PROSPECTUS - The Pew Charitable Trusts

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Pew Environment Group
We live on a blue planet—71 percent of the earth’s surface is covered
by ocean. The world’s oceans play a critical role in sustaining life.
They help regulate the earth’s climate, generate much of the oxygen
we breathe, detoxify and recycle pollution and absorb vast quantities
of carbon dioxide, a major greenhouse gas.
Yet the unrestrained impact of
human activity—particularly industrial
fishing—is imposing fundamental
changes on the world’s oceans.
Recent studies suggest that 90 percent
of the world’s large fish have
disappeared and close to one-third
of all commercial fisheries have collapsed.
Unless current trends are
reversed, the world’s remaining
commercial fisheries are likely to
fail by 2048.
For more than 15 years, the Pew Environment
Group has been promoting
solutions to problems affecting the
world’s oceans. We ground our
work in up-to-date, accurate and
peer-reviewed science, the findings
of which we convey to the public, the
media and policy makers, including
resource management agencies and
regulatory bodies. Our goals for the
coming five years are both specific
and ambitious. Within the United
States, we are committed to ending
overfishing in federal waters by 2012.
Internationally, we seek to improve
governance of high-seas fisheries
and create at least four large-scale
marine reserves in areas of the
oceans that require comprehensive
protection from fishing and other
extractive activities.
In addition, we are committed to
developing model standards for
marine aquaculture that will lessen
the detrimental impacts of fish
farming on the marine environment;
ensuring the sustainable management
of krill, the basis of the marine
food web in Antarctica; securing
permanent bans on bottom trawling
and other destructive fishing practices
in both national and international
waters; strengthening fisheries
conservation in the European Union;
increasing protection for whales;
and continuing to sponsor critically
important research aimed at informing
and guiding the responsible management
of ocean resources.
Preserving the Earth’s outstanding
wilderness is no less important.
Merely 17 percent of the world’s
terrestrial surface remains essentially
unspoiled, and extinction threatens
innumerable animal and plant species
on land. Consequently, we have also
campaigned for more than 15 years
to protect some of the world’s largest
and most important remaining
wilderness areas; during that time,
we have safeguarded well over 200
million acres in the United States and
Canada, equivalent to twice the size
of California.
Over the next five years, we are
seeking the long-term protection of
millions of acres in the United States,
Canada and Australia. All three
nations have vast wilderness areas
that are biologically and ecologically
rich. Moreover, all benefit from
functioning democracies characterized
by the rule of law, together with
a citizenry that places a high value
on conservation. As a result, once