President Emmanuel Macron on Monday opened the United Nations Oceans Conference in the French Riviera city of Nice with an urgent call for multilateral mobilisation to save the seas. The deep seas, Greenland and Antarctica are not for sale, the French president said, as he called for the ratification of the High Seas Treaty.

French President Emmanuel Macron opened the United Nations Oceans Conference in Nice on Monday with an urgent call for multilateral action to save the seas.

"The first answer is multilateralism," said Macron. “The deep sea is not for sale, neither is Greenland for sale, nor Antarctica," he added in a veiled response to US President Donald Trump's expansionist statements since he took office in January.

"While the Earth is warming, the ocean is boiling," said the French president, as he called for an "open partnership" in science and research to protect the world's oceans.

"The climate, like biodiversity, is not a matter of opinion; it's a matter of scientifically established facts," he added.

A High Seas Treaty will be ratified by a sufficient number of countries at the summit to enter into force, Macron confirmed, noting that 50 countries had submitted ratifications "in the past few hours" before the UN Ocean Conference officially opened.

READ MOREProtecting the ocean: What is the high seas treaty?

"In addition to the 50 ratifications already submitted here in the last few hours, 15 countries have formally committed to joining them," said Macron. "This means that the political agreement has been reached, which allows us to say that this High Seas Treaty will be properly implemented. So it's a done deal," he added, without specifying a timeline.

The treaty, signed in 2023, will enter into force 120 days after the 60th ratification. France initially wanted to obtain the  60 ratifications before the Nice conference began.

Around 60 heads of state and government are attending the third UN Ocean Conference, including Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and his Argentine counterpart Javier Milei.

Macron also called for a moratorium on deep-sea mining, which was "a necessity", he maintained.

"I think it's madness to launch predatory economic action that will disrupt the deep seabed, disrupt biodiversity, destroy it ... The moratorium on deep seabed exploitation is an international necessity," he told the gathering in Nice, southeastern France.

Trump has brought urgency to the debate around deep-sea mining, moving to fast-track US exploration in international waters and sidestepping global efforts to regulate the nascent sector.

The International Seabed Authority, which has jurisdiction over the ocean floor outside national waters, is meeting in July to discuss a global mining code to regulate mining in the ocean depths.

Speaking at the conference after Macron, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the world could not let the deep oceans "become the wild west" as nations negotiate contentious new rules for seabed mining.

Brazil's Lula on Monday warned against the threat of countries unilaterally exploiting the oceans through deep-sea mining, in a reference to US plans to exploit the deep seabed.

"Now we are seeing hanging over the ocean the threat of unilateralism. We cannot allow" what happened to international trade to happen to the sea, Lula said at the UN summit.

He called on the International Seabed Authority to act as Trump prepares to unilaterally authorise mineral exploitation in the Pacific Ocean.

The appeals for unity come as nations tussle over a global plastics pollutiontreaty, and the US sidesteps international efforts to regulate deep-sea mining.

The summit comes as just 2.7 percent of the ocean is effectively protected from destructive extractive activities, according to the nonprofit Marine Conservation Institute. That's far below the target agreed under the “30x30” pledge to conserve 30 percent of land and sea by 2030. 

South Korea, France and the EU have championed the High Seas Treaty, but most large ocean nations have yet to ratify it, including the rest of the G20. 

Beyond new commitments, the conference aims to highlight the growing gap between marine protection declarations and real-world conservation.

France, the conference co-host, claims to have surpassed the 30 percenth target for marine protection. But environmental groups say only 3 percent of French waters are fully protected from harmful activities like bottom trawling and industrial fishing.

In 2024 alone, more than 100 bottom-trawling vessels were recorded spending over 17,000 hours fishing within France’s six marine nature parks, according to ocean advocacy group Oceana.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP, AP and Reuters)

https://www.france24.com/en/environment/20250609-%F0%9F%94%B4-live-macron-opens-un-ocean-summit-in-nice-to-tackle-threats

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         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

Finishing What the World Started at the UN Ocean Conference
in Environmental Protection
by John F Kerry

NICE – As the sun sets on the third United Nations Ocean Conference in Nice, there is much to celebrate, but also much unfinished business for the world to address at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP30) in Belém, Brazil, later this year.

