The Pacific Ocean overflowed the map. There was nowhere to put it. It was so big, unruly and blue that it did not fit anywhere. So they left it outside my window.
That’s how Chilean poet Pablo Neruda described the sea he gazed out upon most days in his 1966 collection Una casa en la arena (A house in the sand). And while our oceans comprise around 70 percent of the planet’s surface area, it seems that we still struggle to make sense of them let alone manage them effectively or sustainably.
Oceans have frequently been left out of international discussions about climate change and sustainable development. For instance, during the 2015 negotiations for the Paris Agreement on climate change, the world’s oceans were not present at all they were just a side event, said Karmenu Vella, the E.U. commissioner for Environment, Maritime Affairs and Fisheries at the international Our Ocean 2019 conference in Oslo, Norway last month.
The conference has run annually since it was initiated by former U.S. secretary of state John Kerry in 2014 to bring oceans more explicitly into international conversations about climate change mitigation, biodiversity conservation and sustainable livelihoods. This year, delegates pledged a combined total of USD 63 billion toward ocean conservation and sustainable management, as well as announced a number of new marine protected areas (MPAs).
In the past five years, evidence and public awareness has also mounted about the role of oceans in buffering against weather events that link back climate change and the importance of coastal and marine ecosystems such as mangrove forests, seagrass meadows and saltwater marshes for carbon sequestration.