Bergen, 24th September 2010. Ministers attending today’s North East Atlantic Environment Summit in Bergen, Norway have failed to take marine environmental issues seriously and have signed an unambitious ”Declaration of Delay”, ignoring a whole raft of urgent issues that demand action from them NOW, rather than vague commitments to do something in the future. Despite calls on environment Ministers at the OSPAR Convention’s Ministerial Meeting by Seas At Risk and other environment NGOs to urgently protect threatened species and habitats and to prevent pollution from marine litter and deep sea oil drilling, a shamefully weak political message emerged from the meeting. Seas At Risk is deeply disappointed that rather than commit to ambitious, time-bound targets, Ministers have preferred to delay action by up to several years. In the case of marine litter, a huge environmental and economic problem, Ministers have failed to send a clear message that the North-East Atlantic should be litter-free, and that measures need to be taken now. A proposal from France (supported by Sweden, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands) to reduce marine litter by 40% in the OSPAR area by 2020 was torpedoed by the UK, and Ministers have postponed any decision on reduction targets and measures to effectively tackle the problem to 2012. … Out of 60 threatened and declining species and habitats, listed by OSPAR in 2003 as in need of urgent protection, only 6 were awarded protective measures at the meeting. A drop in the ocean, with the deadline for implementing measures for all of them being pushed back to 2013. The meeting has also failed to specifically mention necessary actions in the realm of fisheries management to protect these threatened and declining species and habitats. …

Ministers drop marine litter and agree to ”Declaration of Delay”