In December 2019, Greenpeace International released 30×30 In Hot Water: The climate crisis and the urgent need for ocean protection. This makes the scientific case for creating a network of marine sanctuaries covering at least 30% of the world’s ocean, both to increase marine life’s resilience to climate change and to help mitigate its effect by protecting natural blue carbon stores.
Since In Hot Water was released, new research has shown a possible weakening of the ocean’s ability to sequester and store carbon, while climate impacts on the ocean and coastal communities have worsened.
In the meantime, governments have been dragging their feet on measures to effectively protect the ocean. To this day, less than 1% of the high seas – the largest habitat on Earth, comprising 64% of the world’s ocean – is fully or highly protected from human activities. While marine protected areas (MPAs) can be a powerful tool to help restore biodiversity and provide climate benefits, they will only succeed if they are well designed and properly enforced. A recent study of the world’s largest 100 MPAs, representing close to 90% of reported global MPA coverage, revealed that 25% of the assessed MPA coverage is not implemented, and that 33% is incompatible with conservation objectives. There are two factors underlying this: the lack of regulations or management, and the insufficient level of protection in some MPAs where destructive activities are still allowed to take place.
However, the picture isn’t entirely bleak. Political momentum for ocean protection has been growing and some major milestones have been reached in the last couple of years, triggering a wave of hope.
In December 2022, 196 members participating in the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in Montreal, Canada, agreed on the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. This included Target 3, also called “30×30”, committing to the protection of at least 30% of land and sea by 2030. While governments need to ensure the necessary level of funding and ambition to reach this target, they must also define networks of fully or highly protected MPAs to implement the target by the 2030 deadline.
In March 2023, after decades of negotiations, the UN agreed on a new Global Ocean Treaty, officially known as the Agreement under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea on the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ Agreement). Upon entering into force, it will be the first legally binding treaty targeted specifically at conserving marine life within the high seas, and a powerful tool that governments can use to help deliver the 30×30 target by creating vast ocean sanctuaries free from destructive human activities on the high seas.
The International Tribunal for Law of the Sea Advisory Opinion recognises that the Global Ocean Treaty provides tools for governments to fulfil their duty to address the interconnected crises of climate and ocean, which continue to worsen every day. With the 2030 deadline fast approaching, governments must tackle the climate crisis as a matter of utmost urgency. They need to set ambitious emission-reduction targets, transition to renewable energy, and ensure compliance with international climate agreements like the Paris Agreement to effectively tackle climate change. They must protect and restore natural stores of carbon in the ocean and the ecosystem process that maintains them. They must also start working on MPA proposals to be presented at the first BBNJ Conference of the Parties, or Ocean COP, and listen to over a million people around the world who are calling on them to urgently ratify the Global Ocean Treaty.
Key facts about the climate crisis and the urgent need for ocean protection
- The ocean has absorbed more than 90% of the excess heat that greenhouse gases have trapped in the Earth’s system.
- Warming ocean waters mean the ocean is 1–2% less oxygenated than in the 1970s, and marine species are being driven away from the equator towards higher, cooler latitudes.
- Sea ice is retreating in polar regions. The Arctic sea ice minimum extent in 2024 was the seventh-lowest on satellite record, and the 18 lowest annual minima have all occurred in the last 18 years. Antarctic sea ice has recently also seen dramatic falls. This reduction in sea ice coverage has triggered a negative feedback loop of more rapid ocean warming.
- Continued decline in sea ice loss means habitat loss for ice-dependent species, including iconic species like emperor penguins. Under current emissions projections, it is anticipated that by the end of the century nearly all emperor penguin colonies may decline by more than 90%.
- Coral reefs are the foundation of many marine ecosystems throughout the tropics, but climate change and ocean acidification are putting their health at risk. During the latest global bleaching event, by July 2024, 73% of the world’s corals had been exposed to enough heat to begin the bleaching that could eventually cause their death.
- Climate change is having devastating impacts on coastal human populations through sea level rise, more intense storms, and loss of fishing grounds and tourism opportunities. Low-income, marginalised and Indigenous groups are bearing the brunt of these impacts.
- The ocean’s ability to passively absorb carbon dioxide (which has led to ocean acidification) appears to be being reduced. The deep ocean
- is the largest carbon sink on Earth, but a recent study suggests that the rate at which the ocean is absorbing carbon dioxide cannot keep pace with emissions.
- The biological pump which captures organic carbon is disrupted by industrial overfishing, while bottom-towed fishing activities disturb and release seabed carbon stores.
- Healthy, diverse ecosystems build ocean resilience to climate impacts. Marine protected areas (MPAs) promote ocean health – they foster larger, more genetically diverse marine populations, act as safe havens for migratory species, and support ecosystem functions such as the biological carbon pump.
- The Global Ocean Treaty is a vital tool for delivering a network of high seas MPAs to enable governments to realise the globally agreed “30×30” target, and has environmental impact assessment provisions to better evaluate the climate impacts of high seas activities. Rapid ratification and implementation of the Global Ocean Treaty is therefore critical for safeguarding the ocean and protecting its natural stores of carbon and the ecological processes that contribute to them.
