IN THE 1970s, the tiny Pacific island state of Nauru was briefly one of the richest countries in the world. Its per-capita income was on a par with Saudi Arabia, only this wealth was built not on oil, but on faeces. For millennia, passing seabirds deposited their droppings on the island, creating a thick crust of phosphate-rich guano, ripe to be made into fertiliser.
It didn’t last: the guano was all scraped away around 20 years ago. Now Nauru, no longer filthy rich, is the prime mover in another, controversial push to exploit resources. As of last year, the country is fronting an effort to kick-start deep-sea mining in the Pacific, perhaps as early as 2023.
It is a microcosm of a much wider story. As pressures on Earth’s land grow and terrestrial resources look increasingly exhausted, governments and corporations are seeing the next big wins on, in and under the high seas. Whether it is mineral exploration, shipping, energy, tourism, desalination, cable laying, bioprospecting or more, ocean-based industries are picking up speed fast.
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This “blue acceleration” has many people worried. Our record on sustainable development on land is hardly good. With the power to profit from remote ocean resources growing rapidly, and the laws that govern their exploitation less than clear, we risk a free-for-all in the deep. “Our society has been based on the degradation of nature, destruction of nature,” says marine ecologist , a National Geographic Explorer in Residence. “It is very important to understand that we cannot repeat the mistakes of the land in the ocean.” The multibillion-dollar question is: how?
Exploiting – indeed, overexploiting – the oceans isn’t a new story. Think of the collapse of whale populations through hunting in the 19th and 20th centuries, the loss of once-plentiful fisheries and the destruction of the seabed by bottom trawling. But in the past decade or so, our interest in the oceans has taken on entirely new dimensions. In 2016, the OECD, a club of rich-world countries, would become a key driver of global economic growth, doubling in size to around $3 trillion between 2010 and 2030.
“We are in a new phase of humanity’s relationship with the ocean,” says at the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University in Sweden. “You have all these hopes and expectations for the ocean to be the next economic frontier and the engine of future human development.” Jouffray and his colleagues coined the term blue acceleration . It riffs off the Great Acceleration, the name given to the period starting in about 1950 when every measure of humanity’s impact on the planet’s land surfaces, from population growth to resource extraction, grew rapidly.
The new plunge into the ocean has come about in part because technologies – from ocean drilling and offshore wind turbines to desalination plants and factory trawlers – have made it possible. “A lot of offshore industries were unthinkable even just a few decades ago,” says Jouffray.
And sustainable isn’t exactly a word you would use for the bulk of today’s marine industries. By far the largest sector of today’s $1.7 trillion ocean economy is offshore production of climate-polluting oil and gas, which rakes in $830 billion a year, followed by the construction of marine equipment, fisheries and container shipping – the last a major, largely unregulated emitter of greenhouse gases. In this list, sustainable industries of the future barely register. Offshore wind trails in a distant 8th, with revenues of just $37 billion.
That state of affairs is taking a toll. “The ocean is already in a deep crisis,” says . More than 50 per cent of it is already impacted by biodiversity loss, noise from human activity, chemical influx and plastic pollution, he says, and few parts are completely untouched. Meanwhile, a target for 10 per cent of coastal and marine areas to be protected by 2020, especially those of particular importance for biodiversity, was missed, with protected – and just 1 per cent of the high seas.
Visions of a more sustainable future have been swirling around since the 2010s, sometimes under the guise of the “blue economy” – although not everyone is a fan of that term, which can also be used to mean continued unsustainable exploitation. “That’s not what we want to see,” says Julian Barbière at UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission. “We need to find the right balance between conservation and economic development.”
Many factors currently militate against that. For a start, the current ocean economy is heavily concentrated in the hands of a small number of established companies. Nine of the 10 biggest are oil firms. by found that in the eight largest sectors of the ocean economy – the five already mentioned, plus shipbuilding, cruise tourism and ports – just 100 companies hog 60 per cent of the revenues. They are largely headquartered in just six countries: the US, Saudi Arabia, China, Norway, France and the UK. “It’s the usual suspects,” says Jouffray.
And the status quo pays handsomely. Around 40 per cent of offshore oil and gas revenues, for example, end up in government coffers, and governments respond in kind with lucrative subsidies. Over the past 10 years, less than 1 per cent of the total value of the ocean economy has been invested in sustainable projects via philanthropic grants and government assistance, says Jouffray. Redirecting subsidies that currently prop up overfishing and offshore fossil fuel development has been on the to-do list of the World Trade Organization (WTO) for 20 years.
