Countries that pump out large amounts of greenhouse gases could “retain or expand” their fossil fuel industries while treating such emissions as “inevitable” in their net-zero accounting, according to a new study.
Some sectors, such as livestock farming and heavy industry, are viewed as particularly hard to decarbonise. This is due, in part, to a perceived lack of cheap technological solutions.
Any “residual emissions” from these practices will have to be balanced by removals from the atmosphere, if nations want to claim they have achieved their net-zero goals.
The new study, published in One Earth, analyses the strategies that nations have submitted to the UN to understand their approach to these emissions, and how they define them.
It finds significant uncertainty, with just 26 out of 71 countries with long-term plans having outlined how much they expect to still be emitting by 2050.
These nations alone say their residual emissions could be up to 2.9bn tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e) – equivalent to around 5% of the current global total.
Fossil-fuel producing nations, such as Australia and Canada, plan to continue producing large volumes of emissions – before removing them via carbon capture technologies or paying for them to be offset elsewhere.
The study authors warn that the slow development and rollout of CO2 removal technologies means this approach could lead to net-zero ambitions ending in “failure”.
Hard-to-abate?
“Residual” emissions are defined as those that remain once a nation, or some other entity, has gone as far as it thinks is possible to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
The concept is closely tied with the net-zero targets that many nations have set for the middle of the century. A country must remove CO2 from the atmosphere that is equivalent in volume to its residual emissions, in order to say it has reached net-zero.
The amount of residual emissions each country is left with therefore dictates how much it will have to invest in CO2 removal – either by planting trees or building machines that directly remove the CO2 from the atmosphere.
So far, countries have shown very little progress in developing technologies to remove CO2.
Yet, as the new study explains, “there is a tendency to treat residual emissions as inevitable”. One key reason for this is that these emissions are expected to largely come from so-called “hard-to-abate” sectors.
These sectors are generally framed as those that lack cheap and widely available technologies to drastically cut their emissions. Examples include steel production, aviation and many aspects of livestock agriculture, such as rearing cows, growing rice and using fertilisers..
Yet, despite these common framings, in practice, both residual emissions and hard-to-abate sectors remain poorly defined. Moreover, there is a growing body of evidence suggesting that even “hard-to-abate” sectors can feasibly be decarbonised using available technologies.
According to Prof Naomi Vaughan, a climate change researcher at the University of East Anglia (UEA) and one of the new study’s co-authors, this means “net-zero can hide a multitude of sins”. Speaking to Carbon Brief, she asks:
“What are you choosing – as an industry or as a country – to decide is hard to abate…And what genuinely is?”
In order to interrogate this, the team led by Harry Smith, a UEA PhD student focusing on the role of CO2 removal in climate policy, set out to understand what different countries were describing as “residual emissions” and how they were justifying this description.
Big residuals
Under the Paris Agreement, nations are encouraged to submit long-term low-emission development strategies (LT-LEDS). If a country has a mid-century net-zero target, this document will explain how it intends to get there.
In their study, Smith and his colleagues analyse every LT-LEDS submitted to the UN by October 2023 – covering a total of 67 countries. They also include four extra long-term strategies produced by EU member states, but not submitted to the UN.
The 71 nations with long-term strategies for tackling climate change cover 71% of global emissions, the study notes.
However, the majority – 41 in total – do not quantify residual emissions at all in their plans. These include major emitters with net-zero targets, such as China, India and Russia.
The researchers identify 26 countries that have calculated the amount of emissions they expect to still be producing at the point they reach net-zero.
In total, this amounts to between 2.6-2.9GtCO2e, excluding emissions from land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF). (The range results from countries including several different scenarios in their strategies.)
The study also compares the scale of each nation’s residual emissions to the highest level its emissions have reached in a year. If countries are yet to peak, data from 2021 was used.
The authors conclude that, on average, the 16 developed “Annex I” countries assessed in this study plan on still producing 21% of their peak emissions when they reach net-zero.
Meanwhile, the nine developing and emerging “Annex II” economies expect to continue producing 34% of their peak emissions, the study finds. This estimate excludes Cambodia, which plans to keep increasing its emissions but cancelling them out by turning its extensive forests into a net carbon sink.
The chart below shows residual emissions (red) as a share of each nation’s peak emissions (blue) – or its most recent annual emissions, if its emissions have not yet peaked. Residual emissions from the US alone are set to be higher than the total emissions of nearly every other country.
