The filibuster has gone international.
The Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Living Marine Resources spent the past ten days in Hobart, Australia attempting, for the third time, to pass a measure designating what would be the world’s largest marine protected areas — conservation zones in the Southern Ocean that rings the world’s least populated continent. After failing at last year’s annual meeting, and at a special meeting in Bremerhaven, Germany last summer, the U.S. and New Zealand delegations which had championed the proposal were hopeful that the third time would be the charm.
Instead, according to multiple reports, as the meeting wound down, the delegates from Russia and Ukraine effectively borrowed a page from the Ted Cruz playbook. They ran out the clock, refusing to end debate on the measure, thereby preventing it from coming up for a vote before the meeting drew to a close.
The Guardian quoted Andrea Kavanagh, director of the Pew Charitable Trust’s Southern Ocean sanctuaries project, saying Russia and Ukraine blocked the measure because they, “wanted to open up more areas for fishing and set a time limit of 10 years. Given that it has taken that amount of time to draw up the protected zones, we would’ve spent more time planning this than protecting it, which is ridiculous.”
John Podesta, Chair of the Center for American Progress, referenced the international agreement setting aside the Antarctic continent as a global commons focused on scientific research, and called out the proposal’s detractors for “engaging in a new cold war over Antarctic marine protected areas, meaning those universally accepted principals that prioritize conservation and collaboration will senselessly continue to stop at the water’s edge.”
For the complete article, please see Climate Progress.
We are entering the last days of the BCSC 2020, with insightful discussions on a number of climate security challenges still to come, as well as the launch of our “21st Century Diplomacy: Foreign Policy Is Climate Policy” essay series. Building on the high-level political Part I of BCSC 2020 back in July, this second part aims to bring together the field’s various actors in the realm of climate, development and security policy in one digital space to meet the strategic goals of sharing good practice on what works on the ground and help inform policy processes.
The novel corona virus has had the world in its grip for months. Most countries’ immediate response was to focus on internal issues: they resorted to nationalistic approaches, closing borders and even competing for equipment, even though a multilateral approach was necessary. In the longer term, will this crisis strengthen the ties between nations? Or exacerbate the flaws of today’s multilateralism?
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Now in its second decade, the ambitious African Union–led restoration initiative known as the Great Green Wall has brought close to 18 million hectares of land under restoration since 2007, according to a status report unveiled by the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) at a virtual meeting on Monday, 7 September.