bbest
commented
7 years ago EEZ disputed areas issue -- @bbest perspective
I appreciate the concern about disputed territories in the EEZ shapefiles from the MarineRegions.org, which is totally valid. This was something OHI also got blowback about from certain countries.
However, a tiny handful of problematic countries shouldn't necessarily dissuade us from providing the most sensible product for the rest of the world. Furthermore, I think we can offer a solution to satisfy all countries. These disputed areas are clearly identified within the EEZ product, so we do have some flexibility in how to proceed. Where countries are in dispute, we can simply offer two options, eg Peru (Peru perspective) or Peru (Chile perspective).
Given the international, nation-state dedicated audience of this SDG14 product, I think we would be woefully off target to not make country EEZs our top priority set of regions to describe biogeographically.
APRIL 7:
From Frank's email: Eduardo Klein suggests that we not go with EEZ in designing our initial test product.
Apparently over the years OBIS has had increasing blowback from various countries that made clear to the IOC that they won't use OBIS if an EEZ filter is used, because there are so many disputes on the EEZ boundaries. Some countries, including Peru, have formally requested that the EEZ filter be removed from OBIS because they don't recognize the jurisdictions posted by marineregions.org
We should go with LME, which is not controversial and it would be beneficial in several other ways for our SDG effort. Other jurisdictions for MPA can come later after we decide how to zoom into a region.
SDG14 telecon: Valia Drakou: overview of remote sensing data to construct indicators relevant to ecosystem services. Decompose ecosystem services into categories and relate these to specific environmental properties tracked with remote sensing. Just started collecting remote sensing data and reviewing existing satellite-based indicators.
There was a lot of discussion about whether we should use EEZs or LMEs as boundaries. Using EEZs can be politically problematic. A solution would be to use shapefiles delineating EEZs or other preferred jurisdictions by countries. Most participants agree on using EEZs as the geographic framework for the SDG14 pilot product.
Note from Frank: There are limitations with EEZ- they are coastal in nature and don't advance the idea of management of resources or tracking SDG targets in the high seas. LME are also coastal (Ben, LEM are a very serious management tool that has grown over 25 y, are funded alternatively around te world by the word bank and brings countries together, not apart) There are limitations with FAO regions because they are way big and even less defined than LME. So, I think we want to go with one or more of these options: