Foreign Desk Report
NEW YORK: The world must harness “clear, transformative and actionable solutions” to address the ocean crisis, the President of the UN General Assembly said Tuesday, opening a meeting to generate momentum towards the 2022 UN Ocean Conference, when public health safety measures allow.
“Simply speaking, our relationship with our planet’s ocean must change”, the 193-member Assembly President, Volkan Bozkir, told a high-level thematic debate on the ocean and Sustainable Development Goal 14 (SDG14): Life Below Water.
Against the backdrop that human activities have threatened to undo the delicate balance of this ecosystem, that supports nutritional, economic and social value to billions the world over, he upheld that there is “simply no scenario” wherein we live on a planet without an ocean. People do not want to live in “a world of one crisis after the next”, Mr. Bozkir said, preferring instead the “security, sustainability and the peace of mind” that comes with a healthy planet.
“We have seen this in countries and cities that have prioritized coastal and marine areas over tourism in protected wetlands in efforts to address illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing, and regulate shipping and resource extraction”, he said. New governance, policy and market approaches that incentivize both profit ability and sustainability, for people and planet, provide an opportunity for a “blue recovery” to build resilience, particularly in small island developing States, upheld the Assembly President.
