By Chris Howe

One of the more irritating things about conservation at a global level is that it is full of acronyms, abbreviations and jargon. For example, ACAP is not, as you might think, something you’d wear on your head. It is the “Agreement on the Conservation of Albatrosses and Petrels”. It is a sub-agreement of the “Convention on Migratory Species” (known as the CMS). Thirteen countries have signed up to ACAP, while 113 have signed up to the CMS. Meetings of these countries are known as “CoPs” (Conferences of the Parties). The CMS has a bewildering array of sub-agreements alongside ACAP – covering everything from gorillas to dugong, saiga antelopes to the ruddy-headed goose.

Getting to know global organisations and structures like the CMS is essential if WWF is going to be effective in what we do. One of the reasons is that so many of the species we are concerned with are global or at least highly migratory – that is, they travel vast distances across the planet as part of their life cycles. The great whales, for example, migrate every year from the Southern Ocean to the tropics and back again. But this week – and the reason I mentioned ACAP earlier - WWF’s focus is on seabirds, and particularly those extraordinary seabirds for which New Zealand is so important – the albatrosses.

New Zealand is by far the most important country in the world for albatrosses. There are 21 species globally, of which 12 breed in New Zealand, and another 6 live here but don’t breed. That’s 18 out of 21 species. And of the 12 that breed here, 6 breed nowhere else in the world. So we have a huge responsibility to protect them. But it’s not just down to us. We can remove pests from their breeding sites, and encourage or even require our fishers to reduce the chances of the birds being caught on hooks or in nets. However, albatrosses are amazing birds and after they leave the nest, many species spend years at sea before returning to breed. They fly around the Southern Ocean, or across to South America, or to South Africa. And once they’re outside New Zealand’s waters, then we have much less, if any, control over the threats to them. That’s the heart of the problem.

That’s why it is so important for our staff, such as Rebecca Bird our leading marine campaigner, to understand and participate in organisations like ACAP and CMS. These organisations were set up specifically because national conservation efforts on their own, however good, simply cannot achieve the desired effect. If New Zealand fishers never caught another albatross, and we completely removed all pests from their breeding sites, it would count for little if fishers off Chile or South Africa were still killing hundreds or even thousands of birds.

This week Rebecca is at the ACAP meeting in Argentina, lobbying hard on behalf of WWF to get parties to the agreement to take co-ordinated action. That includes things like agreeing and implementing national seabird plans of action that include real commitments to reducing seabird deaths through fishing. There’s also a lot of technical discussion and some valuable information sharing, especially as some New Zealand fishers can be rightly called world leaders in avoiding seabird deaths during fishing.

As you might imagine, there’s a lot of jargon and a lot of negotiating with governments. But by keeping the end result firmly in mind – fewer deaths of our albatrosses and petrels in fishing operations around the world – Rebecca will make a valuable contribution to WWF’s overall mission of world where people live in harmony with nature.

Map (C) Chris J. Robertson

Box: The Chatham albatross

• Critically endangered with breeding (4,000-5,000 pairs) restricted to a small area in the Chatham Islands.
• They spend 3-4 months each year off the coast of Chile and Peru (see map above)
• Tagged birds have been caught by coastal longline fisheries in Chile and Peru, and this is the most serious threat to the species.