Monster reserve: Spectacularly vibrant anemone fish crowd around a thriving reef off Manra Island in the Phoenix Islands, Kiribati. To see so many of them in one place is extremely unusual anywhere else.
Credit: Paul Nicklen/Getty Images
HOW THE PHOENIX ISLANDS reserve came to be is a tale combining serendipity, talent and persistence. The eight islands were never permanently populated by Polynesians, but they were successively mined by the U.S. for seabird guano and used by British companies to grow coconuts.
Canton, the largest, served as a base for Pan Am's glorious Clipper seaplanes before World War II, as a hub for military Pacific aviation during the war and as a refueling station for Qantas and Pan Am's wheeled aircraft afterward.
Then it hosted a NASA base to track the Mercury space program and, finally, a U.S. Air Force station until 1978, the year the Phoenix were folded together with the Gilbert and the Line islands into the state of Kiribati.
Repeated attempts to colonise them, with the aim of alleviating overpopulation in Tarawa failed because the rainfall was insufficient. By 2000, "we had no development plan for the Phoenix Islands," recalled Tebwe Letaake, the environment minister's deputy.
But the large swaths of waters between the islands were prized by long-liners fishing for yellowfin and bigeye tuna. Purse-seiners were hauling in thousands of tonnes of skipjack and juvenile yellowfin tuna for canning. According to scientists, this contributed to the steady decrease of tuna stocks.
These international fishers paid US$26 million (A$27.5 million) to use the country's Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), a seaborne area over which a state has special rights over the exploration and use of marine resources. The Phoenix Islands region represents 11.7 per cent of Kiribati's EEZ.
In 2000, Greg Stone, a scientist with the New England Aquarium in Boston, USA, was invited to join an exploratory cruise of the Phoenix aboard the Nai'a, a luxury, 36-metre motorsailer. "What we found was amazing," he says. "We'd never seen so many fish before."
Because of their isolation in the central Pacific, the Phoenix had escaped the ravages of the shark-finning vessels, which pull up sharks, slice off their fins and throw them back into water to die, then sell the dried fins to China. The islands' distance from any airport also immunised them against the live reef fish trade. And the absence of people meant the tastiest reef fish were left undisturbed.
After that first cruise, Stone flew to Tarawa with an illustrated report. "The book caused quite a sensation," recalled Teroroko, the project director who was then deputy to the fisheries minister. "We were all very surprised and impressed at how much life there was."
Stone asked the fisheries minister at the time, Tetabo Nakara, if Kiribati would consider protecting the islands. "I told Stone it was a great idea, but we'd have to get compensated for the money from the fishing licenses," Nakara recalled. "I said we'd have to invent a reverse fishing license, and the term stuck."
Stone returned to the islands in 2002 with a National Geographic team, which produced a movie that was shown the following year to an increasingly enthusiastic political elite in Tarawa. Along with the movie (which can be seen on www.phoenixislands.org), Stone brought with him several staffers from Conservation International (CI) in Washington DC, one of the world's wealthiest environmental groups, who told the officials they were ready to make up for any financial shortfall.
In 2005, a memorandum of understanding was signed: Kiribati would gradually end all exploitation of the Phoenix Islands, and Conservation International along with the New England Aquarium, would help them: CI would finance a trust fund, while the aquarium would design the marine protected area and help the government manage it. And so, the Phoenix Islands Protected Area was declared in 2006.
Meanwhile, Teroroko was made director of the newly protected area, with his salary and budget paid by the U.S. conservation group. In late 2007, Nakara, a vigorous promoter of the project, was provided with four possible sizes for the reserve. He recalled with a proud grin, "I chose the largest." It was more than 400,000 km2.
climate
I hate to be pessimistic but it is a shame that just a few degrees rise in temperature could severely threaten marine ecosystems. By shame I mean frightening and saddening. Let us enjoy them while they exist in their current state.