With high seas treaty in place, West African countries plan for protected area

With the High Seas Treaty coming into force in January, efforts to establish protected areas in the marine spaces that lie beyond countries’ jurisdiction are gaining momentum — including one off the coast of West Africa.

The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) is taking the lead in designing the proposal that will be up for consideration at the first Conference of Parties for the High Seas Treaty. The meeting is scheduled to take place within a year of the treaty coming into effect.

Covering almost half of the Earth’s surface, the high seas host tremendous levels of biodiversity, much of it underexplored. However, these areas are also difficult to police, making them vulnerable to all sorts of illegal and unregulated activities, including exploitative industrial trawling.

The Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction accord (BBNJ), commonly known as the High Seas Treaty, provides the framework to establish marine protected areas in waters beyond countries’ exclusive economic zones (EEZs). However, the institutions and mechanisms to operationalize the treaty are still being established.

The area under consideration in West Africa includes the convergence zone of the colder Canary and warmer Guinea Currents, characterized by a strong upwelling and nutrient-rich waters. It is considered an ecologically or biologically significant marine area (EBSA) that stretches from Cape Verde and Senegal in the north to Nigeria and São Tomé and Príncipe in the south, according to ECOWAS representatives Mongabay spoke to.

A BBNJ coordination committee consisting of Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Benin, Senegal, Guinea and Guinea Bissau is in charge of this ambitious endeavor, assisted by a mentoring panel and a consortium of scientific experts, with members from each West African country. Nigeria, co-chair of the coordination committee, is leading the proposal development.

Sikeade Egbuwalo, the BBNJ focal point for Nigeria, said the site was selected as it belongs to the most biologically and socioculturally significant marine areas in the world, with exceptional diversity of marine life. “It provides critical ecosystem services to over 300 million people in the coastal West African region,” she said in an email.

According to Hellen Njeri, regional coordinator for Africa of the High Seas Alliance, a partnership of dozens of nongovernmental organizations and the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the area “serves as a vital breeding, spawning and migration site for species such as sea turtles and manatees.” The alliance helped bring the BBNJ to life.

Some of the species found here are threatened, including the sawback angelshark (Squatina aculeata), the hawksbill turtle (Eretmochelys imbricata) and the sei whale (Balaenoptera borealis).

There are multiple threats to this marine ecosystem, from warming surface waters due to climate change to pollution.

Oil and gas exploration activities are also accelerating in West Africa, according to Papa Diouf, a marine biologist and member of the expert panel advising on the MPA proposal. Egbuwalo drew attention to the emerging threat from deep-sea mining.

The region already records some of the world’s highest rates of illegal, unregulated and underreported (IUU) fishing.

Researchers have found that Mauritania, Senegal, The Gambia, Guinea Bissau, Guinea and Sierra Leone lose billions of dollars per year due to the illegal operations of foreign fleets in their waters.

With severe challenges to governing waters that are under countries’ jurisdiction, a key question in designing a High Seas MPA is: How will activities in a zone beyond the EEZs be monitored and rules enforced?

“In West Africa, it will not be very easy to manage things, because we have a lot of IUU and we don’t have the capacity to really monitor, control and surveille,” Diouf told Mongbay in a phone interview.

Egbuwalo told Mongabay that it’s paramount that compliance strategies include effective monitoring, control and surveillance of human activities, calling it “a key enabling condition to avoid the establishment of a ‘paper park.’”

Monitoring and enforcing the protected area are as much an issue as finding funding to turn the idea into reality. And the solution won’t be regional, experts told Mongabay.

Diouf made it clear that the solution is not the responsibility of West African countries alone and lies in collaboration between different bodies. Raising regional awareness will, however, be important, he said, including “sensitizing governments that the high seas are of critical importance to the people living in coastal nations.”

While the proposal for the High Seas MPA is country-led, ECOWAS representatives agree that the actual implementation, including its monitoring and enforcement, and making necessary resources available will require international support.

“Addressing disparities in [monitoring, control and surveillance] capacities among States will require promoting access to financial resources and capacity-building initiatives,” Egbuwalo said, adding that the strategy for this MPA proposal includes the use of satellite data, artificial intelligence, cloud computing and big data solutions.

While it is known that IUU activities are rampant, the lack of adequate data in the oceans beyond EEZs obscures the real scope of unlawful activities.

In a statement released during a recently launched campaign in West Africa, Greenpeace said this lack of data adds “urgency of the call for a Marine Protected Area that would kick out industrial fishing vessels to allow these fish stocks to recover.”

Right now, besides the West African efforts, two other regions in the world are advancing on developing proposals for high seas MPAs. In Latin America, Chile is pushing to designate the Salas y Gómez and Nazca, underwater mountain chains that stretch for almost 3,000 kilometers (1,860 miles) off the coasts of Chile and Peru; and north of Madagascar, the Saya de Malha, located within the joint management area of the Seychelles and Mauritius.

Before any high seas MPA can formally be established under the BBNJ treaty, a scientific and technical body must be elected with the authority to assess proposals and issue recommendations.

The coordination committee is eager to submit the MPA proposal “at the earliest opportunity,” Egbuwalo said.

The next steps for the ECOWAS proposal include identifying relevant regional scientific experts, institutions and stakeholders and assessing capacity gaps and developing a work plan, said Njeri, adding that they are targeting a draft proposal for December.

Banner image: Sei whale (Balaenoptera borealis) mother and calf as seen from the air. Image by Christin Khan NOAA/NEFSC via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

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