Report: In Hotter Water – How the Global Ocean Treaty can boost climate action
After witnessing the effects of sea-level rise in the low-lying island nation of Tuvalu, Pacific leaders on Tuesday used the pre-COP31 summit in Fiji to voice their frustration at the difficulties they have experienced in tapping the global climate finance system.
A small group of government leaders, climate negotiators and heads of development banks and climate funds took a trip to Tuvalu’s Funafuti atoll on Tuesday morning, travelling by road over land just 10-20 metres wide to visit a project that is building barriers to keep the sea from the land.
They then flew to Fiji for the pre-COP summit, where several Pacific leaders said they had been let down by the insufficient quantity, bad terms and slow speed of international finance to help them adapt to a warming climate that is bringing higher oceans, drought and more powerful storms to their shores.
“Right now, our islands are like a canoe that has been rammed by a massive foreign ship. Our canoe is taking on water, we are sinking, and what is the world’s response?” asked Palau’s President Surangel Whipps Jr.
“They hand us a tiny patch to cover a gaping hole,” he continued, “but the bureaucratic process just to receive that patch is so slow that the water fills the hole while we wait. Then to rebuild the vessel so that we can survive the next storm, we are offered loans, debt that adds weight to a sinking boat packaged in red tape so thick we can barely access it. And while we wait, the water continues to fill.”
Pacific leaders and Australia called again on governments to invest in the new Pacific Resilience Facility (PRF), which has been designed by the Pacific Islands Forum and is seeking $500 million in investments by COP31 in November.
It has around $180 million so far, but did not receive additional pledges during the UN General Assembly in New York. The PRF aims to invest to generate annual returns which it can give to projects like water tanks for drought-hit communities.
Witnessing sea level rise
The annual pre-COP gathering is usually a low-profile technical meeting of climate negotiators. But this year, Australia – which is the president of negotiations at COP31 – partnered with the Pacific to introduce a “leaders segment” in an attempt to shine a spotlight on climate issues affecting the region.
Fourteen government leaders – from Australia, Timor-Leste, Mauritius and the Pacific – made the trip. They were joined by the European Union’s climate commissioner Wopke Hoekstra, the heads of the Green Climate Fund and the Asian Development Bank and former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard.
On their return to Fiji, Solomon Islands Prime Minister Matthew Wale told the pre-COP leaders roundtable that the sea level rise they had witnessed was personal for him.
“Tuvalu was not just a site visit for me. I saw the story of my own saltwater people,” he said, adding that he, his daughter and his grandfather had lost their houses to sea level rise and that three-quarters of his electorate live on land that will be underwater in the next 30 years.
From the other side of the world, Antigua and Barbuda’s environment minister Michael Joseph said Tuvalu’s problems felt similar to those of his own Caribbean islands. “I saw vulnerable communities… just metres from the sea and people determined to remain on their land, preserve their culture and way of life,” he said.
A group of Fijian schoolchildren told the leaders it was not just sea level rise the Pacific struggles with but also heatwaves, droughts and storms, which worry their families and prevent them from learning.
Climate finance red-tape
Several Pacific leaders criticised the world’s leaders for not doing enough to combat climate change. Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown expressed disappointment that only two non-Pacific leaders had come to the pre-COP, a fact Australian media widely picked up on to label the event a flop and question its A$20 million (US$14m) price tag.
“We’ve heard a lot of numbers these last two days,” Brown said. “Let me share one of my own. More than 50 invitations extended to world leaders… to see for themselves what high emissions are doing to our nations and our ocean – an ocean that covers nearly one-third of the Earth’s surface.”
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He called for more climate finance for the Pacific, asking “if the world is prepared to assess our suitability for climate finance, why is it not equally prepared to scrutinise whether those responsible for delivering it are meeting their obligations?”
Like Palau’s president Whipps, Naoero’s President David Adeang criticised the red tape that is hindering access to climate finance as well as a lack of money, complaining especially about “complicated procedures, heavy reporting, delays in approval and disbursement”.
Adeang added that “the way we assess vulnerability matters”, adding that it should be measured by more than income. Naoero, for example, is classified by the World Bank as high-income, restricting which climate finance it is eligible for.
Action plan to improve access
On Thursday, the Australian government will present a statement and action plan on improving access to climate finance for small island developing states and least developed countries, which it is asking other countries and organisations to endorse.
The statement addresses some of these Pacific complaints as well as acknowledging that progress has already been made on simplifying access by multilateral development banks and climate funds.
In Fiji, Asian Development Bank head Masato Kanda said his institution is “tailoring our finance and operations to island realities” because “your children and their children should be able to grow old in the countries their ancestors have called home for millennia”.
