https://arab.news/nzzn5
In global climate policy, the ocean was for a long time treated as an afterthought, too vast to manage effectively and too resilient to be degraded. Instead, the focus was almost exclusively on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and preserving forests. That era is now over.
At the most recent UN Climate Change Conference, COP30, in Belem, Brazil, the ocean moved from the margins to the mainstream of climate governance. It featured prominently in national climate plans, adaptation frameworks, the follow-up to the first “global stocktake” under the Paris climate agreement and even the evolving architecture of climate finance.
This shift in the global agenda was likely inevitable, as the ocean increasingly suffers the effects of absorbing more than 90 percent of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gases and about a quarter of annual carbon dioxide emissions. The consequences include warming, acidification, deoxygenation, collapsing fisheries and coastal erosion. But small island developing states and least developed countries, many of which are extremely vulnerable to sea-level rise, accelerated the shift by framing ocean governance as a matter not just of environmental management, but of survival and justice.
