Advancing progress towards the European Green Deal: the fisheries sector
A concept known as ‘other effective area-based conservation measures (OECMs)’ represents an important opportunity to facilitate the involvement in biodiversity conservation of people acting in sustainable use sectors, as well as that of many other communities.
In particular, the OECM approach enables a variety of sustainable use sectors to contribute to meeting global biodiversity targets through their own area-based management initiatives.
At an EU event designed to explore OECM in the fisheries sector, and its contribution to achieving the objectives of the European Green Deal, members of the FAO fisheries and aquaculture division explained how the Organization is helping Member States to implement this practice.
The meeting, ‘Advancing progress towards the European Green Deal: other effective area-based conservation measures (OECMs) implementation in the fisheries sector’, was hosted under the umbrella of the European Parliament Intergroup on Climate Change, Biodiversity and Sustainable Development, with the aim of informing the European institutions on the state of play regarding OECMs in fisheries.
Opening the discussions was Pierre Karleskind, who is a Member of the European Parliament, Chair of the European Parliament Committee on Fisheries (PECH) and Member of the European Parliamentary Alliance against Hunger and Malnutrition. He stressed the crucial importance of fisheries and aquaculture within the European Green Deal, as well as the intrinsic link between the health of our oceans, the earth and human health.
The FAO delegation explained that the 34th Session of the FAO Committee on Fisheries (COFI), held earlier this year, had provided a mandate on OECMs and had requested FAO to produce related practical guidelines. In response, FAO had organized workshops to learn from country experiences and make assessments of OECMs through case studies. FAO is currently drafting guidelines on OECMs, in order to assist agencies that face an OECM assessment, providing guidance on how to undertake such an assessment, and how to report an OECM to the Convention on Biological Diversity.
Follow-up on fisheries OECMs is needed to achieve their potential in biodiversity conservation, said the speakers. FAO identified addressing the issue of terminology as an important area for future work, given that fisheries and biodiversity stakeholders are still using different terminologies. The FAO guidelines on OECMs will be tested through shared learning workshops provisionally scheduled for December 2021 and February 2022. These workshops will be jointly organized by FAO’s Fisheries and Aquaculture Division and the General Fisheries Commission for the Mediterranean.
You can read more on FAO’s work on fisheries and aquaculture, including on OECMS here.