There are some vaguely positive signs. Finance for the ocean economy largely comes from the world’s big asset managers – BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street and the like. They are gradually seeing the light on green investment onshore, says Jouffray, and there is some hope the same thinking might percolate into offshore investments.
But it isn’t just finance. Another hindrance to sustainable development and ocean conservation is simply a lack of knowledge of what we are trying to develop and conserve. Then there is the disjointed way different ocean activities are – or are not – overseen by various UN agencies: shipping by the International Maritime Organization, fisheries by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), biodiversity by the UN Environment Programme, science by UNESCO, and so on. “These sectors don’t speak to each other,” says Unger.
Cutting across this is UNCLOS, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which came into force in 1994. This established “exclusive economic zones”, or EEZs – areas of the sea out to 200 nautical miles (370 kilometres) from a country’s shore over which it has full sovereignty and exploitation rights, provided there is no overlap with another country’s EEZ. It also enshrined the relative lawlessness of what lies outside these zones. Technically called the Area Beyond National Jurisdiction, this is subdivided into “the Area”, denoting the seabed and what lies beneath it, and “the High Seas”, for the water column above it. The UN says resources in these places are the “common heritage of all mankind”, while obliging every country to protect and preserve the marine environment.
“UNCLOS was an amazing, extraordinary achievement of international cooperation, but it leaves two-thirds of the ocean beyond jurisdiction,” says Virdin. “At least, two-thirds of everything above the seabed.” The Area is governed by the International Seabed Authority, established as part of UNCLOS to regulate future mining there – an issue that now, thanks to Nauru’s move, has become very live.
This gappy regulatory system has been left floundering in the wake of the blue acceleration. As recognition of the potential riches in EEZs has increased, nations’ attempts to claim more of the sea as their own have too. Meanwhile, technology is making it easier to exploit parts of the high seas. The system as it stands makes sustainable development of the ocean all-but impossible, says Unger. “We need to transform how we are governing the ocean,” he says.
In some places, this is happening, on paper at least. One example is the fishing industry. While UNCLOS guarantees access to the high seas, they are now far from the fishing wild west they once were, says Manuel Barange at the FAO. It helps that there aren’t plenty of fish in the high seas. Nutrient availability means fish tend to be associated with a specific habitat, such as a sea bottom, a coral reef or a coastline. “In the middle of the ocean, you have tuna and marlin, but you don’t have much more,” says Barange. Large areas where fish actually live are now governed by a patchwork of some 50 agreements between countries known as Regional Fisheries Management Organisations (RFMOs) – something that should be extended to all international waters, says Barange.
Regulated the right way, there is no reason why our demand for seafood can’t be supplied sustainably. The same goes for other aspects of the oceans. One effort to do this is the proposed UN-sponsored , for Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction. Its , the requirement for environmental impact assessments of planned economic expansion into the high seas, and the fair and sustainable use of genetic resources, seen as important for the emerging ocean biotechnology industry. The completion of the BBNJ would be “an important step to create this new vision” of ocean governance for the two-thirds of it that is currently hardly regulated, says Unger. The negotiations have been dragging on for years, however, and the latest round of talks
Meanwhile, at the delayed Convention for Biological Diversity summit in Kunming, China, later this year, nations are due to agree a new set of biodiversity targets for 2030. Despite the comprehensive failure to meet the previous targets set in Aichi, Japan, in 2010 – including one for marine conservation areas – the 2030 draft agreement is significantly more ambitious, calling for at least 30 per cent of land, freshwater areas and oceans to be protected by the end of the decade (16 April). This “30 by 30” target would be a “game changer” for ocean conservation, according to Peter Thomson, the UN secretary-general’s special envoy for the ocean.
There are reasons to be optimistic about the ocean part of the biodiversity goals this time round, says Sala. “We see countries understanding that there is no future to their ocean economies without protected areas.” Fishing areas, for example, are much more productive and sustainable if they are next to zones where catching fish is banned.
More than 70 countries have pledged to hit 30 by 30 by joining the UK-led have joined the , which is committed to 30 by 30 on land and sea. Last year, the UK created the 700,000-square-kilometre Tristan da Cunha Marine Protection Zone around this Atlantic archipelago and Costa Rica expanded the size of its Cocos Island National Park in the Pacific Ocean by 27 times. “We’ve seen this incredible increase, exponential increase, in the surface of the ocean that has been protected,” says Sala.
