Sea Control - Sea Control 246 - Beyond Static Spatial Management with Dr. Guillermo Ortuño Crespo and Andrea Galassi

Episode Date: May 2, 2021

Links1. "Beyond static spatial management: Scientific and legal considerations for dynamic management in the high seas," by Guillermo Ortuño Crespo et al, Marine Policy, Vol. 122, December 2020.2. "An ocean of surprises - Trends in human use, unexpected dynamics and governance and challenges in areas beyond national jurisdiction," by Andrew Merrie et al, Global Environmental Change, Vol 27, July 2014.

Hey folks, Jared here. I've talked about our feed. I'm going to keep talking about the feed. There's two existing Sea Control feeds out there. Make sure you're on the right one. The one that we're using is labeled simply Sea Control and includes the phrase Simsex Flagship Podcast in its description. So Sea Control, Simsex Flagship Podcast, that's where you want to be. Please rate and review the new feed as well. In this episode, my guests are Dr. Guillermo Ortonio Crespo and Andrea Galassi, and we have a very wonky policy discussion of fisheries management. So we're talking the history of the law of the sea,

difficulties of working with decades-old policy documents in an organization that's significantly more industrialized than when it was originally regulated, and some potential solutions for the future. This episode was edited and produced by Marie Williams. Please check out everything going on over at the main website, simsec.org. We've just released our next call for submissions for Project Trident. If you're interested in contributing to the discussion on the law of naval warfare, submissions are due May 17th. For more information, check out our website, simsec.org. Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec Podcast Network, The Bilge Pumps. You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of Iron Brew bottles

wherever you download your podcasts. On that note, I'll turn it over to Kimbersman. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha shipmates and welcome back aboard Sea Control. Today we are entrenched firmly in the policy world. We will be discussing the paper, Beyond Static Spatial Management, Scientific and Legal Considerations for Dynamic Management in the High Seas. One of its many authors, Dr. Guillermo Ortuño Crespo. Also joining us is Andrea Galassi, a legal advisor on international law of the sea. So Guillermo, Andrea, thank you very much for agreeing to come on today. Guillermo, I'd like to start by asking you to introduce yourself to our listeners.

Hi, everyone, and thank you very much for having me today, Jared. So my name is Guillermo Orteño-Grespo. I'm a postdoctoral researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Center in Sweden, where my work primarily focuses on high seas fisheries management and corporate sustainability. I have a background in marine science and recently completed my PhD. Thank you very much for joining us, Guillermo. And then, Andrea, would you mind telling the audience a little bit about your background? Sure. Well, thank you very much, first of all, for having me here. It's a pleasure to share with Guillermo and with you, Jer, this conversation. I was born in Argentina and I'm an international environmental lawyer with a specialization in

law of the sea, marine policy and ocean governance for more than 12 years. I'm a recently LLM graduate from the Global Environmental Law Specialization Program from Elizabeth High School of Law at Pace University, and I previously had studies in international relations with a major in conflict resolution and international cooperation at Universidad de El Salvador in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Previously, I have a JD. It was always my pleasure to research work in these matters of law of the sea. Thank you very much, Andrea. Just a reminder for the listeners as well, all opinions are our own and not representative of any institution with which we may be otherwise associated. So Andrea, I'm going to come right back to you for our first question and ask what

is meant by spatial management? So marine spatial planning is a public process of analyzing and allocating the spatial and temporal distribution of human activities in marine areas to achieve ecological, economic, and social objectives that usually have been specified through a political process. According to the UNESCO, we can find several characteristics of marine spatial planning that englobe ecosystem-based, area-based, integrated, adaptive strategy and participatory implementation. To be clear, marine spatial planning is not an end in itself,

but it's a tool that was created to establish more rational use of marine space and interactions among these use And its major objective is to balance demands for development with the need of protecting the environment and to deliver social and economic outcomes and resilience in an open and planned way. What are area-based management tools? Area-based management tools are measures that are adopted, but defining a competent international organization to achieve biodiversity conservation objectives for a specific area. We can mention some examples of this regarding the International Maritime Organization, particularly in some sensitive seas areas. For example, the Marple special areas, the RFOMO temporal spatial closest areas, those are always related to the most vulnerable ecosystems because, as I always say, these are particular. The major objective is to establish a balance between the use of the oceans by humans and also with a particular approach to management of ecosystem there in those areas.

