Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Oceans Ministerial Meeting - September 16-17, 2005

MR. BAILY: Welcome to the Washington Foreign Press Center for this afternoon's briefing.

This afternoon, we have Under Secretary of Commerce, Conrad Lautenbacher, who is also the administrator at the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration. He will be briefing you today on the upcoming Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Oceans Ministerial Meeting next week in Bali, Indonesia.

Admiral Lautenbacher led our delegation to the first such meeting in Seoul, South Korea two years ago. And this is the first meeting that it is of particular significance since the tsunami of last December in the region and more recently, the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in the United States.

Among the topics discussed will be hazard preparedness as well as marine resource management and the integrated coastal management.

Admiral Lautenbacher will begin with a short statement and then be happy to take your questions.

Thank you for coming.

VICE ADMIRAL LAUTENBACHER: Thank you very much and good afternoon. Thanks to each of you for coming to this briefing.

As mentioned in the preamble, I have the honor of leading the United States delegation to the second APEC Oceans Ministry, which will be held in Bali. I did attend the first one in Seoul and I'm delighted that we're continuing in the same vein to hold these meetings and to make progress in the areas of joint and mutual ocean management for the Pacific Ocean.

Since that time there have been several events that I think are pertinent, certainly from the United States' point of view. First of all is the signing by our President of our Ocean Action Plan, which puts things into place a new governance mechanism for the United States for ocean management. In fact, I was working on that at an interagency government meeting this morning. This is a policy, which emphasizes developing an earth observing system, including our oceans; promoting ecosystem approaches to management; sustainable use of our resources; and also supporting a sustainable and environmentally sound aqua culture. These are internal priorities in the U.S. Government. We intend to talk to our colleagues and partners around the Pacific about ways that we can work together in these areas.

As mentioned, this is the first meeting of the APEC group since the tsunami event in the northern Indian Ocean. And I think hazards and warning, particularly in ocean-related events, are on everyone's mind. We have been working hard to push a comprehensive global earth observing system, ops systems, as it's called, through the GEO group. Most of the economies in APEC are members of group, which now has a ten-year plan to create such a system and has a secretariat headquartered in Geneva with the WMO and will be working to provide worldwide comprehensive coverage for tsunami warning as an initial start.

I might mention that we also are interested in an all hazards warning. For those of you that were watching the news events here and I'm sure you all did -- Hurricane Katrina and the severe damage that was caused on the Gulf indicates the value of having a warning system. We believe that all nations should have the capability, access to data and information to provide timely warning to its citizens so that you can minimize loss of property and save lives through that. And our system did that; we're in the process now, obviously, of recovering from severe property damage that occurred in the Gulf.

We are also interested in the ecosystem-based approaches to fisheries management and that would include several things:

First of all are sustainable fisheries, where capacity is not greater than the ability of the oceans to support fishing, so capacity should be matched. We need to look carefully at our fishing methods to ensure that we don't have by-catch of other species that are harmful to the ocean ecosystems, such as turtles, which are endangered; sea birds, for instance; and other species which are essentially over-fished at this point. We're also obviously interested in reducing or eliminating IUU -- illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing.

All of these things are involved in the ecosystem approaches to management. We also want to look at working with APEC on environmentally sound aqua culture. It's a very important source of protein for the world today and certainly a large part of the United States' imports to this country.

With that, let me stop and see if there are any questions. Those are our major themes and our major issues and we look forward to working with our friends in the APEC area to build more cooperative means of governing our oceans.

Thank you.

MR. BAILY: Before you ask your questions, I'd like to remind you to state your name and news organization and wait for the mike to come around so we can get your question on mike as well. Thank you.

QUESTION: Thank you. Donghui Yu with China News Service. Would you please tell us something more detailed about the cooperation between U.S. and China in the field, such as the explorations of ocean resources, the protections of ocean environment and forecast of the tsunami, typhoon and hurricane. Thank you.

VICE ADMIRAL LAUTENBACHER: Yes. I'd be delighted to. We have a number of agreements with China that pertain to the subjects you're talking about. We just recently completed a meeting with SOAA and here in the United States and talked about cooperative measures for coastal zone management, for areas in development in the coastal zone and how to go about that; for environmental remediation and environmental support for what I would call sound development practices for the future. We have also some agreements for exploration. We've recently completed an expedition to the Artic with the Chinese scientists.