Justifying emissions
To understand more about how governments justify the residual emissions in their strategies, the researchers analyse the sectors where emissions remain high out into the second half of this century.
Overall, agriculture is expected to see the least progress in emissions reductions, contributing roughly one-third of residual emissions across all the nations assessed, the study finds.
Methane from livestock and emissions from fertilisers are frequently cited as some of the “hardest-to-abate”. Developed countries only expect their agricultural emissions to drop 37%, on average, by the time they hit net-zero.
(International aviation and shipping, while viewed as some of the hardest sectors to decarbonise, are simply excluded from most countries’ long-term plans, meaning they do not feature prominently in this analysis.)
The researchers also look in greater depth at the rationales given by each country for defining emissions as “residual” or “hard-to-abate”, by analysing 357 statements on the topic within the long-term strategies. They group the statements into different categories, based on which sectors are described and the type of language used.
As the chart below shows, countries frequently provide no justification at all for their continued production of residual emissions in particular sectors.
The definition of “residual” varies considerably between countries, with governments focusing on different aspects depending on their circumstances. Smith tells Carbon Brief:
“What you find is this range of rationales [that are] not just technical…They’re not just political either…It’s a kind of pick your buffet of rationales.”
The most common arguments concern residual emissions from industry and transport – particularly the production of cement and steel, the emissions of F-gases and domestic aviation and shipping. (The researchers note a “mismatch” here, with arguments explaining residual emissions from agriculture often overlooked, despite it being the largest contributor.)
Countries most frequently cite the lack of new technologies and limits to existing ones as the reasons for continued emissions from these sectors.
Despite these assertions, hundreds of industry leaders from the heavy industry and heavy-duty transport sectors have described net-zero goals as “technically and financially possible by mid-century”.
For example, a recent report by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) concluded that “the technologies to decarbonise hard-to-abate sectors have seen significant progress in recent years and are today largely available”.
‘Retain or expand’
The large amounts of residual emissions in most nations’ long-term strategies reveals that many are expecting to lean heavily on carbon removal to meet their net-zero targets, the study says.
The study notes that this “risks the credibility of their target[s] and risks a failure to meet national and global net-zero”, given the known limits to carbon removals.
In some cases, this could also mean shifting responsibility elsewhere by purchasing carbon offsets from other countries.
Moreover, the study adds that some nations “may attempt to retain or expand their fossil fuel production”, and pass off resulting emissions as “residual”. Vaughan explains that countries may lean towards looser definitions of residual emissions, if it benefits them:
“If you have a country with a very significant investment in the fossil fuel industry or extraction industries, then there is an incentive to imagine getting to net-zero where you still have quite a lot of emissions – but you’re using lot’s of CO2 removal to get there.”
The authors highlight Australia and Canada, two nations that currently produce large amounts of fossil fuels. Both include scenarios in their net-zero strategies – albeit at the high end of several potential outcomes – where emissions only fall by around half by 2050.
In Australia’s case, this scenario relies on purchasing large amounts of carbon offsets from other countries. Canada relies on very high use of CO2 removal technologies.
Prof Holly Jean Buck, a climate researcher at the University of Buffalo who published an initial investigation into residual emissions in countries’ LT-LEDS last year, but was not involved in this research. She says tackling the “ambiguity” around these emissions is key:
“We don’t know if countries are planning to phase out fossil fuels…We have infrastructure that has long lifetimes in terms of how long it takes to build it and how long it will be in operation. Without specificity around which sectors or activities we hope to fully decarbonise and electricity, it’s hard for countries to do that planning.”
More political
Experts tell Carbon Brief the new study is a welcome contribution to a relatively sparse literature on residual emissions.
Buck says it is a “thorough and careful” study that expands on her work, both by increasing the number of strategies assessed and broadening the scope of the analysis.
Her assessment only focused on high-ambition strategies for LT-LEDS from Annex I countries. The new research led by Smith and his colleagues includes a broader range of scenarios, and suggests that residual emissions could be even higher in 2050 than thought.
The study proposes a number of measures to tighten the definition of “residual” emissions and help countries better address them. This includes stronger reporting requirements for national strategies.
The researchers also propose separate targets for emissions reductions and CO2 removals, in order to prevent countries continuing to burn fossil fuels while simply pledging to remove emissions.
Dr William Lamb, a researcher at the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change who was not involved in the study, tells Carbon Brief he supports this idea and adds:
“I would also like to see the discussion of residual emissions become more political than it currently is. If countries were asking questions such as ‘how fast can we phase out fossil fuels?’ and ‘what human needs and services do we need to deliver, at minimum impact to the climate?’ then their long-term strategies would look very different.”
