World Oceans Day – 8 June 2020
On 8 June 2020, SANParks celebrated World Oceans Day. This is a day first honoured in 1992 by the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development and designated officially in 2009, to raise awareness of the vital importance of the world’s oceans. It is a day to honour and reflect on our relationship with the ocean and provides an opportunity to promote protection and conservation initiatives that help sustain the important resources and services that oceans provide to humankind. An essential means of achieving this is through the declaration of marine protected areas (MPAs). These are formally protected ocean or coastal spaces that are managed to conserve valuable and sensitive ecosystems that also benefit people. MPAs are an important means of restoring and sustaining coastal and ocean resources, particularly as impacts on ocean ecosystems, such as overfishing and pollution, continue to increase.
In May 2019, South Africa gazetted 20 new MPAs, increasing our ocean’s area of protection from 0.43 to 5%. The new MPA network conserves sections of our marine environment that include the deep oceans, coastal, estuarine and islands areas. SANParks was granted custodianship of three of the MPAs – Robben Island MPA, Namaqua National Park MPA and Addo Elephant National Park MPA. These new MPAs were showcased on World Oceans Day in exciting infographics, posted on 8 June 2020 on SANParks’ media platforms (links A, B and C), highlighting their conservation significance.
The Robben Island MPA (580km2) will help conserve and protect threatened seabirds, e.g. endangered African penguins, Bank and Cape cormorants, as well as support the recovery of the west coast rock lobster and abalone fisheries while safeguarding a culturally important National and International heritage site.
The Namaqua MPA (500km2) provides the first protection in the Namaqua bioregion for several critically endangered coastal ecosystem types as well as two important estuaries. In addition, it affords protection to an important nursery habitat for Cape hake as well as supports the recovery of west coast rock lobster stocks, thereby increasing supply to these valuable fisheries.
The Addo MPA (1200km2) protects a wide range of ecosystems including shallow nearshore habitats and the Sunday’s Estuary which are nursery grounds for ~78 species of fish, thus assisting in the recovery of valuable resources such as abalone and kob. The MPA further protects important feeding areas for several large marine animals such as great white sharks, humpback, southern right, minke and brydes whales, as well as the largest group (>28 000) of Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins that use the MPA for part of their life cycle. In addition, essential foraging grounds are protected for ~6000 pairs of African penguins and 60 000 pairs of Cape gannets that breed on the islands in the MPA.
SANParks’ celebration of World Oceans Day joins the global movement to raise awareness of the critical need to protect our oceans and urges world leaders to safeguard our blue planet through the expansion of our MPA network to at least 30% while ensuring valuable ocean resources are sustainably managed for the benefit of all.
