Lima Convention 1981: South-East Pacific marine + coastal environment (CPPS)

Background: UNEP Regional Seas + CPPS founded 1952

The South-East Pacific basin is geographically distinctive among the 18 UNEP Regional Seas Programmes: it is not a closed sea like the Mediterranean, the Black Sea or the Persian Gulf, but neither is it a true open margin like the Atlantic-African coast covered by the Abidjan Convention. The basin is bounded to the west by the East Pacific Rise and the open Pacific gyre, to the north by the Panama Bight and the equatorial Pacific transition, to the east by the Andean cordillera that walls off the basin from the Amazon and Río de la Plata watersheds, and to the south by the Drake Passage and the circumpolar current off Cape Horn. The dominant oceanographic feature is the Humboldt Current System, sometimes called the Peru-Chile Current, an eastern-boundary upwelling system that delivers cold subantarctic water along the Chilean and Peruvian coast and drives the most productive single fishery basin on Earth.

The institutional architecture for cooperation in this basin predates the 1974 launch of the UNEP Regional Seas Programme by two decades. On 18 August 1952, three states - Chile, Ecuador and Peru - signed the Declaration on the Maritime Zone, the Santiago Declaration, asserting sovereignty and jurisdiction over the sea, sea-bed and subsoil out to a minimum distance of 200 nautical miles from their coasts. The Santiago Declaration was the founding act of the Comisión Permanente del Pacífico Sur (CPPS), the Permanent Commission for the South Pacific, which was established as the operational body to coordinate the three states’ fishery, marine science and oceanographic policies in the new 200 nm zone. Colombia acceded to the system in 1979 and Panama acceded in 2012 (although Panama had been a participant in the broader CPPS framework since the 1980s).

By the late 1970s the CPPS had become the natural counterpart for UNEP in negotiating an Action Plan and framework Convention for the South-East Pacific. UNEP launched preparatory consultations in Lima in 1979 through a series of expert meetings with the CPPS Secretariat and the four (then) member states, producing two parallel documents on the same Mediterranean and Caribbean architectural pattern: an Action Plan for the Protection of the Marine Environment and Coastal Areas of the South-East Pacific as the operational programme, and a binding framework Convention as the legal anchor.

1952 Santiago Declaration: 200 nm jurisdiction precursor to EEZ

The 1952 Santiago Declaration is one of the foundational documents of modern international ocean law. At a time when the dominant doctrine was a 3 nm territorial sea plus freedom of fishing on the high seas, the three Pacific coastal states asserted that the productivity of the Humboldt Current was a national patrimony that could not be left to unregulated foreign fishing fleets. The Declaration was widely regarded by the United States and the European maritime powers as a violation of customary international law at the time of its issuance, and it triggered a series of confrontations through the 1950s and 1960s, including the tuna boat seizures by Ecuador and Peru of US flagged vessels operating inside the 200 nm zone (the Tuna War) which prompted US economic sanctions in some periods.

The doctrinal innovation of the Santiago Declaration was the assertion of resource-jurisdiction beyond the territorial sea, an idea that ran counter to the prevailing Anglo-American freedom-of-the-seas tradition but which proved historically vindicated. By the time the Third UN Conference on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS III) opened in 1973, the 200 nm concept had spread to most coastal states in Africa, Latin America, Asia and Oceania, and UNCLOS III ultimately enshrined it in the form of the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) under Articles 55 to 75 of the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. The Santiago Declaration is correctly described as the direct precursor of the UNCLOS EEZ, and the CPPS as the institutional ancestor of all the EEZ-based regional fisheries management organisations.

The 1952 Santiago Declaration also gave the CPPS its mandate for marine-environmental cooperation: Article IV of the Declaration committed the parties to harmonising their fisheries and marine-science policies, and from 1954 onwards the CPPS Secretariat coordinated joint surveys, oceanographic research cruises and stock assessments along the Peru-Chile coast. By the time the Lima Convention was negotiated in 1981 the CPPS had 29 years of operational track record as a regional intergovernmental body, more than any other UNEP regional-seas counterpart at signature.

1981 Lima signing + 1986 entry into force

The Conference of Plenipotentiaries on the Protection of the Marine Environment and Coastal Areas of the South-East Pacific convened in Lima, Peru in November 1981 under the auspices of UNEP and the CPPS. The Conference was hosted by the Government of Peru under President Fernando Belaúnde Terry, who had returned to office in 1980 after the long military period and who used the occasion to project Peru’s recommitment to multilateral cooperation. The Conference adopted three instruments on the closing day, 12 November 1981: the Action Plan for the South-East Pacific, the parent Convention and an initial Hydrocarbon Emergency Cooperation Agreement.

The Convention required ratification by three states to enter into force, a notably low threshold by comparison with the six-state thresholds typical of UNEP regional-seas instruments and reflecting the small membership of the CPPS at the time. Ratifications were deposited at a moderate pace through the early 1980s: Ecuador (1983), Chile (1985), Colombia (1985), Peru (1986), with the Convention entering into force on 19 May 1986, four and a half years after signature. Panama acceded later, joining the regime as the fifth Contracting Party.

The 1986 entry-into-force coincided with a turbulent regional decade. The 1982-1985 Latin American debt crisis (the “lost decade”), the internal armed conflict in Peru (Sendero Luminoso, MRTA) which intensified through the late 1980s, the return to democracy in Chile in 1990 after the Pinochet period, and the Andean drug-trafficking conflicts in Colombia and Peru drained political attention from environmental cooperation. The Convention machinery existed on paper from 1986 onwards but its operational delivery was thin through the 1980s and only began to gather pace from the mid-1990s with the development of the Land-Based Sources Protocol work programme and the post-Rio environmental momentum after 1992.

Protocols: summary reference table

The six Protocols were adopted at five separate diplomatic conferences: Lima (1981), Quito (1983), Paipa in Colombia (1989, two Protocols simultaneously) and Guayaquil (2012). Five of the six are in force. Only the 2012 Mangrove Protocol awaits the third ratification.

The 5 contracting parties (Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Peru)

As of 2026 the Lima Convention has 5 Contracting Parties, listed here from north to south along the Pacific coast: Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Chile. The 5 represent the full set of independent coastal states along the Pacific margin of South America from the Panama-Costa Rica boundary at the northwestern corner to the Cape Horn maritime boundary at the southern tip of Chile.

The 5 Parties are remarkably homogeneous compared with the 22 of the Abidjan Convention or the 25 of the Cartagena Convention: all 5 are Spanish-speaking former colonial possessions of Spain, all 5 are upper-middle-income economies under the World Bank classification (although with material differences in GDP per capita, with Panama and Chile at the upper end and Ecuador at the lower end), all 5 share a continuous land border or maritime boundary with at least one other Party, and all 5 are members of the Pacific Alliance (in the case of Chile, Colombia and Peru as full members; Ecuador and Panama as observer or associated states at various points).

The Parties divide into two clear sub-regional blocks:

• Tropical northern block (Panama, Colombia, Ecuador): Caribbean-influenced climates with high rainfall, mangrove-dominated coasts, the Panama Bight and the Gulf of Guayaquil as principal features, the Galápagos Islands offshore from Ecuador as the regional ecological jewel.
• Subtropical-to-temperate southern block (Peru, Chile): Humboldt Current-dominated arid coasts (the Atacama Desert in northern Chile is the driest non-polar place on Earth), the great Peruvian and northern Chilean anchoveta fisheries, and the temperate-to-subantarctic fjord coast of southern Chile that runs to Cape Horn.

