Sharks: Conservation, Governance and Management

Erika J. Techera, Natalie Klein, Erika J. Techera, Natalie Klein

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135012601
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Law
• Categoría: Environmental Law

The key aim of this book is to explore the global conservation and management of sharks. There has been a rapid decline in populations of many shark species, while new science has emerged of the critical role they play in marine ecosystems. However, the authors show that conservation law and policy have been slow to develop, with only a small number of iconic species being protected worldwide. The increase in fishing impact – primarily through shark finning and by-catch - has led to shark conservation receiving greater international attention in recent years.

The book explores our current knowledge and status of the law and science in relation to sharks with a particular focus on improving frameworks for their conservation and management. Recent trends are analysed, including shark finning bans that have been put in place in several countries, the widening number of nations establishing shark sanctuaries and the growth of shark-based tourism. The efficacy of current listing processes for endangered species and fisheries regulations is also examined. Tourism is explored as an alternative to fishing and the risks and impacts associated with this industry are analysed.

Contributors include leading authorities from universities and conservation organizations in North America, Europe and Australia. A common theme is to emphasise the importance of collaborative governance between various interest groups and the need for inter-disciplinary research and management approaches that are necessary to address the decline in sharks.

Part I

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Governance challenges

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Chapter 1

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Approaches to conservation and governance of marine species

Erika J. Techera

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Introduction

The marine environment is a challenging area within which to work. The vast- ness of the oceans and their three-dimensional nature creates a complex management problem, compounded by the mobility and diversity of marine species, as well as humans whose activities impact upon them. Yet because humans depend heavily upon the oceans for food production and other ecosystem services, including assimilation of waste, climate control and carbon sequestration, it is critical that they be appropriately conserved and managed. The risks of not doing so are enormous, not only in terms of human health and well-being, but the survival of other species as well – including sharks.

Humans have interacted with the oceans for thousands of years. Historically, traditional peoples and Indigenous communities fished for subsistence purposes and developed cultural practices related to the ocean and its inhabitants. Even today it is clear that ‘the close interrelationship between land and sea, mountain and shore, and river and lagoon form particularly important components of indigenous worldviews and politics’ (Hviding, 2003, pp. 257–258). The impact these people had on the oceans was negligible due to low populations and lack of technology to exploit resources on a large scale. Later human oceanic exploration led to discovery, conquest and settlement of new lands. For example, the Lapita people navigated across the Pacific and settled many of the Pacific islands; the Dutch opened trading routes between Europe and Southeast Asia; the Spanish conquered South America; and the British settled the United States, Australia and New Zealand. Despite these developments, even as late as the turn of the nineteenth century there were few visible impacts on the marine environment.

It was the industrial revolution that saw the start of anthropogenic environmental degradation, initially on land and later in the oceans, resulting in the over-harvesting of marine living resources and pollution. Although commercial whaling had been undertaken since the eleventh century, mechanization and the use of factory ships began to have a negative impact in the 1800s (Roberts, 2007). The scale of that industry, and others including the mass hunting of marine mammals such as walrus for oil and fur seals for clothes, as well as the over-fishing of ocean areas close to industrialized countries, all took their toll. Simultaneously, increases in oil and gas exploration, shipping and transport have led to pollution issues. Many of the problems have been driven by technological developments. Unlike land areas, which have benefited from technology allowing more crops to be grown in smaller areas, technology has facilitated marine degradation. Equipment such as drift nets and tuna aggregation devices, as well as bottom trawling and super trawlers, have facilitated indiscriminate fishing on a massive scale. These problems have been compounded by rapid growth in human populations, resulting in expansion of markets for seafood. The growing impact that humans are having on shark populations illustrates this.

Scientific research has uncovered knowledge of these marine environmental problems, which in turn has led to law and policy responses. The bans on killing juvenile fur seals and conventions prohibiting the use of drift nets first started to appear in the 1980s. Later, whale sanctuaries were established and the global moratorium on whaling was adopted in 1986. Moves to restrict high-seas bottom trawling in 2006 are a further example of the international community’s response to ocean challenges. The drastic decline in shark numbers is a more recent development, but comes as a result of the same unsustainable practices. It has been driven by environmental degradation that has harmed shark habitats, fishing methods and equipment that have resulted in sharks being taken as by- catch, and growth in populations and markets leading to the problem of shark finning. Again, albeit recently, specific laws and policies have been developed in response. Although the scientific research preceded these developments, it is clear that compared to other marine species attention has come very late for sharks. Even today, there is resistance by many people to protection measures for sharks; more often than not they are feared by humans rather than the subject of conservation efforts.

The laws and policies that are aimed at conserving and managing sharks rely upon a legal foundation comprising the law of the sea, environmental laws and natural resource regulations. These laws themselves are underpinned by concepts, principles and governance approaches that have developed over many decades. If the conservation outcomes for sharks are to be enhanced, then the frameworks and mechanisms, together with their foundations, must be analysed.

