world ocean summit · 2019-04-17 · the ocean under sdg 14, four of which come due in 2020. much...

March 5th-7th 2019Abu Dhabi, UAE

EVENT SUMMARY REPORT

WORLD OCEAN SUMMITBuilding bridges

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After Singapore, the United States, Portugal, Indonesia and Mexico, the World Ocean Summit arrived in the Middle East in 2019. From March 5th to 7th more than 900 representatives of government, business, science and civil society from over 60 countries assembled in Abu Dhabi for constructive and challenging discussions on the sustainable development of the ocean.

The past few years have seen many commitments, but in spite of this concern the global mobilisation of resources has been slow. The sixth summit, a more diverse and representative discussion on the future of the ocean than ever before, brought together government and industry leaders to determine what technological infrastructure, financial investments and policy innovations can help balance economic growth and profitability with ocean health.

New and improved technologies will be crucial to establishing a sustainable ocean economy: they will enable industries such as shipping, cruising and aquaculture to meet both increased demand and sustainability targets.

How to finance the transition to a sustainable ocean economy remains a key question. Summit participants discussed the means to finance ocean infrastructure projects and direct investment towards a long-term transition, lessons from the green economy, and how to mobilise capital on behalf of blue carbon systems and coral reefs.

Policy experts and scientists appraised efforts to tackle the twin crises of biodiversity decline and climate change. The summit considered the outlook for deep-sea mining, and shone a spotlight on marine protected areas, cities on the frontline of the solid waste and marine plastics dilemma, and coastal tourism’s potential contributions to a sustainable blue economy. Business leaders considered how companies should work together to promote the sustainable ocean agenda, and where can their efforts have the most impact.

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2020 is set to be a significant year for the blue economy; the decisions taken next year will determine the health of the ocean at the end of the century.

While the shipping industry will be able to comply with the 2020 sulphur cap, there is no clear path to halving its greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

The first blue bond has opened the door for ocean finance, and there are opportunities to learn from the experiences of green finance as investment takes hold.

There is a window of opportunity to capitalise on the public’s interest in the ocean to win support for conservation issues alongside plastics pollution.

Aquaculture continues to be a promising area of growth for the seafood industry, with new development in Africa and Asia putting it on course to overtake supply from wild capture.

Deep-sea mining, a polarising issue for many, will come under greater scrutiny, including calls for a “precautionary pause” as the International Seabed Authority moves closer to publishing its mining code.

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O C E A N G O V E R N A N C E

Good progress has been made in putting the ocean at the centre of the environmental debate over the past few years, and global targets have been agreed for the conservation and sustainable use of ocean and marine resources—but it is clear that these commitments are not being met.

In September 2019 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is due to publish its Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate, which is widely expected to conclude that the impacts of climate change pose an existential threat to the marine environment.

The Sustainable Developments Goals (SDGs) agreed in 2016 included 10 targets concerning the ocean under SDG 14, four of which come

due in 2020. Much work remains to achieve these targets, but there has been some progress. Peter Thomson, the United Nations’ special envoy for the ocean, told the World Ocean Summit that the target of having 10% of the ocean under some form of protection will be achieved. Likewise, the World Trade Organisation is confident of reaching an agreement in December on removing harmful fisheries subsidies, which contribute to overcapacity, overfishing and illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing.

But with 90% of fish stocks overexploited or fully exploited and carbon levels continuing to rise, many marine experts say the SDG targets do not go far enough to reverse the damage being done to the ocean. They say 30% of the land and 30% of the ocean needs

O C E A N G O V E R N A N C E


to be protected in its natural state by 2030 for climate disaster to be averted. The ocean plays a crucial role as a carbon sink which is not reflected in the current commitments; the focus needs to be on restoring the abundance of marine habitats, such as mangroves, seagrasses and coral reefs.

The good news is that if the world takes decisive action now, ecosystems can recover. One success story is Mexico’s Cabo Pulmo National Park, said Enric Sala, explorer-in-residence, National Geographic. This marine protected area covering 27.5 square miles of reef was established in the mid-1990s after the local community recognised the need to intervene to save the dying reef and restore fish stocks, following decades of overexploitation. In little more than a decade of protection, fish biomass increased by 460% and larger marine creatures returned to the area. Today the reef is a popular tourist attraction, supporting jobs in the community, and the local fisherfolk benefit from replenished fish stocks outside the protected area. Key to the project’s success was that the local community understood the consequences of losing their reef and the benefits of protection.

