By Courtney Mattison
Mission Blue has teamed up with a coalition of leading marine conservation organizations to urge the British Government to step up to its responsibility to safeguard the maritime zones of the UK’s overseas territories by creating three of the largest marine protected areas (MPAs) in the world. Through the Great British Oceans campaign, this alliance between 106 signatories including The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), Greenpeace UK, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Marine Conservation Society, the Zoological Society of London, the Blue Marine Foundation, the Marine Reserves Coalition and National Geographic Society is gaining support for the UK to fund large-scale, full marine protection in the waters surrounding Ascension, Pitcairn and South Sandwich Islands.
The United Kingdom has jurisdiction over the fifth largest combined ocean area in the world – a collection of territories nearly 30 times the size of the UK itself.1 The three MPAs proposed around Ascension, Pitcairn and South Sandwich Islands would more than double the size of existing protected areas in the global ocean.2 Fully protecting these areas would mean shielding countless rare and threatened species including endemic seabirds, whales, turtles, penguins and corals from the enormous threats of overfishing, pollution and resource extraction.…