About

 

Beyond the national jurisdictions (> 200 miles of the coast), we find the "high seas". Ocean resources are freely exploitable without any specific knowledge of their resilience.

The United Nations (UN) is currently working on the development of a legal framework for the management and conservation of international waters, potentially belonging to all nations.

Involved in this effort of sustainable management and conservation, scientists are committed to sailing with the mission to qualify, quantify and understand the dynamics of the ecosystems supporting these resources.

The FFEM (French Global Environment Facility) and IUCN (the International Union for Conservation of Nature), as well as experts from the MNHN (French National Museum of Natural History), the IRD (French Research Institute for Development) and IDDRI (Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations) have chosen to apply this commitment to a particular type of habitat of the high seas, namely the seamounts. The IUCN FFEM-SWIO project was then launched in 2014.

 
Known to be aggregators of biological and mineral richness, seamounts are particularly exposed to fishing pressure and future mining operations.

The Walters shoal, located in the international waters of the South West Indian Ocean, has been chosen as a pilot ecosystem because of the shallow depths of its summit area, thus increasing its target potential for ecosystem exploitation of high seas resources.

The emblematic "Marion Dufresne", a French oceanographic ship of the French Polar Institute IPEV, will host the "Walters Shoal" expedition from 22 April to 18 May 2017. She will take the research teams off Madagascar on the Walters shoal, with the objective of acquiring biological and physical data on this ecosystem.

This unprecedented project will contribute to addressing the gaps identified by the United Nations Division of Ocean Affairs and Law of the Sea (DOALOS) in its assessment of knowledge of the high seas and in particular the seamount and deep seas ecosystems barely explored. The aim is to support the Division's preparatory work (PrepCom) for the negotiations in view of adopting an international and legally binding instrument that will lead to the sustainable management of resources and conservation of biodiversity in the Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (ABNJ).