I attended the Economist World Ocean Summit last week. As it happens they have made it free all year, with registrations open for two more weeks (to March 19th I’m guessing). The sessions will all be available to stream on demand for 30 days (possibly longer, it was unclear, I think the plan was still changing on Friday). The platform they are using is called Swapcard.com and it includes a social network and the ability to request meetings. To register go to: https://events.economist.com/world-ocean-summit/ . They also recommended using an organization or corporate email to increase chances of acceptance (student registrant cap had been met already). For me it was easy to create an email address for my https://www.savetheoxygen.org site to use instead of Gmail.
Over 8,000 people attended, with free registration and no travel, something that would have been impossible before Covid moved everything to video conference. One presenter noted that last years’ virtual UN World Ocean Forum had over 60,000 daily attendees. There seems to be a lot of momentum behind the 30/30 goal of protecting 30% of the oceans by the year 2030. The proportion has doubled to 7.5% in the last decade. The same presenter as mentioned the UN Forum also noted that, roughly: “Only 10-12 countries really fish the high seas, and it wouldn’t be profitable without destructive subsidies. That destructive fishing harms around 144 other fishing nations by damaging reproductive stock and ecosystems. High seas fishing accounts for only 1% of marine fishing jobs and 10% of the catch globally. So maybe we should just protect the entire area of the high seas instead of piecemeal.”
Nations have a 200 mile offshore Exclusive Economic Zone, everything beyond that is considered high seas. I think I recall someone saying that the Arctic Ocean is already protected from fishing by multilateral treaty, and the prospect of soon protecting the Antarctic is plausible.
I encourage you to take a look if you’re involved in environmental efforts. There were a ton of good plenary sessions and special interest tracks in shipping, fishing, plastics, and a couple more areas.
Lost in Mist 