The political homogeneity of the 5 Parties is a structural advantage of the Lima Convention regime relative to its peers: a regional environmental standard agreed at a CPPS-level meeting can typically be implemented by all 5 Parties on a comparable timetable, in contrast to the Abidjan or Cartagena regions where the political and administrative heterogeneity makes synchronous implementation impractical.

Geographical scope: ~10,000 km Pacific coast (~7°N to ~56°S)

The Convention area is defined in Article 1 as the marine environment, coastal zones and related inland waters of the South-East Pacific from the southern boundary of Panama at approximately 7°N to the southern maritime boundary of Chile near Cape Horn at approximately 56°S, with a seaward extent corresponding to the outer limit of the territorial sea of each Party at signature, later extended through practice and by COP decision to encompass the Exclusive Economic Zones under UNCLOS as ratified by each Party. The latitudinal extent of the basin is therefore:

The Pacific coastline of the five Parties runs for approximately:

The coastline is geomorphologically heterogeneous along its enormous latitudinal extent:

• The Panama Bight and the Darien Gap (Panama, Colombia) is a tropical wave-protected coast with extensive mangrove fringe, the Gulf of Panama, the Bay of Tribugá and the Cabo Corrientes salient.
• The Colombian Pacific coast is one of the rainiest places on Earth (the Chocó Biogeographic region, with mean annual rainfall locally exceeding 10,000 mm), with the San Juan and Atrato Pacific river outlets and the Buenaventura port complex.
• The Ecuadorian coast transitions from the wet equatorial mangrove fringe of the Esmeraldas province through the Gulf of Guayaquil (the largest estuarine system on the Pacific coast of South America) to the arid Santa Elena Peninsula and the Manabí dry forest coast, with the Galápagos Islands offshore at approximately 1°S, 91°W.
• The Peruvian coast is uniformly arid (the Sechura Desert transitioning into the Atacama), backed by the steeply rising Andes, with the Sechura, Paracas and Mejía wetland enclaves and the Callao port complex serving Lima.
• The Northern Chilean coast through the Atacama Desert is hyper-arid, with virtually no surface freshwater discharge to the sea except the small Río Loa, the world’s longest desert river.
• The Central Chilean coast is Mediterranean-climate, with the Maipo, Rapel, Maule and Bío-Bío rivers providing significant freshwater discharge, and the Valparaíso and San Antonio port complexes serving Santiago.
• The Southern Chilean coast below approximately 41°S is the Patagonian fjord coast, an extraordinarily indented temperate-to-subantarctic margin with hundreds of fjords, channels and islands, the Aysén region and the Magallanes region, ending at the Drake Passage off Cape Horn.

The aggregate Convention area is an open Pacific margin with one tropical northern sub-region, one arid subtropical mid-latitude sub-region and one temperate-to-subantarctic southern sub-region, the most latitudinally extended of any UNEP regional sea.

Hydrography: Humboldt Current System (coldest tropical/subtropical)

The dominant oceanographic feature of the Convention area is the Humboldt Current System, the eastern-boundary current of the South Pacific subtropical gyre. The Humboldt is unique among tropical and subtropical eastern-boundary currents in three respects: its coldest temperatures (locally below 14°C at the Peruvian coast at latitudes where the Atlantic equivalent runs at 24°C or above), its highest productivity (estimated 10 percent of global marine fishery production comes from this single basin), and its strongest interannual variability (the El Niño-Southern Oscillation discussed below).

The Humboldt Current is fed by the Antarctic Circumpolar Current through the Drake Passage, augmented by mid-latitude westerly-driven equatorward flow, with intense coastal upwelling along the Peruvian and northern Chilean coast where wind-driven Ekman transport pulls cold, nutrient-rich water from depths of 100 to 300 metres up onto the continental shelf. The upwelling is strongest between approximately 6°S and 15°S off Peru, with secondary upwelling cells off Coquimbo (30°S) and Concepción (37°S) in Chile.

The high productivity of the Humboldt is a direct consequence of the upwelling: nutrient delivery (nitrate, phosphate, silicate, iron) supports phytoplankton biomass that is among the highest measured in any open-ocean system, which in turn supports the Peruvian anchoveta (Engraulis ringens) standing stock that has historically reached 20 million tonnes and currently ranges between 5 and 12 million tonnes depending on ENSO state. The anchoveta is the largest single-species fishery on Earth in tonnage terms and the foundation of the Peruvian fishmeal industry.

The Humboldt also supports the South Pacific eastern stock of jack mackerel (Trachurus murphyi), the Chilean sardine (Sardinops sagax), the horse mackerel (Trachurus declivis) and a suite of demersal stocks including Patagonian toothfish (Dissostichus eleginoides), southern hake (Merluccius gayi, M. australis), southern blue whiting (Micromesistius australis) and the South Pacific squat lobsters and crab fisheries. The basin is also the seasonal feeding ground for humpback whales migrating from Antarctic waters and for sperm whales off the Galápagos and central Chilean coast.

El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) impact

The South-East Pacific is the home basin of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) climate phenomenon. ENSO is the periodic warming (El Niño phase) and cooling (La Niña phase) of equatorial Pacific surface waters, with a typical 2 to 7 year recurrence cycle, that alters the Walker circulation of the equatorial Pacific atmosphere and triggers cascading impacts on global weather, agriculture and fisheries.

In the eastern Pacific the El Niño phase is characterised by a collapse of the trade wind-driven equatorial upwelling, a poleward shift of the South Equatorial Counter-Current, anomalous warming of the surface waters along the Peruvian and Ecuadorian coast (locally 5°C to 8°C above climatology), and a rapid collapse of the upwelling-driven phytoplankton-anchoveta food chain. The historical major El Niño events on instrumental record are:

• the 1972-1973 El Niño, which collapsed the Peruvian anchoveta fishery from a peak of around 13 million tonnes in 1971 to under 2 million tonnes in 1973;
• the 1982-1983 El Niño, the first event captured by satellite oceanography, with severe fishery and rainfall impacts in Peru and Ecuador;
• the 1997-1998 El Niño, the strongest event of the 20th century by some measures, with extreme rainfall and flooding in coastal Peru and the Galápagos and a near-total collapse of the central Pacific fishery;
• the 2015-2016 El Niño, comparable in magnitude to 1997-1998, with renewed coastal flooding and fishery collapse.

The Lima Convention regime has historically lacked dedicated ENSO-response machinery, the ENSO impact assessment and forecasting being delivered through the parallel CPPS Permanent Working Group on the Regional ENSO Study (ERFEN) which has run since the early 1990s and which feeds into the NOAA-CPPS El Niño bulletin issued from the CPPS Secretariat. The bulletin is one of the longest-running joint NOAA-CPPS products and the principal regional source of ENSO analysis for the Pacific coast of South America.

Major rivers: Magdalena, Esmeraldas, Guayas, Loa, Aysén

Riverine discharge to the South-East Pacific is highly heterogeneous along the Convention coastline. The Andean cordillera prevents most of the Amazon and Río de la Plata watersheds from draining to the Pacific, with the result that the riverine inputs to the Convention area are dominated by a small number of trans-Andean and coastal-Andean rivers:

• The Magdalena River (Colombia) is technically a Caribbean river with its mouth at Barranquilla on the Caribbean coast, but its sediment plume influences the Panama Bight and the Pacific entrance to the Panama Canal through cross-isthmus precipitation patterns.
• The Esmeraldas River (Ecuador) drains the equatorial Andes of Ecuador to the Pacific at Esmeraldas; its delta is a major mangrove and aquaculture zone.
• The Guayas River (Ecuador) and its associated Daule and Babahoyo tributaries form the Gulf of Guayaquil estuarine system, the largest estuarine system on the Pacific coast of South America, supporting the Ecuadorian shrimp aquaculture industry and the Port of Guayaquil.
• The Amazon River is technically Atlantic-draining at Belém, but the precipitation flux from the eastern Pacific into the Amazon basin is a large component of the regional hydrological cycle and ENSO-driven Amazon rainfall anomalies feed back into the South-East Pacific climate.
• The Río Loa (Chile) is the longest desert river on Earth (around 440 km), draining a small fraction of the Atacama plateau to the Pacific at Tocopilla, with negligible flow but significant historical significance for Chilean copper mining water supply.
• The Aysén River (Chile) drains the Patagonian Andes to the Aysén Fjord, one of many small rivers feeding the southern Chilean fjord system.

