Melissa Waage's Blog
C is for...Could be doing more for oceans
March 31, 2008
Posted by Melissa Waage in Reviving the World's Oceans
The good news: America’s oceans policy score improved this year! The bad news: from a C- to a C. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer recently highlighted these poor marks from the Joint Oceans Commission Initiative. Our C grade means that U.S. policy makers are barely passing when it comes to taking concrete steps recommended by two independent, blue-ribbon commissions to address the silent collapse of ocean ecosystems.
A fifth-grader could probably find a way to spin this modest report card improvement in a positive way, but there are compelling reasons for the U.S. to hold itself to a higher standard.
The urgency of the situation is unquestionable. As a New York Times editorial put it earlier this month, “There is no shortage of scientific studies documenting the degradation of the world’s oceans, the decline of marine ecosystems and the collapse of important fish species. …What is in short supply is a sustained effort by world governments and other institutions to do something about it.”
So what can we do, and where are we slipping up? One key area for improvement is National Ocean Governance Reform, in which the U.S. received a D this year on the JOCI scorecard.
Scattershot ocean governance, it turns out, is a major obstacle in the effort to tackle ocean threats from pollution to overfishing. Our oceans are managed under 140 different laws, implemented by 20 federal agencies, without an overarching vision or coordinated implementation of that vision.
A step in the right direction would be enacting what we’re dubbing a national “Healthy Oceans Act” to establish a fundamental vision and game plan to protect and restore our oceans, and coordinate this vision across the federal, regional, and state levels.
This concept meshes with the Joint Ocean Commission’s recommendation to “enact legislation that creates a national ocean policy, codifies NOAA, and strengthens federal coordination.”
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