Rupal Kalebere<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The ocean is often imagined as a distant frontier – vast, remote, and separate from everyday human life. Yet the discussions at the seventh webinar of the Global Maritime Accord Academy made one point unmistakably clear. The ocean is not separate from us. It regulates climate, sustains livelihoods, enables trade, carries data and energy infrastructure, supports biodiversity, and increasingly shapes questions of security and geopolitics. To protect the ocean, therefore, is not merely an environmental concern; it is a planetary, economic, and strategic necessity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The webinar, convened as a precursor to the launch of Ocean Action Year on World Oceans Day, brought together voices from science, civil society, fisheries, and maritime security. Across these perspectives, a common thread emerged: the health of the ocean cannot be protected through fragmented action. The threats facing the ocean deep-sea exploitation, plastic pollution, overfishing, climate change, and geopolitical competition are interconnected. The response must be equally integrated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One of the most powerful reminders came from the discussion on the deep ocean. Although the ocean covers around 70 percent of the planet, humanity has visually observed only a tiny fraction of the deep seafloor. Yet decisions are already being made about mining, fishing, resource extraction, waste disposal, and climate interventions in these poorly understood ecosystems. The deep ocean contains extraordinary biodiversity, including species that live for hundreds or even thousands of years, and ecosystems that recover very slowly from disturbance. This makes precaution not optional, but essential.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The deep sea is also increasingly viewed as a source of strategic materials. Polymetallic nodules, cobalt-rich crusts, hydrothermal vent deposits, and other seabed resources are being considered for mining. These materials may serve industrial and technological demand, including the green transition, but extraction without adequate scientific understanding risks destroying ecosystems before they are even discovered. As Professor Lisa Levin emphasized, the deep ocean stands at a crossroads: the world must decide whether it will regulate use responsibly or repeat the extractive mistakes made on land. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The governance challenge is equally complex. The ocean is legally and institutionally divided across multiple regimes: biodiversity, fisheries, seabed mining, shipping, pollution, climate, and marine science are governed through separate bodies. This \u201csiloing\u201d is ill-suited to one highly interconnected ocean. The High Seas Treaty, or BBNJ Agreement, offers an important opening by addressing marine genetic resources, area-based management tools, environmental impact assessments, and capacity building in areas beyond national jurisdiction. But its effectiveness will depend on implementation. It must not remain a legal achievement on paper; it must become a practical framework for climate-smart, equitable, and science-based ocean governance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At the same time, the webinar made clear that ocean degradation does not begin only at sea. Plastic pollution is a striking example. The framing of marine plastic as merely an \u201cocean problem\u201d is itself a policy error. A major portion of marine plastic originates from land-based sources, travelling through cities, drains, rivers, stormwater systems, coastal settlements, ports, and fishing activity before entering the ocean. This means the most effective intervention point is often upstream: at the level of households, municipalities, river systems, and local waste infrastructure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The experience of youth-led initiatives such as Swachh Sagar demonstrates the importance of civil society action. Clean-ups, waste segregation campaigns, school and college outreach, and volunteer-led recovery of waste from water bodies can create visible impact. However, activism has limits if it is not supported by upstream reduction, producer accountability, and municipal enforcement. Clean-ups alone can become a treadmill if plastic production, disposal systems, and compliance mechanisms remain unchanged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is where ocean governance must widen its lens. Informal waste workers, coastal communities, fishing groups, youth volunteers, and local institutions are not peripheral actors. They are often the first line of defence. Policies that ignore them risk becoming technocratic and ineffective. The most durable behavioural change comes when people understand the full land-to-ocean pipeline: that waste discarded in a street, drain, or river can eventually become marine pollution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A similar argument applies to overfishing. Fisheries are not only an economic sector; they are a life-support system. They contribute to food security, nutrition, employment, trade, and community well-being. Yet overfishing continues to threaten marine ecosystems, especially where illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing persists and where harmful subsidies distort incentives. Professor Micheni Ntiba\u2019s remarks underlined that overfishing is not only a fisheries problem. It is also a governance problem, a societal awareness problem, and a justice problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ocean literacy therefore becomes central. Many people who depend on the ocean may never see it. Inland communities consume fish, use goods transported by sea, rely on rainfall generated through oceanic processes, and are affected by climate patterns shaped by ocean systems. Yet the ocean remains absent from classrooms, media narratives, public budgets, and everyday political imagination. Moving from \u201csea blindness\u201d to ocean literacy and eventually to ocean citizenship is essential.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This requires scientists to become better storytellers. Knowledge cannot remain confined to journals, laboratories, and expert conferences. It must reach schools, markets, fishing communities, media houses, government offices, and local institutions. Ocean action will gain political force only when citizens understand that the ocean is part of their own lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The security dimension adds further urgency. The ocean has long been valued as a space for trade routes, energy flows, undersea cables, and naval mobility. But climate change and geopolitical competition are transforming maritime spaces into zones of heightened risk. Rising seas, severe storms, changing monsoons, maritime boundary disputes, contested chokepoints, and growing militarisation all complicate ocean governance. As Vice Admiral Ben Bekkering argued, economic, ecological, security, and energy questions can no longer be treated separately.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is particularly important in an era when full global consensus is increasingly difficult. The answer may lie in regional and cross-regional coalitions of willing states, institutions, scientists, militaries, civil society groups, and industry actors. Such coalitions can create practical momentum even when universal agreement is slow. They can advance sustainable shipping, responsible fisheries, marine protected areas, plastic reduction, coastal resilience, and climate adaptation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The central lesson from the webinar is that ocean action must be both global and local. It must involve treaties, but also classrooms. It must involve navies, but also waste workers. It must involve scientific mapping of the deep sea, but also municipal waste management. It must protect biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction, but also restore rivers and coastal ecosystems closer to home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The ocean is not merely a victim of human activity. It is a regulator of climate, a source of food, a carrier of commerce, a security space, and a living system with intrinsic value. But its resilience is not unlimited. Deep-sea ecosystems can be damaged before they are understood. Fish stocks can collapse before policies catch up. Plastics can flow endlessly into the sea if land-based systems fail. Maritime competition can undermine cooperation precisely when cooperation is most needed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
World Oceans Day and the proposed Ocean Action Year should therefore be treated not as symbolic events, but as opportunities to reshape priorities. The task ahead is to make the ocean visible: in policy, education, budgets, security planning, industry, and public consciousness. The future of the ocean will not be decided only by those who live on coasts or work at sea. It will be decided by societies as a whole.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To save the ocean, we must first stop treating it as distant. The ocean begins on land, in our cities, in our consumption choices, in our rivers, in our laws, and in our political imagination. Ocean action is not only about protecting what lies beyond the horizon. It is about recognising that the horizon is already connected to us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Rupal Kalebere The ocean is often imagined as a distant frontier – vast, remote, and separate from everyday human life. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[893,1027,364,1030,1031,680,1028,693],"yoast_head":"\n