Experts lament poor ocean protection

World governments have made little progress in the past 20 years when it comes to their pledges to protect marine life and reduce overfishing, experts said Thursday.

With ocean health among the top 10 issues at the Rio 20 summit on sustainable development June 20-22, international experts called for concrete action to avoid “empty ocean commitments.”

Targets set at UN summits in 1992 and 2002 have largely gone unmet, and implementation “has been difficult, ineffective or practically nonexistent,” the authors wrote in the U.S. journal Science.

Contributors came from the Zoological Society of London, Simon Fraser University in Canada, the Pew Environment Group in the U.S., the University of British Columbia and the University of Oxford.

“Our analysis shows that almost every commitment made by governments to protect the oceans has not been achieved,” said Jonathan Baillie, director of conservation at ZSL.

“If these international processes are to be taken seriously, governments must be held accountable and any future commitments must come with clear plans for implementation and a process to evaluate success or failure.”

An international action plan to end illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing remains voluntary and has not put a stop to the $23 billion per year industry, the article said. Although local level protections of marine biodiversity have improved in some places, the global picture is “bleak” for many forms of sea life, it said.