DM Monitoring
PARIS: World leaders, scientists and major companies gather in France this week to boost efforts to protect the oceans, which cover 70 percent of the planet but receive far less attention than land ecosystems.
The One Ocean Summit in the northwestern port city of Brest on February 9-11 seeks to raise the international community’s ambitions to protect sealife, cut plastic pollution and tackle the impact of climate change.
The world’s five connected oceans regulate the climate, nurture millions of species, feed the world and enable trade but are still badly understood and lack protection.
President Emmanuel Macron hopes to eke “ambitious commitments” from “a small but determined” group of more than 40 countries and multinational companies, including European maritime transport giants Maersk, CMA CGM, Hapag-Lloyd and MSC.
European Union leaders Ursula von der Leyen and Charles Michel will address the summit in person as France heads the bloc’s six-month rotating presidency.
Environmental groups hope the Brest summit will jump-start efforts to finalise a wide-ranging and legally binding UN treaty in March.
The treaty would protect marine life in international waters — which cover nearly half the planet — and the expansion by one million square kilometres (386,102 square miles) of the marine reserve in Antarctica and the South Pacific.
But campaigners are also urging France to do more at this week’s summit, petitioning to stop dolphins being accidentally killed by fishing vessels off the French coast and demanding an end to French exploration of the deepest marine trenches.
These ocean trenches, more than four kilometres deep, are home to extraordinary marine life, much of which is not fully understood, and to potentially lucrative mineral resources. “We have no idea what the ocean really is,” said Francoise Gaill, an expert at France’s national scientific research centre.
Last year, governments and NGOs at the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s World Conservation Congress approved an international moratorium on deep seabed mining. France was one of several countries to reject the move.
The Brest summit comes ahead of major UN environmental negotiations in the coming months. These include efforts to clinch a global agreement on curbing plastic waste, the high seas treaty, key summits on climate and biodiversity and a UN conference on the oceans.
Last week, the United States had threw its support behind negotiations on a treaty to curb plastic pollution, ending a key holdup in international efforts to clean up the planet’s oceans and save marine life.
On a visit to the United Nations Environment Programme in Nairobi, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the United States would back talks in the Kenyan capital in February on a treaty to address plastic.
“Our goal is to create a tool that we can use to protect our oceans and all the life that they sustain from growing global harms of plastic pollution,” Blinken said.
“As we know, our health—our survival—is bound up in the health of our oceans. We have to do more to protect them,” he said.
About eight million tonnes of plastic end up in the oceans each year, killing or injuring one million birds and more than 100,000 marine mammals, according to UN figures.
Blinken’s statement is the latest US effort to ramp up environmental protection under President Joe Biden, who has made the fight against climate change a key domestic priority.
Likely mindful of political realities in divided Washington, where treaties need ratification by the Senate, Blinken called for a plastic treaty in which countries would come up with their own plans of action.
