Save the Ocean or Else
The United Nations Ocean Conference opened on Monday with dire warnings from the U.N. leadership: humanity’s fate depends on saving the ocean.
“Oceans are a testing ground for the principle of multilateralism,” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told heads of state and other dignitaries at the conference’s opening ceremony. “The health of our oceans and seas requires us to put aside short-term national gain to avoid long-term global catastrophe. Conserving our oceans and using them sustainably is preserving life itself.”
Peter Thomson, president of the U.N. General Assembly warned that “In most probability this conference represents the best opportunity we will ever have to reverse the cycle of decline that human activity has brought upon the ocean.” He added, “If we want a secure future for our species on this planet, we have to act now on the health of the ocean and on climate change.”
More than 4,000 government leaders, scientists, non-governmental organizations and business leaders are gathered at the U.N. in New York City this week to discuss ways to implement Sustainable Development Goal 14 (SDG 14), which sets seven targets to restore ocean health by 2030. The U.N.’s 193 member states adopted the goals in September 2015 as the perilous state of the ocean became ever more apparent, with increasing rates of pollution, overfishing, species loss and degradation of ecosystems from accelerating climate change.
The conference will adopt a “call for action” that reaffirms the commitment to SDG 14 targets and, as of Monday, more than 800 “voluntary commitments” have been registered by governments, organizations and businesses pledging to take specific actions to achieve the goals, including reducing plastic pollution, creating marine protected areas, ending overfishing and minimizing the impacts of ocean acidification.
The Blue Economy
One phrase that seems to be on everyone’s lips at the U.N. Ocean Conference is the “blue economy.”
The idea is to promote the sustainable use of the ocean to discourage more destructive practices while providing revenue to Small Island Developing States, or SIDS in U.N. parlance.
At a standing-room-only side event, the focus was on how to finance the blue economy in small island nations, which lack resources to make such a transition while facing increasing risks from climate change as sea levels rise and they suffer the effects of more destructive cyclones and other extreme weather.
“We need to move from the well-worn narrative of small being a disadvantage. Small island states are large ocean states,” said Ambassador Keisha McGuire, Grenada’s permanent representative to the U.N., who noted that her country has executed a debt-for-nature swap to preserve 25 percent of its coastal waters. “The challenge for small states is how to harness this potential and make it sustainable.”
It won’t be easy. Representatives from the U.N. Development Programme and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development noted the public financing has been falling while private financiers view investing in blue economy projects as speculative and risky.
One solution floated at the event was “blue bonds,” the oceanic counterpart to the green bonds that are an increasingly popular instrument to finance renewable energy and other sustainable projects on land.
While panelists cautioned that it took decades for investors to become comfortable with the idea of green bonds, John Virdin, a Duke University professor and former World Bank official, offered a note of optimism. “We saw first blue bond in Seychelles,” he said. “With the success of green bonds I don’t see why blue bonds couldn’t follow. The challenge is to build a pipeline of finance for the blue economy.”
The Deep Sea
Scientists at the U.N. Ocean conference made a plea for stepped-up research into the deep sea, an area of the ocean that remains largely unknown even as it is targeted for exploitation by commercial fishing, oil and gas development, and mining.
“We have very little knowledge about the resilience of ecosystems to disturbance,” said Nadine Le Bris, a French deep-sea ecologist. “There’s a huge paradox here, as you know the human footprint is expanding in the deep sea.”
Said Kristina Gjerde, the high seas policy advisor to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s global marine program: “Our pollution, our plastics, our cans have reached the deepest of our trenches, the Mariana Trench. They’ve found creatures at the deepest depths contaminated with our PCBs. This is going to come back to haunt us.”
She added, “What’s different in the deep sea is that recovery from disturbance can be measured in centuries and millennia. Life in the deep sea is in the slow lane.”
Murray Roberts, a professor of applied biology at University of Edinburgh, is involved in a program called Atlas that is mapping the deep-sea ecosystem in the North Atlantic Ocean. “Blue growth needs to be sustainable from the outset,” he said.
The scientists said potential threats to the deep sea underscored the need for an international treaty to preserve biodiversity on the high seas beyond national jurisdiction.