A/42/427
English
Page 259
plants, including minute, oxygen-producing phytoplankton. They provide protein, transportation, energy, employment, recreation, and other economic, social, and cultural activities.
5. The oceans also provide the ultimate sink for the by-products of human activities. Huge, closed septic tanks, they receive wastes from cities, farms, and industries via sewage outfalls, dumping from barges and ships, coastal run-off, river discharge, and even atmospheric transport. In the last decades, the growth of the world economy, the burgeoning demand for food and fuel, and accumulating discharges of wastes have begun to press against the bountiful limits of the oceans.
6. The oceans are marked by a fundamental unity from which there is no escape. Interconnected cycles of energy, climate, marine living resources, and human activities move through coastal waters, regional seas, and the closed oceans. The effects of urban, industrial, and agricultural growth are contained within no nation's Exclusive Economic Zone; they pass through currents of water and air from nation to nation, and through complex food chains from species to species, distributing the burdens of development, if not the benefits, to both rich and poor.
7. Only the high seas outside of national jurisdiction are truly 'commons'; but fish species, pollution, and other effects of economic development do not respect these legal boundaries. Sound management of the ocean commons will require management of land-based activities as well. Five zones bear on this management: inland areas, which affect the oceans mostly via rivers; coastal lands – swamps, marshes, and so on – close to the sea, where human activities can directly affect the adjacent waters; coastal waters - estuaries, lagoons, and shallow waters generally – where the effects of land-based activities are dominant: offshore waters, out roughly to the edge of continental shelf; and the high seas, largely beyond the 200-mile EEZs of coastal states' control.
8. Major fisheries are found mostly in offshore waters, while pollution affecting them comes mostly from inland sources and is concentrated in coastal waters. Formal international management is essential in the areas beyond the EEZs, although greater international cooperation, including improved frameworks to coordinate national action, is needed for all areas.
1. The Balance Under Threat
9. Today, the living resources of the sea are under threat from overexploitation, pollution, and land-based development. Most major familiar fish stocks throughout the waters over the continental shelves. which provide 95 per cent of the world's fish catch, are now threatened by overfishing.
10. Other threats are more concentrated. The effects of pollution and land development are most severe in coastal waters and semi-enclosed seas along the world's shore-lines. The use of coastal areas for settlement, industry, energy facilities, and recreation will accelerate, as will the upstream manipulation of
