Open-ended Informal Consultative Process on Oceans and the Law of the Sea

As delivered

Intervention by Peter Thomson, the President of the UN General Assembly, at the 18th meeting of the UN Open-ended Informal Consultative Process on Oceans and the Law of the Sea

15 May 2017

 

Your Excellencies, the Co-Chairs.
All courtesies observed.

I’m very happy to be here today to address the eighteenth meeting of the United Nations Open-ended Informal Consultative Process on Oceans and the Law of the Sea.

I thank Ambassadors Korneliou and Meza-Cuadra for their service as Co-Chairs of the ICP and for their invitation to me to address you today.

I also thank the Secretariat for their preparations and express my deep appreciation to the panellists and experts who will be sharing their insights with us during the course of the meeting.

Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen,

In these challenging times, there are few phenomena of greater importance to the sustainability of our species on this planet than the health of the Ocean and the ominous threat of climate change.

Global consciousness of the existential nature of these phenomena reached levels that enabled us, at the end of 2015, to put in place multilateral agreements that were universally adopted by the leaders of all nations.

With the ratification process proceeding at record pace, the Paris Climate Agreement entered into force last year and the first Meeting of the Parties to the Paris Agreement took place at COP22 in Marrakech in November 2016.

Of course, all this represents but a dash to first base. The massive transformations of mitigation and adaptation lie ahead, and all along we will have to be vigilant to ward off recalcitrance, maintain the urgency, and lift ambition. And the realities of climate change demand our constant attention; for many fundamentals of the environment are transforming as we speak.

The equally worrisome decline in the health of the Ocean led to the inclusion of SDG14 in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. For the first time, a universally adopted Sustainable Development Goal came into being to address the woes humanity has been putting upon the Ocean. The list of woes is long, including a plague of marine pollution, steadily depleting fish stocks, degrading and destruction of coastal, coral reef and marine ecosystems, inadequate governance of the high seas, and the acidifying, warming and deoxygenizing of the Ocean.

The universal adoption of SDG14 committed us all to the conservation and sustainable management of the Ocean’s resources. This was a moment of honesty. It was an admission by humanity that we were harming the Ocean and that we had a common responsibility to commence remedial action.

But how to do so? How to reverse the cycle of decline that our actions had cumulatively put upon the Ocean? How to ensure that SDG14 was not just a beautiful collection of words?

The answer did not lie in reliance on the status quo, for the status quo had presided over the Ocean’s decline. The answer demanded scientific truth-telling, laying bare the extent of the problems and producing the best solutions to comprehensively meet the targets of SDG14.

The answer lay in convening all of humanity who felt committed to making SDG14 succeed, into a real moment of responsibility, so that the truth and the solutions could be shared and acted upon.

This meant opening the doors of cooperation to humanity as a whole, to the private sector, the fisheries and shipping industries, the scientific community, non-governmental organisations, civil society, philanthropies, and of course the public sector of governments, multilateral agencies and programmes, along with us here at the United Nations.

 

Thus it was that The Ocean Conference was mandated by the General Assembly last year, to support the noble aims of SDG14. In 21 days’ time, for the full week of 5-9 June, the United Nations campus will be home to what may prove to be the most important gathering ever held in support of Ocean’s well-being.

And so, I look forward to working with you all at The Ocean Conference and to our collecting every visionary and pragmatic solution we can to heal the Ocean. To any that have not yet done so, I urge you or those you represent, to visit the conference website and without delay register your voluntary commitment in support of SDG14. Enter this global register and you will join with those who are standing to be counted in the defence of the sustainability of life in the Ocean.

Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen,
The oneness of the planetary climate and the Ocean is a fundament of Nature. Every second breath we take is thanks to the Ocean’s production of oxygen. Rain clouds roll in from Ocean’s evaporation to replenish the land. The Ocean absorbs heat and greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and serves as a vast sink for carbon dioxide emissions.

But all is not well. Thanks to the steady accumulation of anthropogenically-created greenhouse gases, the planet’s atmospheric temperatures have been steadily rising. As a result the Ocean is warming, leading to rising sea levels and migration of marine life away from over-heating tropical waters. Science tells us this warming will continue throughout the twenty-first century.

Meanwhile the rising C02 levels of the atmosphere are causing the Ocean to acidify, making life tougher for calcium-based marine life, including vertebrates and shellfish. Already the alarm bells are ringing for many of the world’s commercial oyster industries.

The effects of the exponential melting of the ice cap of the Arctic and Greenland are yet to be fully understood, but inversion of the life-bringing Gulf Stream is one consequence that has been postulated. According to a scientific report delivered to the Artic Council last week, the Artic Sea may be free of ice in summer twenty years from now.

Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen,
Your discussions at the ICP on climate change and the Ocean will enrich the preparations for and deliberations at The Ocean Conference. I encourage you to develop ideas at this meeting that will add to the solutions presented at the conference, particularly in this case at the Partnership Dialogue on Ocean Acidification to be co-chaired by Monaco and Mozambique.

These are times when all beneficial work on behalf of the Ocean must be embraced and supported – we must extend our partnerships and networks far and wide. Here at the UN, your findings and those of The Ocean Conference will also enrich the High Level Political Forum’s consideration of SDG14 when it is convened in July.

We are part of a forward-looking process, a determined march towards achievement of SDG14 by the mandated year of 2030. In resolutely pursuing this process we carry a promise to our children and grandchildren to restore Ocean’s health, so that we do not continue to steal from their future.

We who wish to see humanity’s respect for the Ocean resurrected, for natural balance to be restored, for the joy and bounty of the Ocean to live on – we are all set sail on a grand endeavour. And our fleet will not be sunk, nor will it be diverted; we will reach that harbour of restored respect. And we will be driven there by honesty of effort, in fulfilment of SDG14, our universally agreed undertaking to conserve and sustainably manage the resources of the Ocean.

Thank you for your attention.

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