The ninth Our Ocean conference takes place this week in Athens, Greece. It is the largest and highest profile conference of its kind, and attracts presidents and celebrities, who all try to outdo one another with bigger and stronger conservation commitments. This year I was invited to attend and will be speaking about my 20 years of experience working as an Indigenous Chamorro scientist to protect the ocean. I plan to call attention to the fact that ocean conservation has lost momentum toward protecting 30% of the ocean by 2030 — and that a lot more needs to be done to address the human dimensions of conservation, including guaranteeing access rights, equity, and justice. According to the World Database of Protected Areas, at the start of the global COVID-19 pandemic in February 2020, 7.91% of the ocean was protected. That number stands at 8.01% today — an increase of only 0.1% over the last four years. False killer whales in the Mediterranean. Image by Vincent Kneefel / Ocean Image Bank. At this rate, raising the area of global ocean protection from 8% to 30% will take an additional 880 years. Put another way, achieving these goals by 2030 would require that marine-protected areas be designated at a rate nearly 150 times faster than what’s happening now. To put this in perspective, the Biden Administration is working feverishly to designate the proposed Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary. Through the America the Beautiful for All Coalition and the National Ocean Protection Coalition,…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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