BUSAN, South Korea — Delegates from more than 100 nations and thousands of participants convened in Busan, South Korea, between April 28 and 30, for the 10th Our Ocean Conference (OOC). The annual event focuses on enacting concrete actions to protect the ocean.

The OOC has generated 2,618 pledges, amounting to $160 billion in funding for ocean action since its inception in 2014. With this year’s contributions, the totals rose to 2,895 pledges worth nearly $170 billion.

This year’s conference carried its usual energy and shared sense of urgency to accelerate global ocean conservation efforts, but this year’s numbers were the lowest since 2016. Delegates announced only 277 new commitments and mobilized around $9.1 billion across the conference’s six main target areas: the ocean-climate nexus, marine pollution, marine protected areas (MPAs), the sustainable blue economy, sustainable fisheries and maritime security.

There was also a significant absence at this year’s conference: For the first time, the U.S. did not send an official delegation or make any pledges, even though the OOC originated as an initiative of the U.S. State Department under the direction of then-Secretary of State John Kerry. The country’s absence this year aligned with the Trump administration’s broader retreat from multilateral engagement, including on oceanic issues as well as deep cuts to agencies like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the rollback of environmental protections.

But even without the U.S. presence or pledges, momentum for ocean action remained strong.

Kerry, who also served as special presidential envoy for climate from 2021 to 2024, attended the conference independent from the U.S. government. At the opening plenary, he rallied the audience with a call to action: “We can’t just go to conferences and make a pledge and walk away and say, ‘Well, we’ve done our part.’ We have to make sure that these pledges are implemented.”

A 10-year progress report delivered by the World Resources Institute, a Washington D.C.-based environmental nonprofit that now leads the newly established OOC secretariat, revealed that over the past decade, 1,130 commitments (43%) have been fulfilled and 1,005 (38%) are currently underway, collectively mobilizing $133.4 billion. However, the report also highlighted that 483 commitments remain uninitiated, with $24.9 billion pledged but unused, underscoring the need for continued efforts to fully realize the conference’s overarching goals.

Progress made; progress needed

South Korea (officially named the Republic of Korea) is a nation deeply reliant on maritime industries such as shipping and fisheries, and with strong cultural ties to the sea: It’s home to the UNESCO-recognized Jeju Haenyeo culture, where women dive without oxygen tanks to harvest seafood. The country took a leading role at the OOC not only by hosting, but with the government announcing 76 commitments — the highest number from any participant. These pledges mobilized more than $2.5 billion and included initiatives to improve fisheries management, decarbonize Korea’s multibillion-dollar shipping sector and support climate science. Korea also announced its ratification of the high seas treaty, also known as the biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ) agreement, which aims to protect vast areas of international waters. The treaty requires 60 ratifications to enter into force; so far, only 21 countries of the 113 that signed the treaty have completed the process.

“With these pioneering and ambitious actions, Korea will achieve tangible results and share those outcomes with the local community,” said Kang Do-hyung, Korea’s minister of oceans and fisheries, while speaking through a translator during a press briefing. “As a maritime nation whose growth has depended on the ocean, and as a responsible member of the international community, Korea remains committed to protecting our ocean.”

Sanghoon Yoon, an expert adviser for Paran Ocean Citizen Science Center, a Korean civil society group that advocates for the protection of the ocean, and who attended this year’s OOC, said he welcomed many aspects of Korea’s commitments but also said there was a “severe lack of specific implementation plans and budgets.”

“Paran’s position on the Korean’s commitments can be summarized in one word ‘paper commitments,’” Yoon told Mongabay in a text message following the conference. “For example, the Korean government announced three pledges in marine protected areas, but the budget allocated was Zero. In order to expand the marine protected areas by 30% by 2030, more budget, manpower, organization, and annual detailed implementation plans are needed. However, it is questionable whether the Korean government can implement them.”