The post Major emitters ‘may retain or expand’ fossil fuels despite net-zero plans appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Major emitters ‘may retain or expand’ fossil fuels despite net-zero plans
After witnessing the effects of sea-level rise in the low-lying island nation of Tuvalu, Pacific leaders on Tuesday used the pre-COP31 summit in Fiji to voice their frustration at the difficulties they have experienced in tapping the global climate finance system.
A small group of government leaders, climate negotiators and heads of development banks and climate funds took a trip to Tuvalu’s Funafuti atoll on Tuesday morning, travelling by road over land just 10-20 metres wide to visit a project that is building barriers to keep the sea from the land.
They then flew to Fiji for the pre-COP summit, where several Pacific leaders said they had been let down by the insufficient quantity, bad terms and slow speed of international finance to help them adapt to a warming climate that is bringing higher oceans, drought and more powerful storms to their shores.
“Right now, our islands are like a canoe that has been rammed by a massive foreign ship. Our canoe is taking on water, we are sinking, and what is the world’s response?” asked Palau’s President Surangel Whipps Jr.
“They hand us a tiny patch to cover a gaping hole,” he continued, “but the bureaucratic process just to receive that patch is so slow that the water fills the hole while we wait. Then to rebuild the vessel so that we can survive the next storm, we are offered loans, debt that adds weight to a sinking boat packaged in red tape so thick we can barely access it. And while we wait, the water continues to fill.”
Pacific leaders and Australia called again on governments to invest in the new Pacific Resilience Facility (PRF), which has been designed by the Pacific Islands Forum and is seeking $500 million in investments by COP31 in November.
It has around $180 million so far, but did not receive additional pledges during the UN General Assembly in New York. The PRF aims to invest to generate annual returns which it can give to projects like water tanks for drought-hit communities.
Witnessing sea level rise
The annual pre-COP gathering is usually a low-profile technical meeting of climate negotiators. But this year, Australia – which is the president of negotiations at COP31 – partnered with the Pacific to introduce a “leaders segment” in an attempt to shine a spotlight on climate issues affecting the region.
Fourteen government leaders – from Australia, Timor-Leste, Mauritius and the Pacific – made the trip. They were joined by the European Union’s climate commissioner Wopke Hoekstra, the heads of the Green Climate Fund and the Asian Development Bank and former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard.
On their return to Fiji, Solomon Islands Prime Minister Matthew Wale told the pre-COP leaders roundtable that the sea level rise they had witnessed was personal for him.
“Tuvalu was not just a site visit for me. I saw the story of my own saltwater people,” he said, adding that he, his daughter and his grandfather had lost their houses to sea level rise and that three-quarters of his electorate live on land that will be underwater in the next 30 years.
From the other side of the world, Antigua and Barbuda’s environment minister Michael Joseph said Tuvalu’s problems felt similar to those of his own Caribbean islands. “I saw vulnerable communities… just metres from the sea and people determined to remain on their land, preserve their culture and way of life,” he said.
A group of Fijian schoolchildren told the leaders it was not just sea level rise the Pacific struggles with but also heatwaves, droughts and storms, which worry their families and prevent them from learning.
Climate finance red-tape
Several Pacific leaders criticised the world’s leaders for not doing enough to combat climate change. Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown expressed disappointment that only two non-Pacific leaders had come to the pre-COP, a fact Australian media widely picked up on to label the event a flop and question its A$20 million (US$14m) price tag.
“We’ve heard a lot of numbers these last two days,” Brown said. “Let me share one of my own. More than 50 invitations extended to world leaders… to see for themselves what high emissions are doing to our nations and our ocean – an ocean that covers nearly one-third of the Earth’s surface.”
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He called for more climate finance for the Pacific, asking “if the world is prepared to assess our suitability for climate finance, why is it not equally prepared to scrutinise whether those responsible for delivering it are meeting their obligations?”
Like Palau’s president Whipps, Naoero’s President David Adeang criticised the red tape that is hindering access to climate finance as well as a lack of money, complaining especially about “complicated procedures, heavy reporting, delays in approval and disbursement”.
Adeang added that “the way we assess vulnerability matters”, adding that it should be measured by more than income. Naoero, for example, is classified by the World Bank as high-income, restricting which climate finance it is eligible for.
