A major ocean conference has ended in Mombasa, Kenya, with just a handful of countries committing to high-level political declarations on banning deep-sea mining, protecting climate-resilient coral reefs and combatting illegal fishing.
The Our Ocean Conference (OOC) brought together more than 5,000 delegates to discuss marine issues and make voluntary commitments to advance ocean sustainability.
It was the first time in the conference’s 11 editions that it had been held on African soil.
African countries played an “important leadership role” at the talks, observers told Carbon Brief, helping to drive ambition on fisheries transparency, a precautionary pause on deep-sea mining and developing proposals for marine protected areas on the high seas.
Across the three-day conference, attendees also made 320 separate commitments, including new funding for scientific research, improving waste-management programmes to reduce marine pollution and mapping Indigenous groups’ customary waters.