Across all participating nations and organizations, blue economy measures received the highest amount of funding, totaling $6 billion across 59 commitments for initiatives that included wetland restoration and efforts to achieve carbon neutrality in the shipping sector. Another major focus area was sustainable fisheries, which attracted 51 pledges totaling $1.1 billion.

One significant development came from Panama, which announced plans to combat illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing by enhancing its data collection systems and increasing transparency around vessel ownership. By making these records more accessible, Panama aims to make it easier to identify ships’ “ultimate beneficial owners” — that is, the people who profit from ships’ activities — so those who participate in IUU fishing can be held accountable. Panama has previously received two “yellow cards” for not complying with international fishing rules. Given that Panama flags the highest proportion of the world’s vessels (around 18%) and that it has a history not disclosing vessel ownership, this move was viewed by many as a meaningful and overdue step forward.

Korea, Ghana and Cameroon also announced their official endorsement of the Global Charter for Fisheries Transparency, a framework of 10 policy principles aimed at making data on vessels and fishing activities more accessible to support responsible fisheries management, combat illegal practices and uphold human rights at sea.

“The driving force behind these advances is the conviction that we have, that while transparency is not an end in itself, it’s an essential lever to fight against IUU fishing to the benefit of the population and economic players who abide by the rules,” Mimbang Irene Guy, a technical adviser to Cameroon’s minister of livestock, fisheries and animal industries, said in a statement, following the official announcement. “We recognize that this is a long term battle and we are contributing our effort to meet these challenges.”

Beth Lowell, vice president of the Washington D.C.-based NGO Oceana, told Mongabay at a press briefing that she was “very pleased with the announcements of this conference,” but that more needs to happen on a quicker time scale. “I think transparency can be a gamechanger if countries can adopt it more rapidly and put those policies in place on the water to better level the playing field for all countries and the fishers that are following the rules,” Lowell said.

Some experts say marine protected areas (MPAs) in particular must be implemented more quickly, and that requires more funding. The World Resources Institute report indicates that MPAs have historically received the least funding of the six action areas, getting $6.7 billion, which is less than 4% percent of the funding allocated over the last 10 years. This year was no exception: MPAs received $117 million, the lowest amount of any target area.

The 2030 deadline specified by the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework for nations to protect 30% of their territorial waters is inching closer. Yet only 8.3% of the ocean is included in MPAs, and that figure drops to 2.7% counting just well-protected MPAs, according to MPAtlas, an online marine protection tracking platform.

Angelo Villagomez, an Indigenous Chamorro ocean advocate and senior fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based think tank Center for American Progress, said in a Linkedin post that there has been “some progress,” but that it will still take 845 years to achieve 30%, given the pace of action. Last year, Villagomez wrote a commentary for Mongabay saying it would take 880 years — the slight acceleration since then was due to the establishment of new MPAs in the interim.

Lance Morgan, a marine biologist and president of the organization behind MPAtlas, the California-based Marine Conservation Institute, told Mongabay he believes many nations and conservation groups are counting on the future protection of the high seas under the BBNJ treaty, rather than implementing more MPAs in countries’ territorial waters. Besides the goal of protecting 30% of each nation’s territorial waters, there is also a larger goal of protecting 30% of the high seas by 2030.

“A lot of people are lined up, really eager to get it going, but we got five years, and it looks like a fast timeline would be about three to five years for high seas MPAs,” Morgan told Mongabay. “They don’t have the rules in place yet. And then once the rules are there, a lot of negotiation has to go on.”

Still, Rebecca Hubbard, director of the High Seas Alliance, a Netherlands-based coalition of conservation groups pushing for the treaty’s swift ratification, struck a more optimistic tone.

“There has been the political and widespread public ambition to reach 60 ratifications by the U.N. Ocean Conference in June in Nice, which many countries are currently working hard on back in their capitals,” Hubbard told reporters during a press briefing. “And that’s happening in countries across all seven regions of the world.”