The aggregate riverine discharge to the South-East Pacific is far smaller than the corresponding figure for the Atlantic-African coast (where the Congo alone delivers around 41,800 m³/s) or the Wider Caribbean (where the Mississippi delivers around 16,800 m³/s). The basin is river-poor by global standards, and the freshwater-influenced coastal zone is correspondingly narrower, with most of the Peruvian and northern Chilean coast effectively unaffected by direct riverine discharge.

Secretariat: CPPS in Guayaquil, Ecuador

The Convention is administered by the Comisión Permanente del Pacífico Sur (CPPS) through its Permanent Secretariat located in Guayaquil, Ecuador, under a Headquarters Agreement between Ecuador and the CPPS. The Secretariat is housed at the Avenida Carlos Julio Arosemena premises in Guayaquil, with operational responsibility for the South-East Pacific sub-programme of the UNEP Regional Seas Programme as well as for the broader CPPS mandate on regional fisheries cooperation, marine science and oceanographic policy.

The CPPS is distinctive among UNEP regional-seas counterparts in being a pre-existing intergovernmental commission with its own founding treaty (the 1952 Santiago Declaration) and a mandate that goes well beyond the Lima Convention. The CPPS is therefore not a “Convention Secretariat” in the narrow sense, but rather a regional intergovernmental body that hosts the Lima Convention Secretariat as one of several functions. This dual character distinguishes the Lima Convention regime from the Abidjan, Nairobi or Cartagena Conventions, where the Convention Secretariats are creatures of the respective Conventions and not pre-existing bodies.

The CPPS Secretariat employs around 15 to 25 staff, drawn primarily from the four CPPS member states (Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru) on rotational secondment, with a Secretary General appointed for a four-year term by rotation among the member states. The staff complement is comparable to the smaller UNEP regional-seas secretariats and materially smaller than the Mediterranean (UNEP/MAP at Athens with around 60 staff) or the OSPAR Commission at London. The funding model relies on assessed contributions from the five Contracting Parties plus project funding from UNEP, the Global Environment Facility (GEF), the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and bilateral donors.

The Secretariat services the biennial Authority of the CPPS (the meeting of foreign ministers of the four CPPS member states), the annual Coordinating Committee of senior officials, the annual Lima Convention Conference of the Parties (COP), the ERFEN Working Group on ENSO, the GEF Humboldt Current LME Project secretariat and a network of thematic Working Groups on land-based sources, protected areas, marine science and capacity building.

Lima Agreement on Hydrocarbon Emergency Cooperation (1981, in force 1986)

The Agreement on Regional Cooperation in Combating Pollution of the South-East Pacific by Hydrocarbons or Other Harmful Substances in Cases of Emergency, the Lima Hydrocarbon Emergency Agreement, was adopted at Lima alongside the parent Convention on 12 November 1981 and entered into force together with the Convention on 19 May 1986. The Agreement is the foundational pollution-emergency instrument of the regime and remains operationally central in 2026.

The Lima Hydrocarbon Emergency Agreement creates a binding framework for cooperation among the Parties in responding to pollution incidents involving hydrocarbons (crude oil, refined petroleum products) or other harmful substances. The Agreement obliges Parties to establish national contingency plans, to designate national focal points, to share information on pollution incidents, to provide mutual assistance on request and to maintain inventories of response equipment, dispersants and trained personnel. The Agreement is operationally implemented through the CPPS Regional Contingency Plan which is updated periodically and which is exercised through periodic regional drills.

The 1981 Lima Agreement established three regional response zones corresponding to three sub-regional groupings: the northern zone (Panama, Colombia, Ecuador), the central zone (Ecuador, Peru) and the southern zone (Peru, Chile), with each zone maintaining its own equipment stockpile and national lead-state arrangements. The Agreement is broadly aligned with the OPRC 1990 Convention and operates as the regional implementation of OPRC obligations for the South-East Pacific Parties.

Quito Supplementary Hydrocarbon Protocol (1983, in force 1987)

The Supplementary Protocol to the Agreement on Regional Cooperation in Combating Pollution of the South-East Pacific by Hydrocarbons or Other Harmful Substances in Cases of Emergency, the Quito Supplementary Hydrocarbon Protocol, was adopted at Quito, Ecuador in 1983 and entered into force in 1987. The Supplementary Protocol extends the 1981 Lima Agreement to cover harmful substances other than hydrocarbons, in particular noxious liquid substances carried in bulk under MARPOL Annex II and packaged hazardous materials under IMDG Code categories.

The Quito Supplementary Protocol broadens the scope of the regional contingency plan to include chemical tanker spills, packaged dangerous-goods incidents and bulk solid hazardous-cargo incidents, with corresponding amendments to the response zone arrangements and the equipment-stockpile inventories. The Protocol entered into force ahead of the global OPRC-HNS Protocol of 2000 by approximately 13 years and is in some respects a regional precursor to the global instrument.

Operationally the Quito Supplementary Protocol has been activated for several incidents, most notably the 2016 Esmeraldas pipeline rupture in Ecuador, the 2022 Repsol La Pampilla terminal spill off Callao, Peru (where approximately 12,000 barrels of Brazilian crude were spilled during a tanker discharge complicated by the Hunga Tonga tsunami swell), and a series of smaller incidents at Chilean refinery and terminal facilities through the 2010s and 2020s.

Quito Land-Based Sources Protocol (1983, in force 1986)

The Protocol for the Protection of the South-East Pacific against Pollution from Land-Based Sources, the Quito Land-Based Sources Protocol, was adopted at Quito, Ecuador in 1983 and entered into force in 1986 simultaneously with the parent Convention. The LBS Protocol is the substantive land-pollution instrument of the regime and addresses the dominant pressure on the Convention area: pollution from coastal cities, agriculture, mining, aquaculture and industrial outfalls.

The Quito LBS Protocol is structurally similar to the Mediterranean LBS Protocol (1980) and the Caribbean LBS Protocol (1999, see Cartagena Convention) and obliges Parties to:

• prevent, reduce, combat and eliminate pollution from land-based sources affecting the Convention area;
• adopt national legislation and standards consistent with the Protocol’s Annexes;
• monitor pollution loads from major outfalls and rivers;
• exchange information on pollution loads and monitoring results;
• cooperate on regional standards for priority pollutants.

The Annexes to the Protocol list Annex I priority pollutants (organohalogens, organophosphorus compounds, organotin compounds, persistent organic pollutants, mercury, cadmium, lead, persistent plastics) and Annex II second-tier pollutants (biocides, antimony, arsenic, beryllium, copper, nickel, vanadium, zinc). The Protocol does not establish numerical discharge limits, leaving those to national legislation, but it sets the regional floor for harmonised monitoring methodology.

