By NICK PERRY, Associated Press
WELLINGTON, Latest Zealand (AP) — Delegations from Russia and Ukraine are amongst those meeting in Australia this week to make a decision the long run of Antarctica’s pristine waters.
Conservationists say latest marine protected areas and rules to forestall overfishing are desperately needed, but that Russia could use its veto-like powers to once more block progress.
Achieving the required consensus for motion amongst this diverse group of 27, which also includes China, the US and the European Union, has at all times been an immense challenge.
And when two of the members are at war — and relations between China and lots of Western nations have deteriorated — consensus looms as an excellent greater obstacle. Just this month, Russian bombing in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, partially destroyed Ukraine’s Antarctic research center.
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Yet despite the large political hurdles, some remain hopeful that scientific arguments will win through. The U.S. is paying more attention to the region under President Joe Biden, and this 12 months has sent a comparatively high-level delegation led by Monica Medina, an assistant secretary within the State Department.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Medina said Antarctica was “a very fragile, crumbling a part of the planet that needs all our help to resist the challenges we face with climate change.”
The meeting in Hobart within the Australian island state of Tasmania is the primary in-person gathering of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resource in three years, after the COVID-19 pandemic kept meetings online.
It comes as Latest Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern makes a rare visit by a world leader to Antarctica, to see firsthand the scientific research going down and to mark the sixty fifth anniversary of Latest Zealand’s Scott Base.
The 2-week meeting in Hobart began Monday with a mass walkout when the Russian delegates began speaking. Kostiantyn Demianenko, who’s leading the Ukrainian delegation, said they were grateful for the international support and that Russia had no right to be on the table.
“A state that kills the civilian population, destroys the air and ground civilian infrastructure of one other country and defiantly violates the essential provisions of international law should definitely be limited in its right to take part in the activities of international organizations equivalent to CCAMLR,” he wrote in an email.
Still, he acknowledged, Russia remained a member of the group.
He said that back home, Ukraine was attempting to rebuild its National Antarctic Research Center in Kyiv, although ongoing drone attacks made that difficult.
“Cracks within the partitions, broken windows, destroyed equipment led to the impossibility to make use of these facilities for work,” he wrote.
Russia’s delegation didn’t reply to a request for comment.
Medina said the U.S. backed the walkout since it condemns the war in Ukraine, however it stays eager for progress in Hobart.
“Without delay, Russia is obstructing consensus on adoption of three MPA (marine protected area) proposals, but China is as well,” Medina said. “So we’re here attempting to work through the problems with each countries. Not one-on-one necessarily, although we will probably be trying with the People’s Republic of China to work through the problems informally.”
She said Russia had been using what amounts to its veto power to dam progress not only in Hobart but at a lot of international forums.
“It could actually block consensus. That could be a huge impediment to our ability to maneuver forward on some things here, but other things do go ahead in a form of extraordinary course of business,” Medina said.
Some hope the group could make progress on other agenda items, including latest rules on krill fishing and reaching agreement on fishing for invaluable Antarctic toothfish, marketed as Chilean sea bass.
Andrea Kavanagh, who directs the Pew Bertarelli Ocean Legacy Project’s Antarctic and Southern Ocean protection work, said the issue with krill fishing around Antarctica has been that it’s just about all concentrated in a single small area.
She said the depletion of the small, shrimp-like creatures affects predators including seabirds, penguins, seals and whales. She said the fishery doesn’t necessarily should be reduced, just opened up.
Kavanagh said Norway is the most important fisher of krill, which is used for human health supplements and feed for aquariums and salmon farms.
“It isn’t a food security issue,” Kavanagh said. “Krill is used for luxury products.”
Russia last 12 months used its veto-like powers to reject the toothfish catch limits proposed by the commission’s scientists. That led to Britain taking its own motion by issuing licenses without CCAMLR approval, putting it offside with many other members.
Medina said Britain had been attempting to sell among the toothfish in America however the U.S. had refused to purchase it. But she said it was less than the U.S. to inform Britain to stop its fishing.
She said Britain’s fishing was “inside the bounds of what had been permitted previously, and mustn’t in any way be controversial apart from the undeniable fact that Russia has blocked it.”
One shiny spot of the meeting to this point has been that discussions with China appeared to have been more positive than in previous years, said Kavanagh. It was also helpful to have high-level support from the U.S. and resume face-to-face discussions, she said.
She identified the group had managed before to get Russia on board, back in 2016 when it created a marine protected area twice the dimensions of Texas within the Ross Sea.
Countries mustn’t interpret consensus as a veto power, Kavanagh added, but fairly should offer counterproposals so everyone works toward a compromise.
But in recent times, she said, “no person’s offering counterproposals which can be legitimate. It’s all just ‘No.'”
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