Routledge Handbook of Marine Governance and Global Environmental Change

Paul G. Harris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781138555914
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351369596
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

This comprehensive handbook provides a detailed and unique overview of current thinking about marine governance in the context of global environmental change.

Many of the most profound impacts of global environmental change, and climate change in particular, will occur in the oceans?. It is vital that we consider the? role of marine? governance in adapting to and mitigating these impacts. This comprehensive handbook provides a thorough review of current thinking about marine environmental governance, including law and policy, in the context of global environmental change. Initial chapters describe international law, regimes, and leadership in marine environmental governance, in the process considering how existing regimes for climate change and the oceans should and can be coordinated. This is followed by an exploration of the role of non-state actors, including scientists, nongovernmental organisations, and corporations. The next section includes a collection of chapters highlighting governance schemes in a variety of marine environments and regions, including coastlines, islands, coral reefs, the open ocean, and regional seas. Subsequent chapters examine emerging issues in marine governance, including plastic pollution, maritime transport, sustainable development, environmental justice, and human rights.

Providing a definitive overview, the Routledge Handbook of Marine Governance and Global Environmental Change is suitable for advanced students in marine and environmental governance, ?environmental law and policy, and climate change, as well as practitioners, activists, stakeholders?, and others concerned about the world's oceans and seas.

Part 1 Introduction

1 The growing challenge for marine governance: Global environmental change

Paul G. Harris

DOI: 10.4324/9781315149745-2

The places that humans inhabit day to day are experiencing the effects of global environmental change. Many of those effects, such as the impacts of global warming and other manifestations of climate change on land-based ecosystems and human communities, are increasingly reported in the daily news. They include unusually widespread and massive wildfires, prolonged droughts, intense cyclonic storms, and heavy rains, flooding, and landslides, and much more. Other widescale environmental occurrences on land, such as deforestation and habitat destruction, diminution of biodiversity and agricultural productivity, omnipresent plastic rubbish, fetid waterways, and the spread of pathogens due to human activities, are also featured every day in news reports around the world. But what of the environments that few people experience directly on a regular basis, such as sparsely inhabited mountain ranges and remote polar landscapes? Widescale environmental changes are underway in those places, too, but they are less likely to receive much attention in the news. As the proverb intones, ‘out of sight, out of mind’. Too often, this is also the case with environmental changes underway in the world’s oceans and seas, which are profoundly affected by climate change, notably by warming and acidification, and by other impacts, such as widespread pollution and intensive extraction of marine living resources, the latter manifested in formerly vibrant fisheries in which sought-after species are now commercially extinct. It is not that millions of humans are not affected by these changes; they are, profoundly. It is that they are often those people who are, like the high seas, often invisible to those actors with the power to do something about it.

Global environmental change is thus creating new and profound challenges for the governance of marine environments and the people who depend on them for their well-being, and often for their survival. More attention needs to be directed toward the changes that are underway, and growing, and the associated challenges that result. This handbook tries to do just that, in the process offering a unique treatment of marine environmental governance in the Anthropocene – the current geological epoch characterised by unprecedented anthropogenic impacts on the earth and its ecosystems (see Biermann 2022). The chapters that follow explore challenges for governing the marine environment that arise from global-scale (or nearly global-scale) environmental changes. They survey many of the key issues arising from global environmental change and the multifarious actors and institutions involved in governing oceans and seas. Devoting more attention to the impacts of global environmental change on marine environmental governance is justified because humanity is extremely reliant on the oceans for resources and ecosystem services. As global environmental change intensifies, so, too, do the threats to those resources and services. Effective marine governance becomes more important, and more challenging, as time passes. With all of this in mind, this book is intended to be a useful resource for researchers, students and others interested in marine governance in the current era of accelerating global environmental change.

Global environmental change: challenges for oceans and seas

For the purposes of this book, global environmental change is defined broadly to include changes to environments that are occurring over wide geographic areas, such as ocean warming and changes to ocean chemistry as a result of carbon pollution, as well as those changes that are happening in many geographically removed places simultaneously, such as agricultural runoff leading to ocean dead zones (eutrophication) and decimation of fish numbers and varieties due to overfishing or habitat destruction in many locations across the world’s ocean. Global environmental changes make marine governance more difficult: they make existing problems worse, thus increasing current governance challenges, and they create new challenges altogether, creating a need for not only more effective marine environmental governance but also completely new types and layers of governance. The result is often that existing institutions and mechanisms for managing the marine environment are found to be lacking in their capabilities, and increasingly that existing institutions and mechanisms do not exist and need to be created from scratch, or that uncoordinated existing marine governance regimes and schemes need to be synchronised with regimes and schemes from other issue areas. For example, fisheries regimes may need to be coordinated with regimes for regulating agricultural runoff or, as several chapters in this book make clear, the law of the sea regime may need to be coordinated with the climate change regime.

