US President Barack Obama was to announce the creation of a new marine reserve on Thursday as Washington hosted a major world summit on protecting the planet’s oceans.
Advertisement
“We can not truly protect our planet without protecting our oceans”, Obama said at the conference, which was attended by Secretary of State John Kerry and representatives of more than 20 countries who announced creation of their own protected marine areas.
“Dangerous changes in our climate, caused mainly by human activity; dead zones in our ocean, caused mainly by pollution that we create here on land; unsustainable fishing practices; unprotected marine areas, in which rare species and entire ecosystems are at risk – all those things are happening now”, the USA president said.
The Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, some 130 miles from Cape Cod, is approximately the size of CT.
The new national monument follows Obama’s recent expansion of the huge Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument off Hawaii, and several more countries are expected to declare new reserves. She said the White House struck a balance so there would be a “soft landing” for the industry, with seven years to phase out fishing.
Commercial fishing as well as “other extractive activities such as mining and drilling” in the protected area is to be phased out. “I think the entire New England fishery is upside down over this”.
As a part of the Our Ocean conference, President Obama will be designating a subterranean jungle the size of CT as the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument. “Formed millions of years ago by extinct volcanoes and sediment erosion, sea canyons and seamounts are biodiversity hot spots – home to many rare and endangered species”, explains NOAA.
“Nature is actually resilient if we take care to just stop actively destroying it, that it will come back”, US President Barack Obama told those attending the event.
“My administration has protected more waters than any in history”.
White House officials said the administration listened to industry’s concerns, and noted the monument is smaller than originally proposed and contains a transition period for companies like Williams’.
The plans impose a permanent ban on commercial fishing in an additional one million square kilometers (386,100 square miles) of ocean, according to the Foreign Office. “He has a place out on Martha’s Vineyard, where truly people appreciate everything we’re here to protect in terms of the ocean”.
The president called for optimism in fighting climate change and other environmental threats, recalling efforts to save the ozone layer and end acid rain as examples of seemingly impossible environmental tasks that were successful.
Advertisement
President Obama’s designation of the Atlantic’s first marine monument has cemented his legacy on both conservation and climate change, while demonstrating the continued importance of the venerable Antiquities Act, first used by President Theodore Roosevelt, in protecting natural resources at risk.
