Call to protect marine resources

Christopher Serju, Gleaner Writer

Regional states need to recognise the value of marine resources and move decisively to protect them, especially since our actions today could ultimately affect our long-term collective economic future. That was the challenge issued by Nelson Andrade Colmenares, coordinator of the United Nations Environment Programme's regional coordinating unit on Wednesday when Jamaica joined the world in observing World Oceans Day.

"Ours is an ocean planet: 70 per cent of it is covered by the seas, and it is in them that all life originated. Yet we have done far less to protect the marine environment than the much smaller part of the planet that is dry land. While almost 13 per cent of the Earth's land surface is covered by officially designated protected areas, less than 0.6 per cent of the oceans are similarly safeguarded, even on paper," Colmenares charged in his official message.

He called for more regional cooperation to address the growing impact of land-based pollution, noting that it was not constrained by geopolitical boundaries and affects countries in different ways, making regional cooperation and maximum flexibility most important. Ongoing and emerging issues, such as biodiversity degradation, overfishing, eutrophication, ocean acidification and sea-level rise are global, with universal impact, and need to be addressed.

With less than five per cent of the ocean floor ever been seen even once, let alone explored or mapped, what we do know for certain is that the ocean is vital to life on Earth, and we need to take better care of the natural systems that ultimately take care of us, Colmenares argued.

conservation commitments

To this end, the United Nations Environment Programme, through its Caribbean Environment Pro-gramme's Specially Protected Areas and Wildlife Programme (SPAW), has undertaken a number of initiatives to help Caribbean countries meet marine-conservation commitments by strengthening the management of marine-protected areas through technical assistance and capacity building. Promoting species conservation, SPAW provides on-the-ground expertise to address emerging threats such as marine-invasive species (for example the lionfish), and technical support for mapping the distribution and habitats of threatened and endangered species such as marine mammals.

Other initiatives include the Caribbean Regional Fund for Wastewater Management, a four-year project that will focus on piloting revolving financing mechanisms and related wastewater-management reforms in the wider Caribbean region. Another project in development will focus on improved management of agrochemicals life cycles in the Caribbean and Central American regions, as a follow-up to the very successful GEF project on reducing pesticide run-off to the Caribbean Sea.

Meanwhile, Cabinet last month gave approval for Jamaica to ratify the UNESCO Convention on the Protection of Underwater Cultural Heritage. The convention requires states to preserve underwater cultural heritage, preferably in its original place and encourages cooperation among states through training, education, and research to protect this heritage, ensuring that it is not exploited.

Minister of Youth, Sports and Culture, Olivia Grange, has said that the Cabinet considered several matters in giving its assent to ratification, including the value of the underwater cultural heritage to the people of Jamaica, the implications for offshore drilling, and the limitations and implications with regard to commercial exploitation.

"We know that this heritage is of great value to the people of Jamaica and to the world, and we considered carefully how we were going to preserve and protect it. We considered several scenarios because we want to ensure that we have a clear plan for what happens if, for example, any of this heritage were discovered during the ongoing oil and gas explorations. We also want to balance the need to protect this heritage against the need to allow access to natural resources," she explained.