Marine Biodiversity Hub scientists are applying experience gained while working with the Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities (DSEWPaC) marine bioregional planning teams to support the Australian Government’s regional and international interests in marine conservation.

The scientists, Nic Bax, Piers Dunstan, and Mike Fuller of CSIRO, have been helping Southern Hemisphere nations to identify priority marine areas for conservation and management.

The program to identify Ecologically and Biologically Significant Areas (EBSAs) was requested by the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in 2010. Since then, six regional workshops have been held: three in the Northern and three in the Southern Hemisphere. 

Marine Biodiversity Hub scientists led all the Southern Hemisphere workshops – in the South West Pacific, Southern Indian and most recently the South East Atlantic Ocean – covering 40% of the global ocean. Secretary General of the CBD, Ahmed Djoghlaf, said their input had been vital to the program’s success.

Piers Dunstan, who led the data collation for the workshops, said Australia was especially qualified to support the CBD in these global marine issues because of the quality and global scope of its oceanographic products.

“We have provided more than 50 physical data layers to each workshop - many of them from Hub partners CSIRO and Geoscience Australia - and have worked with the Australian Ocean Data Network (AODN) to make them available to all countries for their ongoing use,” Piers Dunstan said.

Opportunities for communication
Marine Biodiversity Hub Director, Professor Nic Bax, said that while the workshops had a technical focus, communicating the CBD process to parties at the workshops and internationally had been an important component of success.

The team has presented the results of the EBSA process at national and international conferences on marine conservation and fisheries. At the request of the Secretariat to the CBD, Nic Bax presented workshop results to the 193 parties to the Convention in Montreal and Hyderabad in 2012.

Although the initial focus of the work was to identify areas of high ecological value in open ocean waters and deep sea habitats, almost all the emerging economies involved in the workshops have been equally interested in applying the CBD approaches to their own waters.

“It has been especially rewarding working with the emerging economies in Africa and the Pacific Island countries and Territories, who made local use of this international program,” Nic Bax said. “It has allowed us to do some significant capacity building which is already bearing fruit, with the EBSAs providing input to the Cook Island's intention for the declaration of a marine reserve and further marine spatial planning efforts in the South West Pacific.”

Identifying areas meeting the EBSA criteria is only the start of a long process towards developing management options for these areas. One key question is whether new international agreements will be needed to facilitate their implementation for high seas areas. Another question is how the work can inform existing management regimes.

In this respect, the Hub team is working with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation to determine how EBSAs overlap with conservation instruments being developed by regional fisheries management bodies.

(The work described above, and undertaken for the CBD, was additionally supported by funding from DSEWPaC’s Marine Division and CSIRO.)

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Workshops have been held to identify Ecologically and Biologically Important Areas across the Southern Hemisphere: in the South West Pacific Ocean, the Southern Indian Ocean, and now the South East Atlantic Ocean.

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Further reading

N.C. Ban; N.J. Bax; K.M. Gjerde; R. Devillers; D.C. Dunn; P.K. Dunstan; A.J. Hobday; S.M. Maxwell; D.M. Kaplan; R.L. Pressey; J.A. Ardron; E.T. Game; P.N. Halpin.(2013) Systematic conservation planning: A better recipe for managing the high seas for biodiversity conservation and sustainable use.  Conservation Letters

Convention on Biological Diversity: Meeting Documents

Contact

Prof Nic Bax, University of Tasmania
Dr Piers Dunstan, CSIRO