NEW YORK — September 25, 2014 — The Obama administration's creation of a vast protected area in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, announced Thursday, raises the question of how to police such a large and remote body of water.
The area to be protected is enormous: three times the size of California. And the protections are extensive, including bans on commercial fishing, dumping, and mining. Enforcing the fishing ban alone will mean tracking down illegal "pirate fishing" by individual boats across nearly 490,000 square miles (1.3 million square kilometers), already a huge challenge for the U.S. Coast Guard and others patrolling the waters.
The U.S. is "committed to protecting more of the world's ocean," Secretary of State John Kerry said when he announced the expansion of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument. (See "U.S. Creates Largest Protected Area in the World, 3X Larger Than California.")
But the administration has not laid out a precise strategy for watching over such a large area in the central Pacific, a daunting challenge that Kerry acknowledged on Thursday. "Agreements won't matter if no one is enforcing them," he said. Kerry added that enforcement is "going to take training and resources," but did not make clear where the resources will come from. The administration does intend to lay out a strategy for enforcement soon, with an international agreement to keep illegally caught fish out of markets intended as a keystone policy.
The area already protected by the monument is patrolled by the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard, with some presence from the Air Force.
Experts in fisheries regulation and technology say that expanding fishing bans to the new larger area could require adding patrol boats and developing new monitoring technologies such as drones and GPS tracking of fishing vessels, as well as banding together with other nations to keep illegal harvests out of markets.
Read the full story at National Geographic