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Welcome to World Ocean Radio…
I’m Peter Neill, Director of the World Ocean Observatory.
I have read with interest the recent publication by the UN Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission entitled Call to All Voices of the Ocean – Consultation of Civil Society in Preparation of the Next United Nations Ocean Conference – A Synthesis Report. This document, prepared by a group of distinguished consultants, is intended to propose an agenda for presentation at the forthcoming World Ocean Summit, the major gathering of ocean experts and advocates to be held in Nice, France, in June 2025. The document addresses a panoply of issues, with themes, questions, and recommendations across the full spectrum the ocean’s relation to climate, science, and policy, along with a schematic for specific actions. It promises to be a comprehensive, effective, and exciting meeting; I will be there.
But there is one serious, frustrating omission, at the very end: the conclusion addressing the ultimate question of How Can Civil Society Support These Efforts, found on page 20 as the last word — actually, 9 words only, as follows:
Through communication, by raising awareness through storytelling and campaigns.
This happens all the time: after all the research is done and the recommendations are said, the final call to action reads typically, and often less emphatically, as vapid as this one.
I have quoted often UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres’s description of the status of our collective response to the ocean/climate challenge as “too little, too late.” We have simply not addressed effectively both the decline and the burgeoning need, and, despite best efforts, we are continually falling behind. Why? What are we leaving out? Why are we failing, or at least not doing to keep up with the urgent demand for solution? I submit that because of our failure to educate and communicate beyond ourselves to civil society, we have lost, and will continue to lose, the necessary understanding and essential political will to affect the changes required. The final recommendation of the Synthesis Report is symptomatic of the problem. What we have here is a tragic failure to communicate.
We do science well; we do policy well enough, but are victim to political agendas, fear of change, and consensus thinking. We focus education primarily on higher education, even as the ocean literacy movement, in which I am fully engaged and support, struggles to find traction. But we do communication not well at all, confined to each organization’s purpose, limited NGO missions, restricted budgetary support, and the many conferences where, for years now, we have been speaking primarily and repetitively to ourselves. Until this dramatically changes, I fear we will carry on, with best intention, but with ongoing, limited success.
What is missing is a powerful call for action to amplify and extend communication of the progress and recommendation made far beyond the circle of ocean experts and advocates who will gather in Nice. It must transcend the limits of existing finance; it must open the audience from a few hundred to tens of thousands. It must focus on public engagement beyond membership and government, through innovative education, new technology and curriculum, multi-generational connection and the involvement of youth, relentless social media, film and far less expensive visualization, open access to podcasts, interviews, online services, exhibits, and publications, designed, produced, and distributed through multiple platforms and communications platforms that will reach, measurably, millions of “citizens of the ocean” worldwide who will add new individual awareness, increased social engagement, and massive political will to support and implement the expert agenda, to advocate for and initiate the change required. Yes, civil society, the UN phrase for all the rest of us, is the answer, but another international meeting of the best minds is not nearly enough unless their knowledge and advocacy can be channeled into an aggregated communications collaborative that sounds the call, demands our attention, and coalesces around real messaging from mountaintop to the abyssal plain that resonate and recruit the people who are, and will be, most affected by success, or failure.
The last word must no longer be last. Raising awareness through storytelling and campaigns is a call to action dramatically inadequate to the compelling need. We need a PLAN, not an aspiration -- a serious, imaginative global ocean communications plan, with agency and adequate financial support to succeed, to inform and galvanize the public, to maximize the collective power of ocean organizations worldwide, to engage civil society at all levels of discipline, community, and economic interest, and to give voice to the power of social and political connection embodied in the sea that connects all things.
One wave is not good enough. We need a tsunami.
We will discuss these issues, and more, in future editions of World Ocean Radio.
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