President Obama will designate a 4,913-square-mile off the New England coastline as the first marine monument off the Atlantic Coast, the Washington Post reported.
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More than a year in the making, the designation will protect an area of undersea peaks and canyons 130 miles southeast off Cape Cod and will be called the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, the White House said.
The White House said Obama will make the announcement at a conference in Washington bringing in leaders from around the world to mobilize efforts on protecting the health of the world’s oceans.
The declaration nonetheless means most commercial fishing will soon be banned from the waters within the monument. As with the 215 million acres designated by President George W. Bush, the vast majority of that acreage has been marine monuments. But they say it will also have a real impact on segments of the state’s commercial fishing industry. Until recently very little was known about it, but the 2013 NOAA Okeanos Explorer expedition found a range of rare and endangered species thriving there that includes 73 corals, some of them over a thousand years old, as well as turtles, whales, dolphins, birds and deep sea fish. This week, at the third Our Ocean conference, we will build on those achievements by announcing over 120 significant ocean conservation projects, including nearly $2 billion in new pledges and commitments to protect more than two million square kilometers in new or expanded marine protected areas. This designation comes just weeks after the world’s largest marine protected area was created outside Hawaii – also by presidential decree through the Antiquities Act. Ed Markey says he appreciates the seven-year delay for lobstermen and fishermen, but says he’s “concerned” that impacts on the fishing industry were “not fully minimized”.
Meant to protect the region’s ecosystem, the plan applies to an area near Georges Bank, approximately 130 miles off the southeast coast of the Cape.
“By protecting ecologically sensitive areas of our ocean, the United States is leading on an issue that is important to people on every continent because of the ocean’s connection to food security, shared prosperity, and resiliency in the face of climate change”, Secretary of State John Kerry reportedly said.
While environmentalists celebrated the decision, the fishing industry has not reacted quite as warmly.
The canyons and seamounts marine monument designation is especially timely and important for New England, where the ocean has the compounding threats of climate change, overfishing, and proposed extraction of oil, gas, and other resources.
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Jon Williams, president of the Atlantic Red Crab Co.in MA, says his company will survive, but he tells The Associated Press, “It’s a big blow to us”. “With that same boldness, President Obama is conserving the crown jewels of our nation’s seascape”, Rhea Suh, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, reportedly said. Other commercial fishing operations will get 60 days to transition from the area, officials said.
