Humans can’t survive without a healthy Ocean: UN envoy

This article is published in association with United Nations.

The Ocean is in deep crisis. Factors such as acidification, declining fish stocks, rising temperatures and widespread pollution are contributing to a catastrophic decline in biodiversity: over half of marine species are at risk of extinction this century.

The urgent need to restore the Ocean will be the focus of a major international conference taking place in Nice, France, this June. This will be the first UN Ocean Conference since the adoption of a legal agreement for the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity and the protection of life in the Ocean will be a key topic.

Peter Thompson, the Secretary General’s Envoy for the Ocean, Alfredo Giron, Head of the Ocean Action Agenda at the World Economic Forum (WEF), and Minna Epps, who runs the Ocean Program at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), spoke to UN News ahead of the Conference, to talk about UN-led initiatives designed to protect marine biodiversity.

UN News: How serious is the marine biodiversity crisis

Minna Epps: We’re in really dire straits. If we don’t protect and restore the Ocean this is going to have devastating consequences for all those services that we are dependent on. The entire climate is dependent on the Ocean as a climate regulator. However, we don’t want the Ocean to absorb more carbon dioxide, because that’s what makes it acidic, so we need to start by cutting emissions.

If you are in an airplane and you fly over a forest, you can see deforestation, that a habitat has been lost. The same thing is happening in the Ocean, but we can’t really see it. Another effect of climate change is marine heat waves, when water temperature increases over an extended period. A marine heat wave in Panama wiped out around 75 per cent of coral diversity.

Or take coral reefs. These make up less than one per cent of the Ocean, but almost 25 per cent of marine species depend on them. Reefs also protect against storm surges and extreme weather events.

Peter Thomson: Fossil fuels are causing man-made global warming, which is heating the Ocean at an alarming rate, which is causing changes in ecosystems, rising sea levels and the death of coral.

Divers pose with transplanted corals and a ‘One Million Corals for Colombia’ sign, the name of the biggest ocean restoration project in Latin-America.

How can Homo sapiens survive on a healthy planet if you don’t have a healthy Ocean? And how can you have a healthy Ocean if you don’t have a coral in it? So, my message is, leave fossil fuels in the ground. Get as fast as we can to an electrified world, an equitably electrified world powered by renewable energy.

Alfredo Giron: So many things in our daily lives depend on the Ocean. How we eat, how we move and transport goods. Your Amazon delivery package probably went on a ship at some point in the supply chain. How we power our activities: offshore wind is the fastest expanding renewable energy source today. Or how we communicate: the deep-sea cables that we depend on for so many transactions are having an impact on marine biodiversity.

UN News: What is the 30×30 biodiversity initiative and how could it help to restore the Ocean?

Alfredo Giron: 30×30 is about protecting and restoring thirty percent of the Ocean and of land by 2030. Many countries that have stepped up and achieved their targets of protecting thirty per cent of their national waters. And we finally have the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction Agreement, the High Seas Treaty, which is giving us, for the first time, the legal instruments to actually protect waters that are outside of national jurisdictions.

We have protected close to ten percent of the Ocean at this point. So, as we go into the last five years of the decade, the important question that we should be asking ourselves is, how are we going to protect that other 20 per cent? Do we have the right instruments? Do we have the right incentives? Do we have the right amount of money and ambition to achieve it?

Peter Thomson: The best of our scientists told us that if we don’t protect 30 per cent of the planet by 2030, we are going to begin seeing a great cascading away of species on this planet and extinctions, including the extinction of Homo sapiens.

That’s why this 30 per cent protection assumes such great importance, and the Ocean community stood up and committed to protecting 30 per cent of the Ocean. Whether we get there or not is a big question, but at least we’re going to have a plan to get there.

UN News: This is the first UN Ocean Conference since the adoption of the High Seas Treaty. Why is this important?

UN Global Compact/Elma Okic

Peter Thomson: The Treaty brings in a multilateral regime for the exploitation of genetic resources and sharing technology. We are very hopeful that, by the time of the UN Ocean Conference, we will have got the sixty ratifications required for the Treaty to come into force.

Equally important to me are the World Trade Organisation Harmful Fisheries Subsidies. We are very close to an agreement. This is about up to $30 billion of public money funding industrial fleets each year, to go out and chase diminishing stocks of fish.

It is human madness. That money should be going towards the development of coastal communities or adaptation to sea level rise, rather than subsidizing industrial fishing fleets.

© UN Indonesia/M. Gaspar

Women on the remote island of Bianci, Southwest Papua, have doubled their income by moving from selling raw fish to selling fish-based products.

UN News: What role should the private sector play in the protection of the Ocean?

Alfredo Giron: It is not enough to think about sustainable use. Now we need to think about regeneration. For example, if you install an offshore wind farm, can you make sure that you use the right materials so that you can build a coral reef around it? Or, if you build a new port, can you use mangroves to protect and stabilise the coastline, while making sure that the waves are not as strong and that the ships can interact more easily with the port itself?

If we stop thinking about the private sector as the flip side of conservation but rather as one more stakeholder that will really benefit from a healthy Ocean, then we start unlocking a lot of opportunities. The WEF is partnering with the UN to bring in the private sector and help them to navigate and understand what is going on in this space.

Minna Epps: We also must stop thinking about the private sector as a homogenous group, and distinguish between the big corporations that we can we need to work with, and the small to medium enterprises that we need to invest in.

We want this conference to be a game changer. We are focusing on initiatives such as the International Panel of Ocean Sustainability, which is gathering both scientific and Indigenous knowledge. Then there is finance: how do we move the needle in a decisive manner? Because without that happening, the conference will not have a strong legacy. 

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