Pollution |
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At the beginning of UNEP's work in the Regional Seas, most legal agreements dealing with marine pollution focused on sea-based sources, particularly the deliberate dumping of oil and other wastes and spills from maritime accidents and offshore oil drilling. It became clear, however, that most pollution of the marine and coastal environment
originated on land, in the form of municipal, industrial and agricultural wastes
and run-off. These sources account for as much as 80% of all marine pollution.
Sewage and waste water, persistent organic pollutants (including pesticides),
heavy metals, oils, nutrients and sediments – whether brought by rivers
or discharged directly into coastal waters – take a severe toll on human
health and well-being as well as on coastal ecosystems. We find more carcinogens
in our seafood, more closed beaches, more red tides, more beached carcasses
of seabirds, fish and even marine mammals.
The first regional steps to deal with this widespread problem were taken in the Mediterranean, with the adoption of the Protocol on Land-Based Sources of Pollution in May 1980 after three years of difficult and delicate negotiations. Over the next two decades, this landmark agreement led to similar regional agreements in other Regional Seas. A global programmeIn 1991 UNEP took the first steps in its global strategy to address the problem of land-based pollution, calling together experts from 52 countries to a meeting in Nairobi. The meeting drew up six objectives for the global strategy on curbing environmental degradation from land-based sources of pollution and activities in coastal areas. They also drew up a list of major pollution issues and priority substances in the coastal marine environment, and set out a table of globally significant contaminants with details of international action that could control them. The major agreed problems are
Sewage The Nairobi meeting led to the creation of the Global Programme of Action for the Protection of the Marine Environment from Land-based Activities (GPA) at a 1995 intergovernmental conference in Washington, DC. The GPA works to identify the sources of land-based pollution or harmful activities, and prepare priority action programmes of measures to reduce them. It concentrates not just on problems originating near the shores – such as discharges from megacities, other urban areas, harbours or industrial enterprises in the coastal zone – but targets pollution from entire catchment areas, taking in sources such as agriculture, forestry, aquaculture and tourism. The GPA, although a global programme, it addresses problems at regional, sub-regional and national levels, and thus helps to guide the efforts of the individual Regional Seas programmes to deal with land-based pollution. Visit the GPA website. More reading: |
