This case study covers Chile under both terms of President Sebastian Piñera
(2010-2014 and 2018 - 2022)
Chile's protected seas
Since 1970 animal populations have declined by 70% around the world. We need urgent action to halt nature’s sharp decline. At the end of 2022, nations agreed to a set of targets designed to halt and reverse the decline of nature. The headline target that was agreed upon was to protect 30% of land and oceans for nature by 2030, the so-called '30 by 30 target’. Globally, only around 16% of all land is protected for nature, but the percentage of the world’s oceans that are protected is less than half this.
Countries around the world will need to protect nearly four times the ocean area they do now to meet the 30 by 30 target.
One country that has been at the forefront of protecting its’ oceans has been Chile, which now has 43.1% of its judicial waters under some kind of protection. Chile’s president, the left wing Gabriel Boric has stated that he wants to pursue ‘a turquoise foreign policy’ a two-pronged approach based on green policies to tackle climate change and blue policies to protect the oceans. However, Chile is only in a good position to implement this turquoise foreign policy because of world-leading actions by its previous president, centre-right Sebastián Piñera.
Under Piñera’s governments from 2010-14 and 2018-22, the area of Chile’s waters was protected grew with the establishment of large marine reserves like the Rapa Nui Rahui and the Sala y Gómez islands. This is the largest marine protected area in all of Latin America. His actions have cemented the importance of marine conservation for the Piñera administration.
Marine protected areas
The 30 by 30 target agreed at the end of 2022 is to protect 30% of land and sea for nature by 2030. Chile is well ahead of many other countries with its approach to marine conservation. Around 40% of Chile’s marine areas have some level of protection, making Chile the South American country with the highest levels of its waters protected.
Not all marine protected areas (MPAs) are the same. Some MPAs are listed as multiple-use areas which means that they allow different uses of the area with some restrictions. For instance, they may allow some fishing but prevent more exploitative practices or have strict quotas. There are no-take MPAs that allow boats to pass through but prohibit fishing; others have banned intensive fishing and practices like bottom trawling but still allow indigenous fishing practices. The levels of restriction in Chile’s MPAs are varied and are based on the historic use of the area.
Chile’s geographical advantage
Chile is well suited to being a global leader in marine conservation. The size of ocean that a country has jurisdiction over is limited by that country’s geography. National waters are determined by the size of the coast and the closeness of neighbours. Chile is fortunate to have both a long uninterrupted coastline with no close neighbours and a number of more distant islands. These islands often occupy completely different climates to the waters around the mainland. Chile has eight distinct types of marine environments and, with its high number of MPAs, can protect parts of all eight. So far, the biggest and most impressive MPAs have been around more remote islands which naturally lend themselves to huge protected areas and often rare or even unique species. But it is still important to protect areas closer to the mainland which have greater levels of economic activity, and are therefore most vulnerable to over-exploitation.
President Pinera of Chile identified this potential and in both his presidential terms set about making marine protected areas in all of Chile’s marine environments by supporting the creation of large MPAs around Islands and smaller MPAs closer to the mainland in more commonly fished waters.
Rapa Nui Rahui and the island MPAs
Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, in the southeastern Pacific Ocean, has long been heralded as a parable on the perils of overexploiting the environment. Whether there is any truth in the theory that all the trees on Rapa Nui were felled for transporting its famous stone heads, or whether the real reason for the deforestation was rats or slash-and-burn agriculture, is beside the point. What matters is that archaeological records show that before the settlement of the island by the Rapa Nui people, trees were plentiful. And yet by 1772 when Europeans first arrived on Rapa Nui, there was scarcely a tree left and many of the species we now have fossils for were already extinct. The deforestation affected the Rapa Nui people’s ability to grow food and has left them painfully aware of the need to protect their natural environment, as well as the economic and societal dangers of not doing so.
Rapa Nui is one of the world’s most isolated inhabited Islands and contains a unique marine ecosystem around it. Almost a quarter of the marine species around Rapa Nui are endemic to the area. Rapa Nui is one of the more populated islands to have a marine protected area around it. The Chilean government, therefore, had to balance protecting the area with the livelihoods of the Rapa Nui people, working with them to design the MPA. This meant that when the MPA which had been announced in Piñera’s first term was finally established in 2017 and expanded under Piñera’s second term, indigenous people could still fish using traditional methods which mostly avoid bycatch. In the long term, the recovery of the marine environment around Rapa Nui will increase its draw as an ecotourism site as well, bringing economic benefits to the local people.
Piñera also established other large marine parks in unpopulated pristine areas such as the Diego Ramírez-Drake Passage Marine Park, about 100km south of Cape Horn, which is over 55,000 square miles in size. It was the 25th marine protected area in Patagonia and is a good example of how marine conservation can also support terrestrial biodiversity, as the marine park supports birdlife by protecting food stocks for birds such as the grey-headed albatross or the southern rockhopper penguin.
