This is a legitimate question as the Trump II administration is attacking multilateralism (leaving the Paris Agreement on Climate Change or the World Health Organization) and environmental science and policy at home (against NOAA, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and the EPA, the US Environment Protection Agency). This represents an additional challenge to come up with an ambitious consensus that can represent a decisive step forward for the protection and restoration of the ocean.
But just as US and UK opposition at the AI global summit held this week in Paris did not prevent dozens of countries, including China and India, to pledge an open, inclusive and ethical approach to the development of AI technology, the hope of a meaningful agreement in Nice remains alive.
The current “zero draft” of the Nice Ocean Action Declaration is disappointing. And exactly for that reason, we must continue to advocate for the Protection Principle: making ocean protection the norm, not the exception.
- Read our paper Advancing the Protection Principle, published in October 2024 in Cali, Colombia at the 16th Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (COP16).
The Nice conference outcome can take several forms, which are not necessarily mutually exclusive:
- Multilateral: the “zero draft” of the Nice Ocean Action Declaration needs to be strengthened, not the opposite.
- Plurilateral: one or more groups of countries can join forces and agree in Nice to go beyond the multilateral lowest common denominator to increase their ambition.
- Polylateral: voluntary agreements and programmes committing together governments, international organizations, non-governmental organizations, philanthropy and/or private sector entities can also play an important role to raise ambition.
