$63 Billion Committed To Help Save Our Planet’s Oceans

The sixth annual “Our Ocean Conference” took place on October 23rd and 24th in Oslo, Norway. The website states that the purpose of this annual conference is to “bring together leaders from governments, businesses, civil society and research institutions to share their experiences, identify solutions and commit to action for a clean, healthy and productive ocean.” This year, international governments made 370 monetary commitments to improving marine health and oceanic improvements; the commitments totaled $63 billion. 

At the conference last year $10 billion was committed amongst the world’s groups, however, this years increase shows a sense of greater urgency. Last years commitment has helped create protections for one third of the world’s ocean’s, so leaders are hoping this large increase in commitment will help speed up the process of protecting the many ecosystems that make up our oceans. Speakers at the event put a heavy focus on the importance of remembering the goals set out every year, and maintain them while also improving upon them as time progresses and environmental conditions worsen. 

“As someone who grew up by the ocean and lives in a country that derives two-thirds of its revenue from the ocean, I know that we cannot choose between ocean protection and ocean productivity. We need to achieve both. We have to recognize the connection between ocean health and ocean wealth: we need ocean resources, but the oceans can only be productive if they are healthy,” said Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg. 

One of the main focuses behind these financial commitments has always been a reduction in global overfishing. The fishing industry is responsible for a huge percentage of ocean pollution, and is causing fish populations to drop at an extremely fast rate. When certain fish populations decrease it means that integral members of certain ecosystems are no longer there, killing off other species of marine life within those systems. However, at this point the damage has been done, the focus can’t now be maintaining what we have left, but how to rebuild what was lost. “We need to rebuild ocean abundance — simply conserving what’s left isn’t enough. We need a new solutions pathway,” said Alexandra Cousteau, a senior adviser for international marine environmental NGO Oceana.

According to Manuel Barange, director of fisheries and aquaculture policy and resources for the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), in an interview with Mongabay Magazine, we really need to focus on the importance of considering and supporting the 10 percent of the world’s population that relies on fishing for their livelihoods. “Check your privileges — it’s easy to dismiss food systems when your life and livelihood does not depend on them, most of the people in this room are not part of that 10 percent.”

In addition, government forces plan on using the funding to greater support the crackdown on unregulated and illegal fishing industries. These industries bring in around 26 million fish every year, creating another huge percentage of marine life taken from the oceans annually. New technologies that involve fishing vessel tracking software, fish migration tracking, and ocean scanning devices are being more heavily used and distributed throughout the globe, according to Mongabay. Additionally, there’s a new call to increase the amount of Marine Protected Areas (MPA’s) in the world. MPA’s are natural bodies of water on Earth that are protected from any sort of fishing, polluting, etc. The new initiative calls to have 30% of the planet’s oceans protected as MPA’s by 2030. 

Plastic pollution is also an obvious and growing concern in regard to ocean pollution. Every year over 8 million tons of plastic is dumped in the ocean. These plastics also emit microplastics into the waters that are spread and ingested by all marine life, and therefore ingested by anything/anyone who eats that marine life. So the conference came up with some solutions to help support anti-plastic efforts. 

“Norway, Sweden and Grenada committed to establishing and supporting a global, legally binding treaty to combat marine plastic pollution by 2023. Other countries and companies made individual commitments: Peru announced a ban on polystyrene, and the Alliance to End Plastic Waste, comprised of 42 largely multinational companies, committed to investing $1.5 billion over the next five years to research toward reducing plastic production and developing better recycling techniques and cleanup efforts.”

These decisions are major for the health of our planet, however, the group is under constant scrutiny, because even with these new expensive plans, many people have a “too little too late” sort of attitude. Massive damage has already been done to our oceans ecosystems, much of it irreversible. So while these efforts and commitments of billions of dollars is appreciated and will most likely help, we have to constantly be wondering if it’s enough.