The Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) entered into force in 1982, with the express purpose of ensuring “the conservation of Antarctic marine living resources.” This focus on conservation was revolutionary because  other similar international environmental agreements took single-species approaches to regulating fisheries, whereas CCAMLR took an ecosystem-based approach to preserving the Southern Ocean as a whole. In its opening lines, the convention insisted on the “importance of safeguarding the environment and protecting the integrity of the ecosystem of the seas surrounding Antarctica.”

While the text of the convention endorses taking an ecosystem-based approach to protecting Antarctic marine living resources, implementing these principles has been a more gradual process. Initially, CCAMLR focused its attention on immediate concerns such as managing krill fisheries and then in the 1990s on reducing illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing within the Antarctic. In the last two decades, however, CCAMLR members have sought to more fully implement the holistic management principles articulated in the early 1980s by establishing a representative network of marine protected areas (MPAs), with two major successes: the designation of the South Orkney Islands Southern Shelf and the Ross Sea Region MPAs.

Despite these successes, other threats remain. In particular, some member countries have sought to advance their own agenda and engage in unrestricted fishing by reinterpreting the Convention and downplaying its roots as a conservation instrument. While the Convention’s definition of ‘conservation’ does include ‘rational use,’ it so strongly lays out the limited circumstances under which fishing may take place that this further highlights the intent of the original architects of the agreement, who intended for it to be a conservation-oriented instrument consistent with the principles of the Antarctic Treaty System. These efforts to undermine the convention have not gone unnoticed, and other parties have pushed back to ensure that CCAMLR remains able to protect the Southern Ocean ecosystem. 

Hammering out international environmental agreements and keeping them up to date is no easy task, and one that I explain more in a new paper, published in Aquatic Conservation. It examines the process of reaching consensus on proposed conservation measures to better understand the role of informal and external drivers in establishing large-scale networks of MPAs. Based on these insights, I also outline a series of recommendations for transboundary conservation efforts, which are likely to become increasingly more important as we tackle climate change and other large environmental issues.