Feature article
Thin
ice over the Regional Seas
The
following interview with Stjepan Keckes, Director of UNEP's
Regional Seas Programme for two decades, was conducted in
1990 by Peter Hulm for AMBIO magazine.
Stjepan
Keckes was born in Yugoslavia, the son of a Hungarian country
doctor. He received his Ph D in Biology at the University
of Zagreb. A marine scientist with a special passion for
the Mediterranean, Dr Keckes has been Deputy Director of
the Ruder Boskovic Institute in Zagreb and ran its Marine
Laboratory at Rovinj on the Adriatic coast, not far from
Trieste, before becoming Director of the Regional Seas Program.
Ambio:
Is the Regional Seas Program still a race against time?
Keckes:
I would rather say we are skating on very thin ice: safety
depends on your speed. If you stop, the ice breaks. So you
cannot stop. That is the problem.
We
are racing against time to a certain extent because
we are trying to remedy a situation which is already here,
not just facing us in the future. Coastal zones and coastal
waters are already in bad shape in many parts of the world.
We have to deal with an existing problem, not just design
a system which would avoid it.
In
the Mediterranean, for example, the deterioration is far
advanced. In other regions—take the Pacific—we
cannot talk about damage to the environment in the same
way. But by learning from our experience with the Mediterranean,
our first Program, we try to help countries understand and
avoid problems which are already there for governments in
the Mediterranean.
It
is not only a truism but also a hard fact of life that you
hardly ever learn from other people’s experience because
you just do not believe the same can happen to you. So we
have to expect that mistakes are going to be made in the
future in all these regions.
Ambio:
Has the Regional Seas approach been justified?
Keckes:
Well, I think that the results themselves are the best proof.
Over the very short period of a few years we have succeeded
in mobilizing more than 120 states to participate in the
Program. You know very well how difficult it is to get them
to agree to something and to put aside their political differences.
But they are cooperating.
We
succeeded in achieving this in the Mediterranean in spite
of a war that was going on between some countries. We were
able to go ahead with the Program in the Persian/Arabian
Gulf region in spite of the problems besetting that area.
In the Caribbean we are successfully bringing together countries
like the United States, Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Mexico.
That
is the best proof that these countries find something of
interest for them in the Regional Seas Program.
Ambio:
The Portmann report singles out two aspects of the Program
as weaknesses: first, that national institutions in many
countries are not always up to your standards scientifically
and second, that the Program has to lead a kind of hand-to-mouth
existence because of its reliance, like the rest of UNEP,
on voluntary contributions. What is your reaction?
Keckes:
Portmann himself comes from a developed region where you
could say science was born, where science has existed for
hundreds of years. So probably he is a little too hard on
the institutions and experts we are dealing with in the
developing countries.
I
would not be so hard on them. I come from a developing country.
I have seen with my own eyes that you can start from
scratch and build up the scientific capability of developing
countries.
My
point is that you don’t have to wait until the infrastructure
is well-developed to use it. You have to make the infrastructure
grow through the Program. You can’t learn how to drive
if you don’t have a car.
Obviously
at the beginning this infrastructure is very weak and therefore
the results are meager. But the Program itself provides
an excellent motivation for the scientists, technicians
and governments to build on this foundation. It is a weakness,
sure, that we don’t have the same infrastructure in
other regions that we found available in the Mediterranean.
But I think that through the Program the infrastructure
can be created faster than it would be in a vacuum.
Basically
what we are trying to do through the Regional Programs is
to assist countries so that they can solve their own problems.
Only when you are able to solve your national problems can
you hope to solve the regional ones. Our philosophy is to
make use of the national infrastructure. We are not trying
to create supranational institutions. So strengthening the
national infrastructure is a major aspect of our Program
in all the regions—a critical aspect.
Ambio:
And the other problem—your financial support from governments?
Keckes:
Nobody has enough money. If we were given 10 million for
a Program we would still feel that more money could and
should be spent on it. We try to work within a realistic
financial framework. We have to have a high degree of flexibility
since we don’t know, really, how much money we are
going to have the next year.
But
experience shows we have never had to stop a Program because
there was no money, although we have had to slow down in
some cases. Our job is to ensure that no Program is so starved
that it dies.
Ambio:
The voluntary system can work?
Keckes:
Oh, sure. A few years ago people didn’t believe we
could collect money in the Mediterranean. Even the governments
themselves were skeptical. But now government contributions
are running at the level of $3.5 million. UNEP has succeeded
in disengaging itself financially from the Mediterranean
Program. That is, we spend only about 60,000 dollars a year
on it. If this is not a success, then nothing is.
In
the Persian/Arabian Gulf there was never a real financial
problem. But take a poorer region like the Caribbean—here
countries like Belize and St Vincent are paying, even though
four or five thousand dollars a year is a lot of money for
them. They are showing their clear commitment.
Ambio:
And from here where do you go over the next few years? Is
it a question of bringing up the other Programs to the level
of the Mediterranean?
Keckes:
If you look at the map, you can see the Regional Seas Program
covers practically the whole globe, except for regions such
as the Baltic or the North Sea, where there are other mechanisms
and other organizations.
Our
Program is now nearly global, and we are trying to ensure
that this leads to a situation where we can assess the problems
on a global scale through a unified methodological approach.
The
Mediterranean is a semi-enclosed sea, so obviously you cannot
compare its needs with those of the Pacific, which consists
of thousands of islands, or of the Caribbean, or of the
Pacific Coast of Latin America. Their needs are different
and their problems are different.
So
I would not say the task is to bring them up to the level
of the Mediterranean. Each of these Programs is developing
in a different way.
But
when we are assessing, say, the problem of mercury pollution
in any region we can do it in the same way, using the same
techniques.
We
have used the Mediterranean to learn, and it has taught
us a lot. There was hardly any big international organization
that could have brought together Arab countries and Israel
to sign a treaty as we did for the Mediterranean in 1976—before
the Camp David accords. With the exception of Albania, the
Mediterranean treaty has been ratified by every single Mediterranean
country; the first agreement ever ratified by them all.
It seemed to us that if we could succeed in the Mediterranean
we could succeed practically anywhere. And we are seeing
similar developments in the Caribbean, the Pacific, the
Gulf region, and West and Eastern Africa.
You
can ask yourself what is the common problem facing countries
stretching from Senegal to Namibia? When the same problem
crops up in every country, even if only on a local scale,
then it becomes a common problem. All the countries of the
region benefit by looking for a common solution.
Ambio
Vol. 12 No. 1, 1983, pp 12-13
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