At a side event focused on the BBNJ treaty, at least six countries including Kenya, Costa Rica, and the Philippines announced plans to ratify the agreement. Charlina Vitcheva, director-general at the European Commission for maritime affairs and fisheries, added that a “critical mass” of the 27 EU member states is expected to ratify the treaty by the end of the month. So far, Spain and France are the only EU nations to have completed the process.

Climate action also garnered some support, with a number of governments, including those of Australia, the EU, Indonesia, Japan and Korea, making 61 commitments worth more than $862 million. These ranged from pledges of funding for climate-focused research and even carbon dioxide removal technology to improving the condition of ecosystems known to capture carbon, such as seagrass meadows and mangroves.

‘Ocean health is not a political issue’

Ambition ran high at the OOC conference, but the absence of the U.S. government and its contributions was conspicuous. Mongabay identified only one current U.S. federal official in attendance, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island.

Sally Yozell, a senior fellow and director of the environmental security program at the Washington, D.C.-based think tank the Stimson Center, who previously held positions at both the U.S. Department of State and NOAA, called the lack of U.S. participation “disappointing.”

“Ocean health is not a political issue, and so for an administration to politicize that, it’s just very, very disappointing when it’s about the lives and livelihood of not only American citizens, but citizens around the world,” Yozell told Mongabay in an interview.

“I think the U.S. is just sidelining itself, isolating itself,” she added. “And other countries have seen this before, and they’ve said we’re going to move on without the United States, and in the long run, it’s going to hurt the U.S. Also, every time we step back and isolate ourselves, the Chinese government is cheering and stepping in.”

A spokesperson for the U.S. State Department, who did not provide their name when Mongabay asked, confirmed via email that the U.S. government did not send anyone to the conference. The department did, however, promote the event on its website.

In an emailed statement, the spokesperson said the U.S. had made progress in key areas, highlighting two executive orders signed by President Trump in April. One, aimed at restoring the nation’s maritime dominance and seafood competitiveness, called for scaling back fishing regulations and reviewing all marine national monuments — one category of U.S. MPA —  for possible reopening to fishing. The other paved the way for the controversial deep-sea mining industry, which many experts say could cause severe harm to the marine environment.

“President Trump is prioritizing the revitalization of domestic maritime industries, efforts to combat IUU fishing, and establishing the United States as a global leader in responsible seabed mineral exploration and processing,” the spokesperson said in the statement.

On April 29, the second day of the conference, Canadian firm The Metals Company (TMC) announced it had applied to the U.S. for a mining exploitation license in international waters, via a U.S. subsidiary. Both Trump’s executive order, which calls for expediting the process of approving deep-sea mining licenses, and TMC’s application drew criticism from the international community.

“There is much more that we need to understand about the deep sea and the sea bed,” Solomon Pili Kahoʻohalahala, known as Uncle Sol, an Indigenous conservationist from Hawaii, told Mongabay at the conference. “And without that, we are possibly going to be destroying the last things that are really necessary for the global Earth to continue to exist.”

‘We need to walk the talk’

Nevertheless, many participants at this year’s OOC expressed cautious optimism, tempered by a broad consensus that the pace of action must accelerate. The next OOC is already scheduled to take place in Mombasa, Kenya, in 2026 — an opportunity many attendees said they hoped will build on this year’s momentum.

Renz Nathaniel Luyao, a youth activist from Dipolog City in the Philippines’ Zamboanga Peninsula, who attended the OCC on behalf of Washington, D.C.-based environmental nonprofit EarthEcho International, told Mongabay the commitments and calls to action gave him “hope,” but stressed the urgency of follow-through.

“In my country, we’re facing so many problems — the destruction of our coral reefs, climate change, overfishing,” Luyao  said. “We need to walk the talk, and we need to remind ourselves all the time.”

Banner image: A school of hammerhead sharks, Mikimoto, Japan. Masayuki Agawa / Ocean Image Bank

Elizabeth Claire Alberts is a senior staff writer for Mongabay and a fellow with the Pulitzer Center’s Ocean Reporting Network. Follow her work on Bluesky: @elizabethalberts.bsky.social.

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