- The 9th Our Ocean Conference (OOC) took place in Athens from April 15-17.
- Government, NGO and philanthropic delegates made 469 new commitments worth more than $11.3 billion to help protect the oceans, which was lower than in previous years.
- While some conference hosts and attendees celebrated the many successes of the OOC, there was also a shared concern that decision-makers aren’t moving fast enough to secure a sustainable future for the global ocean.
ATHENS — From April 15-17, state delegates, organization representatives, academics and philanthropists met at the 9th Our Ocean Conference (OOC) in Athens to discuss the protection of the world’s oceans and pledge actions to safeguard their future.
As the OOC took place, news broke about the world’s coral reefs undergoing a mass bleaching event, which lent a sense of urgency to the conference. Experts say this global bleaching event is a result of the current El Niño climate pattern as well as the ongoing rise in global ocean temperatures due to human-induced climate change.
“Devastating but also predictable,” is how Melissa Wright, a senior member of the environment team at Bloomberg Philanthropies, which funds ocean conservation work, described the bleaching event at the conference’s opening press briefing. She urged leaders to take “decisive action” on climate change as well as other threats such as overfishing, pollution and development.
Pledges to protect the ocean
The OOC events, which have been running annually for 10 years (with the exception of 2020 and 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic) and are hosted by a different government each year, are characterized by delegates from states, organizations and philanthropic funds making considerable commitments for ocean conservation and pledging large amounts of money to carry out these actions.
By the end of this year’s conference, delegates had made 469 new commitments worth more than $11.3 billion to help protect the ocean. The commitments included pledges to establish marine protected areas (MPAs); combat illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing; protect marine biodiversity; and fight climate change.
One big commitment came from host Greece itself: to establish two new MPAs in the Aegean and Ionian seas, ban bottom trawling in its MPAs by 2026, and enforce this ban through monitoring and surveillance. Bottom trawling is known to damage the seabed and sensitive marine ecosystems, and catch non-target species at a high rate. Currently, bottom trawling still takes place in about 90% of Europe’s MPAs, according to a report co-authored by the NGOs Marine Conservation Society, Seas At Risk and Oceana.
The European Union made 40 commitments toward ocean action worth 3.5 billion euros ($3.7 billion), which included support for sustainable fisheries, MPAs and ocean and climate research.
The United States Agency for International Development pledged $103 million to establish new programs and bolster existing ones aimed to strengthen “marine preservation, build resilient blue economies, and address the impacts of the climate crisis.”
Dionysia-Theodora Avgerinopoulou, the Greek prime minister’s special envoy for the oceans, said in a press briefing on the last day of the conference that the OOC had been “very successful” as she applauded the commitments and amount of money raised. She also said the number of commitments was “almost double than in other times” and that the amount of money raised for the commitments was “really exceeding other conferences.”
The reality, however, was that while the number of commitments did increase from last year, the amount of money pledged has gone down dramatically over the years.
For instance, delegates to the 2023 OOC, which took place in Panama, pledged $20 billion for the implementation of 341 commitments. And in 2022, $16 billion was pledged toward 1,800 commitments at the OOC in Palau. Prior to the pandemic, the OOC that took place in Norway in 2019 raised $63 billion in pledges for 370 commitments.
Is ocean protection happening fast enough?
Besides a drop in financial contributions, there was shared concern among many delegates that decision-makers aren’t moving forward fast enough to implement their commitments — and that generally, the world wasn’t working quickly enough to secure a sustainable future for the oceans.
As dictated by the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, the world is working to protect 30% of land and sea by 2030. But in terms of ocean protection, the world is still far from reaching this goal.
According to the “30×30 Progress Tracker,” a new online tool built by the environmental organization SkyTruth and launched at OOC, only 7.9% of the global ocean is currently protected, and only 4.2% is fully or highly protected.
Angelo Villagomez, an Indigenous Chamorro ocean advocate and senior fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for American Progress think tank, who spoke at the OOC, put it this way in a recent op-ed published in Mongabay: “At this rate, raising the area of global ocean protection from 8% to 30% will take an additional 880 years.”
During the OOC, there were numerous calls for nations to ratify the biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ) treaty, also known as the high seas treaty, which will provide a legal framework for governing the high seas, including establishing MPAs there. Thus far, 89 countries have signed and only four countries have ratified the treaty. Sixty countries need to ratify the treaty for it to take effect.
At a press briefing on April 16, Rebecca Hubbard, director of the High Seas Alliance — a group of more than 50 nongovernmental members and the IUCN, the global biodiversity conservation authority, that is working to protect areas of the ocean beyond national jurisdiction — said her group’s goal is to get 60 ratifications by the time of the next U.N. Ocean Conference, which will take place June 9-13, 2025, in Nice, France.
“This is … a goal that is both very ambitious and requires a lot of hard work,” Hubbard said. “But obviously, in light of the biological and climate crises it is really critical, because we cannot get to 30% protection of our oceans without the high seas treaty in force.”
There was also concern raised that action to slow down and mitigate the impacts of climate change isn’t happening fast enough.
