Q&A: ‘We need to rely on the ocean for climate solutions’

The ocean has soaked up around 90% of the heat caused by humanity’s addiction to fossil fuels. But at the UN’s giant climate conferences (COPs), it has often been an afterthought at best, say many experts concerned about global warming.

Kilaparti Ramakrishna, director of the Centre for Marine Policy at the lauded Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the United States, is one of them. He has been working for years to build bridges between ocean science and global climate negotiations.

Ramakrishna helped draft the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Kyoto Protocol. He was a lead author on the Fifth Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Ahead of COP31 in Türkiye this month, he spoke to Dialogue Earth about his hopes for what can be achieved for the ocean at what advocates hope will be a Blue COP.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Dialogue Earth: Where does the ocean fit with broader trends in climate action? 

Kilaparti Ramakrishna: What we have done, despite all the leaders meeting year after year after year, is continue to increase greenhouse gas emissions. There’s only one year we did not and that was during Covid.

We cannot continue on this path.

If we do, you can forget about limiting warming to 1.5C, no matter what the island states say. You can even forget about 2C. I’ve been an author of the IPCC reports, and the consequences are disastrous. That’s not acceptable.

So we need the ocean for climate solutions. But we want to make sure that we are not creating other problems. We need to minimise negative consequences, and mitigate whatever impact there is on the environment.

What happened for the ocean at the last COP in Brazil?

What COP30 did was phenomenal. They have taken the blue and green together, as it should be, because COP30 was held in the Amazon and the Amazon River has such a major impact on the Atlantic Ocean.

When you think about the Paris climate agreement adopted in 2015, there was just one mention of the ocean in the preamble, nothing else. Now you have a Pacific Ocean envoy, Inia Seruiratu from Fiji. We have Australia naming Tony Warby as their ocean envoy. And there is an ocean envoy for all the oceans in the world, the UN’s Peter Thomson.

On the ocean front, the trend is absolutely in the right direction. But we cannot say we have done the job. You know, these are only words on a piece of paper. Those words need to be translated into action, implementation.

Where do countries’ climate action plans fit with this?

Before producing their Nationally Determined Contribution to the Paris Agreement, leaders consult with the private sector, civil society, academic institutions, governmental institutions. Then they say: “Okay, with the measures that we have put in place, we can reduce our emissions into the atmosphere by this much.” And then: “If there is support from external sources, we can do more.”

That’s the basic concept of NDCs. If you want to include ocean, what does that mean? What is it that you do with the ocean that reduces emissions? You need to know what exactly ecosystems such as mangrove forests and kelp forests are currently sequestering. Then how much the NDC action would increase that by, and how much more could be sequestered.

How does the UN climate process fit with other ocean agreements and negotiations?

We have to sort out the jurisdictional problems among the various bodies and agreements.

There is the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction agreement, the Convention on Biological Diversity, the UNFCCC, the International Seabed Authority, the regional fisheries organisations. And then decarbonisation of marine shipping is a big issue.

We need a coherent, comprehensive strategy that looks not just at this or that convention independently but at them all together. COP31 should reflect these things. Even if it is a nod to the nexus, it is important.