HYDROGRAPGIC MAPPING TERM PAPER

WINKLER AJUOGA F19/1930/2017

EXCLUSIVE ECONOMIC ZONE

An exclusive economic zone is a sea zone prescribed by the United Nations Convention on the
Law of the Sea over which a state has special rights over the exploration and use of marine
resources, including energy production from water and wind. It stretches from the baseline out
to 200 nautical miles from its coast. In colloquial usage, the term may include the territorial sea
and even the continental shelf beyond the 200-mile limit.
HISTORY
For centuries, coastal nations have sought control over the oceans near their shores. These
countries have also sought the right to control the ocean’s valuable resources as coastal nations
have long valued coastal waters with large amounts of fish (Fishing being important for food and
trade). Coastal nations quickly realized that they must control and defend their coastal waters in
order to protect their ocean resources. In modern day, countries have established exclusive
economic zones (EEZ)

By the seventeenth century, laws governing the ocean began to develop. The ocean was divided
into two categories:
 territorial waters (part of the ocean just off a nation’s coast over which that nation may
exercise any right). The nation in control of its territorial waters could remove resources
from those waters and defend the waters from other nations.
 the open ocean or high seas (is the expansive, deep part of the ocean). Every nation had
the right to travel over the open ocean and remove any resources.

From the seventeenth century until the mid-twentieth century, territorial waters extended for 3
miles (4.8 kilometers) off of a nation’s coastline because: a nation could not claim an area larger
than it could protect and the 3-mile (4.8-kilometer) limit supplied most coastal nations with all of
the ocean resources that they needed.

Until the twentieth century, the main resources that nations took from the oceans were fish and
whales. Usually an abundant supply of fish could be found within 3 miles (4.8 kilometers) of the
coast. If a sufficient supply of fish or whales were not within that limit, that nation’s fishermen or
whales could easily travel out into the open ocean.

With the advent of new technology two key things happened; one of which was fishing vessels
to travel for thousands of miles and remain at sea longer resulting in overfishing and over-
whaling in many areas. With fish stocks dwindling, coastal nations sought protection beyond the
traditional 3 miles limit and the second was oil and natural gas exploration on the seabed led
many nations to look beyond their territorial waters. Most of this oil and gas lay under the
continental shelf and beyond the 3-mile limit.

In 1945, the United States became the first country to abandon the 3-mile limit. President Harry
S. Truman (1884–1972) declared that the United States had the right to all of the ocean
resources that existed on the continental shelf. Afterwards, many nations followed suit and
abandoned the traditional 3-mile limit and extending their territorial waters to 12 miles and 200-
mile zones.

With nations demanding for leeway to exploit the ocean resources, the demand of the already
exploiting resources i.e. fish, minerals, oil and gas surpassed the supply thus United Nations
stepped in to help establish a consistent system of ocean resource management.
EEZ was born out of political demand strongly expressed by countries undergoing development,
especially African states (The concept of EEZ was initiated by Kenya in the 1972 at the Geneva
Session of the UN Committee on Peaceful uses of Sea-bed and Ocean Floor beyond the limits of
National Jurisdiction.) which were not prepared to allow the unlimited removal of halieutic
resources in the vicinity of their territorial seas. EEZ was then integrated into the Convention on
the Law of the Sea 1982 and it has its roots in the concept of Exclusive Fishing Zone and doctrine
of Continental Shelf.

Aside from resources in the EEZ, we have open ocean resources that do not lie in the EEZ and are
considered to belong to every nation thus any nation can extract them.
Occasionally, for groups of islands, the EEZs may intersect or two nations may have EEZs that
overlap and thus the nations may enter into agreements on sharing the resources within that
EEZ, or the United Nations may redraw the lines for those nations’ EEZs.

There are three main types of EEZ boundaries.

 Treaty boundaries have been formally recognized by neighboring countries and are thus
not contested.
 Median line boundaries have mainly been established by the UNCLOS convention. While
many have been recognized by the concerned countries, a few are being disputed.
 Disputed boundaries lead to large areas of disputed EEZ, notably the Spratly Islands on
the South China Sea, portions being contested by China, Vietnam, Malaysia and the
Philippines.
From a transportation perspective, an important distinction is that vessels of other states have
the freedom of navigation within the EEZ. While they also have the more restricted right to
“innocent passage” through the territorial sea, the coastal state has much greater authority over
foreign vessels in that zone.
THE EEZ FRAMEWORK

The EEZ's legal regime is characterized as follows:

— the EEZ is an area beyond and adjacent to the territorial sea: it can extend to a maximum 200
nautical miles from the baselines.
— within the EEZ, a coastal state enjoys sovereign rights over its natural resources. It can
exercise its jurisdiction over certain activities for the purpose, among others, of protecting the
environment. But it is also obliged to respect the rights of other States (thanks to the
maintenance of certain freedoms laid down by the law of the high seas such as freedom of
navigation).
Some of the challenges experienced by this law’s implementation is at the Mediterranean where
the greatest distance between opposite States is no more than 400 nautical miles. But apart
from this detail regarding breadth, all the characteristics of the EEZ can be applied to it.

