Humane Society International: Antarctic Ocean Campaign

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Antarctic Ocean campaign

Antarctic Ocean campaign – HSI joins other environment groups to call for protection for Antarctica’s waters

The Antarctic Ocean Alliance, an international collective of environmental organisations and high-profile supporters, have come together to call for the world’s largest network of marine protected areas and no-take marine reserves to be established to protect Antarctica’s Southern Ocean.

Alliance members and supporters include actor, activist and UN Biodiversity Ambassador Edward Norton, Oceanographer Sylvia Earle, entrepreneurs Richard Branson and Ted Turner, as well as 15 environmental and conservation organisations including Humane Society International, Greenpeace, WWF, the International Fund for Animal Welfare and many others.

The regulatory body responsible for this region – the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) – has agreed to create a network of marine protected areas in some of the ocean around Antarctica. However, CCAMLR meets with limited public participation and no media access and the Alliance believes that, without public attention during the process, only minimal protection will be achieved.

Antarctic waters make up almost 10% of the world’s seas and are some of the most pristine left on earth. Home to almost 10,000 unique and diverse species such as penguins, seals and whales, these waters are now at risk from the impacts of commercial fishing and climate change. The Alliance is calling for 19 critical habitats in Antarctica’s Southern Ocean to be protected, starting with the Ross Sea.

To find out more about the campaign, and to ‘join the watch’ visit www.antarcticocean.org

Weddell Seal in Ross Sea, Antarctic, Image by John Weller

In addition to the campaign, HSI has also been working on attaining listing under the EPBC Act of the Australian Antarctic Territory and the waters in its Exclusive Economic Zone, as National Heritage. HSI continues to work not only on reducing bycatch of sub-Antarctic albatrosses and petrels populations in longline fisheries but also on the full suite of Southern Ocean conservation issues as a member of ASOC, the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition of environmental groups. With CCAMLR’s success in recent years in reducing seabird bycatch, the focus of attention is shifting to longlining in the southern bluefin tuna fishery to the north of the CCAMLR Area where thousands of these seabirds are killed unnecessarily each year

HSI also works to ensure Australian domestic law is upheld in Australia's Antarctic territorial waters, which in 2008 resulted in the Australian Federal Court declaring that Japan’s annual whale hunts in is in breach of Australian law and issuing an injunction ordering them to stop. HSI continues to push Government to enforce both the injunction and federal environmental law. Click here for more information about HSI's legal case for the whales.