As geopolitical tensions between the United States and Russia have risen, there is at least one subject about which relations are warm -- the mutual desire to protect the Arctic Ocean from unregulated exploitation by vessels chasing northward-moving fish.
The two nations, along with Canada, Norway and Greenland/Denmark, pledged in July to keep their commercial fishermen out of the 1.1 million square miles of international waters in the central Arctic Ocean, at least for the foreseeable future.
"We did this because we simply do not have enough scientific information with which to manage the fishery," David Balton, deputy assistant secretary of state for oceans and fisheries, said at Monday's international Conference on Global Leadership in the Arctic: Cooperation, Innovation, Engagement and Resilience, also known as GLACIER.
Now the U.S., Russia and the three other nations are working together to try to convince the rest of the world to join a binding agreement to protect that large swath of international waters from unregulated fishing harvests.
Balton, who is also chairman of the Arctic Council's senior Arctic officials, announced an upcoming meeting of representatives from five nations that is aimed at mapping out a strategy to accomplish that goal. The meeting is likely to be in early December in Washington, he said.
Balton also announced initiatives by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA to better understand the marine and fishery resources of the central Arctic Ocean.
Until recently, there was no need to worry about fishing vessels working in those northernmost international waters, Balton said. Sea ice once covered that area year-round, he said. But retreat of summer and fall sea ice has created big areas of open water, including a shallow area of the northern Chukchi Sea that, in the future, may hold fish targeted by commercial fleets, he said.
The campaign to protect the central Arctic Ocean's international waters is not a new area of U.S.-Russian marine-conservation cooperation. In the 1980s, the U.S. and the Soviet Union launched an effort to end the uncontrolled harvests of pollock from a zone of approximately 50,000-square miles of international waters in the Bering Sea surrounded by U.S and Russian waters called the "Donut Hole." That effort resulted in a binding agreement in 1994 between the U.S., post-Soviet Russia and the nations with commercial fishermen who had been using those waters.
Unfortunately, said Vyacheslav Zilanov of the Russian Association of the Fishermen of the North, that area was exploited and overfished before the multinational agreement could go into effect.
Zilanov, a former Soviet and Russian government fisheries manager who helped negotiate that Bering Sea agreement, pointed out that overfishing was also the fate of three other international zones of far-north marine waters.
There is the "Polygon Hole" in the Sea of Okhotsk, the "Loop Hole" in the Barents Sea and the "Banana Hole" in the Norwegian Sea, Zilanov told the GLACIER audience.
Before protective agreements were struck between the Soviet-Russian governments and fishery management partners in the U.S. and Norway, unregulated vessels managed to catch $3.5 billion worth of seafood in the international zones of the Bering Sea, Sea of Okhotsk, Barents Sea and Norwegian Sea, Zilanov said. Protective agreements were important, but they came late, he said. "We were putting out the fire instead of preventing it," he said through an interpreter.
The hope is that such an experience will not be repeated in the central Arctic, he said.