Governance challenges to protect globally important ecosystem services of the Antarctic and Southern Ocean

Abstract

Antarctica and the Southern Ocean (A&SO) has a unique environment that plays an important role in the Earth’s life-support systems. It has no indigenous human population but hosts around 5000 researchers and is visited by more than 100 000 tourists per year. In this paper, we describe the biophysical processes that create the region’s ecosystem services, outlining their related governance systems within the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS), and show the global distribution of the ecosystem service beneficiaries. These services clearly support populations across the world but are endangered by anthropogenic activities, which the current place-based ATS is not empowered to control. We discuss whether it is possible to use insights from Elinor Ostrom’s work on managing the commons, including her eight core design principles and the idea of Common Asset Trusts, to better harness efforts to protect ALL of the region’s ecosystem services. We note that many existing arrangements associated with the ATS are already well-aligned with Ostrom’s design principles but need to be expanded to better protect the globally important ecosystem services produced by A&SO.