The major implementation challenges of the Quito LBS Protocol are the untreated sewage outfalls at the major coastal cities (Lima-Callao, Guayaquil, Esmeraldas, Buenaventura, Concepción), the mining tailings discharge along the Peruvian and northern Chilean coast (with the Atacama mining belt being the source of significant historical metal loading to the coastal zone), the salmon and shrimp aquaculture nutrient and antibiotic loading in southern Chile and coastal Ecuador, and the growing plastic pollution load from urban runoff and beach debris.

Paipa Protected Areas Protocol (1989, in force 1994)

The Protocol for the Conservation and Management of Protected Marine and Coastal Areas of the South-East Pacific, the Paipa Protected Areas Protocol, was adopted at Paipa, Boyacá, Colombia in 1989 and entered into force in 1994. The Paipa PA Protocol is the regional protected-areas instrument and is the South-East Pacific counterpart of the Mediterranean SPA/BD Protocol (1995) and the Caribbean SPAW Protocol (1990, see Cartagena Convention).

The Paipa PA Protocol obliges Parties to identify, establish and manage marine and coastal protected areas of regional significance, with a regional list maintained by the CPPS Secretariat. As of 2026 the regional list includes more than 30 designated sites spanning the five Parties, with the headline entries being:

• the Galápagos Marine Reserve (Ecuador), the largest and oldest of the regional protected areas, established by Ecuador in 1986 and progressively expanded to its current extent of approximately 198,000 km² (with 2022 extension of the Hermandad Marine Reserve of an additional 60,000 km²);
• the Coiba National Park (Panama), a UNESCO World Heritage Site (2005) covering 270,000 hectares of marine and terrestrial protected area in the Gulf of Panama;
• the Malpelo Sanctuary of Fauna and Flora (Colombia), a UNESCO World Heritage Site (2006) covering 8,575 km² of remote oceanic reef habitat;
• the Paracas National Reserve (Peru), a coastal-marine reserve covering the Paracas peninsula and the Ballestas Islands;
• the Juan Fernández National Park and Marine Park (Chile), covering the Robinson Crusoe and Selkirk islands at 33°S, 79°W;
• the Cape Horn Biosphere Reserve (Chile), the southernmost protected area on Earth.

The Protocol also establishes the Eastern Tropical Pacific Marine Corridor (CMAR) as a regional cooperation framework among Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia and Ecuador covering the Cocos-Galápagos-Malpelo-Coiba marine corridor, signed in 2004 and operationalised through the CPPS-CMAR cooperation arrangement.

Paipa Radioactive Pollution Protocol (1989, in force 1995)

The Protocol for the Protection of the South-East Pacific against Radioactive Pollution, the Paipa Radioactive Pollution Protocol, was adopted at Paipa, Colombia in 1989 alongside the Protected Areas Protocol and entered into force in 1995. The Radioactive Pollution Protocol is unique among UNEP regional-seas Protocols in addressing radioactive contamination as a discrete subject and reflects the regional concern in the late 1980s about French nuclear testing in the South Pacific (Mururoa and Fangataufa atolls in French Polynesia, with potential trans-Pacific drift) and about regional civil nuclear activities.

The Protocol prohibits the dumping of radioactive wastes and other radioactive matter in the Convention area, prohibits the disposal of radioactive wastes in the seabed and subsoil of the Convention area, and obliges Parties to take all necessary measures to prevent radioactive contamination from coastal sources. The Protocol implements the regional dimension of the 1972 London Dumping Convention and the 1996 London Protocol for the South-East Pacific Parties and pre-dates the 1996 London Protocol by seven years on the dumping prohibition.

The Protocol is implemented operationally through the CPPS Radioactivity Monitoring Network which monitors background radiation levels in seawater, sediment and biota along the Pacific coast, with reference monitoring stations at Buenaventura (Colombia), Esmeraldas (Ecuador), Callao (Peru) and Valparaíso (Chile). The network provided regional reassurance after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident that no detectable radioactive plume had reached the Pacific coast of South America by trans-Pacific drift, with monitoring data published through the CPPS Secretariat.

Guayaquil Mangrove Protocol (2012, not yet in force)

The Protocol Concerning the Conservation of Mangrove Ecosystems, the Guayaquil Mangrove Protocol, was adopted at Guayaquil, Ecuador in 2012 and is not yet in force as of 2026. The Mangrove Protocol is the most recent of the six regional Protocols and addresses the systematic destruction of mangrove ecosystems along the tropical northern coast of the Convention area, in particular in the Gulf of Guayaquil where shrimp aquaculture has cleared an estimated 30 to 50 percent of the historical mangrove cover since 1970, in the Esmeraldas estuary and in the Tumbes mangroves on the Ecuador-Peru boundary.

The Guayaquil Protocol obliges Parties to:

• inventory and map mangrove ecosystems within the Convention area;
• establish a regional list of mangrove sites of conservation importance;
• regulate aquaculture, port development and coastal infrastructure to avoid mangrove loss;
• implement mangrove restoration programmes in degraded areas;
• cooperate on capacity building and scientific monitoring.

The Protocol requires ratification by three states to enter into force, mirroring the parent Convention threshold. As of 2026 the Protocol has been ratified by Ecuador (2014) and Colombia (2017), with Panama, Peru and Chile signing but not yet ratifying. The third ratification has been pending since 2017 and is expected from one of Panama, Peru or Chile within the 2026-2028 horizon, after which the Protocol will enter into force. The Protocol is broadly comparable to the Calabar Mangrove Protocol 2017 of the Abidjan Convention but has stronger ratification momentum.

Humboldt Current Large Marine Ecosystem (LME)

The Humboldt Current Large Marine Ecosystem (HCLME) is the operational ecosystem-management unit covering the eastern South Pacific from approximately 5°S off northern Peru to 42°S off southern Chile, encompassing the EEZs of Peru and Chile and the contiguous high-seas waters. The HCLME is one of 66 Large Marine Ecosystems in the global LME framework developed by NOAA and the GEF and is jointly managed by Peru and Chile through the Humboldt Current System GEF Project which has run in successive phases since 2010.

The HCLME is the most productive single LME on Earth by total fishery yield, with an estimated mean annual catch of 8 to 12 million tonnes accounting for approximately 10 percent of global marine fishery production and 18 to 20 percent of global pelagic small-fish landings. The dominant species are:

• Peruvian anchoveta (Engraulis ringens): 5 to 12 million tonnes per year, the largest single-species fishery on Earth;
• South Pacific jack mackerel (Trachurus murphyi): 0.5 to 2 million tonnes per year, distributed across the EEZs and high-seas;
• Chilean sardine (Sardinops sagax): 0.2 to 1.5 million tonnes per year (highly variable);
• Common hake (Merluccius gayi gayi): 30 to 80 thousand tonnes per year;
• Patagonian toothfish (Dissostichus eleginoides): 2 to 5 thousand tonnes per year (CCAMLR-coordinated stock).

The HCLME is governed at the regional level by the South Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Organisation (SPRFMO) for high-seas stocks (jack mackerel, jumbo squid), with the SPRFMO Secretariat in Wellington, New Zealand. Within the EEZs, fisheries are managed by PRODUCE / IMARPE in Peru and by SUBPESCA / IFOP in Chile. The Lima Convention regime cooperates with SPRFMO and the national management authorities through the CPPS Working Group on Fisheries.

Anchovy + sardine fisheries: Peru as world’s largest fishmeal producer

Peru is the world’s largest producer of fishmeal by tonnage, with annual production typically in the range of:

Of which approximately 1.0 to 1.5 million tonnes is fishmeal and 0.5 to 1.0 million tonnes is fish oil, with the balance going to direct human consumption (canned anchoveta, anchoveta paste). Peru typically accounts for around 25 to 30 percent of global fishmeal production in non-El Niño years, with Chile contributing a further 10 to 15 percent, making the South-East Pacific the dominant global supplier of fishmeal for the global aquaculture and livestock-feed industries.

