Canada, Mexico, and the United States of America (USA) conform the third largest of the worldâs continents, with a combined population of almost five hundred million inhabitants 1 (UN 2015). To the north, the area is bordered by the Arctic Ocean. The Atlantic Oceanâincluding the Gulf of Mexicoâis located to the east, while in the west is the Pacific Ocean. Central America is located south. This region, regarded in this edited book as North America, 2 includes nine biomes ranging from âtropical rainforests and seasonal deciduous forests [âŠ] to boreal forests and tundra at high latitudes near the North Poleâ, including grasslands, desert, and woodlands at midlatitudes (Peters et al. 2015). This wide array of environmental features, combined with the economic and social issues, has brought together the three countries to collaborate in their preservation and management in a number of ways.
The USA and Canada have a long history on environmental cooperation . They have signed 25 bilateral agreements on issues such as air, biodiversity, chemicals and wastes, climate change, freshwater, marine environment and oceans, meteorology, and on broad environmental cooperation about inland pollution contingency plan, Earth sciences, as well as on research and development (Environment and Climate Change Canada 2016).
For its part, collaboration on environmental matters between Mexico and the USA has relied mainly on transboundary issues, where water and wastewater management has appeared high on the agenda, although air quality, solid waste management, and the promotion of clean and efficient energy are also dealt with through collaborative schemes (BECC 2016). These efforts have been made in the context of an agreement between the USA and Mexico concerning the establishment of a Border Environment Cooperation Commission (BECC) and a North American Development Bank (NADBank), which appeared at a time when trade links were formally set up at the trilateralâregionalâlevel.
The appearance of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which entered into force on 1 January 1994, brought a parallel North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation (NAAEC) that would focus on conserving, protecting, and enhancing the interconnected environment of the three countries, while emphasizing their sovereign right to responsibly exploit their own resources (NAAEC 1993). This agreement would refer to the Stockholm Declaration on the Human Environment of 1972 and the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development of 1992, thus recognizing that mankind can transform the environment in diverse ways and on an unprecedented scale, but that environmental protection should be essential to any development process. The NAAEC would become the first environmental agreement officially linked to a trade agreement.
As the environment would take a big share of the cooperation that the three countries make, the NAAEC allowed for the establishment of a Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) that would deal merely with recommendations to protect and preserve the environment of the region, as long as they do not prevent countries from taking actions deemed as necessary to protect national security interests.
In practice, focus on environmental matters has been made mainly on inland aspects. While the NAAEC mandates the CEC to develop recommendations on transboundary environmental issues, where long-range transport of air and marine pollutants have been considered, little has been made on the latter. For what it stands, reference to marine issues in the NAAEC relates only to territory delimitation. Canada and the USA include areas beyond territorial seas within which exercise rights with respect to the seabed and subsoil and their natural resources. Mexico provides a more detailed account. Besides, this country explicitly makes reference to reefs and keys in adjacent seas, the continental shelf and the submarine shelf of islands, as well as its territorial seas (NAAEC 1993, 39â40).
As economic performance rules policy direction, environmental marine and coastal issuesâincluding wetland protection âare concurrently approached, but CEC actions are powerless. Submission of enforcement matters and factual recordsâor lack thereofâdo not assist in providing adequate environmental protection. Efforts aiming to protect wetlands from fossil energy-related projects (CEC 2014) and from tourism activities (CEC 2015), both in Mexico, exemplify this regard. Instead, the CEC has focused on providing information, as it is the case of atlas maps of marine ecosystems, including Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) , with the intention to enhance scientific understanding, to conserve habitat, protect species, and restore fisheries (CEC 2016a).
The potential impact that the CEC could have if its mandate was restructured otherwise so as to go beyond issuing recommendations could be far greater. Such a perspective relates not only to marine and coastal issues but also to inland environmental matters in North America, which account for the largest share of the CECâs work. That is to say, besides the North American Environmental Atlas, the focus has been given to industrial pollution, climate pollutants, grasslands beneficial management practices, hazardous waste management, and ozone-depleting substance (CEC 2016b).
It is in this sense that North American environmental policiesâboth at bilateral and trilateral levelsâneed to transit from green and brown issues to the blue aspects of environmental policies. The environmental remit of diverse policies agreed at both trilateral and bilateral levels needs to expand from the usual urban development, pollution, and waste management (brown) policies, as well as natural resource degradation and sustainable (green) policiesâwhich should complement each other, but this is a task for another bookâtowards water (blue) policies that go beyond freshwater: to comprehensively approach marine and coastal policies through an environmental lens.
The ocean is often thought of as âa place apart, a maritime wilderness, infinitely self-healing and immune to [âŠ] polluting excessesâ (Neill 2016, 28). However,
[âŠ] the ocean is also threatened by exhaustion: myriad organic pollutants, declining species, poisoned wildlife, excavated mangroves, developed wetlands, dead coral , and more [âŠ] glaciers are melting at accelerated rates [âŠ] extreme weather is damaging [âŠ] coasts in ways unforeseen [âŠ] coastal communities continue to grow into urban centers making exponential demands on supply of food, water and energy [âŠ] those settlements haven been devastated by [âŠ] hurricane [âŠ] and shoreline inundation that has cost millions and displaced thousands [âŠ]. (Neill 2016, 28)
Such a statement was made in reference to the global scale, but North America does not escape this perspective, as previously explained. However, there are trilateral efforts that seem to mirror a tendency towards changing this perspective. This is the case of an increase in the number of MPAs across the region.
In 2016, the Obama Administration announced the designation of the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument in the Atlantic side (White House 2016), which follows the expansion of the PapahÄnaumokuÄkea Marine National Monument , off the coast of Hawaii. Canada has taken a similar path on both coasts by designating the Anguniaqvia Niqiqyuam Marine Protected âArea in its western Arctic region (Beaufort Sea Partnership 2017) and projecting to designate the Hecate Strait/Queen Charlotte Sound Marine Protected Area on the Pacific coast. This is followed by the plans to âprotect sensitive benthic ecosystems in the Gulf of Maine through fisheries closures in Jordan Basin and in Corsair and Georges Canyonsâ on its Atlantic coast (US Department of State 2016). Mexico has also many marine protected areas distributed across and around the Gulf of California and its Pacific Coast, the Gulf of Mexico , as well as in the Caribbean and the Yucatan Peninsula (CONANP 2016).
Managing MPAs at the national level has led to a trilateral collaborative effort. The North American Marine Protected Areas Network (NAMPAN) was created in the context of the CEC . It aims to foster a comprehensive network of MPAs that includes resource agencies, MPA managers, and relevant experts, aiming to enhance and strengthen the conservation of biodiversity in critical marine habitats (NAMPAN 2011).
Increasing the numberâhence, the size of territoryâof MPAs is one of many actions required to tackle climate change. Anthropogenic activities âbased on burning fossil fuelsâhave released carbon buried as coal for millions of years. Being in the atmosphere, it heads to the oceans to be dissolved, taken up by algal cell, consumed by little crustaceans, and then being respired to enter the atmosphere again (Sterner et al. 2011), which means that the carbon cycle also affects the marine food chain. Other inland non-fossil fuel activities, such as the change of land use, further contribute to the release of carbon from forests, changing their role from sinks to sources of carbon dioxide (CO2). Combining them, these anthropogenic inputs are creating a global unbalance with already present consequences. The increase in the planetâs temperature is the most well-known negative effect, but glacier melting , ocean acidification , coral bleaching , and sea level rise have also come to the fore. Fifty years of direct observations of the atmosphere show that this trend continues and is accelerating (NOAA 2016). Average global atmospheric CO2 concentration has surpassed 400 parts per million (ppm), a milestone according to the scientific community (NASA 2016). As of December 2016, latest measurement shows 405.25 ppm (NASA 2017a). Sea level rise also presents a worrisome increasing trend. Measurement from September 2016 indicates a rate change of 3.4 millimetres (mm) per year, with an overall increase of 81.1 mm since 1993 (NASA 2017b).
In this sense, the majority of the international community has come to grips with a general agreement developed in the context of the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change)âduring the 2015 Conference of the Parties (COP) 21 in Parisâwith which countries have made voluntary pledges to contribute to a global aim. In this case, the oceans play a peripheral role, noted only as a type of ecosystems whose integrity needs to be ensured (UNFCCC 2015, 21), while mitigation and adaptation strategies focus on inland issues.
Each countryâs Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) assists to identify the relevance that oceans are getting. Understanding that every single effort can help to protect the oceans, contributions focus on brownâreducing emissionsâand greenâenvironment preservationâissues, but would not address ocean and coastal issues with the same interest.
North American NDCs offer different perspectives of the reduced importance that national governments give to oceans and coastal protection and management. Canada proposes to take further steps to reduce emissions from marine transportation, among other transportation types (see Government of Canada 2015). The USA does not make explicit reference to marine, ocean, o...