Action plan to improve access
On Thursday, the Australian government will present a statement and action plan on improving access to climate finance for small island developing states and least developed countries, which it is asking other countries and organisations to endorse.
The statement addresses some of these Pacific complaints as well as acknowledging that progress has already been made on simplifying access by multilateral development banks and climate funds.
In Fiji, Asian Development Bank head Masato Kanda said his institution is “tailoring our finance and operations to island realities” because “your children and their children should be able to grow old in the countries their ancestors have called home for millennia”.
The executive director of the Green Climate Fund (GCF), Mafalda Duarte, said that the GCF-backed coastal adaptation project leaders visited in Tuvalu shows that “climate finance works” although – as the project took eight years to implement – “it takes time, and therefore we have no time to waste”.
Australia calls for optimism
While Pacific leaders expressed concern that the world is set to blast past its agreed 1.5C warming limit, endangering their nations, Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called for “optimism”. “If people think there is no hope, then they will not strive to get the change that we need,” he said.
He said that when he attended his first COP in 2005, Australia’s renewable energy target was 2%. Its target is now 82% renewable electricity by 2030.
While Albanese promoted Australia’s success at electrifying homes and businesses and rolling out renewables, he has been criticised by climate campaigners for extending the production of fossil fuels, including coal – largely for export.
France’s Minister for Ecological Transition Monique Barbut defended the European Union’s climate action at the pre-COP meeting. She said the continent was heating up and reducing emissions faster and providing more climate finance than anywhere else in the world.
“It is time for all major emitters to step up and do their fair share” on climate finance, she said. Most developing countries with large emissions have fiercely resisted joining the club of climate finance donors, arguing they have played a disproportionately small historic role in causing climate change.
Barbut, as well as Palau’s president Whipps, called for the next flagship scientific assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to be finished by COP33 in 2028, in time to inform the next global stocktake of national climate action.
This timeline has been opposed by countries like India, Saudi Arabia and China, who argue it would put an unfair burden on developing countries. Barbut said countries should “support the work of the IPCC rather than sabotage its calendar”.
Barbut said that governments should agree at COP31 to aim to raise the share of “clean electricity” in final energy consumption to 35% by 2035. The Turkish and Australian governments have pushed for this goal although without specifying that the electricity should be “clean”. Barbut added that COP31 should also agree to cut emissions of methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas.
The post Pacific leaders rail at climate finance failures after pre-COP trip to Tuvalu appeared first on Climate Home News.
Pacific leaders rail at climate finance failures after pre-COP trip to Tuvalu
Jacynta Fa’amau is a Pacific campaigner at global grassroots climate movement 350.org and a secretariat member of Pacific Climate Warriors.
The first thing that struck me was the sheer size of Queensland’s Saraji coal mine. Standing at the edge of the enormous pit, my brain scrambled for words as I scanned the earth’s open wound – a whole island could probably fit inside it.
Looking down, I noticed footprints of an emu and a koala, pressed and dried in what was once a puddle – signs of how drought had driven animals in desperate search of water, so dangerously close to the coal trucks and heavy machinery ahead.
Earlier this year, I joined a small group of Pacific Islanders on a journey through the Bowen Basin to learn from First Nations communities battling Australia’s mammoth coal industry. Of the more than 40 coal mines operating in the area, BHP & Mitsubishi Alliance’s Saraji mine is one of the largest. So it came as a painful shock to us when in August, the Australian government approved the mine’s extension just months after our visit.
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Witnessing coal extraction is devastating. It is bad enough to see what pillaging tonnes of coal can do to a mine’s immediate surroundings: dry creek beds, dwindling wildlife, denuded land. But to know that this coal will be shipped across the ocean, bring air pollution, and eventually lead to the destruction of Pacific islands thousands of miles away is another kind of heartbreak.
Rising ocean waters
I’m an Australian-born Samoan. In 2002, I visited my family home for the first time. My father took me to the rural community where generations of my family were raised. He did not have the words to describe how much has changed since rising ocean waters had taken away almost a third of the beach.
I learned of how we had to relocate my great‑great‑grandparents’ grave to higher ground twice in the last 15 years. Of how my cousins have to paddle out further to sea to catch fish, since warmer waters have destroyed much of the reef. Of how the ocean crashes so close to my uncle’s home that he had to build a new house further away.
