WCPA High Seas Task Force
organization
The World Commission on Protected Areas (WCPA)'s High Seas Task Force spans decades. It was officially established in 2003 following the Vth IUCN World Parks Congress where marine experts formulated a 10-Year High Seas MPA Strategy. The 10 year Strategy built upon the results of a joint IUCN, WCPA and WWF expert's workshop on high seas MPAs in January 2003: Towards a Strategy for High Seas MPAs
Goal
Their goal is to achieve for the High Seas the fundamental objectives of the 1988 World Conservation Strategy—repeated in IUCN's Guidelines for Marine Protected Areas:
to maintain essential ecological processes and life support systems;
to preserve genetic diversity; and
to ensure the sustainable utilization of species and ecosystems.
Membership
The WCPA High Seas MPA Task Force is co-chaired by Kristina Gjerde, High Seas Policy Advisor for the IUCN, and Alistair Graham, an international policy consultant with WWF and other organizations. The Task Force contains over 20 individual experts from a variety of government agencies, conservation organizations, scientific institutions, universities, and media. These individuals include Graeme Kelleher, Sylvia Earle, Elliott Norse, Arlo Hemphill, Jeff Ardron, Dan Laffoley, Sheila Mckenna, Sue Taei and Lisa Speer.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “WCPA High Seas Task Force” is organization. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through WCPA, High and Seas, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “organization” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 18, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q7948008. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2003 and 1988.
Official terminology may obscure informal participation, dissent or communities documented only indirectly. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Three-step research path
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “WCPA High Seas Task Force” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.