New details of the Biden administration’s signature conservation effort, released this month amid a flurry of environmental announcements, have alarmed some scientists who study marine protected areas because the plan would count certain commercial fishing grounds as protected.
The decision could have ripple effects around the world as nations seek to meet a broader global commitment to protect 30% of the entire planet’s land, inland waters and seas. This effort has been lauded as historic, but the critical question of what exactly counts as preserved is still being decided.
This early response from the Biden administration is concerning because high-impact commercial fishing is incompatible with the goals of the effort, researchers say.
Sign up for The Morning newsletter from The New York Times
“There’s just a cognitive dissonance here when we say that these areas that are supposedly geared towards biodiversity conservation should also do double duty for fisheries, especially when we say they need to have highly effective tools for large-scale commercial use,” Kirsten Grorud-Colvert said. A marine biologist at Oregon State University who led a group of scientists who published a guide to assessing marine protected areas in 2021.
The debate comes amid a global biodiversity crisis that is accelerating extinctions and eroding ecosystems, according to a landmark intergovernmental assessment. As the natural world deteriorates, its ability to provide people with basic needs such as food and clean water diminishes. According to the evaluation, it was revealed that the main reason for the decrease in biodiversity in the oceans was overfishing. Climate change is an additional and worsening threat.
Fish is an important food source for billions of people around the world. Research shows that effective protection of key areas is an important means of keeping stocks healthy as well as protecting other ocean life.
Nations are watching to see how the United States implements protection measures.
America’s approach is specific because the broader plan falls under the United Nations biodiversity treaty, which the United States has never ratified. The efforts in the United States are being conducted under a 2021 executive order. President Joe Biden.
Still, the United States, a powerful donor country, wields considerable influence on the sidelines of UN talks. Both the American and international efforts are known as 30×30.
On April 19, federal officials launched a new website informing the public about the 30×30 effort. While they did not specify how much land is currently protected (beyond the approximately 13% of permanently protected federal lands), they did note that they need to better understand what is happening at the state, tribal and private levels. But they did release a figure for the ocean: About a third of U.S. marine areas are currently protected, the website said.
The problem, according to scientists, is how the Biden administration reached this figure.
Everyone seems to agree that highly protected areas classified as national marine monuments should be considered protected, and so they have: four areas in the Pacific around Hawaii, Guam, and American Samoa that were established and expanded between 2006 and 2016; and an area to the Atlantic southeast of Cape Cod, designated in 2016. A large area of the Arctic where commercial fishing is prohibited was also included in a broad agreement.
But Lance Morgan, a marine biologist and president of the Marine Conservation Institute, a nonprofit group that creates global maps of the ocean’s protected areas, said other places on the list should not be counted unless protections are tightened.
For example, 15 National Marine Sanctuaries are included. Although these areas typically restrict activities such as oil and gas drilling, they do not require reductions in commercial fishing quotas. High-impact fishing techniques such as bottom trawling, which damage seafloor habitat and catch large quantities of fish, are banned in some protected areas but allowed in others.
The list also includes “deep-sea coral protected areas,” which ban seabed fishing such as bottom trawling, but not some other commercial fishing methods.
“Much more effort must be devoted to improving the National Marine Sanctuary program and ensuring that new areas created provide conservation benefits and prohibit commercial fishing methods such as bottom trawling and longlining,” Morgan said.
Senior officials in the Biden administration emphasized that ocean studies below 30×30 are not finished yet. For example, very little of the protected marine area is close to the continental United States, and one of the administration’s priorities is to add new locations there to make the effort more geographically representative.
But they defended the decision to include areas that allow commercial fishing. They pointed out that despite the high-impact equipment, national marine sanctuaries have long been recognized as protected areas by the United Nations. More generally, they said the administration is considering various approaches to defining what counts.
For example, an atlas of protected marine protected areas by Morgan’s group states that 25% of American waters would be protected, while the U.S. Fisheries Management Councils put that figure at more than 72%. Administration officials said this number reflects the important conservation work done by various institutions and stakeholders.
“There are very highly regulated fisheries in the United States,” said Matt Lee-Ashley, chief of staff at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, who helped coordinate the 30×30 study. “And so our local definition of conservation may be slightly different, and other countries’ definitions may be slightly different as well.”
Although the United States has not ratified the biodiversity treaty, it will still submit a conservation total to count towards the global 30×30 commitment. Officials said they were still weighing which areas to surrender.
In a statement, representatives of the Fishery Management Councils praised the inclusion of commercial fishing grounds, noting that they are managed under “very stringent sustainability and conservation standards.”
But Enric Sala, a marine biologist who studies and advocates for marine protected areas, said sustainably managed commercial fisheries should also exist in the rest of the ocean. He said allowing commercial fishing in protected areas below 30×30 was “padding the numbers”.
“People admire the United States,” said Sala, who is originally from Spain. “This sends a really bad signal.”
c.2024 New York Times Corporation