Status of activities and outcomes in the MEESO project's work package 7 since 1 March 2021.
Summary
WP 7 has mapped the landscape of policy documents that could be relevant for the mesopelagic and the potential trajectory of policies for governing human activities that might affect it.
Through a series of interviews with high level stakeholders, governance experts, and decision makers, WP7 identified options for protecting the mesopelagic with international policies.
Moreover, it investigated sustainability trade-offs associated with harvesting the mesopelagic, and discussed implications of geographical hotspots for mesopelagic carbon sequestration and biomass in relation to fishing interests within and beyond national jurisdictions.
Highlights
- Options for protecting the mesopelagic include area based management measures (MPAs and MSP) and environmental impact assessment through the BBNJ treaty, and a collaboration on international fisheries management between the BBNJ treaty and RFMOs (Oostdijk et al 2022).
- Opportunities to govern mesopelagic fishing with climate policy are challenged by a lack of scientific information on how long open ocean and fish carbon is stored and difficulties in attributing carbon flows with individual countries mitigation actions (Oostdijk et al 2022).
- A review of 2700 policy documents supporting the 10 main global ocean related agreements revealed a paucity of references to ocean carbon, and evidence that most policies are highly siloed on climate or biodiversity (Elsler et al 2022).
- Cumulative costs of climate damage from harvesting the mesopelagic would far exceed the potential revenues of a mesopelagic fishery (Oostdijk et al in prep).