So we're very much together on exploration and understanding of the oceans, as well as managing coastal, ecosystems and fisheries and development in the coastal zone -- environmentally sound.

Now, in terms of forecasting, we have very strong ties to the meteorological agency in China. We also just had a meeting with their deputy a week or two ago and had some cooperative agreements to help share data, to share models. China has recently bought a computer, which is comparable to the one the United States uses for weather forecasting so we can talk to each other about how to improve our weather models together.

And so, obviously, the forecasting of severe weather is of extreme importance to the CMA as well as to NOAA and our weather service. And we look forward to great cooperation and improvement in our ability to predict weather.

MR. BAILY: Question?

QUESTION: Thank you. I'm Hiroki Sugita with Kyodo News. Would you describe the specific goals you have in your mind in your next ministerial meeting, particularly on the hazard preparedness and forecast the field. Thank you.

VICE ADMIRAL LAUTENBACHER: We look forward to facilitating the work of UNESCO and the IOC, which is looking at the global tsunami warning system. And so we would like to get out of this a strong statement of support from the APEC economies in this regard. That effort is important and each nation needs to contribute in a way to provide this very vital capability for all the nations. Obviously, in the Pacific, we already have a warning system for tsunamis, to which I think all the nations that are in APEC -- I have to go and check, but I think that's correct -- are involved and receive warnings.

We obviously want to make sure that that is, in fact, the case, that everybody is represented and is receiving the warnings and is prepared to use them. So, that’s what we'd like to see in those areas. In the ecosystem, we'd like to see a workshop on capacity reduction scheduled. We think that's a very important issue for sustainable fisheries in the Pacific and it will take international cooperation to make that happen.

We'd like to have a scientific workshop into what factors apply into finding marine ecosystems. It's just a term, marine ecosystem, and what it means to each country. We believe it's important to have some baseline understanding so that we can communicate and provide a sound management structure. And obviously we're interested in working individually or multilaterally with nations for technical assistance and capacity-building in terms of reducing by-catch, so we are going to obviously invite people to help us with that.

We also would like to be able to launch the aqua culture network for the Americas, which would be the Eastern Pacific side of the network that's already established in the Western Pacific -- with the Western Pacific nations. So those are some of the specific things that we're looking forward to.

Next question.

MR. BAILY: Well, if there are no further questions -- yes.

QUESTION: My name is Higuchi of Jiji Press, Japan's news agency. And in the next APEC Ocean Ministerial Meeting, do you have any idea to cooperate with Japan in terms of predicting a severe natural disaster or some warning system about it?

VICE ADMIRAL LAUTENBACHER: Yes. Matter of fact, Japan is one of the major supporters of the GEO effort to build this system. We're working very closely together. Japan has volunteered to take on the architecture and data committee for the world GEO group on earth observations, and, of course, the Pacific is a very important part of that. That's a very significant commitment on the part of Japan and the leadership. Japan has also been very instrumental -- they held the second earth observation summit and have contributed as a co-chair of the ad-hoc group which built this ten-year plan.

We are working very closely with our Japanese counterparts in the meteorological area, in the oceanographic area, and in the space area with the satellites and using satellites to look for severe storms and improving weather predictions. We also have a number of joint projects we're looking at to work on with the earth simulator, which is an extraordinarily important asset to the world in terms of looking at severe weather events and climate future.

QUESTION: I have one more question. It's about a high-tech export to China. As we know, the U.S. Government has very strict control on high-tech export to China, so I would like to know, in the cooperation between the two countries, will U.S. Government loosen, in some degree of control, the high-tech control export to China that can be used in protections of the ocean environment and the forecasts of the severe weather? Thank you.

VICE ADMIRAL LAUTENBACHER: Thank you. That's a good question. Obviously, we have some important technology transfer controls that our government requires by law. But I believe we've been working very well in this area, in the environmental prediction, environmental monitoring area. Let me point out that the new computer that China has received is basically at the same level of technology as the U.S. computer. And so that went through the technology control process and it was agreed that that was an important thing, to be able to transfer that technology.

So I think that we have a good baseline for working in this area for peace and for domestic uses and for hazard warnings and environmental monitoring and measuring. I will continue to support that goal of ensuring that the proper technology is in place.