As the 3rd UN Ocean Conference in Nice has now ended, we would like to thank again our partners who made the #LetsBeNicetotheOcean initiative possible. We extend our gratitude to the 110+ organizations who have come in support of the Protection Principle – making ocean protection the norm rather than the exception.
Let’s Be Nice to the Ocean was launched in November 2023 as part of the response to a mandate given to The Varda Group and the Ocean & Climate Platform to mobilize civil society on the road to Nice.
Will the unprecedented presence of 64 Heads of State and Government at a UN Ocean Conference bring ocean change and the challenges it entails a la par with climate change in international diplomacy? The future will tell, and in the meantime, we recognize that President Macron’s leadership lifted the bar.
However, if we dive beyond the background noise, challenges remain immense.
- Even if – with 50 ratifications – entry into force of the UN Agreement on Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) of 2023 is getting closer, there is a lot of work ahead. Once it is in force, BBNJ will be an important tool, but whether governments will know how to use that tool remains to be seen.
- At the crossroad of marine biodiversity and climate concerns, the most important high seas area of the planet is the Southern Ocean, the global conveyor belt surrounding Antarctica (under international law, the high seas starts on the shore of the Antarctic continent where there are no jurisdictional waters). Yet, there has been no serious attempt in Nice to protect the Southern Ocean, currently affected by a combination of climate change impacts and the proliferation of industrial krill fishing fleets threatening the entire food chain, including penguins, seals, whales and other iconic species.
- The controversy around the protection of the deep sea remains. On the one hand 37 countries are calling for a moratorium on deep sea mining, but the Trump Administration is pushing seabed mining unilaterally as if the ocean belonged to him (after his Gulf of America” stunt, will he try to rename our our ocean “the Ocean of America”?). We will know at the Assembly of the International Seabed Authority (ISA) in Kingston, Jamaica in a few weeks whether Donald Trump has shot himself in the foot with his disregard for international law.
- Ocean advocates also received a cold shower this week, when it became clear that President Macron was taking side for the continuation of bottom trawling – the infamous destructive, wasteful and non-selective fishing methods. To the dismay of scientists, environmental economists and environmental and social justice NGOs, President Macron did not even support ruling out this destructive fishing in so-called marine “protected” areas. Non-sense: you cannot protect and destroy an area at the same time. When will common sense prevail?
This issue was addressed by our coordinator Rémi Parmentier in an op-ed published by Le Monde this week.
In this text, Rémi also explains that bottom trawling would not be economically feasible if distant water and high seas industrial fishing fleets were not receiving generous public subsidies. According to Target 6 of SDG14, the Ocean Sustainable Goal which the Nice conference was meant to promote, these harmful subsidies should have already been removed in… 2020.
- With the announcement on Day 1 of the Nice Conference, of an independent multidisciplinary Protection Principle Task Force to address 10 key issues in 2026, the development of the Protection Principle – the new paradigm making ocean protection the norm rather than the exception – will continue. Plans are for the Task Force’s report to be released in 2027, one year before the 4th UN Ocean Conference, which will be co-chaired by Chile and the Republic of Korea.
Check our new paper on the Task Force, Bringing the Protection Principle into Action