Transboundary Marine Ecosystem and Living Resource
Problems in the North Pacific
Seong K. Park, Ph.D. and Jae M. Choi[1]
Pukyong National University/Faculty of Ocean Industry Policy
599-1 Daeyon-3dong, Nam-gu, Busan 608-737, Korea
Tel: 51-620-6511 Fax: 51-621-8168
Email:
Presented for the Open Meeting of International
Science Planning Committee (ISPC)
October 6-8, 2001, Hotel Gloria
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
I.Defining Problems
The North Pacific region has witnessed profound technological, economic and social transformations for the past fifty years. During the period North Pacific countries also experienced the rapid development and diffusion of marine technological innovations with regard to vessels, equipments, and fish farming that were accompanied by the emergence of mass exploitation of coastal/marine living resources, mass mariculture production and mass consumption.
Many experts on marine ecosystem and resources believe that ocean carrying capacity may no longer allow overexploitation of marine living resources. In reality, North Pacific coastal states and international fishery organizations have put much more efforts on resource management over their jurisdictional waters as well as the high seas than ever before. This is a clear sign that cheap marine fisheries operation in the oceans will be no longer possible throughout the region.
Such global and/or regional trend naturally raises an important question on fisheries/resources sustainability. That is to say, how can coastal states with limited but transboundary[2] marine living resources provide their people with seafood in a sustainable manner under the restrictive conditions? Many North Pacific countries are facing the challenging marine environmental/resource issues. One way to solve the problem is to transform its fisheries into environmentally sound sustainable fisheries. However, most of the North Pacific countries have a wide spectrum of socioeconomic development stage and cultural background and are sharing transboundary marine ecosystems and living resources in the North Pacific waters. Asian countries in the region are quite different from North American coastal states in many respects. First of all, population density seems to be the most important element. China, Japan and Korea are the coastal nations with the highest population density and account for 13 percent of the world population. Second, they are among the largest consumers/producers/traders of fish and fish products in the world. Japan is the biggest importer, while China is the largest exporter. Third, their environmental/resource management practices are not much advanced although some of them are highly industrialized. A main reason for this is that they (particularly, China and Korea) have a large number of less developed coastal communities, which have developed resource-use oriented technologies under the massive government financial support.
Such unbalanced technological development strategy and competitive exploitation of marine living resources showed a tendency of resulting in a treadmill phenomenon (a vicious cycle) in many fisheries. For example, introducing new fishing technology with little conservation concern induces higher fishing intensity, which leads to lowering resource stock/environmental quality associated with higher marginal production/conservation costs, followed by lowering income. This process tends to repeat itself. That is, newer technology requires more investment, which, in turn, results in higher overcapacity.
In this regard there have been serious international debates surrounding world marine environmental conservation and living resource management issues: (i) reduction in government financial transfer (subsidies) to fisheries sector (OECD, FAO and WTO), (ii) fishing capacity adjustments (FAO), (iii) lowering tariff and non-tariff barriers (WTO and APEC), and (iv) early voluntary sectoral liberalization (APEC). The main objective of addressing these marine fisheries issues is to explore ways that international communities can contribute to sustainable marine fisheries and ecosystem management in the world and the Pacific Region as well. However, in particular, a little attention has been given to human dimensions in the previous international marine environmental and fisheries fora.
In this context, section two describes geographic setting of the North Pacific ocean. Section three examines characteristics of Transboundary Marine Ecosystem and Marine Living Resources in the region. Section four identifies and analyzes key driving forces including human dimension, which affect North Pacific marine affairs and national/international responses to the driving forces. Section five concludes this paper and makes some suggestions.
II. Geographic Setting of the North Pacific Ocean
The Pacific is the world’s largest, coldest and deepest ocean. It occupies about 166 million square kilometers, or approximately one-third of the earth’s total surface area. Its mean depth is about 4,000 meters (The Mariana Trench, off the island of Guam, is measured at a depth of 11,000 meters). The Pacific contains a volume of more than 576 million cubic kilometers of water. The average water temperature of the Pacific is about 3.36℃, and the salinity content is about 3.46 percent (Wang 1992).