The fishmeal industry is concentrated at the major Peruvian fishing ports of Chimbote, Chancay, Callao, Pisco and Ilo, with around 100 fishmeal plants of varying scale. The industry operates under a strict Total Allowable Catch (TAC) quota system administered by PRODUCE and IMARPE, with seasonal closures that respond to spawning observations and ENSO conditions. The Peruvian anchoveta TAC has typically ranged between 2 and 5 million tonnes per year through the 2010s and 2020s, with the lowest years (2020 ENSO-influenced, 2023 ENSO-influenced) seeing TAC suspensions or sharp reductions.

The Lima Convention regime intersects with the fishmeal industry through the Quito LBS Protocol (which regulates fishmeal-plant effluent), the Lima Hydrocarbon Emergency Agreement (which covers spills at the fishing-industry terminals) and the Paipa PA Protocol (which establishes protected areas in the spawning grounds). The Convention does not directly regulate fishery quotas, which are the prerogative of the national authorities and SPRFMO.

Galápagos PSSA: MEPC.135(53) 2005 designation

The Galápagos Particularly Sensitive Sea Area (PSSA) is the only IMO PSSA in the South-East Pacific region, designated by the Marine Environment Protection Committee at its 53rd session in July 2005 by Resolution MEPC.135(53). The Galápagos PSSA covers the marine waters around the Galápagos Archipelago at approximately 1°S, 91°W, an area of approximately 133,000 km² that overlaps with the Ecuadorian Galápagos Marine Reserve (1986).

The Galápagos PSSA was designated on the basis of the islands’ exceptional ecological, social, cultural and scientific significance, including:

• endemic species of unparalleled biological significance (Darwin’s finches, marine iguanas, Galápagos giant tortoises, Galápagos penguins, flightless cormorants);
• unique evolutionary phenomena that informed Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection;
• UNESCO World Heritage Site status (inscribed 1978, marine extension 2001);
• vulnerability to ship-source pollution from passing tanker traffic between the Panama Canal and Pacific Asia;
• historical incidents including the 2001 grounding of the tanker Jessica off San Cristóbal Island that spilled around 250 tonnes of diesel and intermediate fuel oil into the marine reserve.

The associated protective measures (APMs) under the PSSA include:

• a mandatory Area To Be Avoided (ATBA) for vessels carrying hazardous cargoes, with a 60 nm exclusion radius around the archipelago;
• a recommended routeing measure for transit traffic;
• a mandatory ship reporting system (GALREP) with VHF reporting at the boundaries of the marine reserve;
• coordination with the Ecuadorian Galápagos National Park Directorate on marine reserve enforcement.

The Galápagos PSSA is the only PSSA in the South-East Pacific region as of 2026 and is one of the more substantively-protected PSSAs globally given the combined regulatory weight of the IMO PSSA, the Ecuadorian marine reserve, the UNESCO World Heritage status and the Paipa Protected Areas Protocol designation.

2024 Galápagos PSSA expansion proposal under MEPC review

In 2022 Ecuador created the Hermandad Marine Reserve as a 60,000 km² extension of the Galápagos Marine Reserve, more than doubling the protected area. In 2024 Ecuador, with co-sponsorship from the CPPS Secretariat and consultation with Colombia, Panama and Costa Rica, submitted to the IMO Marine Environment Protection Committee a proposal for an expansion of the Galápagos PSSA to cover the full extent of the new Hermandad Reserve plus a corridor connecting the Galápagos PSSA to the Cocos PSSA (Costa Rica) and the Malpelo Sanctuary (Colombia) in the Eastern Tropical Pacific Marine Corridor (CMAR).

The expansion proposal was referred at MEPC 81 (March 2024) to the Sub-Committee on Navigation, Communications and Search and Rescue (NCSR) for technical review of the proposed routeing measures and ATBA boundaries. The NCSR review was scheduled to report back to MEPC 83 in 2025 and a further MEPC decision is expected in the 2025-2026 horizon. As of 2026 the expansion remains under MEPC review and the existing 2005 PSSA boundaries remain in force.

The Galápagos PSSA expansion is one of the more closely-watched current MEPC items and is the principal regional ambition under the Lima Convention regime in the 2026 work programme.

ENSO-driven fishery collapses: 1972-73, 1982-83, 1997-98, 2015-16

The historical pattern of ENSO-driven fishery collapse is the defining vulnerability of the South-East Pacific economy. The four major fishery collapses on instrumental record are:

• 1972-1973: Peruvian anchoveta catch fell from 13.1 million tonnes (1971) to 1.8 million tonnes (1973), a collapse so severe that it triggered the entry of the Peruvian fishmeal industry into a long structural crisis and provoked the 1973 Peruvian state expropriation of the major fishmeal companies. The 1972-1973 ENSO is widely regarded as the founding case study in fishery-climate interaction.
• 1982-1983: Peruvian anchoveta catch fell to 0.1 million tonnes in 1983, the lowest single-year figure on record. The 1982-1983 event was the first El Niño captured by satellite oceanography (CZCS imagery) and provided the empirical basis for the modern ENSO theory.
• 1997-1998: Peruvian anchoveta catch fell from 7.7 million tonnes (1996) to 1.7 million tonnes (1998). The 1997-1998 event was accompanied by extreme rainfall and flooding in coastal Peru and Ecuador and severe coral bleaching in the Galápagos.
• 2015-2016: Anchoveta catch fell to 2.3 million tonnes (2016) from 3.6 million tonnes (2014), with TAC suspensions in late 2015 and early 2016. The 2015-2016 event was the strongest of the early 21st century and prompted Peru to suspend the second 2015 fishing season.

The cumulative economic impact of the four major ENSO collapses is estimated in the tens of billions of dollars in lost fishery value across the four decades, with secondary impacts on rural employment, foreign exchange earnings and downstream industries (shipping, processing, packaging). The Lima Convention regime has historically not addressed ENSO directly but has supported regional climate-adaptation programming through the ERFEN Working Group and the Humboldt LME GEF Project.

IUU fishing: Chinese DWF at EEZ boundaries

The South-East Pacific is one of the principal global hotspots for illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing by distant-water fishing (DWF) fleets, in particular the Chinese DWF squid fleet operating along the outer boundary of the Peruvian and Chilean EEZs. Satellite-AIS monitoring through Global Fishing Watch has documented the seasonal presence of 300 to 500 Chinese-flag squid jiggers along the outer EEZ boundary at the height of the Humboldt jumbo squid (Dosidicus gigas) season (June to October), some of which are documented to switch off AIS transponders or to enter Peruvian and Ecuadorian EEZs without authorisation.

The 2020 incident in which a fleet of approximately 340 Chinese squid jiggers congregated at the boundary of the Galápagos EEZ generated significant diplomatic friction between Ecuador and China and triggered a regional response coordinated through the CPPS, the Pacific Alliance and the South Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Organisation (SPRFMO). The incident prompted the Ecuadorian Naval Operations Command to deploy patrol assets along the Galápagos EEZ boundary and led to the 2022 establishment of the Hermandad Marine Reserve as a partial response.

The Lima Convention regime supports IUU fishing surveillance through the Paipa Protected Areas Protocol (which establishes the regional MPA list and the cooperative enforcement obligation) and through cooperation with SPRFMO, the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission (IATTC) and the Port State Measures Agreement (PSMA) which all five Lima Convention Parties have ratified. The 2023-2026 CPPS work programme prioritises IUU fishing as one of the three top regional concerns, alongside plastic pollution and ENSO climate adaptation.

