Call for action to save the oceans
By Fred Pearce
THE world's oceans need a panel of scientific guardians to advise governments on protecting endangered fish stocks, exploiting minerals on the seabed and fighting pollution. This is the conclusion of the government's independent panel on sustainable development, which published its first report this week. The panel, chaired by Britain's former UN ambassador, Crispin Tickell, was set up by John Major a year ago as part of the British response to the Earth Summit.
The guardians of the sea should be modelled on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, set up by UN agencies in 1988 to investigate global warming. The IPCC's reports pushed governments to adopt the Climate Change Convention at the Earth Summit in 1992.
Tickell says an Intergovernmental Panel on the Oceans might also draw up a convention to strengthen the conservation provisions of the Law of the Sea, a UN treaty agreed a decade ago but which only came into force last November.
The oceans emerged as a major environmental theme at the Earth Summit. The head of the US delegation, William Reilly, called for a high-level international meeting to discuss worsening pollution in coastal zones. Gunnar Kullenberg, general secretary of UNESCO's Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission called for the establishment of a $2 billion a year fund to pay for a Global Ocean Observation System. But neither has so far taken place.
Tickell says that UNESCO should get together with other UN agencies, such as the UN Environment Programme and the Food and Agricultural Organization, to create an international panel on the oceans with the same scientific authority as the IPCC.
In an interview with New Scientist, Tickell castigated the failure of the European Union to protect its fisheries. "It's a bloody scandal," he says. "We are going to see the progressive closure of fisheries in European waters unless the EU acts."
His report calls on the government to push for a new conservation-minded EU Common Fisheries Policy. "The government should take a lead nationally, within the Union and internationally on fisheries," it says. Similar steps are needed to reform the Common Agricultural Policy, which "lacks clear environmental standards and objectives". The British government should be drawing up plans for sustainable agriculture and publishing proposals for the future, says Tickell.
The panel also warns that the battle to save the ozone layer may not yet be won, despite draconian international agreements to ban ozone-eating chemicals. "There is a conspiracy of silence," says Tickell. "Everyone says the problem has been solved. But each year the hole gets bigger, and we know that lots of CFCs are escaping from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union."
The government should push for better policing of the agreements to protect the ozone layer – the Montreal Protocol and its successors – he says. But he criticises scientists for failing to produce a coherent assessment of the way the thinning ozone layer might affect the environment and human health. "There has been plenty of research, but nobody is pulling it all together," he says.
The report also chastises the government for failing to use tax incentives to improve the environment. The only recent example is the landfill tax, imposed in the last budget, aimed at reducing the amount of waste dumped in landfills and encouraging recycling. The panel calls for similar measures to cut air and water pollution.
"We are always being told how difficult this is. But other countries are doing it," says Tickell. "Currently taxes are usually put on labour and profits. Instead we should tax pollution and the use of resources."
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