Island Nation Creates World’s Third Largest Protected Marine Area
By Charles Bethea
March 29, 2006 A small island nation in the Pacific has surfaced from obscurity by placing itself squarely on the global conservation map. Tuesday, the Republic of Kiribati—a nation comprised of 33 islands stretching across several hundred miles between Fiji and Hawaii—declared its plan to create the third largest protected marine area in the world and the only marine park in the region with underwater mountains.
Martin Putaa Tofinga, Minister of the Environment of Kiribati, announced the establishment of the Phoenix Islands Protected Area at the eighth United Nations conference of the Convention on Biological Diversity being held in Curitaba, Brazil, this week.
The reserve will ban commercial fishing to protect more than 120 species of coral and 520 species of fish inside its 73,800-square-mile area, according to a press release put out by the New England Aquarium, which will assist in the creation of the reserve.
“It is a remarkable atoll marine wilderness area, the most magnificent I’ve ever seen,” Greg Stone, Vice President of Global Marine Programs at the New England Aquarium in Boston, told Outside Online. “The Phoenix Islands have experienced little human impact and Kiribati’s conservation action will protect the area from future threats, like overfishing, and help mitigate the effects of climate change.”
The plan will allow subsistence fishing by resident communities in designated zones, but no other threatening invasions of its waters. To compensate the Kiribati government, the New England Aquarium and Conservation International will set up an endowment that pays for the park’s management costs and lost revenue from the banning of foreign commercial fishing licenses. .
“If the coral and reefs are protected, then the fish will grow and bring us benefit,” Anote Tong, Kiribati’s President, told Reuters. “In this way, all species of fish can be protected so none become depleted or extinct.”
Bigger marine reserves are located in Australia and Hawaii, but neither has the biodiversity of the Phoenix Islands area, according to Stone.
“This is truly a primal ocean site,” said Stone. “There’s such a vast, pristine array of coral and fish—and the shark density is monstrous. I’ve never seen so much life in a water column in my entire life.”
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