Plastic pollution: Lima, Guayaquil, Callao

Plastic pollution along the South-East Pacific coast is concentrated at three principal urban-industrial nodes: Lima-Callao, Peru (metropolitan population around 11 million, with the Callao-Rímac river outflow being the single largest plastic-debris source on the coast), Guayaquil, Ecuador (metropolitan population around 3 million, with the Guayas River discharging to the Gulf of Guayaquil) and Santiago-Valparaíso-San Antonio, Chile (with the Maipo and the smaller Aconcagua-Marga Marga discharging to the central Chilean coast).

Marine-debris surveys along the Convention coast over the 2015-2025 period have documented mean shoreline plastic densities of:

• 5 to 50 items per metre on the Peruvian coast (highest at the Lima-Callao margin and at Chimbote);
• 10 to 100 items per metre on the Ecuadorian coast (highest at Guayaquil and at the Esmeraldas plume);
• 1 to 20 items per metre on the central Chilean coast;
• under 1 item per metre on the southern Chilean fjord coast (which is largely uninhabited and protected from urban plastic input).

The dominant plastic types are food and beverage packaging, fishing-gear fragments (cordage, netting, monofilament line), single-use bags and microplastic fragments derived from breakdown of larger items. The Lima Convention regime addresses plastic pollution principally through the Quito LBS Protocol (which lists persistent plastics as Annex I priority pollutants) and through the regional CPPS-UNEP Plastic Pollution Action Plan adopted in 2023 in alignment with the global UN Plastics Treaty negotiations under UNEA Resolution 5/14.

Coastal erosion + climate vulnerability

Coastal erosion along the South-East Pacific is highly heterogeneous along the latitudinal gradient. The tropical northern coast (Panama, Colombia, Ecuador) is generally accreting due to high sediment delivery from the Andean rivers, with localised erosion at Buenaventura, the Esmeraldas River mouth and the Guayaquil estuary deltaic margin associated with port-dredging and aquaculture pond construction. The arid northern Chilean coast (Atacama) is broadly stable due to negligible riverine sediment supply and predominantly hard-rock coastline. The central Chilean coast is locally erosive with notable hot spots at the Maipo and Bío-Bío river mouths and at urban beachfronts (Viña del Mar, Concepción) where storm wave climate has intensified through the 2010s and 2020s.

The southern Patagonian coast is glacially-controlled and is undergoing rapid landscape change associated with the retreat of the Northern and Southern Patagonian Icefields, which are losing mass at among the highest rates of any glacier system globally (estimated at 30 to 40 km³/yr from 2000-2020 satellite altimetry) and which contribute materially to the regional sea-level rise budget at southern Chilean tide-gauge stations.

The Lima Convention regime addresses coastal erosion principally through the Quito LBS Protocol (which covers river-mouth sediment management) and through the developing Integrated Coastal Zone Management work stream under the CPPS work programme. There is no formal ICZM Protocol of the Lima Convention, by contrast with the Mediterranean ICZM Protocol of the Barcelona Convention (2008, in force 2011), and ICZM is delivered through national coastal management legislation in each of the five Parties.

Antarctic Peninsula influence + sea-level rise

The southern boundary of the Convention area at Cape Horn is approximately 800 km from the Antarctic Peninsula at the northern tip of West Antarctica, and the southern Chilean climate and oceanography are directly shaped by the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) and the Antarctic Peninsula Ice Sheet (APIS) dynamics. The Drake Passage between Cape Horn and the Antarctic Peninsula is the choke point of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC), the strongest current system on Earth.

The 2010-2025 acceleration of mass loss from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, particularly from the Pine Island Glacier and the Thwaites Glacier, is contributing increasingly to the regional sea-level rise budget along the Pacific coast of South America, with Valparaíso tide-gauge rates of around 2 to 3 mm/yr through the 2010-2025 period. The Punta Arenas tide gauge in the Strait of Magellan shows higher local rates due to glacial-isostatic and continental-shelf-loading components.

The Antarctic Treaty System (ATS) linkage of the Convention area is discussed below; both Chile and Peru are Antarctic Treaty Consultative Parties with operational research programmes on the Peninsula, and Ecuador is an Antarctic Treaty acceding party. The CPPS coordinates with the Antarctic Treaty Secretariat in Buenos Aires on cross-boundary issues including ship-source pollution by tourism vessels transiting between the Cape Horn region and the Antarctic Peninsula.

OAS + Pacific Alliance coordination

The Lima Convention regime cooperates with the broader Latin American regional architecture through three principal channels:

• the Organization of American States (OAS) and its Inter-American Committee on Ports which supports regional cooperation on port-state control and environmental compliance through the Inter-American Network on Ports;
• the Pacific Alliance (Alianza del Pacífico), the trade and economic-cooperation bloc of Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru founded in 2011, which includes a maritime and ocean-economy work stream that aligns with the Lima Convention environmental priorities;
• the Andean Community of Nations (CAN) which addresses environmental cooperation among Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, with the maritime dimension delivered principally through the Lima Convention.

The Pacific Alliance ocean-economy programme has produced joint declarations on marine litter, on sustainable fisheries and on blue economy financing, with the 2023 Pacific Alliance Blue Economy Declaration committing the four members to coordinated implementation of the UN Plastics Treaty, the UN BBNJ Agreement and the Lima Convention LBS Protocol. The Pacific Alliance is not a substitute for the Lima Convention regime but operates as a parallel and broader policy forum that provides political momentum for regional environmental cooperation.

2017 Lima Declaration on the Pacific Oceanic Region

In September 2017 the Heads of State of Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama and Peru adopted the Lima Declaration on the Pacific Oceanic Region, a high-level political declaration reaffirming the regional commitment to ocean conservation, sustainable fisheries and climate adaptation along the South-East Pacific coast. The Lima Declaration is the most significant high-level political endorsement of the Lima Convention regime in the 21st century and is sometimes treated as a soft-law update of the founding Lima Convention 1981 commitments to the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goal context.

The 2017 Lima Declaration committed the five states to:

• accelerate ratification of the Guayaquil Mangrove Protocol;
• develop a regional plastic pollution action plan;
• coordinate the Galápagos PSSA expansion;
• strengthen IUU fishing surveillance and enforcement;
• align national targets with SDG 14 (Life Below Water) of the 2030 Agenda;
• support the negotiation of the UN BBNJ Agreement on biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction (which was adopted in 2023).

The Lima Declaration is implemented operationally through the CPPS work programme and has been reaffirmed at successive CPPS Authority meetings and at the 2022, 2024 and 2026 Lima Convention Conferences of the Parties.

Antarctic Treaty System linkage (Chile + Peru)

Both Chile and Peru are Antarctic Treaty Consultative Parties with operational research programmes on the Antarctic Peninsula. Chile has been an original signatory of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty and operates several Antarctic research bases (Bernardo O’Higgins, Eduardo Frei, Arturo Prat, Capitán Arturo Prat, Profesor Julio Escudero) primarily on the Antarctic Peninsula, and has historically claimed sovereignty over the Chilean Antarctic Territory which overlaps with the Argentine and British claims. Peru is a Consultative Party to the Antarctic Treaty (since 1989) and operates the Machu Picchu Research Station on King George Island in the South Shetlands.

Ecuador is an acceding party to the Antarctic Treaty (since 1987) and operates the Pedro Vicente Maldonado Research Station on Greenwich Island in the South Shetlands. Colombia is an acceding party (since 1989) and has run periodic Antarctic expeditions through the Colombian Antarctic Programme since 2014. Panama is not an Antarctic Treaty party.

