GUEST PAGES
The Black Sea Commission collaborates with many to achieve its objectives
An institution dedicated to fighting pollution in the Black Sea The Black Sea Commission was originally created three decades ago to fight marine pollution, but its remit has since expanded to include marine litter, biodiversity, and integrated coastal zone management. The commission works closely together with a number of international organisations to monitor the environment in the Black Sea and it provides a legal framework to fight land-based and maritime pollution. It is also the only instrument related to international environmental law that has all the Black Sea riparian countries as signatories. Prof. Halil Ibrahim Sur, Executive Director, discusses here some of the environmental challenges facing the Black Sea and the role of the commission in solving them. What are the main objectives of the Black Sea Commission (BSC) and as executive director of the institution what, in your view, are the foremost challenges towards achieving these? What is the current and future role of the BSC as a regional player for the protection of the Black Sea?
climate change, marine litter, and many others. For the moment, the Black Sea Commission is responsible for promoting the implementation of the Bucharest Convention and its Protocols, which foresees, inter alia, monitoring and assessing pollution, controlling pollution from land-based sources, ensuring the conservation of biological diversity, addressing environmental safety aspects of shipping and maritime policy, addressing environmental aspects of management of fisheries and other marine living resources and, last but not least, promoting integrated coastal zone management.
The Black Sea Commission, for almost three decades, plays a major role in addressing issues of conservation of the environment of the Black Sea, being a Regional Sea Convention. As you may know, the Black Sea Commission was created as an executive body to implement the provisions of the Convention on the Protection of the Black Sea Against Pollution also known as the Bucharest Convention, signed back in 1992 and ratified by all the Black Sea riparian countries. The Black Sea Commission consists of representatives the Ministries of Environment of all six Black Sea riparian countries.
We have made substantive achievements in all these spheres, but still, despite the ongoing efforts of the Black Sea riparian countries, environmental deterioration continues and is being significantly affected by global and regional political, social and economic realities.
Initially our activities were focused mainly on marine pollution control, but over the years, we put on our agenda the issues of biodiversity; integrated coastal zone management;
In recent years, the Black Sea Commission and its partners managed to put on the agenda some important issues of our cooperation in the sphere of the Black Sea environment. Among
them let me mention the adoption of the Black Sea Integrated Monitoring and Assessment Program for 2017-2022 (BSIMAP), which foresees harmonization with the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD); defines the Good Environmental Status (GES) for the Black Sea; provides the common lists of indicators and parameters of reporting coordinated with our partners from UNEP, FAO GFCM (General Fisheries Commission for Mediterranean), ACCOBAMS Agreement, and ICPDR
(the International Commission for the Protection of the Danube River) and many others. Together with our partners from the Mediterranean Sea, we elaborated the Regional Action Plan on Marine Litter in the Black Sea (which was already adopted by the Black Sea Commission in 2018) and draft Marine Litter Monitoring Guidelines. In fact, this work is the number one item on the agenda in our cooperation with our Mediterranean colleagues within the MoU between the Black Sea
EUROFISH Magazine 6 / 2021
11_GUEST PAGES (GP).indd 53
53
23/11/21 12:13 PM
