Life Below Water: Will Nice deliver a Paris Agreement for the ocean?

The third UN Ocean Conference at Nice, France will push for a treaty to protect the high seas and garner new commitments for ocean conservation. Critics want to ensure participation of coastal communities.

Vaishnavi Chandrashekhar

The ocean breathes life, producing half the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere. It removes pollution, absorbing around 30% of carbon dioxide emissions. And it reduces Earth’s fever, soaking up as much as 90% of the excess heat produced by those greenhouse gases. 

Yet, until relatively recently, little attention was paid to the health of the ocean, especially the part that lies beyond regional and territorial regulations known as the high seas. (Much of the deep ocean is also unexplored; some say we know the surface of the moon better than the seabed). The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 14, ‘Life Below Water’, is the least funded of all the goals. 

Countries have a chance to rectify this neglect at the upcoming UN Ocean Conference at Nice, France—and to do so in a way that also ensures the livelihoods and rights of the coastal communities that depend on the now-warming seas. From June 9-13, leaders, scientists, and organisations from more than 200 countries will convene on the Côte D’Azur to hammer out ways to protect the seas, including by regulating activities like fishing and mining, preserving marine biodiversity, and reducing pollution. Some of the conference participants are also engaged in the still-pending Global Plastics Treaty—more than ten million tons of plastic enter the ocean every year and into the fish that we eat. 

France, co-host of the conference with Costa Rica, has taken the lead in rallying diplomatic momentum for ocean conservation in the past few months, with in-country dialogues in Egpyt and India, among others.  (In India, the French embassy hosted events across cities themed around the ocean and joined with the Indian ministry of earth sciences for ‘Blue Talks’.) “This is an emergency,” said Jérôme Bonnafont, France’s Permanent Representative to the UN, during a press conference May 27. “An ecological emergency: we are witnessing the deterioration of the quality of the oceans as an environment, as a reservoir of biodiversity, as a carbon sink.” The goal, he said, “is to produce a Nice agreement that is pro-oceans, as the Paris Agreement 10 years ago now was for the climate.” 

A key target will be to get more countries to ratify the Treaty of the High Seas (officially called Marine Biodiversity of Areas beyond National Jurisdiction, or BBNJ Agreement) adopted by the UN General Assembly in June 2023. The treaty is intended to regulate overfishing and pollution in the ‘high seas’, an area that falls outside of any national or regional governance framework yet represents almost two-thirds of the ocean. The agreement aims to establish marine protected areas—just a sliver, or about 1%, of the high seas is now protected—as well as mandate environment impact assessments for marine activities, ensure fair sharing of benefits from marine genetic resources, and enable transfer of technology to help developing countries protect marine resources. 

While more than a 100 countries have signed the treaty—-an agreement that took almost two decades to negotiate—-only 22 have ratified it so far. At least 60 countries must do so before the treaty can go into force. 

Some countries are locked in disputes over maritime jurisdictions, notably in the South China Sea, and they might be concerned that protected areas will affect their territorial claims. It’s also not clear how countries would be held accountable on sharing benefits or transferring technology to developing countries—the latter has certainly been difficult to enforce in the climate space. Experts also point out the pact’s omission of oil and gas exploration and lack of integration with national coastal rules.  

Conservation groups like the IUCN have ambitious dreams for Nice: they would like to see not only ratification of the High Seas Treaty but its enforcement by next year; a strong plastics agreement; and a ‘One Ocean Finance Facility’, a UN-mandated global financing entity to fund all of this action. Yet, the global seafood industry will also be leaning its fins on the negotiation scale. In a recent report, UK-based NGO, InfluenceMap, found that 30 large seafood companies and 12 industry associations lobbying against green protections. Industry pushback was greatest on regulation of bottom trawling and expansion of marine protected areas, the analysis found. 

Global environmental talks are almost always presided over by the twin deities of Hope and Disappointment. Their mixed blessings were evident at the recent ‘Our Ocean Conference’ in Busan, South Korea in April, an annual conclave initiated back in 2014 by the US to accelerate action on the ocean while waiting for multilateral negotiations to conclude. The conference propels financial investments toward specific areas: the ocean-climate nexus, marine pollution, marine protected areas, sustainable fisheries and maritime security. This year’s conference was marked by the lowest pledges since 2016–— 277 new commitments amounting to some $9.1 billion—and the absence of officials from the U.S. (The Trump administration appears to be reducing engagement on international environmental treaties as well as outlays on environment-related issues.)

However, a recent assessment by World Resources Institute (WRI) of a decade of this conference shows some important gains. Over the past ten years, ‘Our Ocean Conference’ has garnered $160 billion from public and private organizations—not a sum to sneeze at. And most of these funds are already being deployed, the analysis found.  

Nevertheless, the pledges are well short of the $175 billion per year needed for ocean conservation. And there are imbalances: most of the funding went to climate action such as green shipping and offshore wind rather than marine protected areas. (Such MPAs currently cover just 8.3% of the ocean, far behind the 30% target that countries have pledged to meet by 2030.) There are also geographical imbalances: the Indian, Southern, and Arctic ocean basins have received the fewest commitments, which also likely reflects a tendency to invest locally, WRI said. Europe is a top funder. 

Which brings us back to Nice. The UN meet’s draft political declaration is now in circulation and has already received some criticism. International environmental group Greenpeace says it lacks the ambition needed to address the crisis. It claims the text has been weakened in a number of ways, including on the issue of deep-sea mining and the removal of  a “human rights-based” approach that would ensure the participation of coastal and indigenous people—often, the people most dependent on marine systems for survival. UN Special Rapporteur on human rights, Astrid Puentes Riaño, also raised some of these issues recently. “Human rights cannot be an afterthought,” she said adding, “Commitments must also advance access to information, public participation and access to justice for everyone.” In April, the UN Human Rights Council had adopted a resolution on human rights and the ocean. 

This column began with some numbers that captured the role of the ocean in maintaining Earth. The following figures reflect the importance of the ocean in sustaining humans: The oceans carry 80% of global trade. Coastal communities in developing nations rely on small-scale fishing for 15-30% of their nutrient intake. And 600 million people—or one in three globally—depend on the seas for their livelihood. Will Nice help them stay above water?

How the health of the ocean affects Indians

India has a long coastline of over 11,000 km, with some 3000 villages along the shoreline. Around 250 million people reside within 50 kms of the coast*Fishing is the backbone of coastal communities both in terms of livelihood and food, especially protein*The Indian fishery sector has grown in the past few decades—the country is now the world’s second-largest fish-producing nation, due to both marine fishing and aquaculture*India aims to develop its ‘blue economy’ further through a variety of schemes and programs, for which it needs a sustainable fishery*Pollution, trawling and warming seas are all affecting fish catch of small fishers who don’t have the resources to go as far out into the sea as the big boats*Climate change is expected to make their lives more difficult with increased extreme events like cyclones and marine heatwaves. According to a recent study, the Indian Ocean is being pushed to a near-permanent heatwave state.

Source: Research papers, UN, GOI

Earth Shifts, a monthly column on The Migration Story, will analyse the impact of global green goals amid mounting climate uncertainties on lives and livelihoods. 

Vaishnavi Chandrashekhar is an environment and science journalist based in Mumbai.