The Sala y Gomez islands’ marine protected area is another island MPA that has been implemented and is now the largest in the Americas. This area has a particularly unique environment with nearly fifty percent of the species in the area being unique to the region. The Chilean waters around the islands were protected during Piñera’s first term but full protection was impossible until the UN Treaty of the High Seas was signed at the beginning of 2023. This was because the remaining waters fell into international waters, despite the Chilean government recommending that the marine protected area be extended.
Chile’s offshore waters
The island marine protected areas such as those around Rapa Nui or Sala y Gomez are impressive for both the rarity of the species they protect and for their sheer scale. These areas are able to remain relatively undisturbed wildernesses and important sanctuaries for many species. However, the majority of economic activity in Chile’s waters is much closer to home.
Balancing protection and economic interests is much more difficult in coastal areas than in isolated areas around islands. But, the rewards of protecting these marine areas are potentially far greater because of the potential for overfishing in accessible areas. Chile’s MPAs off its mainland coast are smaller but there are at least 22 different marine parks which are protected areas.
Many of these protected areas still allow some levels of fishing under specific management schemes. Artisan fishing in particular is common to most of Chile’s coastal MPAs. This means that boats cannot be above 18 metres in length and cannot fish more than 50 registered tons a year. Limiting the size and catch quota of boats limits the extent to which the marine environment can be overfished. Some studies have even suggested that MPAs operated with these specific management schemes can support a similar level of biomass as no-take zones, though the potential for biodiversity is still higher overall in no-take zones.
These coastal MPAs offer an economic opportunity for fishermen who find that the stocks of fish actually improve when there is enough space for them to recover. In fact, Chile has seen a growth in the number of voluntary no-take zones in the Valparaíso region. The area covered by these voluntary arrangements takes up 15 of the 80 hectares that the artisanal fishermen are responsible for.
Global leadership
The announcement by President Boric that he wished to pursue a turquoise foreign policy suggests that he wants to be seen as a global leader on the environment. In doing so, he would be following in the footsteps of his predecessor, President Sebastián Piñera. Piñera has acted not only as a pioneer on marine conservation but has also encouraged other nations to adopt similar proposals and pushed international bodies to consider protocols for marine protected areas in the high seas, which have been amongst the most difficult to protect areas in the world.
During his first presidential term of 2010 - 2014, Piñera used his good working relationship with the then centre-right Prime Minister of New Zealand, John Key, to lobby for the implementation of a marine protected area around the Kermadec Islands, a group of islands around a thousand kilometers north of New Zealand . Much like the Rapa Nui or Diego Ramirez islands the Kermedec islands were an ideal location for a marine protected area.
The Kermadec Islands marine reserve was eventually agreed to by Key and announced. This area would stretch to 620,000 square kilometres but the Bill is currently stuck at second reading in parliament.
Also during his first presidential term, the Sala y Gomez marine protected area was established. This isolated chain of islands in the south eastern Pacific Ocean are not fully Chilean as Peru also has a partial claim. This did not deter the Chilean government from protecting all of the ridges that counted as Chilean in 2010. This has led the Peruvian government to follow suit, proposing an extension to the MPA of all of the Peruvian islands. But even that does not provide full coverage as 73% of the Sala y Gomez islands waters are in international waters and so no one country can declare a marine protected area.
The UN Treaty on the High Seas was agreed in March 2023 but negotiations had been ongoing for almost 15 years. As part of the negotiations, President Piñera announced that Chile intended to create a high seas MPA to surround the Sala y Gomez islands area. This was declared unilaterally in the hope that neighbouring countries like Peru and Ecuador would follow suit. The sites of high seas MPAs have not yet been finalised but it is indeed likely that the Sala y Gomez islands and the neighbouring Nazca ridges will be amongst the areas created.
Under President Boric, Chile was part of the high-ambition coalition that helped to develop an updated global biodiversity framework. This includes the key 30 by 30 target. Because of the strong start that President Boric inherited, this is a realistic target for Chile to reach. But in order to achieve this target, protections will need to scale up further. This includes fully implementing high-seas MPAs like the one around Sala y Gomez and continuing the legacy of his predecessor.
Lessons to learn from Chile’s turquoise foreign policy
Without strong domestic action, countries cannot become credible global leaders. Piñera’s inventions on the Kermadec Islands and the high seas treaty were effective because of his own excellent record of marine protected areas in Chilean territory.
All habitats are worth protecting. While the biggest marine protected areas in Chile are around islands like the Rapa Nui or Sala y Gomez islands, Chile has many types of marine habitats, all of which are their own ecological niches and fulfil functions for different species. These different habitats may require different types of MPAs but are all worth protecting.
Even currently unexploited areas of nature are worth protecting. Even though some of the marine protected areas, particularly the larger island MPAs were not exploited while not legally protected it is still important to protect them against future encroachment. Legally protecting areas also dedicate funding to scientific monitoring and potential enforcement so that authorities can respond much faster to illegal breaches of the MPA.
Nature restoration is an economic opportunity. When nature is allowed to recover in one area, it will eventually spill out into other, still-fished areas. This is why fishermen on the coast have been keen to implement their own voluntary MPAs, to grow fish stocks and in the longer term protect their livelihoods. Additionally, protecting pristine marine environments around islands can make them a much bigger draw for ecotourism.
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