New paper: Are international agreements to protect migratory shorebirds fit for purpose?
We’re celebrating the publication of one of Eduardo Gallo-Cajiao’s PhD papers! After finishing his PhD a few years ago, Ed secured a prestigious Smith Fellowship that took him to the US, and now has a faculty position at Colorado State University.
International conservation agreements are a well-known fixture of migratory shorebird conservation, so a look at them may provide clues to inform ways to advance this agenda. There are now 28 such international agreements in the East Asian-Australasian Flyway (EAAF) alone! The first was the US-Japan Convention for the Conservation of Migratory Birds, signed all the way back in 1972. Following this landmark agreement, 10 bilateral agreements have been developed in the EAAF, of which Australia has signed three, involving Japan, China, and the Republic of Korea. Other agreements include the Convention on Migratory Species, the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, and the East Asian-Australasian Flyway Partnership, to name but a few. We recently investigated how well these agreements cover all the regions used by migratory shorebirds in the flyway, and the sorts of threats the agreements focus on.
We found that many different kinds of organizations are involved in these international agreements, including governments, inter-governmental organizations, non-governmental organizations, and private companies. Encouragingly, we found that agreements for addressing habitat loss and hunting cover the entire flyway, albeit with some variation. First, there are more agreements for habitat conservation than for hunting management. Second, agreements for habitat conservation include a variety of members, such as national governments, intergovernmental organizations, and non-governmental organizations, whereas members were restricted to national governments in the case agreements for hunting management. Third, the agreements around habitat conservation were built into a strong web of connections among organisations, but those for hunting management were much sparser. The East Asian-Australasian Flyway Partnership emerged as the most central agreement in the flyway, and notably there was no agreement in place allowing for flyway-wide coordination of hunting management. Lastly, agreements for habitat conservation covered more thoroughly the migratory cycle of shorebirds than those focused on hunting management.
Many of the agreements have emerged as a response to conservation pressures, such as coastal reclamation. Consequently, it may perhaps be no coincidence that some of those agreements have converged around the Yellow Sea in recent times. However, it is important to acknowledge that each new agreement draws personal energy, political attention, and financial resources for negotiation. So, we should ask if any additional agreements are worthwhile, considering there are already 19 agreements for habitat conservation and 16 for hunting management within this flyway.
We recommend, based on these results, that the issue of habitat conservation requires no further agreements, but does need a much stronger focus on implementation. Specifically, the East Asian-Australasian Flyway Partnership and associated ‘Flyway Site Network’ could be further expanded and implemented by focusing on ways to improve the management of each site that has been designated with the support of additional habitat conservation agreements, such as the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands. In the case of hunting management, a central coordinating agreement is still lacking, which is a significant problem. Hunting management needs to account for flyway-wide mortality and quota allocations per country, and there is no mechanism as yet for achieving this in the EAAF. The two task forces on hunting currently in operation under the Convention on Migratory Species and the East Asian-Australasian Flyway Partnership are an important step towards filling this notable gap.
In short, a focus on additional site designation and improving site management for addressing habitat loss with the East Asian-Australasian Flyway Partnership as a centerpiece is recommended, while further advancing flyway-wide coordination for hunting management through the existing task forces would help address this threat more effectively.
Further reading:
Gallo-Cajiao, E., Morrison, T. H., Fidelman, P., Kark, S., and R. A. Fuller. 2019. Global environmental governance for conserving migratory shorebirds in the Asia-Pacific. Regional Environmental Change 19: 1113-1129. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-019-01461-3
Gallo-Cajiao, E., Morrison, T.H., and R.A. Fuller. 2024. Agreements for conserving migratory shorebirds in the Asia-Pacific are better fit for addressing habitat loss than hunting. Ambio. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-024-02018-3