The pacific is so vast that it could contain all of the world’s land masses or continents within its area. Near the equator the Pacific extends and spreads to 17,700 kilometers-halfway around the world. To the east of the Pacific lie the American continents, and to the west Asia and Australia. To the north the Pacific is connected by the Bering Strait with the Arctic Ocean. In many ways, the Pacific can be a violent ocean where fearsome storms occur and frequent earthquakes, caused by erupting volcanic islands, disturb the tranquility of its waters. The Pacific Ocean is commonly divided into North, Central and South Pacific segments.
Among the segments the North Pacific Ocean is a major world source of marine organisms: harvests of these organisms play an important role in the economic and international relations of the bordering nations. The region itself extends from the near-tropical waters off southern Japan to the arctic waters of the Bering Sea. The Bering Sea contains one of the largest and most productive areas of continental shelf of the world ocean, while the continental shelves along the Pacific coast of Japan and the United States are relatively narrow and productivity is variable.
Table 1. Bathymetry of the North Pacific and Adjacent Seas
Pacific Ocean / Bering Sea / Sea of Okhotsk / East Sea / Yellow andEast China Seas
Area (km2)
Mean Depth (m)
Volume (km3)
Continental Shelf
Area (0-200m)
Continental Slope
Area (200-1000m)
Deep Basin Area / 22,000,000
4,188
92,180,000
1.6%
2.6%
95.8% / 2,261,000
1,492
3,373,000
46.4%
6.0%
47.6% / 1,392,000
973
1,354,000
26.5%
39.5%
44.0% / 1,013,000
1,667
1,690,000
23.5%
15.2%
61.3% / 1,202,000
272
327,000
81.3%
11.4%
7.3%
Source: Edward Miles et al. 1994. The Management of Marine Regions: The North Pacific. University of California Press. p. 19.
There are five marginal seas surrounding the North Pacific – the Bering Sea, East Sea, Okhotsk Sea, Yellow Sea and East China Sea. Together, these seas constitute an area exceeding all the other marginal seas of the world’s oceans. Comparison of bathymetery of the North Pacific and marginal seas in table 1 shows considerable variation in the amount of continental shelf, slope, and ocean basin.
In particular, the East Sea, East China Sea and Yellow Sea are the locales of important marine activities, many of which can be expected to increase in scope in the future, as the economic activities of the coastal states continue to expand. The semi-closed nature of the waters and the market interdependence require a variety of cooperation among the countries. The East Asian Seas are carrying more than 80 commercial marine species, which are of much socio-economic significance. Most of these fish species have transboundary, straddling and highly seasonal migratory characteristics.
III. Characteristics of Transboundary Marine Ecosystem and Marine Living Resources in the North Pacific
Marine Ecosystem
Marine organisms of the same species living in a specific area are populations of that particular species. A population never lives in isolation but interact with other populations. A group of plant and animal population living together in the same region is a community. For example, a variety of marine animals in a food chain system coexist.
Communities of marine organisms that interact with one another, as well as with their physical and chemical environment, in such a way as to sustain a system are found collectively termed an ecosystem. These dynamically balanced systems are found from the tallest peaks to the floors of the deepest oceans. Ecosystems come in many sizes, exhibit variations in life form and have distinct chemical and physical properties, such as those found in sea, bay, tide pool, stream and pond. The North Pacific Ocean has a multitude of naturally balanced ecosystems.
The many marine ecosystems coupled together sustain the larger, complex, and intricately interlinked North Pacific and global ecosystem - ecosphere.[3] Marine living resources would not sustain themselves without healthy ecosystems which are necessary for marine living organisms’ survival and regeneration. In the North Pacific, some sub-ecosystems (i.e., Yellow Sea, Okhotsk Sea and Bering Sea, Gulf of Alaska, California Current, etc.) turn out to have been seriously degraded by marine pollution and/or overexploitation of marine living resources during the last three decades.
Reversing this downward trend will require, besides population stabilization, regional cooperation in management and effort to repair, mitigate and minimize damages by adaptive preventive policy measures to secure sustainable development of these resources. For this, recently, large marine ecosystems (LMEs) approach[4] has been introduced to regions of ocean space.
