Antartica exploitation vs preservation
Successive treaties have built upon this foundation, providing strong protection for the Antarctic environment and strictly regulating fishing, for example. These have culminated in the 1991 Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty (which entered fully into operation in 1998), which designates Antarctica as a "natural reserve, devoted to peace and science" and establishes environmental principles to govern the conduct of all activities. It also prohibits mining, arguments over which caused the failure of a proposed Convention on the Regulation of Antarctic Mineral Resource Activities (CRAMRA) in the late 1980s. CRAMRA would have potentially allowed future exploitation of Antarctic resources, subject to the agreement of all treaty signatories, but it ran into strong opposition from the international environmental movement, which convinced several of the treaty nations to refuse to sign it.
This topic considers whether it is right to maintain Antarctica purely as a "natural reserve, devoted to peace and science". Should some exploitation of its resources be allowed, or should the general ban on economic activity be extended to areas such as fishing and tourism? Pros | Cons | | | | | | |
| | | Antarctica is a pristine