ITS EDUCATION ASIA ARTICLE

Finally we have an agreement on the oceans

By Danny Harrington, MD ITS Education Asia

The resumed fifth session of the Intergovernmental Conference (IGC-5.2) convened from 20 February to 4 March 2023 at the UN to pick up where negotiations left off in August 2022, when IGC-5.1 was unable to finalize agreement.

Despite the oceans making up 90% of earth habitat and containing a significant percentage of the world’s species, it has taken over 15 years of work and negotiation to get here.

Threats from climate change, pollution, overfishing, habitat destruction, ocean acidification, and underwater noise have grown unabated due to the strange status of the oceans as having partly “owned” and partly “shared” spaces yet having these spaces completely and inherently interconnected by nature.

But still the text has been agreed only through tenuous compromise and still needs ratification let alone actual implementation of policies to address it and of course enforcement of any new regulations. We still have a long way to go.