Following a week of discussions and events in Lisbon, Portugal, the UN Ocean Conference concluded on Friday, with governments and heads of state agreeing on a new political declaration to Save Our Ocean.
Recognizing the past “collective failure” in the Conference’s final declaration, world leaders called for greater ambition to ensure that the dire state of the ocean is addressed, and admitted frankly to being “deeply alarmed by the global emergency facing the ocean”.
More than 6,000 participants, including 24 Heads of State and Government, and over 2,000 representatives of civil society attended the Conference, advocating for urgent and concrete actions to tackle the ocean crisis.
Calling for transformative change, leaders stressed the need to address the cumulative impacts of a warming planet, on the ocean, including ecosystem degradation and species extinctions.
At the conference, more than 150 Member States made voluntary commitments to conserve or protect at least 30 percent of the global ocean within Marine Protected Areas, and other effective area-based conservation measures, by 2030.
Following the event in Lisbon, the path to save our ocean will continue through the Intergovernmental Conference on a treaty on marine biodiversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction, the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework negotiations, and the negotiations for increased climate finance and adaptation actions at COP27 in Egypt.
Read full original article UN Ocean Conference ends with call for greater global commitment to address dire state of the ocean at news.un.org.
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