Guillermo, I'm going to turn to you now. So much of the focus has been on improving fishing equipment, which you covered in the paper. for example the shape and the types of nets to reduce bycatch and i guess we should define bycatch for the listener as well as my understanding from context is it's just you're targeting a certain species that you're trying to catch and bycatch your species that you pick up incidentally is that accurate that's accurate i think bycatch is is one of those very uh flexible terms i mean the the same species but at an earlier age class might be bycatch. One species might be target during one time of the year and later it becomes

bycatch. So for the most part, it is those organisms which you are not currently targeting and accidentally engage with and catch. Thank you. So why do you think that the focus has been on improving the equipment rather than on improving regulation? I think that's a very good question. And I think the answer in part depends on if we're looking at what happens within national jurisdiction and what happens in areas beyond national jurisdiction. A coastal or an island nation might be able to implement both gear restrictions and area-based management tools, but in international waters, we're essentially depending on the compliance of fishing nations and pretty much coming up to consensus of what areas have to be closed. It's a very politicized

decision which um our famosa are struggling to to meet essentially um it's i think it's easier to change how you fish but not where you fish thank you uh andrea the tool that i'm most familiar with are mpas or marine protected areas he provides some examples of existing mpas and then the effects that they've had of course so um in october 2016 the commission for the conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, establishing the Ross Sea Region Marine Protected Area. This covers an area larger, we can imagine the size of this, that is about Mexico and includes the area under the Ross Ice Shelf

that is the world's largest marine protected area in the world. This represents a major advancement in fulfilling the commitment to create a network marine protected area in the southern ocean and this will protect which scientists have described in as the least altered marine ecosystem on earth and this is very very very related with all uh the the latest climate change observations um and how the alteration that humans produce in the environment could affect all the world. It's not only in one region concentrated, but it's in all the world. So it's a very, very important research and monitoring plan at the Roe C.

And another example, as I'm from Argentina, that I wanted to mention here is that two years later than that, the Roe, in 2018, the argentine congress uh pays a bill that established uh two new marine protected areas in argentina one is called jaganes that is at the south of tierra del fuego and the other one is in amuncura woodwood bank in the south atlantic and the not important thing is that they are not only protecting fishes um and ecosystem by by itself but also marine mammals that are under threatened by illegal fishing, and that is very, very related with the ecosystems management there in the Southern Ocean.

So those are clearly examples of how marine protected areas are working, especially regarding the Southern Ocean and Antarctic continent and areas. Thanks. And Guillermo, you had something to add on this? Yeah. So I think it's great that Andrea provided both an example within national jurisdiction and beyond national jurisdiction. Because right now, even though the international community has established MPA targets at a global scale, we currently lack a comprehensive mechanism for establishing protected areas in international waters, which some of the listeners might know it's an area that covers approximately half of our planet so in part the reason why it is so hard to establish area-based management tools in

international waters whether it's fishing closures or marine protected areas has to do with the consensus-based decision but also because we're missing some governance frameworks in international waters and the United Nations is currently negotiating a treaty which will hopefully leaders in that direction. But right now, we have just a small handful of examples, the Ross Sea being one of them, of MPAs in the high seas because of this issue. Thanks, Andrea. What has been the response of local fishing industries in areas where the MPAs have been established? In the case of the Argentina MPAs, commercial fishing is an important revenue source for the country and the industry interests are

very strong but the government as itself is committed to protecting at least 10 percent of its territorial waters by 2020 so it's something that we were dealing with that as as a country And it's very difficult regarding your question to conceive the economic interest, the fisheries interest, and also the fishing industry that can be very challenging. And I celebrate the latest launch of excellent tools, for example, that one that is provided by Global Fishing Watch, that is a tremendous effort in order to compile with the marine protected objectives of many South American countries. For example, it is the case of Peru, Chile, as well, that are working with Global Fishing Watch right now. And I think that that would be an important part of the negotiations among the different interested parties, including the local fishers. Guillermo, you point out that all the existing MPAs are static in time and space. I understand being static in space, but what do you mean by static in time?

The majority of the protected areas don't have an intra-annual or a seasonal component, which makes sense. Marine protected areas are normally static both in space and in time in that they are permanent and effective throughout the entire year. I think the question of temporal dynamism for MPAs has to do more with larger temporal scales, so multi-annual or multi-decadal, because climate change will inevitably affect the biodiversity contained within those more static habitats. The mangroves, the coral reefs will shift the distribution at those scales. But then the question of temporal resolution and dynamism or fisheries closures or closures by the International Maritime Organization, that's when other sort of shorter time scales come into play. And those distinctions are what we explore in this manuscript. Thanks. So I'm going to read a quote from the paper and then ask you to quantify this statement.