The environmental changes that are challenging marine governance are as varied as the oceans and seas. They include overexploitation of fish and other marine resources; widespread eutrophication caused by the runoff of pollutants from land environments; plastic pollution so extensive in marine ecosystems that it justifies its own term – the ‘plastisphere’ (Thomas 2021); coastal over-development and habitat destruction; intensifying shipping traffic in busy seaways and new ship traffic in relatively remote and vulnerable sea regions, among many other changes. The greatest challenge to marine ecosystems and their management is climate change (see Harris 2019). In 2019, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) produced a special report describing the impacts of climate change on the oceans (and the cryosphere) (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2019). The list of those impacts is long and worrying. In its latest report on the science of climate change (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2021), the IPCC declared that human influence on the oceans is unequivocal, resulting in ‘widespread and rapid changes’ in marine and other biospheres (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2021: SPM-5). Ocean warming has already resulted in extensive coral bleaching and changes to fisheries. The heat content of the oceans and global mean sea-surface temperatures have increased. The oceans have warmed about 1°C since the second half of the nineteenth century, with much of that increase in recent decades (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2021: SPM-5). Marine heatwaves have become more common. Global mean sea level has risen substantially, partly due to the melting of land ice, such as that of the Greenland Ice Sheet, with major implications for coastal communities, low-lying countries, and small-island states. The extent of Arctic sea ice – its range throughout the year and its thickness – has decreased markedly, and other changes to polar marine ecosystems are increasing, not least in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica. Acidification and other changes to ocean chemistry, such as increasing salinity and decreasing oxygen content of seawater, are affecting marine organisms. Changes to both ocean temperatures and salinity, among other factors, are affecting ocean currents, turnover, and upwelling.

Marine governance amidst global environmental change

All of these manifestations of global environmental change in oceans and seas, and indeed many other manifestations that are not mentioned here, present new challenges for governing the marine environment. Marine environmental governance can be broadly conceived of as marine policies and actions that prevent or limit adverse environmental outcomes and promote desirable ones (cf. Delmas and Young 2009: 6). Governance has always been difficult in the marine environment (see, e.g., Grip 2017), but global environmental change adds new layers of difficulty that cannot be ignored. This is especially true with respect to the most profound of all types of global environmental change: climate change. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has observed, ‘Impacts of climate-related changes in the ocean … increasingly challenge current governance efforts to develop and implement adaptation responses from local to global scales, and in some cases pushing them to their limits’ (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2019: 29). Consequently, it is imperative to strengthen those and other governance efforts that are directly and indirectly related to the world’s oceans and seas. How have governments, communities and other actors concerned about the marine environment responded to global environmental changes? How will, and how should, they do so in the future? The contributors to this book aim to answer these and many related questions. Their chapters are organised into sections that respectively focus on marine environmental governance with respect to (a) international law, regimes, and institutions (Part 2 of the book); (b) non-state actors (Part 3); (c) particular environments and regions (Part 4); and (d) emerging issues (Part 5). The following subsections highlight some of the ideas presented in each chapter.

International law, regimes, and leadership in marine environmental governance

The substantive chapters begin in Part 2 of the book, which focuses on international law, regimes, and institutions in marine governance amidst global environmental change. In Chapter 2, Erik van Doorn provides a foundation for most subsequent chapters with a detailed description of the law of the sea. He argues that marine governance is very largely premised on the law of the sea, which evolved through centuries to become customary international law. The importance of clarifying the law of the sea and adapting it to modern needs resulted in negotiation and agreement of the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). Combined with existing practices, UNCLOS has subsequently affected the use of oceans and seas as the Anthropocene has become more evident there. The question is whether UNCLOS and the law of the sea more broadly are up to the task as global environmental changes become more intense, more widespread, and more influential in the marine environment. The likely outcome for marine environmental governance may be a combination of creative interpretation of existing law and creation of new formal and informal (‘soft’) law agreements and the evolution of practices by states, all of which are taken up in greater detail in several other chapters in this book.

One of the big challenges for marine environmental governance amidst global environmental change is the imperfect fit between regimes developed for ocean management and those created to manage global climate change. The nexus between these two regimes – or, more accurately, sets of regimes – is taken up by Rozemarijn J. Roland Holst in Chapter 3. Holst points out that, despite the many connections between oceans and climate – the bulk of carbon pollution and indeed heat from global warming have been absorbed by the oceans, for example – oceans and seas were, at least until very recently, largely absent from international negotiations on combatting climate change. Where oceans have found their way into international efforts to address climate change are in countries’ so-called Nationally Determined Contributions – their action pledges – to the 2015 Paris Agreement on Climate Change. While the oceans regime is adaptive enough to incorporate considerations of climate change, Holst argues that cumulative impacts of climate change expose the weaknesses of approaching the management of different forms of ocean pollution independently. To be sure, there are opportunities to overcome this sectoral approach within both the oceans and climate regimes, but coordination is still lacking. Neither regime is up to the task of effectively managing ocean challenges exacerbated by climate change, so ‘purposeful coordination’ will become increasingly necessary and urgent.

