'Realising Rights of Nature across and beneath the Southern Ocean' by AD Hemmings in The Polar Journal comments
If the philosophical, ecological, moral and ethical imperatives for Rights of Nature (RON) in the Antarctic can be argued to be clear, given the limitations and failures of contemporary instrumental environmental management, the modalities of operationalising and applying these to the Antarctic marine environment, commonly understood as the Southern Ocean, are not. Securing progressive environmental policies is very much harder in the marine environment than ashore, everywhere. Structural complications of the existing Antarctic regime structure and the historic and contemporary regional geopolitics add to the challenges in the Southern Ocean, beyond those posed by RON. Classical Antarctic framings cast the Southern Ocean as either the area south of the Antarctic Convergence or as merely the area south of 60° South Latitude. Neither suffices for the purposes of RON. Antarctic biota cross even the Antarctic Convergence. In doing so, they enter spaces subject to extra-Antarctic Treaty System (ATS) international legal regimes including Regional Fisheries Management Organisations abutting the ATS area and/or coastal state jurisdictions in the sub-Antarctic. They also penetrate deep below the levels of the ocean hitherto operationally managed by the ATS. Even ‘within’ the ATS geographical area, the deep seabed and particular taxa (cetaceans) are formally subject to other regimes. The area of relevance for RON is thus neither coterminous with the geographical area nor the jurisdictional competence of the ATS. The relevant geographical area is a ‘Greater Southern Ocean’. The politico-legal context across multiple regimes meaningful to RON is extraordinarily complex and multi-tiered. Advancing a RON discourse across this huge and complex field likely entails a fragmented engagement with discrete jurisdictional and institutional entities, albeit an engagement informed by a unitary and coherent understanding and purpose. Necessary as this is, it will be neither simple nor quick.