The specific details of laws for shark conservation and management are explored in the chapter that follows. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the underpinnings, approaches and tools that have been utilized. This analysis commences by examining the foundations upon which shark conservation and management have been based. This includes underpinnings of environmental law, key concepts and approaches to governance. The second focus is on law itself in terms of both the specific legal tools that are and can be used in the governance of sharks and the role of law in a broader disciplinary context. The various approaches to conservation that have been adopted and embedded in law and policy are explored, including the transition from fortress conservation to ecosystem-based management. The analysis then turns to international environmental law, which has rapidly developed in the last 40 years. What has emerged since then is a stable group of principles forming a common thread through various treaties and soft law instruments. The third section brings these foundational elements and legal tools together in the specific context of shark conservation and management. The chapter concludes with a discussion of areas where and ways in which the conservation and management of sharks might be enhanced.

Foundations

Ethical underpinnings

If current governance arrangements have not achieved their goals, it is essential to explore the foundation upon which they are built. Significantly, it has been acknowledged that environmental law has weak underpinnings and it is only recently that this has been explored (Tarlock, 1996). Environmental law is not an area of law, such as contract or tort, with a long history of legal theory at its origin; nevertheless, much of the literature in this area points to ethics as the base, with an alternative viewpoint being that science forms the foundation of environmental law (Tarlock, 1996).

The most dominant view is that approaches to environmental governance have an ethical basis and so this area is explored further here. There are fundamental differences between the treatment of the environment and natural resources by traditional communities and industrialized nations. However, as the environmental movement was largely a product of developed nations it is the ethical approaches of those countries that have dominated. Furthermore, because of these countries’ influence on the development of international law, the same approaches have shaped global responses too.

In essence, these approaches are based upon a belief in the separation of humans from nature, and superiority of the former (Grima and Berkes, 1989; Colchester 1994). The origins of such separation, and the reasons why a utilitarian ethic has dominated, are both varied and complex. Some scholars point to prehistoric origins relating to the first domestication of plants and animals (Scull, 2013). Others refer to the domination of dualism, which emerged during the Enlightenment, religious and cultural influences and technological developments and processes such as urbanization (Holmes Rolston, 2012). Many commentators place the blame on Judeo-Christian beliefs (White, 1967) as

Christianity encouraged certain special attitudes to nature: that it exists primarily as a resource rather than as something to be contemplated with enjoyment, that man has the right to use it as he will, that it is not sacred, that man’s relationships with it are not governed by moral principles.

(Passmore, 1974, p. 20)

There were early calls for a change in attitude. Rousseau, for example, advocated a return to living as part of the natural world, and citizen action in pursuit of the common good. Philosophers such as John Stuart Mill expressed concern about the destruction of nature and natural processes (Mill, 1965). Ralph Waldo Emerson published his essay Nature in 1836, in which he espoused the inclusion of humans as part of and not separate from ‘nature’ (Emerson, 1836). The call for a new ethical approach preceded the environmental movement itself. Aldo Leopold developed his ‘land ethic’ in the 1940s (Leopold, 1949) but ‘no systematic ethical theory to support these ethical ideas concerning the environment’ (Bosselmann, 2013). Dissatisfaction with anthropocentrism led in the 1970s to the emergence of a new field – environmental ethics – whereby ‘ethics were forced for the first time to consider and articulate the value of nonhuman species of plants and animals’ (Brown, 1995). Although sustainable development has marked a shift in human attitudes (Bosselmann, 2002), anthropocen- tric utilitarian ethics still prevail. If current environmental trends are to be reversed it will be necessary to encourage greater moral responsibilities to the environment (Solomon, 2010), and to change the ethical underpinnings of not only approaches to environmental governance, but economic development and socio-cultural concerns also. In the marine context, it will become increasingly necessary to explore sustainable and ethical fisheries to identify best practice (Lam and Pritcher, 2012).

Conservation concepts

The concept of nature conservation is of relatively recent origin, at least in western contexts. In industrialized countries, early efforts to conserve and manage land and marine areas took the form of centralized, top-down regulation. This included ‘fortress conservation’ pursuant to which protected areas were declared, quarantined from human inhabitants. Even in those protected areas where human occupation was permitted, more prestige was attached to those that excluded communities (Borrini-Feyerabend et al., 2004). This approach embodies western conceptualizations of conservation, and the environment as provider of useful resources, goods and services for humans (Gibbs and Bromley, 1989).

The nineteenth-century Sierra Club¹ campaign to stop the reduction in the Yosemite Park boundaries arguably marked the beginning of ‘fortress conservation’ approaches that led to the development of protected area management. This approach quickly spread around the world, leading to the early establishment of national parks and, later, marine protected areas. This approach is based on a scientific belief that everything is in balance – therefore building a fence around an area meant that everything inside the area would be well protected (Tarlock, 1996). This has not proved to be correct as it has since been recognized that nature is not based on a permanent state of equilibrium, and geographically delimiting a conservation area will not ensure protection of species. Conservation goals have not been achieved, leading to an exploration of more inclusive, integrated and participatory approaches. This recognition has ultimately resulted in more holistic approaches to the human use of natural resources and resulted in the emergence of a range of new management concepts.

The paradigm of ecosystem-based management has emerged only in the last 20 years, as attention turned away from conventional, sectoral and single-stock approaches to fisheries management...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of boxes
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Governance challenges
• Part II Scientific perspectives
• Part III Actors and stakeholders
• Part IV Risks and rewards
• Part V Tools and techniques
• Index