Our Ocean, Our Future
This week foreign ministers, ministers of the environment and oceans, along with leaders from the NGO community, private sector, philanthropists, experts from academia, and young people came from near and far, helping call attention of the world to the enormous challenge of protecting our ocean. I hosted the 2016 Our Ocean Conference in Washington, D.C. as a means of catalyzing action to protect our ocean from a number of real threats — including unsustainable and illegal fishing, marine pollution, and climate-related impacts — and to empower a new generation to lead the way toward a healthy and sustainable ocean.
I confess this topic is in fact deeply personal to me. The sheer power of the ocean, its poignant, incomparable grandeur, is something that humans have felt viscerally from my earliest days. Our awe at the ocean’s life-giving power and its beauty has been captured by our most sacred religious texts, our great philosophies, our art and our literature. Achilles declared in The Iliad, “The ocean is the source of all.” Isaac Newton pursued, as he described, “the great ocean of truth.” Walt Whitman called the sea “a continual miracle.” Sarojini Naidu described the ocean as “our mother” and the waves as “our comrades.” And President John F. Kennedy remarked, “We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch, we are going back from whence we came.” So for me, and for literally billions of people around the world, that connection with the ocean is not just emotional, not just a question of admiring something glorious and unique, it is existential.
To put it simply, the ocean is essential to all life on Earth.
It is responsible for almost 50 percent of the oxygen that we breathe, for the food that we eat, for the climate in which we live, for the employment of hundreds of millions of people around the planet. The origin of life on our planet can be traced to the sea, and today the ocean is also the economic lifeblood of communities big and small on every single corner of the world, employing roughly 12 percent of the world’s population. Global revenue from marine fisheries and from related industries is in the hundreds of billions of dollars every single year.
But despite our knowledge and appreciation of the oceans’ importance, despite the inexorable link between the ocean and our variability to exist, we — humans — have been systematically undermining the ability of the maritime environment to nurture, perhaps even survive and sustain life. For, centuries, we have been polluting and pillaging the resources of the sea with devastating consequences for our coastal communities and our marine ecosystems.
Why, is this happening? One big part of the reason is traced to the sheer enormity of the ocean. The landmass of every continent combined is smaller than the Pacific Ocean alone. Confronted by a resource so vast, it is really difficult to wrap one’s head around the notion, the idea that we as human beings could actually do something to threaten the oceans’ future.
Thankfully, after decades of denial and neglect, we have begun to chart a new course for our ocean. The global community has begun to demonstrate a willingness to honor the responsibility that we have to future generations.
Over the last eight years, President Obama has taken very ambitious steps to address environmental issues ranging from cutting our largest sources of pollution to ocean conservation. Evidence of this commitment is seen in his recent expansion of the world’s largest marine preserve, an area twice the size of the state of Texas. As a result of these efforts, President Obama has set aside more land and water area than any president in the history of the United States.
Also consider, for example, the first two of Our Ocean conferences that were held here in Washington and Valparaiso, Chile. Those events generated more than $4 billion of commitments to conservation and other kinds of pilot projects and initiatives to deal with coastal communities and fishing, and more than 6 million square kilometers of newly protected ocean.
Then look at some of the remarkable commitments that have been put forward over the past two days:
This year we launched the Safe Ocean Network to connect various initiatives to detect Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated fishing, enforce international laws, and prosecute those who violate them. Over the course of this conference, we announced the first wave of more than 40 projects that will be part of the Safe Ocean Network, as well as the initial partners for the program, which comprise 27 governments including the EU, and nearly 20 civil society organizations. The United States alone announced more than $65 million over the next five years for Safe Ocean Network projects while Oceana, SkyTruth and Google, Paul Allen’s Vulcan, the Pew Charitable Trusts and Satellite Applications Catapult all announced major, innovative contributions that will help the world better monitor the ocean.
Together, we created more than 40 significant new or expanded marine protected areas (MPAs), including the first two in the Atlantic Ocean with the sister MPAs announced by the United States and Canada. In total, the steps nations have taken this year will protect nearly 4 million square kilometers of ocean water. In addition, more than $1 billion was put forward to address pollution, and 5 countries announced nation-wide plastic bag bans.
The Our Ocean conferences have also placed a spotlight on the connection between climate change, acidification, and the warming of our ocean. Many of the governments and organizations who attended this year’s conference have supported critical scientific efforts to expand our understanding of the impact of greenhouse gases and their emissions on our marine ecosystems. Many have also been working extremely hard to accelerate the essential transition to global low-carbon economy, which we know is by far the single most effective way to deal with climate change.
During this year’s conference, several new announcements were made about new projects that will help us better understand the impacts of climate change on our ocean — and ensure we are able to adapt to them. For example, my government announced the development of two cutting-edge satellites that will be sent into space to help us study what’s happening to the ocean — in addition to the $38 million we committed to help Pacific Island nations whose very existence is at stake adapt to rising seas, threatened fisheries, and the other impacts of climate change.
All told, the commitments we’ve made at the 2016 Our Ocean conference translate to more than $5.3 billion in initiatives to protect marine ecosystems, prevent pollution, and address the crippling impacts of climate change, matching the cumulative investments from the 2014 and 2015 conferences combined. And now with the EU’s commitment to host next year’s conference, Indonesia’s commitment to host the 2018 conference, and Norway’s commitment to host the 2019 conference, we know that the global cooperation that the Our Ocean conferences drives is going to continue for years to come.
The truth is, what we have accomplished in these two days marks not an end, but a beginning.
We are still in the earliest days of a new voyage of environmental leadership and discovery, informed by unassailable science, driven by an awakened and global constituency, and motivated by a recognition that delay, denial, and neglect just won’t do when the very health of our planet is at stake.
It is certainly true that the actions of mankind, the choices that we have made as a society, are in large part responsible for the dire state of the ocean today. But it’s also true that we are the only ones who can repair the problems that we have created. With every positive step that we take, with the marine protected areas that we create, with the networks that we create and the safeguards that we enforce to protect against illegal fishing, with the cooperation we pursue to combat climate change and to deepen scientific research — with each of these steps, we are restoring and preserving the health of the ocean.
And in doing so, we will create a current fueled by the energy of literally millions of advocates and activists, a current that can correct the course of history, that can preserve our coastal communities and ecosystems, that can strengthen fisheries, and feed the billions who will inhabit this planet, and that will allow us to keep for future generations the majesty of the ocean.
The above was adapted from speeches delivered on September 15 and 16, 2016, at the 2016 Our Ocean Conference. You can read the welcome remarks and closing remarks here.