By focusing on the problem of ocean acidification, in Chapter 4, Jennicca Gordon further explicates the important relations between the oceans and climate regimes, in the process especially highlighting the legal connections. Due to emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels, changes in ocean chemistry are occurring at an accelerating rate. In particular, as the oceans absorb that carbon, they become acidic; today, they are almost one-third more acidic than 200 years ago. Impacts on marine organisms and ecosystems are increasingly apparent, ranging from adverse effects on plankton to reductions in shellfish harvests. Gordon argues that ocean acidification is creating specific new challenges for international law. While extant multilateral environmental agreements can serve as the basis for marine governance in this context, it is still unclear which should take the lead and what kind of new rules will need to be agreed upon to do so effectively. An obvious problem is that the cause of this problem – carbon emissions governed by the climate change regime – and the impacts – acidification of oceans and seas – are the subjects of different regimes. Gordon draws on the experience of the Convention on Biological Diversity to suggest avenues for strengthening the oceans and climate regimes so that they can more effectively respond to acidification. Connections across all three regimes – oceans, climate, and biodiversity – point to avenues for more effective marine governance of this aspect of global environmental change.

Marine governance will be conceived by some people as addressing the management challenges of the world’s great oceans, but often it is about regional seas with proximity to large human populations. The latter are the objects of analysis in Chapter 5, by Luciana Fernandes Coelho and Nata Tavonvunchai. Coelho and Tavonvunchai maintain that regional seas programmes – formalised agreements among littoral states, often under the auspices of the United Nations or other international organisations – are important regimes for ocean governance at the regional level. In particular, in addition to their normal focus on addressing traditional forms of ocean pollution, regional seas programmes provide opportunities for storing carbon within marine habitats. They can do this by shifting focus towards ecosystem-based management of marine environments, in the process protecting those habitats, such as seagrass beds and mangroves, which absorb and retain on the order of one-half of all carbon stored in marine (including coastal) ecosystems. Coelho and Tavonvunchai argue that preserving these ‘blue carbon’ ecosystems can contribute to the management objectives of both the oceans and climate regimes. A number of regional seas programmes have adopted ecosystem-based management schemes, the most prominent examples being marine protected areas and integrated coastal zone management. These schemes have the effect of promoting blue carbon storage without necessarily trying to do so specifically. This implies that more conscious efforts to protect, and eventually enlarge, blue carbon ecosystems would result in both more effective marine governance amidst climate change and more effective governance of the climate change problem itself, thanks to regional seas.

Adding to Coelho and Tavonvunchai’s analysis of blue carbon and regional seas programmes, in Chapter 6, Gabriela A. Oanta explores the marine (‘blue’) dimensions of the European Union’s (EU) European Green Deal, a nearly continent-wide initiative to realise environmental sustainability in general and carbon neutrality in particular. Towards that end, the European Green Deal has implied and explicit marine components – implied because maritime considerations matter for the programme’s wider objectives and explicit because it includes specific maritime sectoral policies and the union’s Integrated Maritime Policy. Oanta argues that the European Green Deal should be developed in ways that comport with the EU’s policies that affect oceans and seas. In particular, she calls for policies and laws that move the union beyond its established Integrated Maritime Policy towards achieving coordinated climate-related objectives through the European Green Deal, the European Climate Law, and promotion of the broader blue economy.

Whether efforts to address the marine challenges of global environmental change are likely to be successful will, to a substantial extent, be a function of leadership by actors and institutions. Their strategies for leadership are examined in Chapter 7 by Małgorzata Zachara-Szymańska. Zachara-Szymańska defines leadership in terms of multilevel activity directed towards building capacities to act. She argues that leadership is central to marine environmental governance in identifying problems and building trust among actors that, without that leadership, might face difficulties in working collectively. Leadership, or the lack of it, can be exercised by individuals, such as national leaders, corporate executives, and activists, with roles in the regimes and institutions that formulate and implement marine environmental governance. Through their leadership, they can promote new rules and measures for action, build trust among the entities that must carry out action, and address fragmentation among those entities. Zachara-Szymańska explores several dimensions of leadership: structural leadership among states and international organisations, which is often premised on the distribution of material power; cognitive leadership, which is focused on how knowledge is created, distributed and transformed, in the process affecting conceptual frameworks that guide or at least affect policies; and relational leadership, a dimension that highlights the important interactions among actors that are central to whether marine environmental governance will be effective.

Non-state actors in marine environmental governance

International law and regimes are absolutely key to marine environmental governance. For example, the law of the sea has applied for centuries out of necessity, and as maritime affairs among states became more complex, it was codified and clarified in UNCLOS. But understanding marine environmental governance, not least in the context of global environmental change, also requires that we consider the many roles played by non-state actors. The chapters in Part 3 aim to do this, starting with Chapter 8 by Alice B.M. Vadrot. Vadrot’s chapter focuses on experts and the scientific knowledge that they bring to bear in marine environmental governance. Her chapter introduces a number of prominent features of expertise and science in marine governance. Indeed, without experts and the ideas that they bring to the process, it would be all but impossible to apprehend the environmental challenges of marine governance, including those manifested in global environmental change. At the same time, however, experts and the science that they produce are often...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Part I: Introduction
• Part II: International law, regimes, and leadership in marine environmental governance
• Part III: Non-state actors in marine environmental governance
• Part IV: Governing marine environments and regions
• Part V: Emerging issues in environmentally sustainable marine governance
• Part VI: Conclusion
• Index