Gulls flock in the Pacific Ocean. Credit: Ami Vitale.
The Washington Post today has an interesting story (registration required) about how the Earth’s oceans are getting crowded with competition for use — and how more and more ocean experts are pushing ocean zoning as the answer.
But even though such zoning (which experts call “marine spatial planning”) has high-level support within the Obama administration, it’s anything but easy.
Overlaying the maps of the many uses of the sea in any given area — uses ranging from fishing to fossil fuel extraction to recreation to sand mining and wind farms — “quickly becomes a train wreck,” according to Duke University ecologist Larry Crowder.
Still, Europe and Australia have been doing integrated ocean planning and zoning for a while. And scientists at The Nature Conservancy say the risks of not making a sea change in the way we do ocean management outweigh the inherent conflicts of trying to balance dozens of competing resource demands. As Conservancy scientists Lynne Hale, Mike Beck and Scott Smith wrote in March on nature.org:
In some U.S. states, one agency manages the habitats on the bottom of the sea, a separate agency manages the water above it, and a third manages the gas and minerals beneath the bottom. Even conservation organizations that advocate protection don’t always take into account fully the way people — often the poorest and most marginalized — depend on ocean resources for their livelihood.
Hale, Beck and Scott argue that we can take lessons learned in using zoning for terrestrial conservation — like transparency and interactive web-based maps — and apply them to seascape management practices. The Conservancy is already advising countries on how to make these knowledge transfers — for instance, helping the Venezuelan national energy corporation to preserve critical reef areas in the waters of that country while allowing for energy extraction.
But ocean zoning needs to be adopted widely if it’s going to work, say Hale, Beck and Smith. Individual efforts that don’t affect business as usual at the seascape level, they add, will just mean further decline of our marine resources.
Written by Robert Lalasz, http://blog.nature.org/2009/05/a-sea-change-for-ocean-management/
