Africa Water, Sanitation & Hygiene Africa Water & Sanitation & Hygiene May -June 2017 | Page 18

2017
countless threats to the delicate
Arctic ecosystem.
Beside environmental and biological
threats, the oceans can also facilitate
transnational crime. Piracy, drug
smuggling, slavery, and illegal
immigration all occur in waters
around the world. Even the most
sophisticated ports struggle to
screen cargo, containers, and crews
without creating regulatory friction
or choking legitimate commerce.
In recent history, the United States
has policed the global commons,
but India and China are building
blue-water navies that can operate
across the deep oceans. This
raises new questions about how
an established security guarantor
should accommodate rising—
and increasingly assertive—naval
powers.
To be good stewards of the oceans,
nations around the world need to
embrace more effective multilateral
governance in the economic,
security, and environmental realms.
So far, the most comprehensive
attempt to govern international
waters produced the United Nations
Convention on the Law of the
Sea (UNCLOS). But U.S. refusal
to ratify the convention, despite
widespread bipartisan support,
continues to limit its strength,
creating a leadership vacuum in
the maritime regime. Other states
that have joined the treaty often
ignore its guidelines or fail to
coordinate policies across sovereign
jurisdictions. Even if it were
perfectly implemented, UNCLOS
first came into force twenty years
ago and is increasingly outdated.
Important initiatives—such as local
fishery arrangements and the UN
Environment Programme (UNEP)
Regional Seas Programme—
form a disjointed governance
landscape that lacks legally binding
instruments to legitimize or enforce
their work. Recently, however,
countries increasingly recognize
the need for more comprehensive
oceans governance.
For example, the 2012 United
Nations Conference on Sustainable
Development, also known as
18
Rio+20, identified oceans (or the “blue
economy”) as one of the seven priority
areas for sustainable development. While the
conference produced few concrete results,
it did launch the process to establish a set
of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs),
including a proposed oceans SDGs, which
would give countries and international
organizations a road map for improving
oceans conservation and governance. As
threats to the oceans become more pressing,
nations around the world need to rally to
create and implement an updated form of
oceans governance.
Loss of oxygen blamed on
warming water
By Tim Radford
More than 90 percent of the world’s coral reefs will die
by 2050 The Independent
Warming oceans are losing their dissolved
oxygen, a recent study has confirmed.
Scientists previously suggested that climate
change could lead to oxygen loss in the
ocean, since colder water has a tendency to
store more oxygen — hence the abundance
of wildlife at the poles. This theory was
recently confirmed by research based on
about half a century’s worth of data.
The research team found that as ocean
temperatures rose in the 1980s, oxygen
levels began to fall. Their computer
simulations suggest that the problem will
only get worse toward the end of the
century.
Takamitsu Ito, lead author of the study
with Georgia Tech’s School of Earth and
Atmospheric Sciences, said that the rate at
which oxygen levels are shrinking is about
two or three times more than previous
predictions.
“This is most likely due to the changes in
ocean circulation and mixing associated
with the heating of the near-surface waters
and the melting of polar ice,” said Ito.
This comes after a 2013 announcement
from a team of marine scientists who
Africa Water, Sanitation & Hygiene • May - June 2017