NZ-Australian initiative on Antarctic environment set for approval

4.00pm

A joint New Zealand-Australia initiative to monitor and protect the Antarctic environment looks certain to be adopted at a meeting of Antarctic Treaty nations in Madrid this week.

Antarctica's Committee for Environmental Protection, which advises treaty parties on environmental issues, backed the proposal at a meeting in Madrid on Friday.

Deputy head of the New Zealand Antarctic Treaty delegation Trevor Hughes said countries which had previously flagged reservations about the initiative indicated on Friday they could now go along with it.

Speaking from Madrid, Mr Hughes told NZPA the proposal's acceptance had been a major priority for the New Zealand team.

"One of the main goals for New Zealand has been getting agreement to establish and Antarctic-wide environment reporting system to allow treaty nations to observe and take account of change in the environment on the continent," he said.

"There's been a lot of concern in the past by some treaty parties about the potential expense involved."

New Zealand and Australia were given the task of devising a practical scheme for monitoring the ice environment after the last Antarctic Treaty meeting in Warsaw last year.

Mr Hughes said the two treaty partners met at a workshop in Sydney last March and came up with an internet-based reporting system into which all treaty nations will feed information from their research stations on the ice. "These indicators will be designed to measure such things as human impact and temperature changes. It will be the first time ever that we will have such a system covering what is one-tenth of the Earth's land surface," he said.

"It gives us a better tool to manage human impacts. We should be able to pick up on the influences of increased tourism activity, for example."

The committee's report on the joint initiative will be presented to the main consultative meeting of the treaty nations next week for ratification.

"We're very confident that will be given now," Mr Hughes said.

The 27 full signatories to the Antarctic Treaty have been meeting in Madrid from June 9 to June 20. Among other contentious issues to be covered are controls on tourism to the continent and biological prospecting in its frozen depths for chemical compounds and genes which can be exploited commercially.

Mr Hughes said most treaty nations now recognised that with the expansion and diversification of tourism, existing control measures "such as they are" were not sufficient.

"Tourism is now becoming the major human activity on the continent, bringing a range of new issues for treaty parties to consider," he said.

New Zealand was seeking mandatory regulations covering shipping, including banning non ice-strengthened vessels from operating in Antarctic waters, and limits on the number of visitors to the ice.

"The potential for disaster is always there and it would be very, very serious -- both in human terms and for the environment."

Mr Hughes said New Zealand's position was that tourism had to fit around the basic founding tenet of the treaty -- to preserve Antarctica as a natural reserve devoted to peace (international co-operation) and science.

Delegates would this week consider the question of liability for cleaning up after a disaster in the Antarctic involving either a national research station or a cruise ship foundering.

"It's a very technical discussion. There will be some leading insurance experts addressing the meeting."

Mr Hughes said the treaty nations were also expected to sign off a proposal establishing a permanent Antarctic Treaty Secretariat based in the Argentine capital Buenos Aires after "quite a lengthy process".

Such a secretariat -- to help service treaty meetings and act as an information source for treaty parties -- had first been proposed about 13 years ago.

Objections from some treaty nations had been withdrawn after Argentina's Foreign Affairs Ministry took over responsibility for Antarctic affairs from the military.

- NZPA