Another example is Indonesia, which over the past five years has shown zero tolerance of illegal fishing, with the authorities seizing, and sometimes destroying, nearly 500 foreign fishing boats. The result has been that regulated catches are more abundant and the fish are much larger. Susi Pudjiastuti, Indonesia’s minister of maritime affairs and fisheries, told the World Ocean Summit that before the action was taken there were 7,000-10,000 foreign vessels illegally fishing in the country’s waters. The political will was there to tackle the problem, and the results were self-

evident. However, Ms Pudjiastuti added that the wider community did not yet appreciate that regulation, restriction and limitation make for more productive fishing.

Community engagement has been neglected by governments wrapped up in policy talks, leaving NGOs to fill the void. But governments must educate coastal communities to understand the value of interventions, using accessible language rather than terms like the blue economy, which alienate rather than unite. They need to be shown evidence and to hear how other communities have benefited after ending harmful practices such as cutting down mangroves and illegal fishing.

Furthermore, if their main sources of income are to be removed, communities need help to find alternative and sustainable livelihoods. It is only when people are financially resilient that they can afford to make choices about the environment and their role within it. It is also essential for landlocked countries to be brought into the ocean debate, since rivers and lakes are conveyor belts of pollution into the seas and a major cause of eutrophication.

IF THE WORLD TAKES DECISIVE ACTION NOW, ECOSYSTEMS CAN RECOVER.

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2 0 2 0 — T H E C R U N C H Y E A R

2020 is set to be a pivotal year for the blue economy, and what happens over those 12 months will determine the condition of the ocean at the end of the century. A series of high-level meetings is due to take place, the first deadlines for ocean SDGs will expire, and the UN treaty regulating the high seas and the deep-sea mining code are expected to pass. Among the important talks scheduled for next year are the second UN Ocean Conference ( June 2-6,

Lisbon), a biodiversity COP (end 2020, Beijing) and the 2020 UN Climate Change Conference or COP25 (Chile). Environmentalists hope that participants at COP25 will commit to protect 30% of the ocean by 2030. Before then, the UN will host a Climate Action Summit on September 23 2019 to accelerate implementation of the Paris Agreement, and the IPCC will release its eagerly awaited report on the oceans.

2 0 2 0 — T H E C R U N C H Y E A R


F I N A N C I N G T H E O C E A N E C O N O M Y

F I N A N C I N G T H E O C E A N E C O N O M YAt the end of October 2018, the Republic of Seychelles launched the world’s first sovereign blue bond. It stands as a major milestone for the blue economy. The bond raised $15m from institutional and impact investors and will be used to support sustainable marine and fisheries projects, including the expansion of marine protected areas and improved governance of marine resources. It shows that there is an appetite among capital-market investors for well-structured blue financial instruments, and its success is expected to catalyse other issuers to follow suit.

The summit heard from industry experts that the blue economy must learn from the mistakes made by the green finance market. Availability of capital has not proven to be the challenge for green finance; instead, its key difficulties have arisen from the issuers and the implementation of projects. After the European Investment Bank issued its pioneering Climate Awareness Bond in 2007, it took five years for the market to really take off. Although it reached $170bn in 2018, many green bonds have drawn criticisms of greenwashing, and some projects have failed to deliver on their environmental promises.

The green finance market had to learn as it went along, but the blue economy has the advantage of better climate awareness among investors and several sets of guiding principles that it can adopt, such as the Equator Principles and the Sustainable Blue Economy Finance Principles launched in October 2018.

Jenn Pryce, president and chief executive of Calvert Impact Capital, which invested in the Seychelles bond, told the summit that her company was looking for risk-adjusted returns as well as environmental, social and economic impacts in its investments. Blue finance is not philanthropy but a means to responsibly monetise assets, she said.

Given the well-known challenges of sustainable financing, notably regarding risk appetite, scale and project pipeline, financing for the blue economy will likely come through a blend of development capital and private capital, as with the Seychelles bond, while the market matures and projects demonstrate their bankability. To help support the maturation of the blue financing space, new financial instruments and creative funding solutions that support small and medium enterprises are needed.

INDUSTRY EXPERTS SAID THAT THE BLUE ECONOMY MUST LEARN FROM THE MISTAKES MADE BY THE GREEN FINANCE MARKET.

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F I N A N C I N G T H E O C E A N E C O N O M Y

The Blue Nature Capital Financing Facility, backed by the government of Luxembourg and managed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, is one innovative finance initiative that aims to address the funding gap threatening global climate-change targets. It turns coastal conservation projects into investable assets attractive to private finance by providing technical assistance and seed funding to create revenue streams from natural ecosystem services.

