Section 06 - UKOTCF

The latest proposal is to create the Chagos Marine
Park, on the scale of an Ocean Legacy Reserve.
The plans are outlined in the brochure The Chagos
Archipelago: Its Nature and Future (CCT 2009).
The aim is to encourage the British Government to
make Chagos a very large marine protected area,
comparable with those of the Galapagos or Great
Barrier Reef. Sites like this are few in the world
today – those left need the greatest protection
References
Size of the Chagos Archipelago relative to southern UK
Reserves cover 0.01% of the world’s ocean compared
with Marine Protected Areas which cover
0.6% (although recent Ocean Legacy Reserves will
increase these figures by an order of magnitude)
CCT [Chagos Conservation Trust] 2009. The Chagos
Archipelago: its nature and the future. Chagos
Conservation Trust, London (available via the
www.chagos-trust.org).
The British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) consists
of the Chagos Archipelago, and covers an area
equivalent to mid-southern England, consisting of
55 islands in a quarter of a million square miles
(over half a million km 2 ) of ocean. It is the most
pristine tropical marine environment on the planet,
and Britain’s greatest area of marine diversity. Because
of the coral reefs that occur in BIOT and the
other UKOTs, the UK is ranked 12th in reef area in
the world. The Chagos Conservation Management
Plan has recently been expanded, proposing to protect
30% of the atolls and reef areas (this is awaiting
implementation by the BIOT Administration).
A little of the exceptional biodiversity of the Chagos
Making the Right Connections: a conference on conservation in UK Overseas Territories, Crown Dependencies and other small island communities, page 210