Anna-Marie Laura, senior director of climate policy at the Ocean Conservancy, told Mongabay that while there’s been more focus on climate action at the OOC events and larger commitments toward climate action, “it’s still not enough.”
Kathryn Matthews, chief scientist at the NGO Oceana, said she believes the issue of offshore oil and gas isn’t being discussed enough at the OOC, which she said should be an “ocean-based conversation.”
The offshore oil and gas industry can impact the oceans through seismic testing, drilling activities, pollution, and also the ultimate burning of fossil fuels, which accelerates the process of climate change, driving up sea temperatures and increasing ocean acidification.
“There are countries, including Greece, that are continuing to issue new leases for offshore oil and gas development, which is incredibly troubling,” Matthews told Mongabay in an interview. She added that countries shouldn’t be pursuing offshore oil and gas if they’re “wanting to be an ocean champion” and committed to limiting global warming to 1.5° Celsius (2.7° Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels.
Calls to halt deep-sea mining
There were also calls to halt moves to begin deep-sea mining activities, which could start as early as next year in international waters. Some nations, including Norway, the Cook Islands and Japan, are also looking to mine in their national waters.
At an OOC side event, the president of Palau, Surangel Whipps Jr., called deep-sea mining a “matter of utmost importance,” stressing that the industry could “irreversibly harm” deep-sea marine ecosystems. Whipps said the upcoming annual assembly of the International Seabed Authority, the U.N.-affiliated regulator for the industry, will present “a crucial opportunity to discuss and potentially implement a moratorium on deep-sea mining.”
Hervé Berville, France’s state secretary for the sea, and Ralph Regenvanu, minister of climate change and the environment for Vanuatu, said at the OOC that they would be attending the upcoming assembly, scheduled for July 29-Aug. 2 at ISA headquarters in Kingston, Jamaica.
Palau’s minister of agriculture, fisheries, and environment, Steven Victor, will also be attending the assembly, and Whipps may attend as well, according to the Deep Sea Conservation Conservation Coalition (DSCC), a group of organizations that oppose deep-sea mining.
Palau has called for a moratorium on deep-sea mining in international waters, while Vanuatu has called for a precautionary pause. France has called for a ban on deep-sea mining.
“We need all the countries to come at the ISA in July,” Berville said at the same side event on deep-sea mining. “The fact that we [will have] some ministers there will change the dynamic.”
‘The momentum is there’
One bright spot at the OOC was the disclosure that commitments made at former OOC events to establish marine protected areas or other protective measures are largely being carried out.
A new report distributed at the conference, using methodology laid out in a 2019 study in Marine Policy, found that 72% of protective measures announced at previous OOCs had been completed to date.
“Our research shows that if all of the current protected area commitments were completed, 4.1% of the ocean would be protected, including 1.2% categorized as either fully or highly protected against destructive activities,” Jenna Sullivan-Stack, a marine ecologist at Oregon State University, who co-led the research, said in a statement. “If all promises across all [OOC] venues were completed, more than 9.3% of the ocean would be protected, with more than one-third of that area fully or highly protected.”
However, Kirsten Grorud-Colvert, another marine ecologist at OSU involved in the research, said more progress needs to be made.
“There’s still some commitments that aren’t completed, and we need to get those over the finish line” Grorud-Colvert told Mongabay in an interview. “And we need to do it quickly. We need to accelerate the pace. That’s very clear. The appetite is there. The momentum is there. We just have to accelerate.”
The future of the OOC
To support future OOC events, a decision was made to establish a new secretariat for the OOC, which will be funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Bloomberg Ocean Initiative and Oceans5, a consortium of international funders. The formation of the secretariat signifies the importance of OOC events for ocean conservation actions, even if progress has been slow in some aspects.
“These events are absolutely critical because they’re an opportunity to bring together governments, with the private sector, with civil society,” Lizzie McLeod, global ocean director at The Nature Conservancy, told Mongabay in an interview. “It’s an opportunity to galvanize our efforts, and to really support the power of our partnerships to deliver concrete actions for our oceans.”
The 10th OOC is set to take place in 2025 in Busan, South Korea, although the exact date hasn’t been decided.
The Athens OOC ended with a note of hope, despite the many challenges that lay ahead for protecting the world’s oceans.
“I would like to finish by reminding us that the future does not belong to us,” Theodoros Skylakakis, Greece’s minister of environment and energy, said at the closing ceremony of the OOC. “It belongs to our children and grandchildren in the generations to come. And for them, we have to succeed.”
Banner image: A whale shark in Ningaloo Reef, Western Australia. Image by Emilie Ledwidge / Ocean Image Bank.
Elizabeth Claire Alberts is a senior staff writer for Mongabay’s Ocean Desk. Follow her on Mastodon, @ECAlberts@journa.host, Blue Sky, @elizabethalberts.bsky.social, and Twitter @ECAlberts.
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Citation:
Grorud-Colvert, K., Constant, V., Sullivan-Stack, J., Dziedzic, K., Hamilton, S. L., Randell, Z., … Lubchenco, J. (2019). High-profile international commitments for ocean protection: Empty promises or meaningful progress? Marine Policy, 105, 52-66. doi:10.1016/j.marpol.2019.04.003