[intro music, ocean sounds]
I’m Peter Neill, Founder of the World Ocean Observatory.
When we are caught unaware in a storm at sea, the call for leadership, decisiveness, and action is paramount. In the global response to climate change, we find ourselves in such a space: a tumult of conditions unforeseen, forces unleashed unpredicted, and the consequence of past routine, immediate and demanding a concentrated, effective response.
In the world of ocean science, policy, and global engagement, we are paralyzed in such a place. The old ways, presented and supported for decades, are suddenly proven inadequate to the times – the sudden denial of fundamental principles, proven science, considered policy, and prior behaviors revealed as too little, too late, and ignored. As I have argued before, the solution to this circumstance is not more of the same, the stubborn continuance of what we have done that has failed us. It is time to look at what we have NOT done, to embrace a new strategy to confront the surprising indifference we now know and to provide a liberating tactic and commitment to a new way forward.
Over the past decade, there has been a nascent contravening movement to address amplification of ocean sustainability through inter-generational education – ocean literacy – a movement now established in the US, Europe, the Caribbean, Asia, Africa, and South America – a bottom-up movement driven by classroom teachers who see the solution to the present policy and implementation paralysis in the creation of a global constituency that understands the full meaning the ocean’s implication for climate adaptation and innovation for future survival. While this initiative has found some vital ground, peripherally, it has not been meaningfully embraced by the ocean decision-makers who have guided the international agenda, historically, and even still.
For example, in Venice, Italy, in June 2024, a conference of ocean literacy advocates gathered to address this problem, and produced what was entitled The Venice Declaration for Ocean Literacy in Action, a set of premises and recommendations to provide specific goals and agenda actions for the forthcoming UN Ocean Conference to be held in Nice, France, in June 2025, to urge the organizers of this seminal meeting to advance such educational activity to the forefront of international ocean planning and future investment. Specifically, the Venice Declaration called for new commitment to ocean literacy, Sea Beyond, a vision for inclusion, innovation, global access, and necessary funding to drive necessary change, indeed to invest in the one thing, the single, most important thing required to change the agenda and commit new strategic energy and resources to a vigorous new response. As context and measure of such changing support, the UN Secretary General’s Special Ambassador for the Ocean, Peter Thompson, is quoted as saying “If I had a billion dollars today, I’d invest it in education.”
Encouraging indeed, but somehow lost in translation. The Official Program of that UN World Ocean Conference mentions the word “education” only once in a proposed five-day agenda, as an element of a first-day three-hour afternoon “action panel” to address “ocean related scientific cooperation, knowledge, capacity building, marine technology and education, and the science-policy interface for ocean health,” a predictable, time-consuming list of past topics with no special emphasis, no mention of special finance, no signal that the urgency of the Venice Declaration has been understood, or that the organizers have decided that perhaps, for once, they might change a tired format to an agenda for innovation and change, a courageous modification away from the continuity of past thinking and familiar actions that has been collectively characterized by the UN Secretary General as a “race we are losing…”
Secretary General Guterres does go on optimistically to say “…but a race we can win.” But how? That billion dollars seems a worthy dream, and victory over the further decline of ocean/climate action devoutly to be wished. But the call to action by the Venice Ocean Literacy Declaration seems not even a distant echo. The massive investment required to create a viable, engaged, global constituency for ocean sustainability through science and policy, seems but a turn of phrase. The consensus of ocean leaders across all disciplines and sectors envisioned is reduced to a new arrangement of old ideas to be trumpeted in yet another final declaration to be added to an ongoing catalogue of best intention, the detritus of a collective failure of imagination and political will demonstrated by expensive ritual performance.
How might the agenda be revised?
First, the morning sessions of each day could be changed from “general debate” to presentation of past strategies “re-imagined and transformed” by new iterative thinking; second, the afternoon session could be newly comprised of specifically identified projects, innovation in development or in place, selected to show new possibilities already at work with new audiences toward new, tangible goals and palpable engagement; third, every lunch break could become a platform for communication, concise presentations by change agents; and fourth, throughout, a select committee could be drafting a list of specific, unexpected calls for action by governments, NGOs, philanthropists, and blue economy investors, wherein the focus of the agenda, and the final declaration, is shifted from the general to the specific, from perpetuation to invention, from institution to community, from exclusivity to inclusivity, from theory to practice, indeed, enabling the ingenuity required to guide us with competence and imagination through the continuing storm.
The value of science and policy will be celebrated by the resultant increase of public engagement through education and communication. Effectiveness will be measured by ensuing social response. Success will drive a new consensus, the new baseline for next challengea. And the next challenges will be different as an exhilarating consequence of ocean literacy in action. Action, based on the accumulated data and policy, is surely what we need; but if we do not act to meet that need, we founder.
Hold fast, lean forward, be smart; embrace change; now, it is a matter of survival.
We will discuss these issues, and more, in future editions of World Ocean Radio.
WORLD OCEAN RADIO IS DISTRIBUTED BY THE PUBLIC RADIO EXCHANGE AND THE PACIFICA NETWORK, FOR USE BY COLLEGE AND COMMUNITY RADIO STATIONS WORLDWIDE. FIND US WHEREVER YOU LISTEN TO PODCASTS, AND AT WORLD OCEAN OBSERVATORY DOT ORG, WHERE THE FULL CATALOG OF MORE THAN 700 RADIO EPISODES IS SEARCHABLE BY THEME.
[outro music, ocean sounds]
