Fierce Competition is Straining the Ocean

Plastic, overfishing, global warming and fighting over resources. Despite several urgent problems, oceans and marine resources are the most underfunded of the UN’s sustainability goals. At the ocean conference in Nice, countries will now try to agree and find funding to protect and preserve the world’s oceans.

In autumn 2023, several countries signed an agreement to protect the deep sea, but so far it has not entered into force because not enough countries have ratified it, i.e. formally committed themselves to the agreement. Sweden is one of the countries that has not done so. With the UN Ocean Conference now being held in Nice, it would be a huge prestige boost for the host country, France, to get the 60 countries needed on board.

Karina Barquet, researcher and group leader for water, coasts and oceans at the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), is unsure whether this will be achieved, but still sees the meeting as important for driving the work forward.

A lot was set in motion at the last meeting, and my experience is that things tend to happen in connection with these meetings. This year alone, we have seen eight new countries ratify the global ocean agreement.

‘Most important agreement’

When Sweden signed the agreement in autumn 2023, the then Minister for Foreign Affairs Tobias Billström called it ‘the most important climate agreement since the Paris Agreement’, but Sweden is not among the countries that have ratified it.

‘It’s a bit strange, because Sweden was a driving force and one of the first countries to sign. So we also think it’s very important that Sweden does its homework at home,’ says Karin Lexén, Secretary General of the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation.

The agreement has been considered crucial for the 2022 Ocean Conference agreement to protect 30 per cent of the world’s oceans and land areas by 2030. This work has been slow, with only 8.4 per cent of the oceans currently protected.

Despite this, Johanna Fox, head of WWF’s international Baltic Sea programme, believes that developments following the Ocean Conference are moving in the right direction.

We have a framework in place and we have a goal to protect 30 per cent of the world’s oceans. Now it’s time for action. There are five years left until 2030, so we really hope that the conference will be a kick-start to achieving the goals that the world’s countries have set.

The future of the ocean

Karina Barquet would have liked the conference to have placed more emphasis on the increasingly fierce competition over the oceans.

‘I believe that, in the long term, much of the future of the oceans will be determined by how we manage to combine different interests – such as the environment, energy policy, fishing and security issues – which are very topical issues in Sweden and which I would have liked to see addressed more actively at the conference.’