The EEZ should be analyzed as a concept with three dimensions:

 the surface
 water column
 seabed (and its subsoil).
The interconnection of these three elements makes the EEZ particularly complex, a marine area
which is, in fact, a unique phenomenon. It is of a functional nature (it does not involve any
territorial control, as does the territorial sea) and encompasses three kinds of legal situations:
 the sovereign rights of the coastal State
 the jurisdiction of the coastal state
 freedom for other states

The EEZ and sovereign rights

The coastal State exercises its sovereign rights over the natural resources (living or non-living) in
waters superjacent to the seabed and its subsoil. These sovereign rights pertain to exploration,
exploitation, conservation and management of these resources.
With the sovereign rights, the coastal state can explore and exploit activities for their own
economic purposes. At this point is where the blue economy comes to play. The economics
activities may include production of energy from water, currents and winds, fishing among
others. The convention doesn’t fully explain much on what and what not can be done.

The EEZ and jurisdiction

The two aspects to be considered are; firstly, the nature of the powers involved and, secondly,
the causes behind the process of jurisdictionalisation.
The coastal State's jurisdiction over the EEZ is its empowerment to control activities which make
use of the marine environment and which can only be developed in accordance with the
conditions it has laid down.
However, jurisdiction extends sovereign rights without being merged with them. It can only be
exercised on condition that an EEZ has been previously created under the coastal State's national
law. This condition regarding creation is absolutely essential; without it, the coastal State does
not have an EEZ (whereas it will always have a continental shelf)
Three activities are placed under the State's jurisdiction within the EEZ :
— the creation and use of artificial islands, installations and structures;
— marine scientific research;
— the protection and preservation of the marine environment.

It is within the framework of the EEZ that one can assess extent of the obligation between states
to protect and preserve marine environment and research.

The EEZ and the rights of other States

The Convention itself states that the EEZ is subject to a specific legal regime. It is not an inherited
marine area like the territorial sea, but effectively an ambivalent area in which other States
benefit from certain freedoms applicable to the high sea (freedom of navigation and overflight,
freedom to lay submarine cables and pipelines).
The EEZ regime is not "chemically" pure: it goes back and forth and makes explicit reference to
the rules of the high sea, which also prevail on each occasion when they do not come up against
the coastal State's recognized sovereign rights and jurisdiction.

Offshoots of the EEZ

Since EEZ was acknowledged worldwide since 1976, its role in the jurisdiction of the
Mediterranean is a developing issue at the moment after much rejection with regard to
jurisdiction. For a long period of time, this refusal took the form of a principle of abstention of a
political kind, without any legal basis (cf. Jurisdictionalisation, Delimitation).
To sort this out, over the years in the entire region, areas have been created borrowing
inspiration from the EEZ without exercising it in full thus with explicit reference from EEZ, the
following entities have come into being: the Halieutic Protection Zone (HPZ) for Spain (1997), the
Ecological Protection Zone (EPZ) for France (2003), followed by Italy. Croatia came up with a
synthesis of the two by setting up a Halieutic and Ecological Protection Zone.
CONCLUSION
The EEZ is anchored in part V of the UNCLOS.

Exclusive economic zones benefit coastal nations a lot due to the high economic value even as
blue economy takes shape with the advancements in technology thus the resources shall be fully
utilized. Most of the ocean’s resources lie on continental shelves and an estimated 87% of
undersea oil and gas reserves fall under the EEZ of some nation. Almost all of the world’s fishing
grounds also fall within an EEZ, but some nations, including the United States, have not ratified
(approved and adopted) the Law of the Sea.
Opponents argue that the Law of the Sea could provide the UN with authority over waters that a
nation considers in its domain. Nevertheless, the United States in 1983 enacted its own exclusive
economic zone proclamation similar to those under the Law of the Sea, establishing a 200-mile
economic zone in most coastal waters.
REFERENCES

https://www.definitions.net/definition/exclusive%20economic%20zone

https://www.iucn.org/content/exclusive-economic-zone-eez

https://watersome.blogspot.com/2011/11/exclusive-economic-zones.html?m=1

https://transportgeography.org/?page_id=3962