CCAMLR 2026: Another Year Without a New Antarctic Marine Protected Area

After two weeks of talks in Hobart, the countries that govern the Southern Ocean have gone home with the same outcome they have produced for a decade: no new marine protected area, and no new precautionary rules for the Antarctic krill fishery. The Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, known as CCAMLR, closed its 2026 meeting on 31 October without agreement on any of the proposed protected areas, according to the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition. For the tenth year in a row, its 27 members left Hobart without agreeing protections for the western Antarctic Peninsula.

That record is worth stating plainly, because it is not a story of a single difficult meeting. In 2009, CCAMLR committed itself to a representative system of marine protected areas across the Southern Ocean. Seventeen years later, only two such areas exist, and a decade has passed since the last one was adopted. Five more are now proposed, including a new East Antarctica proposal submitted by China this year. The proposal that drew the most discussion in Hobart was Domain 1, the Antarctic Peninsula area championed by Argentina and Chile with firm support from Brazil and Uruguay. It did not reach consensus, though the coalition reports that many members agreed to join an intersessional process to keep the negotiation moving between meetings.

The krill side of the failure matters just as much, and it is where the abstract idea of protection meets a fleet that is already moving. Krill are the foundation of the Southern Ocean food web, feeding penguins, whales and seals, and the fishery that harvests them for omega-3 supplements and aquaculture feed has now closed early for two years in a row. In 2025 it shut on 1 August; in 2026 it closed on 12 August, both times after vessels reached the 620,000-tonne trigger level for Area 48, the management region covering the Antarctic Peninsula and the Scotia Sea. About 11 vessels fished that region in 2026. The trigger level is only around 11 percent of the 5.61-million-tonne precautionary catch limit for Area 48, and less than one percent of the roughly 63 million tonnes of krill biomass estimated in a 2019 survey. The number itself is not the scandal; the geography is. A safeguard that once spread the catch across four smaller zones lapsed in late 2024, and CCAMLR's own Scientific Committee has since called the resulting concentration of fishing "not precautionary". With no replacement agreed in Hobart, the whole 620,000 tonnes can again be taken from a small area around the Peninsula, the feeding ground where wildlife need krill most.

What happens next is the part that should worry anyone who assumes a failed meeting simply preserves the status quo. WWF-Australia reports that nine vessels have signalled their intent to fish in East Antarctica, meaning the fishery is poised to expand into a new region without the safeguards that the Hobart meeting failed to agree. An expanding fleet, a lapsed spatial safeguard and a warming ocean are not independent problems; they compound each other, and they compound fastest exactly where krill aggregate and predators gather to feed. The conservation groups are not asking for the fishery to end. WWF has renewed its call for a moratorium only until effective management measures are in place, a distinction that matters: the argument is about rules for where and how fishing happens, not about whether anyone may fish at all.

There is one genuine reason not to write this off as permanent deadlock. The intersessional process agreed in Hobart gives the Domain 1 proposal a live track into next year's meeting, and the first Conference of the Parties to the High Seas Treaty is approaching, adding outside pressure that CCAMLR has not faced in quite this form before. But pressure is not consensus, and CCAMLR decides by consensus, which means a single determined member can block an area that 26 others support. That is why the honest reading of this week is narrow: the Peninsula proposal is in a stronger negotiating position than it was a year ago, and it still has not been adopted. Until a meeting ends differently, the pattern, not the promise, is the evidence.