For the global oceans: How does the UN’s latest Global Ocean Treaty draft text shape up? Greenpeace UK examines – Oceanographic Magazine

With these major issues to grapple with, much remains to be done to determine whether this Treaty will truly represent a sea-change in our relationship to the global oceans. Since the last round of UN negotiations in August, political commitment for ocean protection has grown, with 11 nations coming together in a Global Ocean Alliance to advocate for the 3030 target and highlighting the Global Ocean Treaty as a crucial tool in delivering this vision for the next decade. This kind of leadership at a political level will be essential to inject momentum and ambition into what has largely remained technical negotiations.

No one is going to want a legacy of a weak treaty that simply creates paper parks, failing to halt and turn the tide on biodiversity loss. But governments will need to step up their political engagement, and give this treaty the diplomatic attention it requires, to achieve a robust framework that can help our oceans recover.

Amid a rising wave of public mobilisation on the climate and nature emergencies, its welcome to see the text refer to ocean stewardship on behalf of present and future generations. Intergenerational justice is a vital principle in prioritising long-term ocean health over short-term exploitation, and a sign of the impact that youth strikers have had on political discussions on the environment. The draft also allows for the precautionary principle to be included to guide the implementation of the Treaty, which is particularly important given that the high seas are the least explored and understood by scientists. The deep sea epitomises this: a tiny 0.0001% of its seafloor has been subject to biological investigation by scientists, yet the nascent deep-sea mining industry is keen to plunder the depths, risking irreversible biodiversity loss, potential extinctions, and disturbance to vital carbon storage processes in the deep sea.

There is growing public pressure and scrutiny on the political efforts to comprehensively tackle the nature crisis and climate emergency. The eyes of the world will be watching a series of international summits on nature and climate in 2020 to assess how governments respond and the Global Ocean Treaty negotiations, defining the future of more space than all the continents combined, will be a first major test.

Photographs by Paul Hilton, Dean Miller, Christian slund, Bernd Remmelt, Jonas Scheu, Nick Cobbing and Daniel Beltr, courtesy of Greenpeace UK.

__________

Unplug. Reconnect.

#WhereWillYouReadYours?

See the original post here:

For the global oceans: How does the UN's latest Global Ocean Treaty draft text shape up? Greenpeace UK examines - Oceanographic Magazine