WWF - For a living planet

Antarctica and the surrounding Southern Ocean is a vast region – home to a variety of fish, birds and mammals, including great whales, elephant seals, albatross and penguins.

Why is it important?

• Antarctica is almost entirely covered in ice, and contains 90% of all the ice on Earth. The ice plays a vitally important role in influencing the world's climate, reflecting back the sun's energy and so helping to regulate global temperatures.
• Around 100 million birds breed in Antarctica, with the continent's seven species of penguin making up 90% of them. Many more birds migrate there to feed in the summer.
• Despite the extreme conditions, two species of flowering plants and more than 200 species of lichen, mosses, fungi and primitive algae exist in ice-free areas.
• Year round, scientists at around 60 local research bases study the environment and the pollution caused by humans worldwide.

Challenges and threats

Climate change threatens the delicate balance of the Southern Ocean ecosytems. There is currently little or no comprehensive protection of the Antarctic marine environment through tools such as marine protected areas, which could severely affect the region's resilience to the impacts of climate change.  Antarctic ice sheets are already melting, and, if all Antarctic ice melted, sea levels would rise by about 55m worldwide, causing widespread floods and devastation. Although the Antarctic ice sheets are unlikely to melt entirely, even small-scale melting is likely to have significant effects on global sea level rise.

More than 50 species of birds, along with seals, whales and fish, feed directly or indirectly on krill – a shrimp-like creature just 7cm long. Unfortunately, krill numbers have dwindled by as much as 80% since the 1970s due to increased fishing pressure and the loss of winter sea ice, under which the krill stay over winter and use as a key spawning and nursery area.

Pirate (Illegal, Unregulated or Unreported (IUU)) fishing results in the plundering of valuable fish stocks. Illegal fishing probably accounts for tens of thousands of seabird deaths each year.

WWF in action

WWF is striving to ensure that, by 2012:

• a network of marine protected areas is established across 2,000,000 sq km – that's 10% of the Southern Ocean
• the impacts of climate change on the Antarctic and Southern Ocean ecosystems are understood, and effective adaptation measures are implemented
• fishing is managed sustainably, ensuring that fish stocks and ecosystems are stable and not over-exploited
• the impact from IUU fishing is no longer a major threat to marine ecosystems
• seabird populations have stabilised and started to recover
• mining and oil drilling remain illegal. Under the Antarctic treaty system there is a moratorium on mineral exploitation in the region until at least 2048.