Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources

I'm Eva Cahill, the assistant editor here at Oceanographic.

Today marks the opening of the annual Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources conference, or CAMLR, and over the next fortnight, world powers gather in Hobart, Australia to negotiate the future of southern ocean governance.

It's an arena where negotiations over marine protected areas, emperor penguin protections, and Antarctic krill fisheries regularly collide with global geopolitical friction.

So, to help us make sense of these complex dynamics, I sat down with one of the world's leading authorities on polar politics, Professor Klaus Dodds, Executive Dean and Professor of Geopolitics at Middlesex University London, a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, Honorary Fellow of the British Antarctic Survey and author of books including Border Wars, The Scramble for the Poles and Unfrozen, Klaus has spent decades advising governments and parliamentary committees on polar security.

So the fishing vessels in the Southern Ocean catch krill for omega-three supplements for feed on salmon farms and for pet food.

The international body that manages the fishery is the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, or the CCAMLR.

It's a lot to say.

And it set a precautionary ceiling back in nineteen ninety-one.

But, you know, this issue has been at the forefront of the global environmental sector for a while.

And the marine ecosystem down in Antarctica is governed by this really tediously named organization called CAMELA, which is the Commission for the Conservation, that is the key word, the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources.

And every year at the end of October, they meet for two weeks.

And it happens to be hosted down in Nipaluna, Hobart, where I live.