Figure 1. World Map of Large Marine Ecosystems
Source: Sherman K. 1999. Large Marine Ecosystem: Assessment and Management in the Large Marine Ecosystems of the Pacific Rim (edited By K. Sherman and Q. Tang). Blackwell Science. p. 444.
encompassing coastal areas from river basins and estuaries to the seaward boundary of continental shelves and the seaward margins of coastal current systems. They are relatively large regions characterized by distinct bathymetry, hydrography, productivity, and trophically dependent populations.[5]
This approach to management, pertinent to LMEs, represents a paradigm shift from highly focused short-term sector by sector resource assessment and management to larger spatial scale, long-term management. This practice moves away from management of commodities to management practices that are focused on ensuring the sustainability of the productive potential for ecosystem goods and services. Now, 61 LMEs are designated around the world oceans. Among them there are 12 LMEs in the North Pacific region. To obtain information in support of improved management practices, a five module strategy, which is called modular assessments, has been developed for assessing and analyzing ecosystem-wide changes in (i) productivity, (ii) fish and fisheries, (iii) pollution and ecosystem health, (iv) socio-economics, and (v) governance (. In particular, for governance Costanza et al (1998) advocate an integrated approach based on adaptive management embodying six principles: responsibility, scale matching, precaution, adaptive management, full coast allocation and participation.
Marine Living Resources
While socio-economic and political interests of the North Pacific nations may be fragmented, reliance upon shrinking ocean and coastal resources, international trade and foreign investment capital are the most important factors that are common in all North Pacific economies. Through international markets, investment and trade links these interdependencies will reverberate throughout the region with consequences that must be addressed by all economies of the North Pacific rim.
Exploitation of fishery resources has already exceeded sustainable levels in some parts of the region and it has transboundary implications in such areas as Bering Sea, East Sea, Yellow Sea, East China Sea and North American Pacific waters. Anadromous fish (i.e., salmon), marine mammals (i.e., whales and dolphins), and seabirds have typical transboundary and straddling characteristics.
All species of salmon have extensive migration patterns during their long growth period in the marine waters. Various information sources have provided some indications of the transboundary migration routes of the different species from various spawning grounds, but in general the routes are not well-defined. The area between 175 degrees west longitude and 175 degrees east longitude is an area where the distribution of migrating stocks of Asian and North American origin overlap, and the difficulty in distinguishing between stocks that spawn in different rivers has been a major source of conflict in the management of salmon fisheries in the North Pacific. It also should be noted that stocks originating in the rivers of the nations of Asia intermingle with other stocks of Asian and North American origin and vice versa. Thus, high-seas fishing and, to some extent, even coastal fishing can occasion significant interception of stocks. Salmon feed on large zooplankton and small fishlike lantern fish.[6]
Over fifty species of marine mammals are found in the North Pacific. The polar bear (Ursus maritimus) is largely an ice-living mammal, while seals and alruses spend time in rookeries for mating and pupping. The whales, dolphins, and other mammals are exclusively water-dwelling animals. One species of marine mammals, the Stellar’s sea cow (Hydroanalus gigas) is known to have been exploited to extinction prior to 1800, and the Japanese fur seal (Zalophus californianus japonicus) is thought to be extinct despite possible shifting off the coast of the Republic of Korea. Not all species are considered to be of commercial importance. The distribution of whales in the North Pacific is largely within several hundred miles of the coastline of the continents, although some have been noted over much wider areas during seasonal migrations.[7] The sperm whale is found in the North Pacific from southern along the coast of North America.[8]
Large numbers of seabirds exist in the North Pacific area. Among the most numerous families are the Alcidae, such as murres and auklets, the laridae, or gulls and terns, and the Procellariidae, such as fulmars and shearwaters. Most species are found in the coastal areas during warmer months and migrate offshore or to more southerly latitudes in colder months. Many species breed in the North Pacific but some breed in the southern hemisphere and visit only during the summer. The food required and methods of capturing it differ greatly from where one group of species to species even within families. One example of this variation is seen in the Alcidae, exclusively on fish, and a third group on both.[9]
Overuse and/or by-catch of some marine living resources in the North Pacific waters may irreversibly transform marine ecosystems in the intermediate and long run. Continued human pressures and resulting deterioration of marine sub-ecosystems and resources have caused significant losses of marine biodiversity and weakened the potential for long-term sustainable development of the coastal areas (table 2).
