AFTER four nights at sea on a pitching and rolling ship, the announcement over the Tannoy is the sound of sweet relief. “Land ahoy!”
I get dressed and lurch out onto the foredeck. If it really is ahoy, I can’t see it. The sun is coming up and dazzling the point on the horizon where terra firma should be, due east of our position in the middle of the South Pacific. The ship rolls sickeningly and I retreat to my berth.
A couple of hours later, I re-emerge and am greeted by an awesome sight – a rugged green rock rising out of the ocean like something from the film Jurassic Park.
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This is Pitcairn, one of the remotest inhabited islands in the world and part of a British overseas territory. I am here to find out how this isolated community is aiming to put its dark past behind it and reinvent itself as a paradigm of ocean conservation – and also if there are lessons to be learned more generally about how to protect marine biodiversity. But as always on this precarious outpost, there are squalls gathering on the horizon. How can Pitcairn’s stellar conservation efforts continue when its already tiny population is dwindling?
Pitcairn is best known as the final destination of nine mutineers from the ship HMAV Bounty, who made landfall in January 1790 along with 11 Tahitian women and six Tahitian men they had persuaded to join them. After going ashore and deciding the island was a suitable hideout, they scuttled and burned the ship to avoid detection – mutiny was a capital offence. For the next few years, they scraped out an existence on the tiny but fertile island before turning on one another in an orgy of murder and suicide. Ultimately, just one mutineer, John Adams, was left standing. More recently, the island was engulfed in a sexual abuse scandal that necessitated the construction of a prison.
I hitched a ride to Pitcairn on the that occasionally drop by to assist the locals. It was the longest journey of my life: 19,000 kilometres by air from London to Tahiti (I offset it) and a 2180 km boat ride. The crossing took four days and traversed three time zones with nothing to see except blue sea, azure sky and the odd atoll on the horizon. I had hoped to spy an albatross or whale or two. No such luck.
Pitcairn is the only inhabited island in a group of four separated by hundreds of kilometres of open ocean, and with even vaster stretches of water between it and the next nearest settlement (see map, below). It is the southern half of a volcano that rose from the waves around a million years ago, built from lava gushing from a hotspot where the Nazca and Pacific tectonic plates are pulling apart. The northern half of the resulting island was blown to smithereens by an eruption; the capital, Adamstown, now nestles in the remains of the extinct caldera. Its nearest inhabited neighbour is the French Polynesian island of Mangareva, 540 km away. With a population of approximately 1200, Mangareva is a relative metropolis. Pitcairn’s population is 47, the smallest of any sovereign state or dependency in the world, an order of magnitude less than the next smallest.
The other islands – Henderson, Ducie and Oeno – are uninhabited coral atolls. on account of its geological oddness: tectonic upheavals have elevated it several metres above the waves and it is now one of only two such raised coral atolls in pristine ecological condition, along with Aldabra in the Seychelles.
Of the outer islands, only Henderson has ever been inhabited. Archaeological evidence suggests that it and Pitcairn were colonised and then abandoned by Polynesian settlers long before the arrival of the Bounty. Ducie and Oeno are totally inhospitable.
Bumper biodiversity
The islands are, however, home to a bountiful marine ecosystem above and below the waves. There are 20 breeding species of bird – six of them found only on the islands, such as the Pitcairn reed warbler – and over 300 species of plant, including 10 endemic ones. The reefs are home to 70 species of coral, hundreds of species of fish, five shark species and two of the seven types of sea turtle – green and hawksbill. Three species of whale, including the critically endangered southern right whale, pass through these waters. All told, more than 1250 species have been recorded on and around the islands, many of them found nowhere else, according to , manager of the territory’s Environmental, Conservation and Natural Resources Division.
On land and in the air, it is easy to see the biodiversity. But there are few obvious indicators that this is one of Earth’s great marine biodiversity hotspots. However, the wildlife gradually reveals itself. There are flying fish, hoards of crabs and near-shore corals. On the second day of my visit, a group of islanders go fishing in their open longboats. Later, they return with a heaving catch, mostly grouper, but also an amberjack and a spectacularly large and impressively ugly triggerfish. When I go snorkelling in a lagoon called St Paul’s Pool, I get a glimpse of what is out there: abundant corals teeming with fish.
