Peter Thomson: What Mother Ocean taught me about our future

When I graduated from university, I joined Fiji’s Ministry of Rural Development, choosing to do what my family had done for generations – to spend my life in public service. My first job was as district officer for a rural district called Navua. In those days it had no electricity or paved roads and most villages lived without piped water supply. We had work to do, especially after a monster hurricane took out most of the district’s infrastructure.

Over four decades later, I found myself presiding over the General Assembly of the United Nations and many people asked me where I learned the competency to perform that role. My answer, which bewildered most, was by learning from my betters in the villages and the local government committees of the Navua district.

Why Peter Thomson? In 2017, after his stint as president of the UN General Assembly, Thomson was appointed the UN’s first special envoy for the ocean. He now also co-chairs Friends of Ocean Action. Going from Fiji, an island state on the front lines of climate change, to the centre of global ocean diplomacy, positions Thomson perfectly to make his case in this essay: we must relearn a nature-positive way of life to turn around the ocean’s decline.

For more than ten years, I’ve dedicated my time to the defence of the ocean’s best interests. That task is all-consuming. My wife and I have four granddaughters, and I cannot bear the thought of them not knowing a healthy ocean when they are adults.

But there is another reason too. Over those years, I have come to understand that the health of the ocean is inseparable from the health and stability of human society.

Coming from Fiji, I’ve always been close to the ocean. In the week before I was born, my mother was sailing across the Koro Sea from where my family lived in northern Fiji. The small inter-island vessel in which we were sailing was hit by a severe storm. We survived, but as a result, I think I inherited a pre-natal sense of the ocean’s power.

As a boy and young man, fishing at sea with line and spear was my primary leisure activity. And in my early career, getting to the villages where I served, required much open-water travel to outer islands in little boats.

Through these pursuits, you learned that along with the sun above, Mother Ocean was all powerful. What she gives with such abundance, she can take away in a moment. Love her, yes; but mostly, respect her.

The state of play

My daily mantra is: “No healthy planet without a healthy ocean, and the ocean’s health is currently, measurably, in decline.” Most people, even the deniers, are now acquainted with the causes of that decline: pollution, fisheries malpractice, rampant atmospheric greenhouse gas emissions, rising sea levels, ocean acidification, death of coral, fast-altering marine habitats, loss of biodiversity, weakening currents and changes to the planet’s weather systems.

It may not sound like it, but the mantra is a path to hope. For it is a call to action, and in the decade or more that we’ve been espousing it, a mounting response has given us cause for hope. The BBNJ High Seas Treaty has been ratified, allowing us the prospect of protecting great swathes of the ocean. At the World Trade Organization (WTO), the first part of agreement on harmful fisheries subsidies has come into force, with work underway on the second part.

Around the world, giant marine protected areas are being established by countries and territories. The International Maritime Organization (IMO) is pursuing a positive course on the greening of shipping, while the negotiation of an internationally binding Plastics Treaty, serviced by the UN Environment Programme, is underway.

Throughout this oceanic response, the Pacific Island countries and territories have been at the forefront. Perhaps to such an extent that their efforts have, by some, been taken for granted. Having served for many years as an ambassador of Fiji, I can say that it is often underappreciated how these efforts come at great cost to the limited resources of the Pacific Islands. This is true for most small island developing states around the world and I would urge the international community to up its game in support of the vital role of ocean stewardship that these island countries perform.

Ocean Nature Positive

Being at the frontlines of the great changes underway in the ocean’s properties, the Pacific Islands have zeroed in on the causes. It became clear to us that these observable changes were primarily anthropogenic and that humanity’s creation of vast quantities of greenhouse gases through the burning of fossil fuels is the ultimate cause. The green transition, moving as quickly as possible to an electrified world powered by renewable energy, has emerged as the obvious path to a sustainable future for humankind.

And so, for those of us who do not want humanity to be ruled by AI-powered robots; who do not want to see humanity reduced to living in bunkers after the planet’s forests have burnt away; or watch the ocean acidify to the detriment of life as we know it, there is a better path.

On that path, the green transition is joined by a universal acceptance that humankind must relearn a nature-positive way of life. We must relearn how to live in harmony with nature, as we did before the Industrial Revolution took us all, innocently at first, on the great geoengineering undertaking of warming an entire planet.

The nature-positive movement is well underway, and my main message therein is that above all, nature-positive means ocean-positive. The vast majority of living space and life in our planet’s biosphere exists in the ocean. If you lift a jar of just one litre of water from a healthy part of the ocean, you have in your hand one million lifeforms – phytoplanktons and zooplanktons. One of these critters, prochlorococcus, produces 20% of the oxygen in the biosphere. Respect!

Turning knowledge into action

The blue economy is a burgeoning source of livelihoods and wellbeing for communities around the world. But its impacts can be damaging and its many dependencies on nature in the ocean are often opaque. The focus should thus be on a nature-positive, sustainable blue economy.

The challenges are many. I have no doubt that aquaculture will be one of humanity’s main sources of food security, through developing non-fed aquaculture, appropriate species and nature-positive feed systems. In the face of now unavoidable sea-level rise, the adaptation of port facilities can be done with new nature-positive methods already at hand. Shipping is progressively being greened. Offshore energy is modifying its ways to be nature-positive, and even the desalinisation of sea water at scale can become a nature-positive development.

Decline is not inevitable. Where science informs policy, resources are managed responsibly and rules are enforced.

The task for the next two decades is increasingly clear. We know so much more about what is happening to the ocean, and we have agreed on many of the goals needed to change course. Now we must close the distance between what we know, what we have promised, and what we actually do.

That transition will require capital beyond what governments can provide alone. Businesses and investors have an essential role because, for many industries, a healthy ocean is part of the natural capital upon which long-term prosperity depends.

This is the kind of thinking behind the Friends of Ocean Action Vision for 2030, of which I am a co-chair. To bring ocean health into the mainstream of political and economic decision-making and mobilising leaders from government, business, science and civil society to accelerate action.

In the coming years, advances in science and technology will greatly expand both our understanding of the ocean and our ability to operate sustainably within it. That creates enormous possibilities for conservation and sustainable development, but we must be always alert to any new risks.

Next year, member states of the United Nations will be deliberating at the first BBNJ COP in January, at the UN Decade of Ocean Science Conference in Rio de Janeiro in April, and at the SDG Summit in New York in September. We can confidently expect that by the time we reach the fourth UN Ocean Conference in Korea in June 2028, the makings of a post-2030 course of action will be well set out – a course that reinforces ocean science, elevates ocean finance and brings coherence to ocean governance.

That places a particular responsibility on those of us in positions of leadership today. Increased capability must be accompanied by increased responsibility. We need to measure progress, report honestly on what has and has not worked, and hold ourselves accountable for closing the gap between promises and implementation.

Twenty years from now, my grandchildren and their generation will be living with the consequences of the choices we make today. Every decrease we can achieve now in the rate of global warming will have direct benefits to their way of life. They will not need to ask whether we understood what was happening; the evidence is already before us. They will ask what we chose to do about it.

My hope is that my granddaughters will look back on this period as the moment humanity finally understood something Pacific peoples have always known: the ocean is not something apart from us.

It connects us. It sustains us. And there can be no stable world without a healthy ocean.