POLAR POLITICS: Exclusive: China proposes its own Antarctic marine protected area – in a Soviet-named sea

It is a potential seismic shift in the heated geopolitics of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) set to meet this month. But Beijing’s offer of protection comes with its own set of conditions.

Three documents supplied to Daily Maverick, attributed to the Chinese delegation, set out Beijing’s plans for a new 127,000km² marine protected area (MPA) in East Antarctica’s Soviet-named “Cosmonauts Sea” – along with proposed changes to the rules for establishing Antarctic MPAs.

The September-dated documents include a new MPA proposed by China, its supporting scientific paper and tracked draft changes to the Southern Ocean’s marine park rulebook.

They are due to be considered at the closed-door 45th meeting of the UK-chaired commission, which takes place in Hobart, Tasmania, from 19 to 30 October. To pass, not one signatory of the 27-member commission – which includes Norway, South Africa and Ukraine – can object.

Reviewed by Daily Maverick, the documents provide a detailed picture of the type of marine protection China is advocating.

Despite its protected status, the proposed MPA would allow commercial krill fishing for weeks at a time each year – roughly six weeks in one zone, two months in another and two months in the coastal zone.

The Cosmonauts Sea proposal expressly describes the MPA as providing “seasonal protection”. The supporting scientific document says the fishery closure is intended to protect important feeding areas for Adélie penguins, whales and seabirds - and conserve the krill on which those predators depend.

Based on seven consecutive years of scientific surveys, the proposed MPA would be reviewed at least every five years, allowing its management measures to be amended.

More significantly, it would have a lifespan of 20 years. Unless commission members then reached consensus to reaffirm or modify it, or adopted a new MPA, the relevant conservation measure would expire.

Klaus Dodds, professor of geopolitics at Middlesex University London, noted that “the choice of the name ‘Cosmonauts Sea’ is a timely reminder of what China’s proposal is seeking to do”.

“First, it signals to non-Western states that China’s citation of a Soviet name dating back from the early 1960s underscores Beijing’s strategic relationship with the Russian Federation. China and Russia have worked together to undermine Western-backed MPA proposals in the last decade or so,” says Dodds.

“Second, it is a sideswipe at what Beijing perceives as the ‘monopoly club’ of Euro-Western claimant states such as the UK and Australia.”

A new package model for protection on Beijing’s terms?

Although the name “Cosmonauts Sea” has not been adopted by the International Hydrographic Organisation, the MPA proposal is significant in its own right. But it may also form part of an inevitable package deal, because one of the companion documents is seeking changes to the framework under which the commission greenlights MPAs.

In this companion document, China proposes a new definition of an MPA as a geographically defined area established “by regulating harvesting and associated activities”. To be an MPA, such an area would also have to satisfy conservation aims that cannot be achieved by any another commission measures.

The mooted definition also notes that conservation includes “rational use” - the term employed by the commission to describe sustainably harvested “marine living resources”.

Rational use, then, is hardly a novel concept within the commission.

What is significant is the attempt to embed this philosophy into the foundations of Antarctic marine protection.

Climate protection struck from proposed rules

Within the proposed document aiming to rewrite the rules, tracked changes in draft form strike two objectives from the existing list of purposes for which protected areas can be established.

One is “the protection of features critical to the function of local ecosystems”.

The other is “the protection of areas to maintain resilience or the ability to adapt to the effects of climate change”. Both are visibly struck out in China’s proposed revision of “Conservation Measure 91-04” - the commission’s existing MPA rulebook.

The change would not remove climate change from the MPA framework altogether - the draft seen by Daily Maverick retains broader language elsewhere about maintaining the ability of ecosystems to adapt to climate change.

China is also proposing a higher bar for supporting information for future MPA proposals.

What happens to the four existing proposals?

Four other MPA plans are currently before CCAMLR, including proposals for other parts of East and West Antarctica blocked by Beijing and Moscow’s envoys for nearly a decade.

And now China’s rules document says that once the commission adopts an amended framework, existing MPA proposals “should be improved” to comply with the revised version.

That, in other words, raises the prospect that MPA proposals already exposed to years of negotiations could face additional scientific and procedural hurdles before being adopted.

China presents the approach differently.

The rulebook document argues that MPAs should complement other conservation measures rather than replace them, and that their objectives should be “specific, practical and verifiable”. Deploying a “step-by-step” blueprint, it calls for stronger baseline information, monitoring and review to determine whether an MPA is achieving its conservation objectives.

China says it first proposed its staggered blueprint for MPAs in 2023 and developed it over subsequent commission meetings.

It has also previously argued at the annual meeting that an MPA’s duration “should be reasonable” and that any extension “should be decided by consensus”.

‘MPAs cannot be seasonal’

The last Antarctic MPA was approved in the Ross Sea region by consensus in 2016 after high-profile leadership by Senator John Kerry persuaded China to support the proposal.

“Russia acquiesced after it was left isolated,” notes Dodds. China’s Cosmonauts Sea proposal “signals a willingness to re-write the ‘rules’ around MPAs and the way CCAMLR parties have done their business in the recent past. Beijing is not interested in long-term blanket bans on fishing.”

A close observer of commission processes, who could not be identified, told Daily Maverick that “China’s bid to host the Secretariat of the High Seas Treaty is increasing scrutiny of their role in ocean governance around the world. Their proposal for an MPA in the Cosmonauts Sea is likely a result of this and it does signal a shift in almost a decade of Chinese engagement in Antarctica.

“But if China wants to be taken seriously as a multilateral leader, MPAs cannot be seasonal … approval in this form could set a weak precedent from a conservation standpoint, which after all is the mandate of CCAMLR.”

No immediate response was received on Tuesday from China’s embassy in South Africa or the CCAMLR office in Hobart.

Asked whether South Africa would support the proposed changes as well as China’s Cosmonauts Sea MPA, Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment spokesperson Sello Molekwa declined to provide detail.

“The Department is not in a position to comment on a hypothetical draft proposal,” according to Molekwa. However, the documents note that they have been submitted to the commission and its scientific committee, where South Africa holds vetoes.

Professor Alan Hemmings, 2026 New Zealand Antarctic medallist, says that “any sort of protected area proposal from China should be welcomed ... the MPA project in CCAMLR appears to be effectively dead in the water right now, so even a less than perfect proposal is surely better than nothing.”

Hemmings says he hopes that, despite politics elsewhere, the proposal will be considered on “its merits”.

Prominent Antarctic advocate Geneviève Pons-Deladrière says China’s own MPA proposal could break the deadlock and bring Southern Ocean protection to 27%. On Tuesday, she revealed on her LinkedIn page, in French, that China “itself is proposing a marine protected area”. DM