Marine Biodiversity Conservation Strategy

Marine Biodiversity Conservation Strategy in Japan is a national cross-sectoral policy formulated by the Ministry of the Environment in Japan on the basis of the “National Biodiversity Strategy (2010)” under the “Basic Act on Biodiversity”, in line with the “Basic Act on Ocean Policy” and “Basic Plan on Ocean Policy”, in response to increasing public awareness on marine biodiversity. The Strategy aims to protect the biodiversity to support the sound structure and function of marine ecosystems, and to use ecological services of the ocean, or its blessings, in a sustainable manner. The Strategy provides a basic view and direction of measures for conservation and sustainable use of the marine biodiversity.
To increase sustainability of ecosystems measures sat forth by the strategy include: 1- Improvement of baseline information including improvement of scientific information & knowledge to identify high‐priority areas for conservation of the biodiversity; 2- Identification of factors influencing the marine biodiversity to implement measures to reduce their impacts focused on measures against developments and the pollution loads to marine environment, those for fishery stock management & protection of fishery environment, measures against alien species, and those against climate changes; 3- Implementation of measures appropriate to characteristics of individual areas focused on implementation of measures for their conservation and sustainable use, considering differences in characteristics between individual areas, such as coastal areas and the open ocean; 4- Improvement of Marine Protected Areas and enhancement of their networking focused on improvement of management of Marine Protected Areas and consideration of methodologies to assess their performance, additional designations of the Areas, and enhancement of networking among the Areas; and 5- Facilitation of the public acceptance and involvement of various entities including publicity campaign, assistance to activities of local communities, and facilitation of collaboration & cooperation by various entities.
To increase the resilience of livelihoods to disasters and crisis risk management the strategy promotes effective and adaptive conservation management including the identification of especially important marine areas with consideration paid to nature’s ability to cope with environmental changes, and reducing other anthropogenic stress to the area. Regarding governance, the Ministry of the Environment in Japan is the lead institution for the strategy implementation.