(Puerto Ayora) Ecuador officially expanded its Galapagos Marine Reserve, a biodiversity paradise in the Pacific Ocean, by nearly 60% on Friday, AFP noted.
Posted at 7:58 p.m.
On board a scientific boat from the Galapagos National Park (PNG), anchored off the island of Santa Cruz (one of the five islands of the archipelago), Ecuadorian President Guillermo Lasso signed the decree creating a new nature reserve called “Fraternité”.
This marine reserve of 60,000 km2 is added to the reserve of 138,000 km2 existing since March 1998, famous in particular for its turtles and its very rich marine fauna.
The Ecuadorian archipelago, which inspired the theory of evolution of the English naturalist Charles Darwin, now has 198,000 km2 marine protected area.
The creation of “Fraternité” is a “clear message to the world”, declared Mr. Lasso on this occasion. It is “a new relationship with the Earth, a new way of understanding what it means to progress for humanity”, he assured.
Colombian President Ivan Duque and former US President Bill Clinton attended the event, as well as government officials from Costa Rica and Panama.
The new reserve, in the north of the archipelago, extends to the maritime border of Costa Rica. It forms a marine corridor that connects to the protected area of Cocos (Costa Rica), following a natural migration corridor for marine fauna.
The protected areas of the islands of Malpelo (Colombia) and Coiba (Panama) are to be added later to create a cross-border marine biosphere reserve, which will then be an area free of industrial fishing over more than 500,000 km2, in waters where sea turtles, whales, sharks and manta rays live.
“vital necessity”
This new reserve “will guarantee the survival of 40% of the world’s marine species”, assured Colombian President Duque.
“We may be a small territory […], but the planet is also ours”, pleaded for his part President Lasso, who had announced the creation of this new protected era during COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland, last November, in exchange for a reduction in its international debt.
“The seas are great regulators of the global climate,” he added, emphasizing that “taking care of them is not naïve idealism, it is a vital necessity.”
The Galapagos archipelago, which owes its name to the endemic giant tortoises that live there, is located 1000 km from the coast of Ecuador and classified as World Heritage and a World Biosphere Reserve for its unique flora and fauna.
This area, protected and where industrial fishing is prohibited, is the second largest in the world and has more than 2,900 marine species.
In March 2016, Ecuador created an additional 38,000 km sanctuary2 in the Galapagos to protect the hammerhead shark (Sphyrnidae), an endangered species.