The water is incredibly clear and blue, a patchwork of aquamarine and lapis lazuli. Even on the Tamar, which is anchored in 17 fathoms (31 metres) of water about half a kilometre offshore, it is possible to see the seabed. This incredible clarity is what allows coral to thrive as deep as 75 metres down, the world’s deepest-known tropical reefs.
Christian and her fellow islanders have big dreams for their biodiversity bounty. In 2016, after four years of surveys by the National Geographical Society and others, the UK government (which administers Pitcairn) designated the islands’ exclusive economic zone (EEZ) – which extends 200 nautical miles from shore in all directions apart from where it butts up against French Polynesia’s waters – as a marine protected area (MPA). At the time, it was the largest in the world, covering almost 842,000 square kilometres, about three-and-a-half times the area of Britain. The surveys revealed not just an abundance of wildlife, but also a completely intact marine ecosystem – something extremely rare in today’s world, which Pitcairn’s deputy governor, Alasdair Hamilton, says is the true value of the MPA.
MPAs are the ocean’s nature reserves. Technically, they are free from the human exploitation that has blighted much of the rest of the seas, from industrial fishing to container shipping, mass tourism, hydrocarbon exploration and extraction, pipelines, undersea cables, wind farms, aquaculture, pollution and the looming threat of deep-sea mining. The in Seattle, Washington, lists 16,854 such areas globally, but their implementation and enforcement has been patchy at best. Only 1042 of the MPAs are ranked as “fully” or “highly” protected, collectively covering just 2.9 per cent of the ocean surface. That is a long way short of the 30 per cent by 2030 target agreed at the latest round of biodiversity negotiations in Canada in 2022.
Enforcing marine protected areas
These “paper parks” are one of the biggest obstacles to ocean conservation. “We create MPAs, but we don’t enforce them,” the , told the in Brest, France, in February 2022. The UK is a serial offender: it has implemented 1286 MPAs within the 731,309 km2 EEZ around Britain and Northern Ireland, but only a piddly 6.75 km2 is classed as fully or highly protected – those areas at Lundy, Lamlash Bay and Flamborough Head. Some “protected” areas allow bottom trawling, which is one of the most destructive forms of commercial fishing.
But the UK does have overseas territories, including Pitcairn, to make up for its domestic failings. Three of these are already surrounded by huge MPAs: South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands; the British Overseas Territory of Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha; and, of course, Pitcairn. There are also pockets of strict protection around the overseas territories of the Falkland Islands, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands and the Turks and Caicos Islands. Together, these strongly protected areas total 2,282,456 km2, 39 per cent of the UK’s EEZs. That makes to have hit the target of protecting 30 per cent of its waters by 2030.
However, it is one thing to draw a boundary around a dot on a map and call it an MPA and quite another to enforce it. “There are some countries that are trying to check the boxes and have paper parks, areas that are just lines on a map, without conservation benefits, without proper management,” says marine biologist , a National Geographic explorer in residence. “These areas are truly incompatible with conservation, so they should not count as marine protected areas.”
And so I made my way to Pitcairn’s new Marine Science Base to find out how to do it properly. The and isn’t fully operational yet, but has become the de facto HQ of the Pitcairn MPA and its planned research programme. “This will be a haven for researchers and conservationists and I think could be a hub for marine and climate science,” says base manager Sid Gould.
Anecdotally, biodiversity has increased since the MPA was designated. “It was funny, but it seemed like as soon as we got that designation, things started happening,” says Melva Evans, MPA officer at Pitcairn’s Environmental, Conservation and Natural Resources Division. “We got more sharks. We got more whales. It’s like they knew that this is safe territory.”
