It's not often that you get the chance to meet with world leaders, top scientists, economists and great communicators, all to talk about ocean solutions and how to implement them. That's why I decided to make the trek to Singapore for the World Oceans Summit last week.
I was excited to be one of a small group of Canadian participants, including some of the greatest ocean scientists in the world, but was also disappointed that not a single representative of the Canadian government attended the summit.
Considering that Canada has the longest coastline of any country in the world, the scope of the issues and solutions presented at the summit and the level of representation from other nations like Iceland, Sweden and Russia, our lack of representation was shocking. Thankfully, the rest of the world was there to pick up the slack.
One of the big announcements was from Robert Zoellick of the World Bank: "We need a new SOS: Save Our Seas... Working with governments, the scientific community, civil society organizations, and the private sector, we aim to leverage as much as $1.2 billion to support healthy and sustainable oceans."
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The World Bank and its partners have committed to raising $300 million dollars itself, and will direct the to $1.2 billion dollars turnaround the biggest ocean problems. In addition to cash, this effort meant to increase the profile of oceans with businesses and governments around the world.
This global alliance set ambitious goals:
- Recovering half of the worlds depleted fish stocks (85% are currently in depleted category)
- Doubling area of global marine protected areas
- Increasing annual net benefits of fisheries from an annual net deficit of $5 billion dollars* to a annual net surplus of $20-30 billion dollars. (Any economist would agree that's an excellent return on investment!)
*Silly subsidies to industrial fisheries are why there is a deficit
Ensuring the full value of ocean ecosystems are measured and recognized will be a major tool in meeting these goals. Such natural capital valuations are a tool that the David Suzuki Foundation has been using with success in Canada.
Although the solutions to address the impacts of climate change, pollution, coastal development, and ocean acidification were discussed, the strongest convergence was on solutions for global overfishing.
The three main solutions that gained broad support were:
- Putting science-based, transparent and enforceable limits on fishing (i.e., recover depleted stocks)
- Using rights-based governance of fisheries that give fishers a stronger long-term incentive to protect fish and the environment (e.g., allocating a fixed share of the catch that fishers can trade, or establishing territorial use rights)
- Significantly increasing the amount of marine protected areas
That's a lot of wonky talk. But overall, the solutions presented at the summit have amazing potential to recover ocean ecosystems and ensure hungry people around the world can eat healthy food from the ocean.
We have seen success with these solutions in Canada, but need to do more to transform our unsustainable fisheries. For example, it's time to put science-based limits on salmon fisheries and to increase marine protected areas on all three of Canada's coasts. Unfortunately, Canada is now sitting at the back of the class in oceans protection.
The World Oceans Summit saw global political, business and science leaders standing up to say that we have the solutions for our ocean, and we're willing to work together to solve them.
It's time that Canada does its share of the work — the payoff is too great to ignore.
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