THE OCEAN AWARDS 2018
http://www.boatinternational.com | June 2018Judges’ Special Award: Campaign of the Year
Establishing the Ross Sea Marine Protected Area
WinnersVisionary
PETER YOUNG, JOHN WELLER
AND DAVID AINLEY
“The Last Ocean” filmmakersVital to the success of the Ross Sea MPA
campaign was the team who made the film
The Last Ocean(2012), winner of numerous
documentary awards. Its tagline summed
up its objective: “The race to protect the
Earth’s last untouched ocean from our
insatiable appetite for fish.”
Shot in Antarctica, Australia, Japan, Korea,
New Zealand, Norway, the UK and the US,
the 88-minute documentary was a
collaboration between the New Zealand
filmmaker Peter Young and the Californian
ecologist Dr David Ainley, who had spent three
decades studying Antarctica.
With the American conservation photographer
John Weller, they also set up a charitable trust of
the same name, through which they were able to
spend significant time speaking to
policymakers as well as the public to raise
awareness of the dangers facing the Ross Sea.
As Ainley puts it on the voiceover: “You can’t be
a doctor of the oceans without knowing what a
healthy patient looks like.”Scientist
GEORGE WATTERS
Chair, CCAMLR Working Group on
Ecosystem Monitoring and ManagementAs the lead US scientist who worked on the
campaign to have the Ross Sea designated an
MPA, the fisheries biologist Dr George Watters
spent six years on the project, travelling the
world to persuade all 25 member countries of
CCAMLR to come on board with the plan.
China and Russia were the last to be
convinced: the former wanted a special
zone for krill fishing; the latter higher quotas
and a larger commercial fishing zone
within the protected area.
Watters’ solution was to expand the size
of the MPA in order to accommodate this.
“Making it bigger could achieve their objective
and ours.” His day job is director of the
Antarctic Ecosystem Research Division of the
Southwest Fisheries Science Center in
La Jolla, California, whose mission is “to
generate the scientific information necessary
for the conservation and management
of living marine resources”.The Ross Sea is the southernmost part of the Southern Ocean. It
extends into a huge bay under the Ross Ice Shelf, part of the polar
ice cap that is Antarctica. It remains one of the last, perhapsthe
last, genuinely pristine place on Earth, home to a fully functioning
marine ecosystem that is still miraculously free from pollution,
untainted by mining and untroubled by invasive species.
Wildlife thrives here, but in 1996 a New Zealand fishing vessel
discovered abundant Antarctic toothfish that, as Chilean sea bass,
commanded about $70 a kilo. By 2010, as many as 20 long-line
ships were catching about 3,000 tonnes a year, threatening an
entire ecosystem; their dwindling numbers afecting killer whales,
Weddell seals, sperm whales and giant squid, who all prey on them.
The only way the unique Ross Sea ecosystem can survive intact
was for it to be declared a Marine Protected Area (MPA), theworld’s largest, in which commercial fishing is banned.
In December 2017, the 25 countries that comprise the
Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living
Resources (CCAMLR), an international convention founded in
1982 to protect the southern polar seas, agreed that 72 per cent
of the MPA, which covers 1.55 million square kilometres, should
be declared a no-take zone, in which all fishing is prohibited
for the next 35 years. It is, says Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, one
of the Ocean Awards 2018 judges, “a phenomenal achievement...
it shows that the protection of great swathes of our oceans
is a possibility”.
Many individuals and organisations were involved in this
achievement, but the judges singled out the below individuals for
their outstanding contributions.134