Habitat preservation and restoration under the Pacific Salmon Treaty

The ongoing dispute between the United States and Canada over the allocation of Pacific salmon stocks migrating through the waters of both countries is a world-class natural resources conflict. The Pacific Salmon Treaty adopted by the two countries in 1985, was intended to facilitate the common management of Pacific salmon through the pursuit of equitable sharing of the resource and conservation. However, the treaty has become dysfunctional because of continual feuding over sharp imbalances in the rates of interceptions by each country of salmon originating in the rivers of the other. To this point, each country has focused primarily on the harvest allocation issue and has been particularly preoccupied with reserving as much of the salmon originating in its own rivers to its own harvest as possible. This note argues that Canada and the United States will continue to fail to achieve the two primary objectives of the Treaty if they do not take into account the importance of habitat protection and enhancement. This note explores practical reasons for why the parties cannot ignore their obligation to conserve habitat. The note then employs the living resources provisions of the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and the Pacific Salmon Treaty itself to argue that the Treaty, in fact, imposes a habitat protection and enhancement obligation on the parties.