March 18, 2013 — U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry called for establishing the world’s largest protected marine area in Antarctica and urged stronger global safeguards for oceans.
Kerry and New Zealand’s ambassador to the U.S., Michael Moore, announced yesterday a joint New Zealand-U.S. proposal to establish a Marine Protected Area, or MPA, in the Ross Sea, a 1.9 million-square-mile area off the Antarctic coast.
Adelie penguins running along the ice edge in McMurdo Sound, Antarctica. The celebrated penguin colony is facing extinction due to a couple of massive icebergs which have since 2000 blocked the sea ice around Ross Island and McMurdo Sound, preventing the Adelie penguins of Cape Royds from having direct access to the sea and food. Photographer: Josh Landis/AFP via Getty Images
“When it comes to the Ross Sea and Antarctica, we’re not going to wait for a crisis to take action,” Kerry said in Washington at a screening of “The Last Ocean,” a documentary by New Zealand filmmaker Peter Young.
Preserving the world’s oceans “is not just an environmental issue, it’s a security issue,” Kerry said. “The entire system is interdependent and we toy with that at our peril.”
The U.S., the European Union and 23 other countries are set to decide in July whether to approve permanent protections for the Ross Sea and for a second area in East Antarctica, or to allow large-scale industrial fishing to continue.
An attempt to reach agreement on establishing a protected area in the Ross Sea stalled in November at a meeting of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, a panel established by international convention in 1982. While some areas of the Ross Sea would be protected under the joint U.S.-New Zealand proposal, the plan would still allow fishing in the most productive areas, said Young, who called that “a disappointment.”
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