We saw reflections of our own climate destruction in the Pacific when we shared these stories with our First Nations relatives at the edge of the Saraji mine. Murrawah Johnson and Teila Watson, both Birri Gubba and Gangulu women, made clear connections between their struggles and ours. “We don’t get to inherit our land and we don’t get to inherit our traditional roles. We are fighting a war on extinction,” Murrawah said.
Coal extraction devastated their lands and cultures – totems have disappeared, fresh water has become scarce – while the effects of using it have devastated ours. “King tide, cyclones, all the violence that has been enacted on your country and people is because of the violence that has been allowed here, to us and our country,” Teila said.
Wearing the mantle of climate leadership
This week, Australia is assuming the mantle of climate leadership as co-president and head of negotiations of this year’s UN Climate Change Conference, COP31. It will lead on deliberating the summit’s priorities as world leaders and climate negotiators descend on Fiji and Tuvalu for the pre-COP meetings.
Ironically, just days before the pre-COP began, the New South Wales Independent Planning Commission approved the largest-ever coal project the state has seen, set to emit an extra 800 million tonnes of carbon emissions. I joined the Pacific Climate Warriors and other communities in submitting about 4,000 appeals to oppose the project – yet these all fell on deaf ears.
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But the fight is not yet over. The project still requires federal approval to proceed, so every promise that Australia makes while at the helm of the climate talks counts. These promises will be measured against actual decisions it makes at home: to either lock us into more decades of climate pollution, or begin shutting down coal and gas once and for all.
Pacific leaders have made it clear that countries must align their policies with the 1.5-degree warming goal, a limit that we already know will be breached within the decade. Any chance of keeping this still within reach requires an immediate end to fossil fuel expansion and concrete plans to phase out existing projects. But success will be an uphill battle if COP31’s own head of negotiations refuses to lead by example.
Australia remains the second-largest coal exporter in the world. It is one of the very few industrialised countries under the Paris Agreement’s Annex I that still has no coal phase-out plan. Since 2022, the Albanese government has approved 37 new, expanded or extended coal, oil and gas projects. It is thus unsurprising that its own mitigation policies have been rated by Climate Action Tracker as “insufficient”, even without factoring in fossil fuel exports and related expansion.
Keeping 1.5C alive
Australia must course-correct to earn the mantle it has been given, especially by Pacific nations that backed the country’s bid for the COP31 co-presidency. As a first step, the government must end all coal expansion and explicitly declare a coal phase-out date. It’s the only way to show that it’s capable of leadership that moves beyond endlessly deliberating the “if”, and starts implementing the “how” of keeping the 1.5C target alive.
The dread I felt staring down at the abyss on the edge of that coal mine months ago still exists. I carry it with me as I show up at the pre-COP to demand that leaders heed the calls of Pacific people. But it is tempered with resolve to keep our lands and communities alive. We remain steadfast in our efforts to secure an outcome that protects people everywhere and brings us back below 1.5 degrees as soon as possible.
The post Coal mines and hypocrisy must not be Australia’s COP31 legacy appeared first on Climate Home News.
Coal mines and hypocrisy must not be Australia’s COP31 legacy
When José Antonio Kast took office as Chile’s new president in March, one of his first moves was to put the brakes on plans to expand two protected marine parks – raising doubts about the country’s high-profile bid to host the headquarters of the High Seas Treaty.
But during the UN General Assembly last month, the right-wing leader reaffirmed his leftist predecessor’s ambition for Chile to host the landmark global pact, which came into effect in January and provides a legal framework to protect the waters of the high seas beyond national jurisdiction that cover about two-thirds of the world’s oceans.
Hailing the country’s “maritime vocation”, Kast’s government said the bid to host the treaty’s secretariat in the port city of Valparaíso was state policy and testament to its commitment to multilateralism.
“For the government of Chile, it is of high interest to achieve this recognition, and we will carry out all the efforts to obtain the necessary support,” Foreign Minister Francisco Pérez Mackenna was quoted as saying by local media.
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Tough competition from Chinese, Belgian bids
But to garner the votes it needs, Chile must fend off competing bids by Belgium – which has proposed its well-connected capital, Brussels – and China, whose well-funded bid includes the provision of free premises in the coastal city of Xiamen and five years of free utility costs.
Parties to the treaty, formally called the Agreement on Marine Biological Diversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ), will choose the headquarters at their first summit (COP1), in New York from January 11 to January 22, 2027. They will seek consensus, falling back on a two-thirds majority in successive secret ballots.