The cross-boundary issues at the Antarctic-South-East Pacific interface include:

• tourism vessel transit between Ushuaia (Argentina) and the Antarctic Peninsula, with seasonal traffic of around 100,000 to 130,000 tourists per austral summer through the 2020s, much of which transits the Cape Horn region;
• ship-source pollution including the IAATO-managed MARPOL Annex I, II, IV, V compliance regime in the Antarctic Treaty Special Area;
• fisheries enforcement at the boundary between the Lima Convention area and the CCAMLR Convention area (south of 60°S), with the Patagonian toothfish stocks straddling the boundary;
• scientific cooperation through the Council of Managers of National Antarctic Programmes (COMNAP) and through bilateral agreements among the five Lima Convention Parties.

Comparison to Antigua Convention 2002 (parallel NE Pacific)

The Antigua Convention 2002 (the Convention for Cooperation in the Protection and Sustainable Development of the Marine and Coastal Environment of the Northeast Pacific) is the parallel UNEP regional-seas framework for the North-East Pacific covering the coastal states from Mexico to Costa Rica (Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama). The Antigua Convention covers the geographical region between the southern boundary of the Lima Convention area (the southern boundary of Panama at approximately 7°N) and the northern boundary of the South-East Pacific.

The Antigua Convention was adopted in Antigua, Guatemala on 18 February 2002 but has not yet entered into force as of 2026, having achieved only three ratifications against a four-state entry-into-force threshold. Panama is a Party to both the Lima Convention (as a Party from 2012) and the Antigua Convention (which it has signed but not ratified), reflecting the trans-boundary nature of the Panama Bight.

The structural differences between the Lima and Antigua frameworks are significant: the Lima Convention is in force with five Parties and six Protocols (five in force), while the Antigua Convention is not in force and has no Protocols. The two frameworks together would cover the full Pacific margin of Latin America from Mexico to Cape Horn if the Antigua Convention enters into force, but as of 2026 only the South-East Pacific (Lima) regime is operational.

Comparison to Cartagena Convention 1983 (parallel WCR Caribbean)

The Cartagena Convention 1983 for the Wider Caribbean Region (see /wiki/cartagena-convention-1983) is the parallel Latin American and Caribbean regional-seas framework on the Atlantic side of the continent. The two frameworks are co-extensive in time (the Lima Convention 1981, the Cartagena Convention 1983, both in force 1986) and share a similar protocol architecture (the Lima regime has 6 Protocols, of which 5 are in force; the Cartagena regime has 3 Protocols, all in force).

The Lima and Cartagena regimes overlap only at Panama and Colombia, both of which are Parties to both Conventions by reason of their two-coast geography. Panama straddles the Pacific (Lima) and the Caribbean (Cartagena) at the isthmus, with the Panama Canal as the operational link between the two basins. Colombia has both a Pacific coast (covered by Lima) and a Caribbean coast (covered by Cartagena), with the Magdalena River discharging to the Caribbean and the San Juan and Atrato discharging to the Pacific.

The two regimes cooperate operationally through joint UNEP regional-seas meetings and through bilateral arrangements between the CPPS Secretariat and the UNEP Caribbean Environment Programme in Kingston, Jamaica. Joint work streams include the regional plastic pollution action plans, cross-basin biological invasions through the Panama Canal and emerging issues on offshore wind and deep-sea mining.

Comparison to Noumea Convention 1986 (parallel South Pacific)

The Noumea Convention 1986 (the Convention for the Protection of the Natural Resources and Environment of the South Pacific Region) is the parallel UNEP regional-seas framework for the South Pacific Region covering the Pacific Island States and Territories west of the Lima Convention area. The Noumea Convention is administered by the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP) based in Apia, Samoa.

The Lima and Noumea Conventions cover the two halves of the South Pacific basin: Lima covers the eastern boundary (the Humboldt Current and the South American coast), Noumea covers the central and western Pacific (the Pacific Island States and Territories, the Coral Sea, the Tasman Sea). The two regimes meet conceptually at the East Pacific Rise mid-ocean ridge and at the Equator, although in practice neither extends to the open central Pacific gyre.

Cooperation between the Lima and Noumea Conventions is delivered through the UNEP Regional Seas Programme global meetings and through the ERFEN-NIWA-SPREP cooperation on ENSO research, with the New Zealand National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) operating as the technical bridge between the two regions for ENSO and climate science.

2030 outlook: PSSA expansion, blue economy, climate adaptation

The 2030 outlook for the Lima Convention regime is shaped by three principal work streams:

• Galápagos PSSA expansion: the 2024 IMO submission is expected to receive MEPC approval at MEPC 84 (2026) or MEPC 85 (2027), creating a substantially expanded protected area covering the Hermandad Reserve and the Eastern Tropical Pacific Marine Corridor;
• Mangrove Protocol entry into force: the 2012 Guayaquil Protocol is expected to enter into force in the 2026-2028 horizon following the third ratification by Panama, Peru or Chile;
• Blue economy and climate adaptation: the 2023 Pacific Alliance Blue Economy Declaration and the 2017 Lima Declaration provide the political framework for a substantial scaling up of regional climate-adaptation programming, with GEF, IDB and bilateral donor support.

The principal risks to the 2030 outlook are:

• continued ENSO climate volatility with potentially intensifying El Niño events under climate change, which could trigger further fishery collapses comparable to or larger than the 2015-2016 event;
• IUU fishing pressure from Chinese DWF and other non-regional fleets, which has shown no signs of abating through the 2020-2025 period;
• plastic pollution growth as urban populations continue to expand at Lima, Guayaquil, Callao and Buenaventura without commensurate waste-management infrastructure investment;
• funding constraints on the CPPS Secretariat and on the GEF Humboldt LME Project, which has historically operated on lean budgets relative to the basin’s economic significance.

The Lima Convention regime is reasonably well-positioned to address these challenges, with the most homogeneous Party set of any UNEP regional-seas regime, the strongest pre-existing intergovernmental institutional base in the CPPS, and a track record of substantive Protocol implementation extending back to 1986.

Regulatory basis and treaty identifiers

The primary text is the Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment and Coastal Area of the South-East Pacific, Lima, 12 November 1981 (entered into force 19 May 1986). The Lima Hydrocarbon Emergency Agreement is formally the Agreement on Regional Cooperation in Combating Pollution of the South-East Pacific by Hydrocarbons or Other Harmful Substances in Cases of Emergency, Lima, 12 November 1981 (in force 19 May 1986). The Quito Supplementary Hydrocarbon Protocol was adopted at Quito in 1983 (in force 1987). The Quito Land-Based Sources Protocol was adopted at Quito in 1983 (in force 1986). The Paipa Protected Areas Protocol was adopted at Paipa, Colombia in 1989 (in force 1994). The Paipa Radioactive Pollution Protocol was adopted at Paipa, Colombia in 1989 (in force 1995). The Guayaquil Mangrove Ecosystems Protocol was adopted at Guayaquil in 2012 (not yet in force as of 2026).

The founding regional intergovernmental instrument is the Declaration on the Maritime Zone (Santiago Declaration), Santiago, 18 August 1952. The Galápagos PSSA designation is IMO Resolution MEPC.135(53) of July 2005, with associated routeing measures adopted at NCSR. The 2017 Lima Declaration on the Pacific Oceanic Region is the September 2017 high-level political declaration of the five Heads of State. UNCLOS Part XII (Articles 192 to 237) provides the umbrella obligations.