The facility’s first project, Net-Works, collects discarded fishing nets in the Philippines to sell to a nylon recycler and sustainably farms seaweed, providing livelihoods for the community. The sustainable element arises from the farmers and fisherfolk being engaged in the management of marine protected areas; guard posts double as seaweed drying rooms. As an added social benefit, the technology used to monitor the impact of the project has brought mobile phone coverage into the area. The mangrove habitat rehabilitation project will also be eligible for blue carbon offset credits. The plan is to attract private investment to enable the project to grow from a small village-run pilot operation into a regional leader of the circular economy.

Carbon credits are another area of opportunity for the blue economy, serving both to incorporate marine ecosystems into global carbon-sequestration efforts through the carbon market, and to provide a new revenue stream for coastal communities on which services such as insurance can be built. Nevertheless, there are challenges around proving the true value of coastal wetland ecosystems due to a lack of data and understanding.

The Nature Conservancy is working on a project to develop blue resilience carbon credits that take into consideration the carbon sequestration and resilience benefits of mangroves, seagrass fields and salt marshes. It hopes to provide a product that insurance companies and other corporates can use to offset carbon footprints under their corporate social responsibility obligations.


R I D I N G T H E P L A S T I C W A V E

Public awareness of ocean plastics pollution is at an all-time high, thanks to a combination of hard-hitting documentaries, such as “Blue Planet II”, and graphic images of suffocating animals shared across social media.

A number of governments have responded with new legislation, imposing charges and bans on plastic bags and other single-use items. These measures have led to a dramatic reduction in their use and have sparked a discussion on the importance of waste-management systems and infrastructure, and the roles of the private and

public sectors—alongside consumer lifestyle changes—in addressing plastic waste systemically.

This momentum offers an opportunity to inform the public about other human impacts on the ocean, notably those created by climate change and over-use of the ocean’s resources, and the ocean’s impact on our lives. Given the gravity of the topic, it is important to share success stories, such as coral-reef rehabilitation and mangrove restoration, so that people understand that ecosystems can recover if timely interventions are made.

R I D I N G T H E P L A S T I C W A V E

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D E E P - S E A M I N I N G

D E E P - S E A M I N I N G While sand, gravel and diamonds are commonly mined in near-shore waters, there has been no commercial mining to date in areas beyond national jurisdiction. The deep seas are known to be rich in rare minerals, including cobalt, nickel and manganese, which are used in smartphones, photovoltaics, fuel cells and wind turbines. With demand for these products rising rapidly as part of the transition to renewable energy, private enterprise is eager to unlock the wealth that lies beneath the ocean.

The International Seabed Authority—the UN body established in 1982 to regulate the international seabed area beyond the limits of national jurisdiction—aims to publish a mining code by 2020, which would allow deep-sea mining to begin within a few years. The relevant deep-sea deposits have already been mapped under 27 exploration licences issued since

2001, and trial runs are currently under way of autonomous underwater vehicles designed to collect metallic nodules from the sea floor.

Alarmed at the speed of developments, many scientists and environmental NGOs are calling for a moratorium on deep-sea mining to allow time to properly evaluate its impact on the ocean ecosystem. Key concerns centre on the direct impact on marine biodiversity caused by removing mineral deposits, the indirect impacts from plumes of sediment created by disturbing the seabed, as well as the light, sound and chemical pollution from the machinery. The potential impacts are hard to assess, as the marine life in the areas of ocean with the most commercially viable quantities of metals has not been fully studied, and it is not known to what extent the minerals contribute to the ecosystem around them.

WE NEED FURTHER RESEARCH ON DEEP-SEA MINING’S IMPACT, BUT AN EU-FUNDED PROJECT SUGGESTS THE LOSS OF BIODIVERSITY IS LIKELY TO BE PERMANENT.


D E E P - S E A M I N I N G

An EU-funded project concluded in 2018 that 10-20 years of further research were needed to make informed predictions about the impact of deep-sea mining, but it suggested that the loss of biodiversity was likely to be permanent, as initial experiments have shown little evidence of recovery after a decade.

Those in favour of deep-sea mining, represented at the summit 2019 by Greg Stone of DeepGreen, an exploration licence holder, say the sweeping up of polymetallic nodules from the seabed is environmentally and socially less harmful than mining for minerals on land, which entails deforestation, blasting and drilling, supports the exploitation of child labour and produces toxic waste. Supporters insist that deep-sea mining is necessary to help the world achieve a carbon-neutral future, as the quantities of rich-earth minerals needed for fuel-cell batteries and other

green technologies cannot be found elsewhere.