IV.Human and Economic Dimensions of Marine Living
Resources: Key Driving Forces
The North Pacific experiences in marine environment and resource management over the decades have shown that the conventional marine management did not work once the human capacity of exploiting marine living resources approaches to or exceeds their ability to sustain themselves. For example, ailing coastal fisheries in the region have been characterized by declining total yields, sharp decreases in the yield per unit of fishing effort, the disappearance of valued species, cut-throat competition among fishermen, in some cases the economic collapse of the fishing industry and communities, and sociopolitical conflicts between domestic /international fishing entities.
Table 2. Marine Biodiversity
Country / Length of Coast-line (km) / Maritime Area(000 sq. km) / Total Number of Known
Coastal Marine Species {a} / Marine Habitats
(000 hectares)
Mangroves Coral Reefs / Marine Protected Areas
Shelf to 200-Meter Depth / Excl-usive Econ-omic Zone / Mammals / Number / Area
(thous hectares) / Regional Priority Sites {b} (number)
F / T / Tl / Th
Russ Fed / 37,653 / X / X / X / X / 17 / 3 / NP / NP / 12 / X / 5
Canada / 90,908 / 2,903 / 2,939 / X / X / 15 / 2 / NP / NP / 76 / 18,193 / 0
Mexico / 9,330 / 442 / 2,851 / X / 6 / 7 / 3 / 525-1,420 / P / 37 / X / 3
USA / 19,924 / 1,871 / 9,711 / X / 5 / 17 / 3 / 190-281 / P / 183 / X / 0
Chile / 6,435 / 27 / 2,288 / X / 1 / 11 / 2 / NP / P / X / X / X
Peru / 2,414 / 83 / 1,027 / X / 2 / 5 / 1 / 5-6 / X / 2 / X / 1
China / 14,500 / 870 / 1,356 / X / 1 / 4 / 1 / 20 / P / 41 / X / 0
Indonesia / 54,716 / 2,777 / 5,409 / X / 5 / 4 / 1 / 4,251 / P / 30 / 3,739 / 2
Japan / 13,685 / 481 / 3,861 / X / 3 / 9 / 1 / P / P / 113 / X / 0
S. Korea / 11,542 / 245 / X / X / X / X / X / X / X / 6 / 338 / 0
Malaysia / 4,675 / 374 / 476 / X / 4 / 4 / 1 / 630-641 / P / 21 / X / 2
Philippines / 22,540 / 178 / 1,786 / ~2.00 / 2 / 4 / 1 / 232-400 / 2,700 / 19 / X / 1
Singapore / 193 / 0 / 0 / 292 / X / 3 / 1 / 1 / P / 1 / 0.087 / 0
Thailand / 3,219 / 258 / 86 / X / 3 / 4 / 1 / 196-269 / P / 15 / 486 / 2
Viet Nam / 3,444 / 328 / 722 / X / 2 / 4 / 1 / P / X / 2 / 30 / 1
Australia / 25,760 / 2,269 / 4,496 / X / 6 / 11 / 1 / 1,162 / P / 244 / X / 7
N. Zealand / 15,134 / 243 / 4,833 / X / X / 6 / 2 / 20 / P / 14 / X / 0
PNG / 5,152 / X / 2,367 / 665 / 4-5 / 3 / 1 / 200 / P / 6 / 229 / 0
Sources: World Resources Institute. 1997. World Resources 1997-98 – A Guide to the Global Environment, P. 268.
Notes: F = Fish, T = Turtle, Tl = Total, and Th = Threatened. a. Includes fish recorded in coastal waters, nesting turtle species, and marine species restricted to coastal habitats. b. Regional priorities as defined by The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, The World Bank and the World Conservation Union. c. Species and habitat data for Hawaii are not included in United States totals. NS = not significant. P = Present,. NP = not present. 0 = zero or less than half the unit of measure. X = not available.
The North Pacific marine environment and fisheries may be described by a driving force-state-response framework, which addresses a set of questions related to the linkages between causes, effects and actions. What are the effects of fishing and other human activities on the resources and marine environment, as well as on the economic and sociopolitical conditions of the fishing industry, people and government? What actions could be taken to respond to changes in the state of the resource and marine environment or in the state of the industry and people/communities?