European countries have agreed to create six marine protected areas (MPAs) in the northeast Atlantic to step up the protection of the region's environment. They have defined six zones or MPAs over 285,000 sq km where human activity should be limited.
The decision was taken at a meeting on Friday in the southwestern Norwegian city of Bergen of the OSPAR Commission, a body through which 15 regional countries, along with the European Union, work to protect the environment of the northeast Atlantic. The occasion was the third ministerial meeting of OSPAR.
These zones comprise "a range of vulnerable deep-sea habitats and species", the OSPAR Commission said in a statement, adding that it wanted to create "a precedent" worldwide.
To achieve a clean, healthy and biologically diverse North-East Atlantic used sustainably, the ministers adopted key measures for human activities. They agreed to take firm steps to apply relevant lessons learnt from the recent disaster on the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico to prevent significant acute pollution from offshore drilling activities in the North-East Atlantic.
The ministers adopted a Ministerial Statement which would constitute a political commitment to achieving these new goals during the next decade.
The North-East Atlantic is rich in marine wildlife, including cetaceans, sharks and rays, orange roughy and other deepwater fish, and vulnerable marine ecosystems such as cold-water coral reefs, coral gardens, sponge aggregations, seamounts and hydrothermal vent fields, many of which have been identified as threatened and declining due to high fishing pressure and impacts from other human activities.
