Speaker: Brad Sewell, Managing Director, Oceans Program, Nature Project, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) 

Brad Sewell has been an advocate for the U.S. oceans and coasts. He has worked to sustain and rebuild marine fisheries, conserve ocean habitat and its special places like the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, restore wetland ecosystems, and protect imperiled wildlife. Sewell has been an adjunct professor at Columbia University's School of Law and Columbia's School of Public Health, Division of Environmental Sciences. 

Introduction: 

Target 3 of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) allows other effective area-based conservation methods (OECMs) to be counted toward its 30x30 goal, aiming to provide long-term effective biodiversity conservation through them. In the oceans, OECMs may contribute to ecologically representative and well-connected conservation networks beyond Marine Protected Areas (MPAs), and may enhance management of ecologically-important areas and incentivizing conservation. However, OECMs also face potential risks such as duplicate calculations and lower level of protection, which may not truly contribute to the 30% protection target. To avoid the above risks, it is important to ensure that OECMs meet the consensus IUCN criteria, and guarantees the long-term effectiveness of biodiversity conservation. 

This video discusses whether Area-Based Fishery Management Tool (ABFMT) in the U.S. are likely to qualify as OECMs. NRDC applied the four OECM criteria developed by IUCN to evaluate 648 areas identified as “Conservation Areas” and potentially OECMs by the U.S. Regional Fishery Management Councils. The results show that vast majority of the 648 areas do not qualify as OECMs based on the IUCN criteria. Most of these areas still allow large-scale commercial fishing activities and face other threats, damaging long-term in-situ biodiversity conservation. 

This video lists 10 representative cases from the U.S. to explore whether they meet the IUCN OECM criteria. At the end, it emphasizes that ABFMT is crucial for achieving sustainable fisheries and global food security. However, protecting nature is not the same as sustainably exploiting nature. CBD has separate targets, Target 5 and Target 10, to account for sustainable use of fishery resources. Achieving these goals is equally important as achieving Target 3.