And the quote is, the scale of today's human activities and impacts in the marine realm have grown massively since UNCLOS was drafted. How would you calculate that? So if we look at a graph of fishing effort intensity or landings over the last 70 years, and a good paper for that is one published by my colleague Andrew Mary in 2014, called An Ocean of Surprises. And essentially, we see that we've become a more oceanic species over the last 70 years. Fishing effort has increased exponentially. The number of fishing countries in the high seas has grown from around 40 to 120. We're fishing deeper and further from shore than ever before. And if you look at other sectors, such as maritime shipping or deep sea mining claims,

since we haven't really started the operational side, Those have also grown pretty fast, and the prospects for some of these industries is to keep increasing. I recently read an estimate that freight demand is predicted to triple by 2050. And in the case of capture fisheries, even though these stabilized in the 90s, so after the law of the sea was signed, we're still catching increasing numbers of large pelagic species in every ocean basin. so I the issue with the law of the sea as it was drafted is that it was designed to respond to the human activities in the open ocean during the 70s and 80s and it it was really hard for decision makers back then to foresee the expansion of some of these sectors the high seas fishing industry

was big back then but I don't think they they ever thought that we'd be fishing every corner of international waters like like we're doing today thanks and for the listeners uh i i just dropped off real quick there to go google that uh the andrew mary doc document that you uh mentioned there so an ocean of surprises we'll link that in the show notes as well so the listeners can go back and find that um kimmer you also use the phrase a fragmented patchwork of sectoral management bodies in the areas beyond national jurisdiction. Can you describe who manages the areas beyond national jurisdiction, how those entities are organized? Sure. So I think as humans started venturing further and deeper offshore and

search for fish or oil and gas or deep sea minerals, we begun establishing instruments to monitor those sectoral activities. Some of them are global, like the International Seabed Authority or the International Maritime Organization. Some are regional, as is the case of all regional fisheries management organizations. And the issue is that we've been establishing these progressively over the last few decades and have not always made sure that these instruments talk to one another. That is also part of the reason why establishing cross-sectoral management measures, such as marine protected areas, which can affect multiple sector simultaneously that has been a huge challenge because these bodies even if they're

in the same ocean basin the mechanisms for data sharing and agreeing on shared quotas is not really there and so some progress has been made but this sort of patchwork of regional and global sectoral bodies that we've created is still quite incomplete I mean we still have large areas of the global ocean, such as the South West Atlantic, which are lacking in non-tunar FMO. So essentially entire pretty much bioregions which don't have a management body in 2021. So we have to make sure that we fill those gaps

and help these organizations talk to one another. Well, this is then I think a natural place to transition into the solutions portion of the paper. What's the Intergovernmental Conference doing to address this? The Intergovernmental Conference, or IGC, is essentially an official process approved by the UN General Assembly in 2017 to negotiate a new treaty for the high seas. Essentially, I think it is the third pretty much annex of the Law of the Sea Convention. And what this treaty seeks to do after 15 or so years of conversation is provide a legal framework to protect and sustainably manage biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction. Like I said in the previous answer, we have established this sectoral framework that has some legal competence over some areas,

but we lack a mechanism to monitor and manage all of the known biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction over time and across stressors. So these negotiations are currently and unfortunately on pause due to the COVID-19 pandemic. There were four intergovernmental conference sort of rounds of negotiations scheduled between 2018 and 2020. And we made it as far as the third round, and then COVID hit, and we're hoping to resume the negotiations in 2021. But essentially, the summary of the way they're structured is countries that try to reach consensus on how to establish area-based management tools, how to harvest marine genetic resources and share their benefits, how to conduct environmental impact assessments in areas beyond national

jurisdiction and how to build capacity and share technology. So that's pretty much the structure. And hopefully in 2021 or maybe 2022, the latest, we will have a new treaty. Thanks. And Andrea, you had something to add here? Yes. In addition to all that Guillermo pointed out about the BB&J negotiations, I think that it's important to highlight the necessity and the urgency

of reaching an agreement in this treaty because we have to take into consideration that the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, as it's called, the Constitution of the Ocean, was established in the 1970s, where most of the development and even the concept of environmental management tools that we are discussing right now, marine and spatial planning, were not developed,

were not talked about. And even as a lawyer, I can say that the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea is like the agreements of the agreements and the treaties of the treaties. And it contains legally an important discussion and important concepts. Actually, as I work for the Argentine Continental Shelf, the office of the Continental Shelf,

we made the limitation of the Argentine Continental Shelf Antarctica with regards to the Antarctic Treaty, of course. but the UN Convention of Law needs an urgent addition of the BB&J Treaty regarding these tools

