Several Coast Guard units in the Gulf, including the Gulf Strike Team and Marine Safety Unit Port Arthur, Texas, have reached out to the community with information about how these products behave and what precautions should be taken in the planning phases of responder deployment. If it’s known that a certain quantity of an unconventional oil such as Bakken or Eagle Ford crude is in transit, for example, a unit can prepare for the contingency of flammability by ensuring special air monitoring equipment is available to detect and track the movement of a potentially explosive vapor cloud.

The vast ocean distances are a challenge to cover, and in recent years, these cooperative efforts have taken advantage of U.S. Navy transits or exercises in specific regions. Through the Oceania Maritime Security Initiative (OMSI), Coast Guard law enforcement officers and their counterparts from other Pacific nations use naval ships as platforms for surveillance and interdiction.

“We’ve been aggressively educating our federal on-scene coordinators on the importance of understanding what the hazards are before arriving at the incident site, and not taking the name of the product for face value,” said Lynn. “We’re here, certainly, to stay abreast of these emerging issues and do that research ahead of time, so we can be a source of information for the federal on-scene coordinators when those incidents occur.”

 

Living Marine Resources: Fisheries Enforcement

The Coast Guard assumed a role in managing the nation’s commercial fish species in the 19th century, when it was still the Revenue Cutter Service, but its current role – enforcer of fishery management plans devised by regional councils and approved by the National Marine Fisheries Service – was assigned in 1976, with passage of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act.

One-fifth of the world’s fisheries, by value of catch, lie off the shores of North America, and the fisheries within the U.S. EEZ are among the best regulated in the world. The tradition-rich U.S. fishing industry is a culture that understands, and has learned the hard way, that fisheries are a precious resource – renewable, but with a finite capacity. If properly managed and protected, they can provide food indefinitely for future generations.

Today, violations of U.S. domestic quota or by catch regulations are, typically, newsworthy exceptions. A more common occurrence – in U.S. waters and for other maritime nations around the world – is the problem of incursions from foreign vessels engaged in illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing.

Because many of the world’s most valuable fish species, such as salmon and especially tuna, are migratory species that cross international boundaries, IUU fishing is a global problem, threatening a food supply that’s a major source of protein for nearly 3 billion people. In September 2015, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) released a report warning that ocean species of all kinds, including fish, birds, mammals, and reptiles, had been reduced by nearly 50 percent since 1970. The hardest-hit species have been the scombrids, the family of migratory fish that include tuna, mackerel, and bonito: Over the same period, those populations have declined by 74 percent. The “Living Blue Planet Report: Species, habitats and human well-being,” warned: “The picture is now clearer than ever: Humanity is collectively mismanaging the ocean to the brink of collapse. ”The U.S. Coast Guard has long been at the forefront of cooperative and bilateral efforts that leverage better outcomes and increase coverage of ocean regions – particularly in the vast Pacific, where Hawaii and island territories account for 50 percent of the U.S. EEZ. Through partnerships such as the North Pacific Coast Guard Forum, the Coast Guard and its counterparts from other nations exchange best practices and conduct joint patrols and exercises to combat IUU fishing; last year personnel and air and surface assets from the United States, Canada, Japan, and the People’s Republic of China combined to interdict and apprehend the crew of a vessel engaged in high-seas drift net fishing, a practice banned by the United Nations since 1992.

The vast ocean distances are a challenge to cover, and in recent years, these cooperative efforts have taken advantage of U.S. Navy transits or exercises in specific regions. Through the Oceania Maritime Security Initiative (OMSI), Coast Guard law enforcement officers and their counterparts from other Pacific nations use naval ships as platforms for surveillance and interdiction. According to Jay Caputo, the Coast Guard’s chief of Living Marine Resources, a similar cooperative arrangement, the Africa Maritime Law Enforcement Partnership (AMLEP) capitalizes on U.S. Africa Command deployments to support capacity-building and theater security cooperation in one of the world’s IUU fishing hot spots: the Gulf of Guinea. “What we’ve been doing,” Caputo said, “is sending a Coast Guard TACLET [tactical law enforcement team] with the Navy ship to conduct boardings and stop illegal fishing, because those countries have no capacity to really regulate their own exclusive economic zones. And they’re losing probably billions of dollars in fish every year.”

In December 2014, a Presidential Task Force on Combating IUU Fishing and Seafood Fraud, which included Coast Guard fisheries experts, released a series of recommendations the U.S. government should take to stem the loss of marine species and prevent their fraudulent introduction into U.S. food markets. A month later, the United Nations began negotiating the first legally binding treaty aimed at conserving marine life in the global ocean commons – the high seas and international seabed that lie beyond any nation’s EEZ.