Safer, anyway. The biggest threat to the MPA is illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing. Islanders are encouraged to report anything that looks fishy, such as a vessel moving slowly through the waters, or fishing gear floating in the sea or washed up on shore. The Royal Navy helps to patrol the waters when one of its boats is in the vicinity. But the bulk of the policing is done by satellites, which track the movement of ships in and around the MPA via their automated identification systems and flag up any suspicious activity.
Judging from this data, there is little evidence of IUU, says Christian. “Everything is carefully monitored and tracked and if something looks suspicious, we’re notified. The good thing is, since we’ve had the designation, they kind of keep their distance.”
Data for 2022 from the UK’s Marine Management Organisation shows industrial tuna fishing vessels, mostly bearing Chinese and Taiwanese flags, massed around the outskirts of Pitcairn’s MPA, but only a tiny number within it. “Pitcairn’s MPA is doing its job,” says Hamilton.
Thanks to satellite tracking, IUU fishing really is no longer worth the effort, says Evans, as the penalties are draconian. “They’d be stupid to risk that.” Doubly so: it is well-known that are fecund nurseries for fish, which then disperse out of the area and fill the boots of waiting vessels in international waters. The islanders are allowed to take fish around the four islands and also from the vicinity of Adams Seamount, known locally as Forty Mile Reef, an active underwater volcano to the east of Pitcairn. Without this concession, the MPA would have been dead in the water.
There is still much to learn about the MPA’s ecosystems. “We’re still quite uncharted,” says Christian. “The more research that happens, the more we’re finding out. At the moment, we’re concentrating on the outer islands to see what they’ve got and the condition of the corals. Later on down the track, it might be the deeper waters.”
Conservation in the oceans
This knowledge gap of the deep isn’t confined to Pitcairn. A concluded that while coastal MPAs are very effective, not much is known about the benefits of oceanic MPAs, which are defined as covering water deeper than 200 metres.
Nonetheless, from what is known, Pitcairn appears to be getting the MPA process right. Last year, it was given a , recognising that it meets the highest science-based conservation standards. “I think this is the jewel in the Pacific,” says Gould.
But, as with everything here, the situation is precarious. The islands may be remote, but they aren’t immune from global change. “Plastic pollution is a major, major problem, especially on Henderson, which is in the southern part of the Pacific gyre, so it gets massive amounts washed up on the beaches,” says Pitcairn administrator Steve Townsend, referring to a vast system of currents that steers waste around the ocean.
An expedition to Henderson in 2019 collected 6 tonnes of plastic rubbish, most of it from the fishing industry, says Hamilton. The same effort estimated that there are 4 billion particles of marine microplastic on Henderson’s eastern shore. Evans describes the island’s litter problem as “heartbreaking”. It is also unnecessary: most of the plastic bottles on Henderson were recently found to have been . Exactly how to solve this problem is a major conservation question.
Henderson also has issues with invasive rats, which eat ground-nesting seabirds and their eggs. A previous attempt to eradicate them failed. Another is planned in 2026. Climate change, ocean acidification and sea-level rise are further threats. Rainfall patterns are changing, too, with more frequent heavy downpours, which wash sediment into the sea and muddy the pristine waters. Sharks and many fish prefer clear water and will vote with their fins.
Perhaps most pressing of all, Pitcairn’s population is ageing and dwindling – more than 70 per cent are over 65 and nobody has been born here since 2006. The school is empty. Mayor Simon Young, the first non-native to be elected to the post, wants to encourage immigration, but some islanders are hostile to that idea. If that means a slow extinction, then so be it, they say. There is a diaspora beyond the island, but moving to Pitcairn and integrating into its insular community is challenging.
In 2040, Pitcairn will celebrate the 250th anniversary of the mutineers’ settlement. Whether anyone will still be living here to mark it is far from certain. If that comes to pass, who knows what will happen to the science base. But as long as the satellites remain aloft, the MPA itself should be fine. “It’s an enormous area,” says Evans. “It isn’t possible to have patrol ships out there. It’s the eye in the sky.”
Long may it endure, even if Pitcairn’s fate is to revert to an uninhabited rock in the vast southern Pacific.
Graham Lawton is a staff writer at New Scientist