The executive director of the Green Climate Fund (GCF), Mafalda Duarte, said that the GCF-backed coastal adaptation project leaders visited in Tuvalu shows that “climate finance works” although – as the project took eight years to implement – “it takes time, and therefore we have no time to waste”.
Australia calls for optimism
While Pacific leaders expressed concern that the world is set to blast past its agreed 1.5C warming limit, endangering their nations, Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called for “optimism”. “If people think there is no hope, then they will not strive to get the change that we need,” he said.
He said that when he attended his first COP in 2005, Australia’s renewable energy target was 2%. Its target is now 82% renewable electricity by 2030.
While Albanese promoted Australia’s success at electrifying homes and businesses and rolling out renewables, he has been criticised by climate campaigners for extending the production of fossil fuels, including coal – largely for export.
France’s Minister for Ecological Transition Monique Barbut defended the European Union’s climate action at the pre-COP meeting. She said the continent was heating up and reducing emissions faster and providing more climate finance than anywhere else in the world.
“It is time for all major emitters to step up and do their fair share” on climate finance, she said. Most developing countries with large emissions have fiercely resisted joining the club of climate finance donors, arguing they have played a disproportionately small historic role in causing climate change.
Barbut, as well as Palau’s president Whipps, called for the next flagship scientific assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to be finished by COP33 in 2028, in time to inform the next global stocktake of national climate action.
This timeline has been opposed by countries like India, Saudi Arabia and China, who argue it would put an unfair burden on developing countries. Barbut said countries should “support the work of the IPCC rather than sabotage its calendar”.
Barbut said that governments should agree at COP31 to aim to raise the share of “clean electricity” in final energy consumption to 35% by 2035. The Turkish and Australian governments have pushed for this goal although without specifying that the electricity should be “clean”. Barbut added that COP31 should also agree to cut emissions of methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas.
The post Pacific leaders rail at climate finance failures after pre-COP trip to Tuvalu appeared first on Climate Home News.
Pacific leaders rail at climate finance failures after pre-COP trip to Tuvalu
Jacynta Fa’amau is a Pacific campaigner at global grassroots climate movement 350.org and a secretariat member of Pacific Climate Warriors.
The first thing that struck me was the sheer size of Queensland’s Saraji coal mine. Standing at the edge of the enormous pit, my brain scrambled for words as I scanned the earth’s open wound – a whole island could probably fit inside it.
Looking down, I noticed footprints of an emu and a koala, pressed and dried in what was once a puddle – signs of how drought had driven animals in desperate search of water, so dangerously close to the coal trucks and heavy machinery ahead.
Earlier this year, I joined a small group of Pacific Islanders on a journey through the Bowen Basin to learn from First Nations communities battling Australia’s mammoth coal industry. Of the more than 40 coal mines operating in the area, BHP & Mitsubishi Alliance’s Saraji mine is one of the largest. So it came as a painful shock to us when in August, the Australian government approved the mine’s extension just months after our visit.
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Witnessing coal extraction is devastating. It is bad enough to see what pillaging tonnes of coal can do to a mine’s immediate surroundings: dry creek beds, dwindling wildlife, denuded land. But to know that this coal will be shipped across the ocean, bring air pollution, and eventually lead to the destruction of Pacific islands thousands of miles away is another kind of heartbreak.
Rising ocean waters
I’m an Australian-born Samoan. In 2002, I visited my family home for the first time. My father took me to the rural community where generations of my family were raised. He did not have the words to describe how much has changed since rising ocean waters had taken away almost a third of the beach.
I learned of how we had to relocate my great‑great‑grandparents’ grave to higher ground twice in the last 15 years. Of how my cousins have to paddle out further to sea to catch fish, since warmer waters have destroyed much of the reef. Of how the ocean crashes so close to my uncle’s home that he had to build a new house further away.
We saw reflections of our own climate destruction in the Pacific when we shared these stories with our First Nations relatives at the edge of the Saraji mine. Murrawah Johnson and Teila Watson, both Birri Gubba and Gangulu women, made clear connections between their struggles and ours. “We don’t get to inherit our land and we don’t get to inherit our traditional roles. We are fighting a war on extinction,” Murrawah said.
Coal extraction devastated their lands and cultures – totems have disappeared, fresh water has become scarce – while the effects of using it have devastated ours. “King tide, cyclones, all the violence that has been enacted on your country and people is because of the violence that has been allowed here, to us and our country,” Teila said.
Wearing the mantle of climate leadership
This week, Australia is assuming the mantle of climate leadership as co-president and head of negotiations of this year’s UN Climate Change Conference, COP31. It will lead on deliberating the summit’s priorities as world leaders and climate negotiators descend on Fiji and Tuvalu for the pre-COP meetings.
Ironically, just days before the pre-COP began, the New South Wales Independent Planning Commission approved the largest-ever coal project the state has seen, set to emit an extra 800 million tonnes of carbon emissions. I joined the Pacific Climate Warriors and other communities in submitting about 4,000 appeals to oppose the project – yet these all fell on deaf ears.
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