The Lima Convention is administered through the CPPS at cpps-int.org and is one of the 18 UNEP Regional Seas Conventions. The Lima Convention depositary functions are held by the Government of Peru.

Common confusions: Santiago Declaration date, Protocol count, MARPOL Special Areas

A frequent confusion is to attribute the Santiago Declaration to 1947 or to the 1947 Truman Proclamation chain; the Santiago Declaration is the 18 August 1952 instrument signed by Chile, Ecuador and Peru, distinct from the 1947 Chilean and Peruvian unilateral declarations that preceded it. A second confusion is to count the Lima Convention as having only five Protocols; the Convention has six Protocols signed, of which five are in force (the Guayaquil Mangrove Protocol of 2012 is not yet in force as of 2026).

A third confusion is to assume the Convention area includes the North-East Pacific coast of Costa Rica or Mexico; it does not. The northern boundary of the Convention area is the southern boundary of Panama at approximately 7°N, and the North-East Pacific is covered conceptually by the Antigua Convention 2002 (not yet in force). A fourth confusion is to treat the Pacific Alliance as the intergovernmental host of the Lima Convention; the Pacific Alliance is a separate trade and economic-cooperation bloc, and the host of the Lima Convention is the CPPS based in Guayaquil.

A fifth confusion is to assume the Convention area includes a MARPOL Special Area designation; there are none as of 2026, and submissions for Special Area status have been discussed at the CPPS but not advanced to the IMO. A sixth confusion is to attribute Peruvian fishmeal production figures to the South-East Pacific aggregate; the figure of around 5 million tonnes per year refers specifically to Peru, with Chile contributing a further 0.5 to 1.5 million tonnes and the regional aggregate therefore around 5.5 to 6.5 million tonnes per year in non-El Niño years.

A seventh confusion is to assume the Galápagos PSSA covers the full Ecuadorian Galápagos Marine Reserve; the 2005 PSSA designation under MEPC.135(53) covers approximately 133,000 km² which overlaps with but does not perfectly coincide with the original Galápagos Marine Reserve, and the 2024 PSSA expansion proposal would extend coverage to the Hermandad Reserve and to the Eastern Tropical Pacific Marine Corridor. An eighth confusion is to conflate the Lima Convention 1981 (South-East Pacific, administered by CPPS) with the Antigua Convention 2002 (North-East Pacific, not in force) or the Noumea Convention 1986 (South Pacific island region, administered by SPREP).

Limitations

The Lima Convention is a framework convention: it creates general obligations and institutional machinery rather than specific technical standards. The operational substance is in the Protocols, not the parent text, and the regime is only as strong as Protocol ratification and implementation in each Party’s national law.

The Guayaquil Mangrove Protocol (2012) is not in force as of 2026 and binds only the two ratifying states (Ecuador and Colombia) in an advance-ratification posture; the substantive mangrove-protection obligations are not triggered for the full regime until the third ratification. This means the Convention area’s most ecologically threatened coastal ecosystem type is not yet subject to binding multilateral obligations for Peru, Chile and Panama.

The Convention does not apply to warships and government vessels in non-commercial service, although Article IV commits Parties to ensure that such vessels act consistently with the Convention so far as is reasonable and practicable. The Convention extends to internal waters of Parties only insofar as they have so notified the CPPS Secretariat, with the consequence that some major coastal lagoons and estuaries (the Gulf of Guayaquil interior, the inner Chilean fjords) may not be formally within the Convention area for regulatory purposes, though they are within it for cooperation purposes.

The Convention does not extend to the Atlantic coast of South America (covered by no UNEP regional-seas Convention as of 2026; the southern Atlantic coast of Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil has no equivalent regional-seas regime). The Convention does not regulate fisheries management directly; the regional fisheries arrangements are administered by SPRFMO (high-seas pelagic stocks), IATTC (eastern Pacific tunas), CCAMLR (Antarctic-boundary stocks) and the national authorities (PRODUCE / IMARPE in Peru, SUBPESCA / IFOP in Chile, MAGAP in Ecuador). The Convention’s role on fisheries is limited to the Paipa Protected Areas Protocol and to cooperation on IUU fishing surveillance.

The Quito LBS Protocol does not establish numerical discharge limits; it sets the priority-pollutant list and the monitoring floor, but domestic implementation is the measure of actual environmental performance. In practice, Lima-Callao’s sewage treatment rate and the mining-tailings management standard in northern Chile are more consequential than the Protocol text.

The southern boundary at Cape Horn at approximately 56°S is conventional and is not formally gazetted at the latitudinal precision required to demarcate cleanly from the Antarctic Treaty Area at 60°S. The gap between approximately 56°S and 60°S is a de facto shared zone with no formal treaty assignment, governed in practice by MARPOL and UNCLOS general obligations.

The Peruvian fishmeal figures cited (around 5 million tonnes per year) represent a non-El Niño average. In major ENSO years (1972-1973, 1982-1983, 1997-1998, 2015-2016) production can drop to 1 to 2 million tonnes, while in strong La Niña years it can exceed 6 million tonnes. Any quantitative claim about South-East Pacific fishery output requires explicit ENSO conditioning.

AEO: What mariners need to know

The Lima Convention 1981 is the legal framework governing marine environmental cooperation along approximately 10,000 km of Pacific South American coast from Panama to Cape Horn. For a mariner, its direct operational relevance comes from four sources:

Galápagos PSSA under MEPC.135(53): Any vessel carrying hazardous cargo and passing through the eastern equatorial Pacific on a trans-Pacific voyage (for example, from the Panama Canal to Pacific Asia or Australia) must observe the Area To Be Avoided with its 60 nm exclusion radius around the Galápagos Archipelago, and must report under the GALREP mandatory ship-reporting system at the PSSA boundary. These are not optional measures; they are associated protective measures adopted under the PSSA designation.

No MARPOL Special Area: Unlike the Mediterranean, the Baltic or the Antarctic, the South-East Pacific has no MARPOL Special Area designation as of 2026. The standard global MARPOL Annex I (15 ppm bilge water, 30 L/nm cargo-tank washings), Annex II (NLS discharge criteria), Annex IV (sewage) and Annex V (garbage) discharge limits apply throughout the Convention area. Vessels should not expect a more restrictive local regime on the open sea beyond the Galápagos PSSA.

National contingency plan obligations: Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama and Peru each maintain national contingency plans under the Lima Hydrocarbon Emergency Agreement. A major spill incident in the Convention area would trigger bilateral or multilateral cooperation through the CPPS Regional Contingency Plan. Operators of oil tankers and chemical tankers trading to Callao, Guayaquil, Antofagasta, Valparaíso or Buenaventura should confirm the national plan contacts with the port authority on arrival.

Ballast Water Management Convention D-2 compliance applies in the ports of all five Parties, as all five have ratified the BWM Convention. The Humboldt Current’s cold upwelling waters create a distinct marine biome; exchanging or treating ballast before entering the Convention area is the relevant mitigation. Consult the Ballast Water Management Convention article for the D-2 standard detail and the BWM Convention Discharge Locations calculator for port-specific application.

See also

• MARPOL Convention
• MARPOL Annex I oil pollution prevention
• MARPOL Annex I Reg 15 oil discharge criteria
• Helsinki Convention 1992
• Bucharest Convention 1992
• Barcelona Convention 1976/1995
• OSPAR Convention 1992
• Cartagena Convention 1983
• Kuwait Convention 1978
• Jeddah Convention 1982
• Abidjan Convention 1981
• Nairobi Convention 1985
• PSSA overview
• Ballast Water Management Convention
• IMO 2020 sulphur cap
• Marine and environmental calculators

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