

After years of being the poster child of marine biodiversity loss, I really hope that the Mediterranean Bluefin can become the poster child of marine biodiversity recovery. That we can soon say that when we all pull up our sleeves and take environmental issues seriously, we can change the course of History. That’s particularly important because the environment needs victories. But we’re not quite there yet.

This blogpiece is also available in español, HERE (AQUÍ) on the website of the Spanish news agency EFE. And also, en français on WIKIOCEAN.

Software update

As I was flying from Madrid to New York yesterday, I noticed that airline companies need to update their software: there isn't much of that Arctic ice left in summer now. Watch out for big trouble dead ahead.

Fourth of July Quiz

Here's a Fourth of July Quiz for you.

The following international instruments all have something in common. What is it?

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child -- the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea -- the UN Framework Convention on Biological Diversity -- the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control -- the UNEP Basel Convention on the Control of the Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal --- the UNEP Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants -- the Kyoto Protocol to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change -- the Rome Statute of the international Criminal Court -- the UN Convention in the Prohibtion of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on their Destruction -- the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty -- The UN Convention on Cluster Munitions -- [I'll stop here -- this list isn't exhaustive]

We all know that the 4th of July is Independence Day in the USA. I wish they'd make it Interdependence Day.

Lessons from Rio

I have refrained from blogging for three days until today, the final day of the Rio+20 Earth Summit. Not only because I have been (and continue to be) extremely busy with a multitude of tasks here. But also because I wanted to wait for the dust to start settling. There has been a quasi-universal condemnation of the Summit outcome and the way it was conducted by the Brazilian Presidency. What Ban Ki-moon had rightly called a one-time-in-a-generation opportunity has failed us (and him). I understand and share the frustrations -- especially from those who attended such a summit for the first time, and in particular for the youth groups. But life goes on (or -- rather -- Life has to go on).

So, what lessons have we learned, and what are the next steps?

Waste of time?

Now that the conference is almost over, many are asking whether such summits are a waste of time, and whether they are always doomed to failure. This is not new. For example I remember that even after the first Earth Summit in 1992 many commentators from NGOs were complaining that Agenda 21 was too weak, that it would not do the job, that the Rio 92 conventions had loopholes, etc. Yet, nowadays Rio 92 is always described as a milestone by the environmental movement. In Johannesburg ten years ago (Rio+10), frustration reached another level; even the then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan  himself said on the final day that "the era of large summits is over." But when the UN General Assembly decided in December 2009 to organize Rio+20, there was renewed interest and broad participation, even though it is true that many people envisaged that governments in 2012 would not have the ambitions we need.

"Waste of time" are the words that Sarah Palin and her cronies from the Tea Party like to hear. Rio+20 has drawn considerable attention to the need to protect our environment and to build a more equitable and just world, even if it has not delivered. But it is true that in future it's got to happen differently.

Reverse order?

Listening to the litany of speeches by the Heads of State and Government here in the last three days, and hearing all of them say that the environmental crisis is upon us, that we need action and not just words, effective targets and measurable progress are urgent, that we owe it to our children, etc, etc. reminded me that the way these summits are conducted needs a thorough re-think. Until now, the appearance of Heads of State and Government at such summits has taken place at the end, after a lengthy process where civil servants represent their countries (this time it started in New York in January, 2011). Civil servants are hard pressed to reach agreement before their bosses (Heads of State and Government, Ministers...) turn up. The result is a race to the bottom, the search for compromise at all cost, also known as the lowest common denominator which reflected this time in the document called "The future we Want" which oddly everyone says is not the future we need.

So, why not invite next time the Heads of State and Government to speak first? They would share their bold vision ("we need action and not just words, effective targets and measurable progress are urgent, we owe it to our children, etc."). This would empower the negotiators to act more in conformity with what their bosses said, and they would presumably be less inclined to dive into the lowest common denominator pool. That would make a lot of sense; after all aren't the Heads of State and Government elected to lead?

Now What?

It's taking some time to develop strategies to work from the 49 page "Future we Want" document. But already there's a lot to build from in the document. Here are just a few examples:

• Heads of State and Government have given their benediction to the idea that a set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) should be developed and launched before 2015. We'll have to push the envelope to make sure that the SDGs deliver the future we want;
• Heads of State and Government have entrusted the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) to launch a ten-year Action Programme on Sustainable Production and Consumption, something that the two President Bush had fiercely opposed at Rio 92 and Johannesburg 02 respectively. The future will tell if this Action Programme will be significant, but clearly Bush & Bush thought it could be, otherwise they would not have opposed it so fiercefully.
• The section on Oceans and Seas contains important commitments to respect science-based management, eliminate subsidies that contribute to overfishing and fleets overcapacity, to combat illegal fishing, to guarantee access to fishing resources to small-scale artisanal fishers including indigenous peoples; 
• Also on Ocean, we were disappointed that -- due to the opposition of the US and Venezuela (strange bed fellows...), Russia, Canada and Japan -- there was no agreement to launch immediately negotiations of an international instrument for high seas biodiversity conservation (the areas beyond national jurisdiction that represent 45% of the surface of the planet and are subject to Wild West grab), but the importance of this issue is emphasized and the Future we Want includes the consideration of the development of this agreement in two years and a half;
• Governments agree that it is wrong to measure wealth just on the basis of countries' Gross National Products; potentially this could be what the History books our grand-children will read may remember of the Rio+20 Summit.

Because I've been at many summits and international fora, maybe I've got a tough skin and once the initial anger has passed I'm ready to go on. But what's most important is that all the young people who've been here don't get discouraged. They've got to be back the next time!

A metamorphosis takes more time than a revolution. But maybe it will have more lasting effects. 

This blogpiece is also available in español, HERE (AQUÍ) on the website of the Spanish news agency EFE.