Scientists in Antarctica are moving research camps because of a 100 mile long crack moving across the world’s southernmost continent. They’re also concerned that a substantial portion of Antarctica will fall into the sea. .But not everything in “The Land of Ice” is threatened. In fact, the world’s largest marine protected area was recently created in the Ross Sea.
We spoke with a scientist from Hot Springs who plays a key role in bringing 24 nations and the European Union into agreement to protect Antarctic marine life. Ben Sharp spent 5 years of his life convincing these countries to protect what’s, in effect, the largest national park in the ocean...and he did it using the one language we all have in common ...scientific principles.
“My name is Ben Sharp,” the Hot Springs native introduces himself. “I’m a scientist for the New Zealand government.”
Ben Sharp was born and raised in the southern Black Hills town of Hot Springs. After attending university in the United Kingdom and pursuing his PhD in Australia, he ended up in New Zealand as a marine ecologist.
Sharp worked for the New Zealand government as part of the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources. The international group was created in 1982 with the objective of conserving Antarctic marine life. Sharp says members of the convention began talking about a protected Antarctic marine area as early as 2005.
“It’s a consensus forum,” Sharp explains. “You need all 25 members have to agree. One person says no and nothing happens, you come back the next year and you try again. And there’s poor countries and rich countries and Western countries and Eastern countries. There’s countries that fish and countries that don’t. So to get agreement on something as big as that, it almost seems like an impossible task. But it’s a wonderfully designed convention in that the scientific basis for decision making is that you have to have a balance between conservation and utilization. But the conservation requirement is very stringent. It’s the most conservation minded ocean management forum out there.”
The other requirement for the protected area was that all decisions had to be made on the basis of science. Diplomats and politicians could agree or disagree, but the ultimate proposal came through the scientific committee…which is an independent body. The first scientific design proposal was presented in 2011. And that’s when the diplomats and politicians became involved.
“Well, of course,” Sharp agrees. “I mean…nothing happens until they get involved, obviously. It’s a declaration of what can and cannot happen on the high seas, which has all kinds of implications for international precedent and sovereignty issues and lots of things that are very political. The Antarctic Treaty is – the basis for it is that all the countries set aside any ideas of territorial claims in Antarctica for the purposes of the treaty. Basically, all of the countries pretended that sovereignty claims don’t exist. But the sovereignty claims are still sort of there, on hold in the background, which makes everything you do intensely political. So nothing was going to happen until it got to the stage of getting the political process in place.”
New Zealand led the process of designing and proposing what ended up being the world’s largest marine protected area. Called the Ross Sea Marine Protected Area it covers some 600,000 square miles of the Southern Ocean and is safeguarded from commercial fishing for 35 years.
“It was about five years of my life,” Sharp observes. “And that was the main part of my job that I was doing, convincing 25 member countries to protect what’s now the largest, effectively a national park, but in the ocean. As part of the scientific justification behind the design of the marine protected area was to protect areas where top predator populations rely upon the same resources that people are also catching.”
As an example Sharp referenced the Antarctic toothfish which is sold as Chilean sea bass in restaurants. But it’s also a critical part of the diet for killer whales.
“So this was the most persuasive argument that we made and the scientific justification for the protected area,” Sharp recalls. “But in the course of doing that, a lot of the other countries – legitimately, this is not a criticism – said this is all based on logic and first principles but where’s your actual evidence? Do you have a killer whale program? And, well, no, we don’t. I anticipated this. So in the course of designing this I was also advocating for we need to start studying the things that we were using to justify it so we’d have a real science behind it as opposed to just scientific arguments. The killer whale program, through the efforts of myself and a lot of other people, ended up getting started.”
Sharp notes that he loves to learn about people.
“You know, the value systems of the people sitting around the table are incredibly different,” Sharp comments. “The Japanese, and the Koreans, and the Russians and the Norwegians all see the world differently and instead of trying to bang the table and convince them that our value system was superior and therefore they should do what we said, we said, “No, we’ve agreed to scientific principles and this is the one language we all have in common and the one thing we’ve already agreed to.”
Sharp says by staying away from politics the participants can focus on science and establish the protected area. He says it was possible with a neutral country like New Zealand at the helm. Ben Sharp says the best lesson from the five-year process was learning that scientists should be allowed to lead the discussion.