In his new role as head of the Global Ocean Commission (GOC), former UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband espoused the need “to sound the alarm about the state of the oceans” and to bridge the gap between expertise in ocean management and politics in a speech delivered to the US-European Sustainable Oceans Summit last week in Portugal.
In an indictment of how fish stocks are managed, Miliband said “they are focused on fishing for specific high value species, not the overall resource, and marked by resource allocation decisions rather than conservation imperatives. Decisions are largely taken by consensus which means that when they are made, they often reflect the lowest common denominator approach.”
According to the GOC “the rules and incentives for exploitation of the high seas are – in the main – too weak to serve the interests of current or future generations.” This has meant that oceans policy and fisheries management has been overly focused on short-term gains which facilitate overexploitation, rather than long-term sustainability.
An example of this is the use of economic incentives such as perverse subsidies which undermine the conservation of marine resources and exemplify poor economic management of marine resources. In his speech, Miliband asked “we are living in an age of austerity, but fishing subsidies are being used to undercut the livelihoods of fishermen. Why?” These subsidies enable bottom trawling to cripple ecosystems and also contribute to overfishing, of which the “up front cost of overfishing on the high seas is currently many tens of billions of dollars.”
The GOC’s formal mandate covers overfishing, habitat and biodiversity protection, monitoring and compliance and governance. They argue that the increasing evidence of ocean degradation merits a higher political priority internationally and recommend that a new international agreement on the conservation of living marine resources on the high seas be developed. Within the next year they will present proposals on reversing ocean degradation and hope to have formed a coalition for change.