- Summary
- Ocean Conference must ratify key treaties and fund ocean restoration to avert ecological collapse
- Just 3% of ocean is fully protected from destructive activities like trawling and mining
- Bottom trawling heavily subsidised despite releasing carbon and destroying marine ecosystems
- Investors eyeing blue bonds and conservation finance, but lack scalable, investable projects
- Coastal nations control 30% of ocean territory but receive little climate finance or investment
June 2 – Governments meeting in France next week hold the fate of the planet in their hands. Scientists and conservationists say the decisions made at the Third UN Ocean Conference (UNOC 3) in Nice must kickstart action to restore life in the vast salty waters on which we all depend.
The ocean has provided a buffer against the worst ravages of climate change, by absorbing most of the heat trapped by greenhouse gas emissions and around a third of the carbon dioxide we’ve emitted.
But those warmer waters cause sea-level rise and coral bleaching. Carbon dioxide has made the ocean more acidic, damaging the shells of sea creatures. Overfishing and plastics pollution are destroying marine life and now there is the threat of seabed mining, with little understood consequences.
Huge progress has been made in the past few years to get agreements to restore and protect marine ecosystems and end some of the fisheries subsidies that allow trawlers to lay waste to huge tracts of ocean life. But treaties have either yet to come into force or not enough is being done to implement them.
“We’re at the starting line rather than the finish line,” suggests Louis Lambrechts, policy and advocacy specialist at Portugal’s non-profit Oceano Azul Foundation.
Top of the priority list at the five-day conference, which begins on June 9 and is co-hosted by France and Costa Rica, is to get the requisite numbers to bring to life a treaty to protect biodiversity on the open ocean and the seabed below it – outside the exclusive economic zones that countries control.
So far, 28 nations have ratified the Marine Biological Diversity of Areas beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) agreement, but 60 are needed to ensure the sustainable use of marine resources, and the sharing of benefits resulting from genetic resources and digital sequence information.
“All the good work we have been doing within our (exclusive economic) zones will amount to nothing if the high seas continue to be the wild, wild west,” says the Pacific Ocean Commissioner, Filimon Manoni.
The BBNJ could support regions like those around the Galapagos islands, which are the targets of Chinese fishing fleets. Those vessels are also a growing source of the plastic pollution that washes up on the islands.
“But protecting the high seas should not be used as an excuse for countries not to protect the key areas within their own waters. That has to be very clear,” asserts Enric Sala, founder of National Geographic’s ocean conservation programme, Pristine Seas.
Today, just 8% of waters are designated as marine protected areas (MPAs) but less than 3% of the ocean is sufficiently protected to ban extractive and destructive activities, such as bottom trawling. Briefing journalists, Sala said, “in Europe, we have reached the crazy situation where marine protected areas suffer more bottom trawling than areas outside.” He likens this destructive practice, whereby weighted nets are dragged across the seabed, to clear-cutting forests on land. To make matters worse, as much as three-quarters of creatures caught in the nets get discarded as bycatch.
President Emmanuel Macron is being urged to back his rhetoric on ocean protection, and join other nations who intend to end bottom trawling in protected waters.
Along with decimating sea life, bottom trawling disturbs carbon stored in the seabed. Sala and his collaborators suggest some 340 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide could have been released to the atmosphere in the four years to 2020, so ending bottom trawling would be a critical tool in tackling climate change.
There’s also plenty of research to show that truly protecting marine ecosystems not only allows stocks to recover but can increase fish populations around MPAs – what’s known as “spillover”. Even migratory species such as tuna are impacted. Initiatives by Pacific nations have led to a bounce-back in tuna populations, guaranteeing supplies and food security to global communities.
The fishing industry is highly subsidised, something a World Trade Organization (WTO) agreement on ending the most harmful fisheries subsidies could tackle. So far 100 governments have ratified the treaty, including China, the world’s biggest fisher and worst offender for illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing. Just another 11 are needed to bring it into force.
Europe alone subsidises bottom trawling to the tune of 1.3 billion euros, and globally total fishing subsidies are estimated to run to over $20 billion a year. But the overfishing they incentivise leads to economic losses that could be four times as high as the subsidies. Tackling them could free up funds to help the industry and its workforce transition to more sustainable methods. This is another area of focus in Nice.
The political certainty achieved by getting treaties ratified and ending bottom trawling would enable economic resources to flow into marine conservation, says Karen Sack, executive director of the Ocean Risk and Resilience Action Alliance (ORRAA), which aims to drive at least $500 million investment into marine and coastal ecosystems by 2030.
Just ahead of UNOC 3, more than 1,200 delegates are expected at this week’s Blue Economy and Finance Forum, an initiative to focus investors’ minds on what’s needed – and the potential bounty that could be reaped – by investing in ocean conservation.
Maritza Chan Valverde, Costa Rica’s ambassador to the United Nations, told a press briefing that she expected the ocean conference would garner $100 billion in new funding from across all sectors.
Kristin Rechberger is founder of Dynamic Planet, an NGO that helps develop business models for conservation, including a new initiative to empower coastal communities to create MPAs. During a briefing for journalists, she said that some 190,000 new small MPAs need to be established in countries’ territorial waters in the next five years.
“We need to take the principles of (the Blue Economy and Finance) forum to heart and really change our mindset so that we think about marine conservation as a business opportunity, and quickly pivot and align everything we can to change the game,” Rechberger said.
Sack told The Ethical Corporation that she expects to see banks make announcements of several blue bonds. “We’re starting to see a little bit of a wave building.”
But she adds that the financial community has bemoaned the lack of a pipeline of investable projects. While there are many opportunities to invest, the blue economy is new to investors, and projects tend to be small in size. Activating that investment would have an outsize impact, bringing not just financial, but social and environmental returns. ORRAA is developing a range of instruments to address this challenge.
An impact investment fund to provide the bridging capital to take projects beyond the grant phase will be focused on small island developing states.
“These are the countries that have jurisdiction over 30% of ocean real estate and yet get a tiny portion of investment capital and are the most vulnerable to climate change,” notes Sack.
MPAs are often set up with public or philanthropic funding, but they then need to try to become self-sustaining, says Sack. ORRAA is working with partners on a blue finance facility to provide low-interest loans and subsidies to businesses working with MPAs to help deliver the 30% ocean protection goal, agreed under the Global Biodiversity Framework in 2022.
At UNOC 3 the European Commission is also expected to deliver its new European Oceans Pact, which seeks to foster a broader, integrated and holistic approach to ocean governance across all sectors of the European economy.
Lambrechts, of the Oceano Azul Foundation, says the pact should clearly define what a truly sustainable, regenerative blue economy should look like.
Importantly, he says, the pact should spell out “what definitely cannot be part of the blue economy”.
Top of his list would be seabed mining and the harvesting of krill in the Antarctic. The latter supplies the fish-farming and pet food industries, while threatening an entire ecosystem by depriving whales, penguins and seals (among others) of a vital food source.
By excluding such activities “governments would give a strong indication to businesses of where they can go and also where they can find support and ideally, financial flows,” he suggests.
UNOC 3 has another role to play, in integrating the ocean into other existing discussions and frameworks – the most obvious being discussions to limit the impact of climate change, as we look to COP 30 in Belem, Brazil.
We have to “connect all these discussions, otherwise we’re stuck in our siloes”, Lambrechts says, while the clock ticks down remorselessly to 2030.