and I think it is very important all the contributions from scientists, lawyers international negotiators has to do with this so this is our next I mean an urgent

task to do as humans, as society, as also as professionals involved in marine governance as well. Thanks. So, Guillermo, I'm going to come back to you then. You're proposing a shift from the static measures that we had talked about previously to dynamic area-based management tools. What do you mean when you reference a dynamic area-based management tool and why haven't they been used up to this point? That's a really good question. I guess what we are suggesting in our manuscript, at least in the context of the BB&J negotiations, is to think beyond static spatial management, which I think is what negotiators, they only refer to marine protected areas in the context of ABMTs, which like Andrea explained earlier, it is a spectrum of

of tools from marine spatial planning to fisheries closures to marine MPAs. And at the end of the day, we have to make sure that the tools that we use for sustainable management of human activities, that the resolution ecologically, temporally and spatially is fit for purpose. If you are trying to reduce an impact on a very highly mobile species, establishing a static two-dimensional closure, essentially a box on a map is not going to do a trick. And so we have to sort of work with negotiators who are primarily lawyers, not exclusively, but primarily, to pretty much get across that the open ocean is the most dynamic part of our planet. And as oceanographic conditions change, biodiversity is likely to shift. And that

could be in quite predictable ways through seasonal migrations that we were now better understanding with with new technologies or it can be in fairly unpredictable ways like we saw in the northeast pacific with the so-called blob where it was a inter-annual sort of process that that put a lot of sort of pressure on marine ecosystems in that region and so any area-based management tool in the northeast pacific during this time period may have been made redundant so Essentially, we're encouraging negotiators to consider a broader spectrum of tools, some static, some dynamic, but essentially that are capable of responding to changes in the distribution of biodiversity, which they're trying to protect. Otherwise, we run the risk of fighting really hard to establish area-based management tools, which are not fit for purpose, either because of seasonal processes or due to climate change. Sorry, can you explain for the listeners a little bit more about the phenomenon that you're referencing in the Northeast Pacific?

I think you said the blob. That's the first time I've heard of that. So I just want to go in a little bit deeper into detail on that. Certainly. I'm by no means an expert, but if I'm not mistaken, the blob is part of a cyclical process in the North Pacific known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. And so each ocean basin has one or several of these multi-annual sort of oscillatory cycles. The most famous one might be El Nino Southern Oscillation, which affects ocean productivity of the coast of Peru, but might also affect rainfall in the Amazon. So these are processes which unfold at regional scales. and the blob or sort of an extreme event of the pacific dedicated oscillation uh pretty much um increased the the temperatures of the north pacific uh dramatically during a one to two year period um so it is part of a of a normal cyclical process in the region uh though that region gets

warmer and then gets cooler every every few years but this particular event was um was very intense And it led to deoxygenation and fish stocks sort of dying out pretty much in the region. So as we try to create area-based management tools, there are predictable cyclical events. But some sometimes have these sort of spikes that lead to unintended consequences. How do you think that the dynamic ABMTs will be more effective? so um well there is some published evidence there aren't that many examples of dynamic area-based management tools to be honest but those which are out there show that we can meet our conservation uh outcomes by essentially closing smaller areas of of the ocean um but

just shifting those areas around so i think dynamic ocean uh management which is sort of the field of thought that thinks through this is trying to optimize sort of conservation and human use by predicting where animals are most likely to be. And if they're of conservation concern, focusing area-based management tools to those sort of smaller areas and just making sure that the remaining, let's say in this case, fishing grounds remain open. So as long as we have enough data to feed into these models, I think we can fairly accurately predict where where some animals will be in higher abundances and the the current alternative to a bycatch problem is to close a much larger area for much longer periods of time so essentially what we're

trying to do is become more efficient and smarter when designing abmts because the other um the other way it's it's a bit more brute um there is an expression in spanish which would translate to uh you're currently killing flies with a cannonball and that's what we're doing we're not using tools at the appropriate resolution. They're also suggesting several different types of dynamic ABMT divided temporally. So can you explain the different elements of your proposal? Sure. So in our manuscript, we try to identify four main temporal scales at which we believe dynamic area-based management tools should be considered, particularly in the context of these BB&J negotiations. And these are sort of contemporaneous scale from several days to several

weeks, intra-annual, so months to seasons. These are fairly cyclical, so your summer and your winters. Inter-annual, so across multiple years. And this one is typically associated with these climatic oscillatory processes that we were just discussing. And so those are a little bit harder to predict but definitely play a big role in shaping how animals move in the ocean and then finally multi-decadal which is essentially climate change so even if you have a fairly static system or species of interest like a coral reef or kelp forest these are likely to shift at these multi-decadal scales so how can we ensure that any area-based management tool that we establish even if it's what looks like a static MPA, has the ability to adapt and evolve over time at these sort of longer timescales.

