Nice Ocean Conference You Have There

posted by janrinok on Tuesday June 10, @04:47PM

""After almost 100 years on the planet, I now understand the most important place on Earth is not on land, but at sea.""

(Sir David Attenborough, at the presentation of Oceans.)

The world's oceans hold between 50 and 60 times more carbon dioxide than there's present in the atmosphere; each year they absorb about 30% of the CO2 being released into the atmosphere. Annually, between 86 and 94 million tonnes of fish are caught in the wild from oceans and seas, while aquaculture yielded 92.4 million tonnes in 2022.

In short, the oceans are pretty important for humanity.

Not everybody is convinced about that though. Bottom trawling is still a dominant fishing "tactic", there's so much plastic pollution you can use it as orientation points from space -- with an expectation that the amount of plastic reaching the oceans will double each year until 2040 -- and now, more recently, there's the push to start mining the ocean floor with robots in search of precious metals.

Let's try to manage our oceans responsibly for future generations, argued the United Nations in 2023 in New York -- and drafted a first version of the High Seas Treaty. That draft is now being worked out further during a conference at Nice, France, running from June 9 until June 30.

While the main highlight being reported in the media is about declaring 30 percent of the oceans to be off-limits for human industrial activity (including fishing) by 2030, the treaty is ostensibly going to be about much more than that, if you look at the inputs to the draft treaty by different countries.

The European Union wants more financial assistance and market access for small-scale fisheries, combined with strategies to minimize bycatch and discard rates; the United States also wants more attention to small-scale fishing, along with better monitoring and collaboration and focus on the impact of climate change; China is worried about ecosystem restoration and protection of deep-sea ecosystems, Indonesia wants restrictions on fisheries subsidies as these promote overcapacity and overfishing, ... and so on; even Interpol wants to have a say about marine pollution.

About a hundred countries put their signatures under the original draft proposal in New York, formally called the Treaty on Biological Diversity Beyond National Jurisdiction. If 60 of these original 100 put their signatures under the finalised treaty during this conference, the oceans will have their first (global) legal protection.

According to Greenpeace, less than 2 percent of the world's oceans is currently protected against human industrial activity.

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