OSPAR and the Cartagena Convention

The OSPAR Secretariat participated in the 71st GCFI Conference special session on Marine Protected Areas. The conference and MPA session took place 5-9 November 2018 on San Andres Island, Colombia. The session enabled sharing of experiences on MPA management and status assessments, as well as for scoping out further issues where information exchange between experts across the Atlantic could benefit the status of the marine environment.

The Secretariat reported to OSPAR 18 on the voluntary commitment with the Cartagena Convention (CEP) registered at the United Nations Ocean Conference (#oceanaction number 17198), June 2017. The commitment explores opportunities for cooperation between the Secretariats, presently focusing on marine litter and marine protected areas. The Netherlands and Sweden have made available funding to support identified activities in 2018 in line with the voluntary commitment.

Other recent cooperation included arranging a Regional Marine Litter Expert workshop from 18-19 October 2018 in Miami, Florida. The workshop’s objectives were to discuss best practice on harmonised monitoring strategies, assess the effectiveness of monitoring and propose arrangements for strengthening monitoring programmes as well as the management of marine litter data. Two experts attended on behalf of OSPAR in order to present on the OSPAR litter monitoring methodology, and help the meeting consider its potential applicability to the Caribbean Region.

Recent actions on MPAs have included the participation of CEP Secretariat in OSPAR’s Marine Protected Area group meeting. One of the actions of the 2018 cooperation project is the development of a full-size project plan for future collaboration on strengthening MPA management capacity. The draft proposal was presented and discussed at ICG-MPA, and will be further developed together with the Netherlands, UK and France as part of the drafting group.