Posts Tagged ‘Antarctic wildlife’

Nations Fail to Protect Antarctic Wildlife

Friday, November 2nd, 2012

With the presidential election just around the corner, I thought this article that discussed the failure of all nations to come together to protect Antarctic wildlife was apropos. Like congress who can’t seem to agree and make the right decisions, when it comes to protecting wild and sealife, the world is divided. The most resistance came from the Ukraine, Russia, and China during talks through the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) to protect areas in the Ross Sea off East Antarctica, home to penguins, seals, whales, and seabirds plus valuable stocks of shrimp-like krill.

The USA, European Union, Australia, and New Zealand were among the countries pushing for an agreement on new protected zones (MontrealGazette). Some of the criticism has come from Greenpeace where a spokesperson observed that CCAMLR was behaving more like a fisheries organization than an organization dedicated to conservation of Antarctic waters.

In 2010, a goal of protecting 10 percent of the world’s oceans to safeguard marine life from overfishing and other threats such as pollution and climate change had changed to 4 percent by year’s end.