So then one final question for you, Guillermo, is I know we're running out of time. And Andre, you may have some thoughts on this as well, given your chosen field. But Guillermo, how would you need to change international regulatory framework to accomplish what you're suggesting? i don't know how to do it uh from a governance standpoint um but but maybe just making sure that the appropriate language is in the in the treaty as we move forward and then it might be up to the conference of the party so the the implementing body of this treaty to operationalize it but but just like perhaps just as the wearing my scientist hat acknowledging that that biodiversity moves over time and that if we're having a meaningful conversation about area-based

management tools, that dynamism has to be reflected in legal terms. But that's why we partner up with legal experts in this manuscript. It was a very neat science sort of legal partnership because it is up to experts like Andrea and others to decide what that tech should look like. So I'll pass the ball to Andrea. Well, actually, to synergize what I think is, as a lawyer, we study in law school. that's when I when I fall in love

of love the sea the Harvey Pardo that was Harvey Pardo

was a diplomat that is known as the father

of the international convention on the love the sea and one of

the most interesting things about this is that

he I pointed out the importance of the seabed as the common heritage of mankind. That was a very interesting concept that was only worldwide known by that time in the 1970s. So my thought about all this of BB&J negotiations and the BB&J treaty, the ISIS treaty to be specific, is that we need from another Arbitrario in that sense that can have, in Spanish we say, that can have the muñeca or the hand to manage both from the legal, both from the diplomat, both from the negotiator point of view, how can incorporate, as Guillermo mentioned, the definition, the conceptualization of what we want, because as lawyers, we have to see in writing the specific definition of the terms

and what it involves from a legal consequence point of view. And of course, as this is an international negotiation, it has different interests, has different parties, but we have to learn and we have to work, especially in how to uh promote all these different interests uh towards uh a common objective that is the protection of the high seas and the restores for all the humanity because it doesn't belong to one state it doesn't belong to one government it belongs to all of us and uh in order to honor that um um approach of the what it means to be sustainable for for sustainable

generation for for for our um children for our nice for our future we need to start um it's it's it's very urgent to to compile with all these objectives to a common to all this interest to a common objective. So I think that would be my final thought regarding this. And we have to work hard because all this interdisciplinary, as Guillermo was pointing out during our conversation, that lawyers need to understand the terms and science need to also know how to manage to provide this term to lawyers, and it's a very important feedback and a very important word that involves all parties in the same level. So we have to be very clear from that point of view that we all have to work together toward this ISIS treatment treaty.

Well, thank you very much. For the listeners, if that's the first time you're hearing the name, Dr. Arvid Pardo. It's the same for me, and I've looked up a few of his works just as we're having this conversation here. We'll post those as links as well, so you can see some of his writings on UNCLOS and Law of the Sea. That is all the time that we have for today, and I would like to thank my guests, Andrea Galassi and Guillermo Otunio Crespo. Andrea, where can we find you online, and what are you working on next? Okay, so right now, I'm a legal advisor for international law of the sea at ASCOMARE. That is a consultancy from Italy. We work in international law of the sea, so to say, from the human point of view as well. That is

an area that I'm very interested in working as well. And I'm also part of the Wilson Center as part of the Argentine project, the Latin American program. And I'm also working for the IUCN as an independent member for the Ocean Coast and Coral Reef Specialty Group. And I have other collaborations with different institutions and think tanks. And you can find me on my Twitter. that is Galassi that is my last name tweets and and also in LinkedIn by my name Andrea Galassi. Thank you very much and Guillermo where can we find you and what's your next project?

I'm going to be here at the Stockholm Resilience Center for another 18 months hopefully hopefully longer I'm glad to be back in Europe and in terms of next projects I have several parallel projects sort of slowly moving forward, some collaborations with regional fisheries management organizations to explore the establishment of area-based management tools within their convention areas. I'm also a new member of an initiative called Seafood Business for Ocean Stewardship, or CBOS, where essentially we work with the 10 largest or 10 of the largest seafood companies in the world to try to help them change their practices and become more sustainable. So ultimately, I think I'm very passionate about any project that brings the best available science

to decision makers, whether that is the BB&J negotiations, hopefully next August in New York to meetings with industry. So a little bit scattered, but based in Stockholm. Well, thank you both again for joining us. And to the listeners, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time.

© transcript Emily Beynon © BF-WATCH TV 2021