Abstract
The Sargasso Sea is to be found within the North Atlantic Subtropical Gyre. Its borders are the major ocean currents. These boundaries shift with these currents, but there is a core area that covers approximately 2 million square nautical miles situated around the Bermuda archipelago, the majority of which is beyond the national jurisdiction of any State. Ten governments have now signed the 2014 Hamilton Declaration on Collaboration for the Conservation of the Sargasso Sea, which mandated the Government of Bermuda to appoint the members of the Sargasso Sea Commission—the first such body to take on a stewardship role for a high seas ecosystem. The Commission has committed to working with the existing international organizations with jurisdictional competences over a myriad of high seas activities. This paper will examine the work of the Commission and lessons learned over the past decade; it will discuss its possible role as a “boundary spanning” organization and look forward to its future in the light of recent grants from the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and the Fonds Francais pour l’Environnement Mondial (FFEM).
Highlights
In June 2014, five governments—the Azores, Bermuda, Monaco, the UK and the US met in Bermuda and signed the Hamilton Declaration on Collaboration for the Conservation of the Sargasso Sea (Freestone and Morrison, 2014; Hamilton Declaration, 2014)
The Conference of the Parties (COP) may be able to provide a much needed impetus for global recognition of regional initiatives in high seas conservation—using the so called area based management tools like MPAs—thereby widening their legal impacts (Freestone, 2019). While these lessons learned may have been of some value to the Inter-Governmental Conference (IGC) negotiators in addressing the challenges of the new treaty regime being negotiated, they did demonstrate that the innovative structure developed by the Hamilton Declaration did have a number of intrinsic limitations
It seems likely that the West and Central Atlantic Fisheries Commission (WECAFC) negotiations will result in a new body with responsibility for nontuna fisheries in the high seas area which covers the Sargasso Sea, but it clear that the fisheries bodies are still not interacting in any systematic way with the bodies which regulate for example vessel movement and operational discharges from vessels or seabed mineral exploration and possible exploitation
Summary
In June 2014, five governments—the Azores, Bermuda, Monaco, the UK and the US met in Bermuda and signed the Hamilton Declaration on Collaboration for the Conservation of the Sargasso Sea (Freestone and Morrison, 2014; Hamilton Declaration, 2014) This was the culmination of a two year negotiation that involved representatives of 14 governments, plus the Canadian Senate and the EU Commission; representatives of seven international organizations attended one or more of the meetings. Governments may tend to negotiate softer language to reflect their commitments in a text that will be legally binding Those involved in the early days of the Sargasso Sea project recognized that it might be possible to start with a political declaration and move to a binding agreement in the future, a scenario that has worked well in other contexts, such as the North Sea (Freestone and IJlstra, 1990), dolphin conservation in the East Pacific (Hampton, 1998) and more recently in the Artic (Schatz et al, 2019). In 2017 the number of Commissioners was increased to seven
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