Environmentalists fear the legislation will also open the door to more destructive methods of deep-sea mining. They argue the social problems associated with land-based mining are fixable, and that land-based extractive operations can be remediated afterwards, while marine ecosystems can never be repaired. They advocate for the increased recycling of rare metals, combined with better product design to enable a circular economy. They also want more time to study the ocean so that science, rather than economics, drives the debate.

The UN has declared 2021-2030 the Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development; it may also be the decade that sees deep-sea mining take off.

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T H E F U T U R E O F A Q U A C U L T U R E


It is estimated that about 110m tonnes of farmed fish are produced every year, slightly more than the output of wild-catch fisheries. By 2030 another 44m tonnes of farmed fish will be needed annually to keep up with demand. This represents a nearly 40% increase in production.

The industry faces the challenge of delivering this step-up in scale while also controlling the adverse impacts of aquaculture on the ocean environment. Marine aquaculture can cause biological and chemical contamination of the seas and contributes to eutrophication through the introduction of nutrients into the water via fish meal.

Investment is being directed into research and technology to try to make aquaculture

more sustainable. Alternative feed ingredients are being developed based on microbes and insects. Automated feeders can use sensors to ensure fish are only fed when they are hungry, reducing the amount of nutrients entering the water and cutting feed spend. Renewable energy is also helping fish farms to reduce their carbon footprint.

The industry panel at the summit said it was inevitable, given the projected growth, that aquaculture will face greater regulation to address its ecological impacts. But while this would mean short-term discomfort, it will bring long-term socioeconomic and environmental gains. The introduction of technology will also provide more real-time, verified data, which is essential to increase transparency in the sector.

BY 2030 154M TONNES OF FARMED FISH WILL BE NEEDED ANNUALLY TO KEEP UP WITH DEMAND. THIS REPRESENTS A NEARLY 40% INCREASE IN PRODUCTION.



Panellists agreed that the industry must set targets for growth and map how those will be achieved, addressing issues such as which species are the most appropriate to farm, and the roles of technology, regulation and open-ocean aquaculture.

The UAE, which imports more than 90% of its food, sees aquaculture as central to its food security. The government this year published a local aquaculture atlas showing locations suitable for fish farms, to encourage investment in the sector. A letter of intent has also been signed for the construction of a fish-feed facility in the UAE.

Michael Selden, co-founder and chief executive of Finless Foods, told the summit that cellular agriculture, rather than aquaculture, is the future. His firm grows boneless bluefin tuna meat from cells. Cellular-agriculture laboratories can be based anywhere in the world and can scale up in weeks rather than years. Given the pressure that our land, ocean and climate are already under, Seldon says “lamp-based” agriculture is our only hope for feeding 9 billion people in 2050. There are 27 companies worldwide now growing cell-based protein.

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S T E A M I N G T O W A R D S 2 0 5 0

S T E A M I N G T O W A R D S 2 0 5 0

The global shipping industry contributes about 2-3% of greenhouse gases, and the International Maritime Organization has set the industry tough environmental targets. From January 1 2020 it will impose limits on the sulphur content in fuels, and it aims to halve the sector’s greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, compared with 2008 levels. While the industry is generally in a good position to comply with the 2020 sulphur cap, thanks to the availability of low-sulphur fuels and scrubbing technology, there is no single fuel or technology yet available that can work on the scale needed to meet the 2050 target.

A number of emerging fuels and technologies could collectively contribute to a reduction

in emissions, such as batteries, hydrogen, biofuels, solar energy and wind propulsion, but each has drawbacks and limitations. A wholesale switch to liquefied natural gas would reduce emissions by 30%, but LNG is still a carbon-intensive fossil fuel.

To achieve the target, while also meeting the demands of increasing international trade, the industry needs to find a breakthrough fuel or technology within the next 30 years. The sector has collaborated in the past to find solutions to safety challenges, but it must now come together to deliver environmental innovations. Bud Darr, executive vice-president for maritime policy and government affairs at MSC Mediterranean Shipping Company, told the summit that it was perhaps time to revisit the proposal for a charge on fuel to provide seed funds for research. The idea was rejected by the industry last time it was suggested, but it could raise $250m or more a year.

Without immediate action, the coming decade will impact the ocean past the point of no return. Investors have a demonstrable appetite for the blue finance market, but in order to mature it must address key difficulties with project implementation and valuation methods. Amid deadlines for internationally agreed-upon sustainability targets, a wave of profoundly influential multi-stakeholder talks will determine how much of the ocean will be open to nascent blue industries.

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world ocean summit · 2019-04-17 · the ocean under sdg 14, four of which come due in 2020. much...

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