Mobile protected areas for biodiversity on the high seas
Protecting mobile marine species and habitats under climate change will require innovative and dynamic tools
Abstract
A new agreement is being negotiated under the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) to provide legally binding mechanisms to protect the marine environment and to conserve and ensure the sustainable use of marine biodiversity on the high seas (international waters in areas beyond national jurisdiction) (1). One of the suggested objectives in the current draft text is to “apply an approach that builds ecosystem resilience to the adverse effects of climate change” when applying area-based management tools (ABMTs), including marine protected areas (MPAs). Yet even though climate change is resulting in shifts in species' ranges (2) and in the behavior of the human users of mobile, commercially valuable species (3), protection of highly mobile species and the dynamic habitats on which they depend is not currently a focus of negotiations. With the final language to be determined as early as 2020 (1), we urge negotiators to include new dynamic management tools, including mobile MPAs (mMPAs), whose boundaries shift across space and time, that could help to safeguard marine life and build ecosystem resilience by protecting dynamic habitats as well as migratory marine species in a changing ocean.
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References and Notes
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Science
Volume 367 | Issue 6475
17 January 2020
17 January 2020
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Copyright © 2020, American Association for the Advancement of Science.
This is an article distributed under the terms of the Science Journals Default License.
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Published in print: 17 January 2020
Acknowledgments
Supported by a fellowship in ocean sciences from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a grant from the Initiatives to Develop Interdisciplinary Scholarship and Collabo ration (I-DISCO) program from the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at University of Washington Bothell, and the Helen Riaboff Whiteley Center (S.M.M.); the Gallifrey Foundation (K.M.G.); a grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts (M.G.C.); and funds administered by the Woods Institute for the Environment (L.B.C.).
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