Chile has offered to provide a restored waterside warehouse “at its own expense” as office space, pitching itself to developing countries as a Global South alternative to Europe-centred Brussels. Among richer countries, it is promoting its democratic credentials and greater transparency as an alternative to China.
Rolling back environmental safeguards at home?
While the South American country remains the top pick among environmental campaigners and other civil society groups, critics of Kast’s government say recent policy moves may make it harder for the country to garner the support it needs.
On March 12, the day after Kast took office, the Environment Ministry withdrew 43 decrees awaiting legal approval, including a push to expand the Mar de Juan Fernández and Nazca-Desventuradas marine parks – vast protected areas in Chile’s Pacific Ocean waters. Both remain under review, the ministry told Climate Home News.
The decrees also included an emission standard for coal power plants and regulations for Chile’s new biodiversity and protected areas service.
A month after holding up the decrees, Kast questioned aspects of Chile’s urban wetlands protection law, suggesting it was sometimes an unjustified obstacle to much-needed housing development, and his administration has also sought to ease the rules on salmon farming in the world’s second-largest producer.
In August, the Constitutional Court struck down the salmon farming reform after a challenge by opposition lawmakers and warnings from green groups including Greenpeace, which said it could help farms relocate into protected areas such as the Kawésqar National Reserve.
Valparaíso mayor Camila Nieto, from former leftist President Gabriel Boric’s party, backs the bid to host the High Seas Treaty, but said she hoped “the government’s support also translates into public policies consistent with the goals of protecting and conserving the oceans”.
“The decisions a country makes on environmental matters can influence international perceptions of its commitment to protecting the oceans. That is something we cannot ignore,” Nieto told Climate Home News.
China’s bid stirs concerns over data access, fishing
Chile’s past record on marine protection – it has protected 43% of its jurisdictional waters – could yet give it an edge.
“Chile deserves it for its conservation record as a state. For more than 15 years Chile has been following this path,” Liesbeth van der Meer, executive director at conservation group Oceana in Chile, told Climate Home News.
Concerns in some quarters about the rival bid by China – for example, over a potential conflict of interest due to the vast Chinese fishing industry – may also weigh in Chile’s favour, experts say.
Chinese-flagged vessels did about 30% of detected high seas fishing between 2022 and 2024, according to an Oceana analysis of Global Fishing Watch data. China also sponsors five of the International Seabed Authority’s 31 deep-sea mining exploration contracts, more than any other country.
The secretariat would host sensitive marine data, making transparency paramount, experts say.
China says hosting the secretariat in Xiamen would help make the treaty more globally representative, fostering cooperation between rich and developing countries and aiding equitable access to marine science and technology.
Wang Yi, China’s minister of foreign affairs, said in a statement that the country has “all along championed true multilateralism” and “firmly defended” UN institutions. Given Xiamen’s $38-billion ocean industry, the city lives up to the treaty’s “significance and promising future”, he added.
Meanwhile, Chile is proposing the treaty’s first high seas marine protected area for the Salas y Gómez and Nazca ridges, a chain of more than 110 seamounts stretching about 4,000 km from off Peru to Rapa Nui (Easter Island) that is rich in endemic fish and other marine species.
The ridges are “a true oasis of productivity”, said Carlos Gaymer, director of the Centre for Ecology and Sustainable Management of Oceanic Islands at Universidad Católica del Norte and co-author of a 2021 scientific review of the area.
The water is so clear that phytoplankton thrive around 200 metres down, feeding zooplankton, small fish and, up the chain, sharks and seabirds. Whales, turtles and sharks use the ridges as “a real highway” across the Pacific, Gaymer said. Parts of the Nazca ridge are likely nursery grounds for jack mackerel and swordfish.
Chile has already asked the body that regulates the industry in the area – the South Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Organisation (SPRFMO) – to close the ridges to all fishing vessels. According to Chilean data, more than 80% of fishing in the area involves Chinese vessels.
Meeting on the Chilean request in early September, SPRFMO’s scientific committee agreed only to recommend closing the area to bottom fishing. SPRFMO’s commission will take the final decision at its next meeting, in early 2027.
For Gaymer, Chile’s push to close the area to fishing should be seen as a “starting point” for the treaty proposal.
“Every time there’s a new expedition, species new to science appear,” Gaymer said. “If you don’t protect areas like these … those species simply disappear from the planet.”
The post Race to host High Seas Treaty HQ heats up as Chile reaffirms bid appeared first on Climate Home News.
Race to host High Seas Treaty HQ heats up as Chile reaffirms bid
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