Against a backdrop of global uncertainty and questions about whether multilateral processes can still deliver, the countries represented in Nice were largely united on the need for a more ambitious response to the challenges facing our ocean. But this was only the first leg of the journey. To protect this life-preserving global commons in time, much more must be done ahead of COP30.

Among the outcomes to celebrate, the High Seas Treaty has made remarkable progress. With 19 countries ratifying it in Nice, and another dozen committing to do so, we are now on course to make this landmark global agreement operational by the start of 2026, enabling the creation of marine protected areas on the high seas. That will plug an enormous hole in ocean governance.

Achieving the goal of protecting at least 30% of the world’s ocean by 2030 is not possible without setting aside large areas of the vast high seas – an area representing two-thirds of the ocean and half our planet’s surface. Establishing effective marine protection is especially urgent in the polar regions, which are on the front line of the climate crisis. The situation in the Southern Ocean is dire, demanding immediate action to advance long-stalled proposals for marine protected areas. Such protections will both safeguard the ocean’s ability to help mitigate climate change (by absorbing carbon) and increase marine species’ resilience against warming temperatures (such as by removing pressures from overfishing).

In Nice, several countries also announced significant new marine protections in their national waters, with French Polynesia announcing what, at nearly five million square kilometers (1.9 million square miles), will be the world’s largest network of protected areas. And the conference delivered welcome progress toward combating plastic pollution and restricting the most harmful fishing practices.

But none of these milestones should be mistaken as a turning of the tide for ocean protection. Rather, each must be part of a broader shift: a rising tide of higher ambitions that still has further to go.

Consider what remains to be done. First, we are still falling woefully short in designating and enforcing marine protection. Even after Nice, only 10% of the ocean is now protected in some fashion. That is a long way from the 30% we need to protect by the end of the decade. Worse, many protected areas are protected in name only. For example, many hoped that an environmental champion like France would have announced a strict ban on bottom trawling in its protected areas. Still, there is time for more countries to set an example, including at COP30.

Second, dollars still count. There remains a big gap between what has been pledged and what has been delivered. Globally, only $1.2 billion annually is going toward ocean protection, less than 10% of what is needed, even when studies show that protecting 30% of the ocean by 2030 could unlock $85 billion annually by 2050. In fact, redirecting the money allocated to harmful fishing subsidies in just ten countries would plug the financing gap for ocean protection. Government spending must rehabilitate, not debilitate, this critical resource.

Third, the silence in Nice on ending our fossil-fuel addiction was deafening. Although the world committed two years ago, at COP28 in Dubai, to “transition away” from fossil fuels, this issue seems to be relitigated at every multilateral convening. With the climate crisis providing an existential threat to all life on our blue planet, new unmitigated offshore oil and gas development is antithetical to all our stated goals. Still, one bright spot was the Blue NDC Challenge – launched by Brazil and France and supported by eight inaugural countries – which is pushing for ocean-based measures to be included in national climate plans.

The Nice conference must become a springboard for greater ocean action in Belém. COP30 is the ideal platform to announce new marine protections and financing for conservation efforts in developing countries, and for resilience-building in vulnerable island and coastal countries.

As the COP30 president and a coastal country itself, Brazil has the opportunity to use the momentum generated in Nice to integrate the world’s response to our connected climate and ocean crises. We have a choice. We can be the generation that turned ambition into action, or we can let our most important global commons collapse irretrievably. The ocean cannot wait. COP30 must deliver.

https://countercurrents.org/2025/06/finishing-what-the-world-started-at-the-un-ocean-conference/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

ONLY 30 PER CENT?....  ONE NEEDS TO SAVE AT LEAST 75 PER CENT OF THE WORLD OCEANS...