There are other hopeful signs, too. The Glasgow Climate Pact, signed at the COP26 summit in November 2021, put ocean warming and acidification firmly on the to-do list, while the next round of climate talks, in Egypt this November, will continue the work of curbing what Thomson says is the “central nemesis of the ocean’s problems” – greenhouse gas emissions. Even the shipping industry, a notorious laggard on this, is starting to think seriously about decarbonisation, with member states of the now committed to reducing shipping emissions by at least 40 per cent between 2008 and 2030 and reportedly tacking towards a commitment to hit net zero by 2050.
Meanwhile last month, the world agreed to negotiate a treaty to deal with plastic pollution. In June, the WTO will again attempt to abolish harmful fisheries subsidies, which currently fund industrialised plunder of fish stocks to the tune of $20 to $30 billion a year. Next up is the , Portugal, in June and July, which will aim to set out the route to a science-based sustainable ocean economy with major participation from private companies and financiers.
But all of this is happening as the clock ticks. Virdin sees two possible trajectories between now and 2030, which is just a way station to 2050, a date the UN wants humanity to be living in harmony with nature again. One is business as usual, where we mindlessly trundle sideways like a crab. Another is much more positive, says Virdin. “Protection ramps up, maybe we hit 30 by 30. Shipping decarbonises, our emissions trajectory goes down. The WTO bans or reduces fishing subsidies. We develop standard reporting systems for the ecological and social footprint of the growing ocean economy. We get a treaty that sets meaningful targets to reduce the plastic waste. And then we start getting into ecological restoration, people see the merits in investing in that and it becomes a natural climate solution. That’s a good scenario for 2030,” he says.
Decisions we take this year will determine whether it is possible, and how far we move from the current situation to an ocean economy that is profitable, sustainable and equitable. “There are success stories, there are causes for optimism,” says Virdin. “I am not a fatalist that it cannot be done, or that we shouldn’t do everything we can to bend the curve.”
It will still be a hell of a big ship to turn around. “We have major biodiversity loss, pollution and overfishing,” says Barbière. “But if by 2030 we have sustainable ocean planning processes across all countries around the world, we will be in a much better shape than we are now. I think that is possible.”
THE UNKNOWN DEEP
The oft-quoted factoid that more people have walked on the moon than have visited the deepest part of the ocean, the Challenger Deep in the Pacific Ocean, is no longer true – the score stands at moon 12, ocean 22. But we still know little about the deep ocean, especially its remoter parts. “We only have about 20 per cent of the ocean sea floor mapped in high resolution. We only have systematic observation on the top 2000 metres, we have very little observation in the deeper parts,” says Julian Barbière at UNESCO, the UN body that takes the lead on ocean science.
A complete map would be a big boost to ocean science, and is also essential for a more sustainable ocean economy. “You wouldn’t build a city on an area that you haven’t mapped; you wouldn’t build a house in a field that you haven’t mapped,” says hydrographer . “But we are operating in our oceans and using ocean resources when we haven’t mapped our oceans.”
“You need a map to figure out what you’re going to do with these things,” says Catherine Novelli, former under-secretary for economic growth, energy and the environment at the US Department of State. “Not only how are you going to conserve them, but how are you going to economically make use of the resources that are there. If we want to preserve the ocean so that it can be a sustainable resource, we have to have a map.”
McMichael-Phillips is director of the Nippon Foundation-GEBCO . GEBCO stands for , a mapping project . It started life as a hand-drawn contour map created by dropping lead-weighted lines onto the seabed, but has since evolved into a high-resolution digital chart of sonar readings.
But sonar is slow and only 20 per cent of the chart is drawn. Seabed 2030 intends to capture the remaining 80 per cent in just over eight years, which McMichael-Phillips accepts is a “monumental task” – but a doable one. “We’ve calculated that it’s 200 ship years: one ship operating for 200 years to map the ocean floor,” he says. “You can drive that down to 50 ships in the remaining eight years. And that makes our mission entirely achievable.”
OCEAN GRABBING
Nauru is the smallest island nation on Earth, with a land area of 21 square kilometres, little bigger than the London Borough of Hackney. If you count its exclusive economic zone (EEZ), stretching up to 200 nautical miles out to sea in each direction, however, that increases to 308,480 square kilometres, around 15,000 times bigger than the island itself and roughly the size of Poland. Other island nations command even vaster areas by virtue of being scattered archipelagos. Nauru’s neighbour Kiribati, which is composed of 33 atolls and islands strung across 3.5 million square kilometres of the equatorial Pacific, is the 172nd largest nation on Earth by land area, but the 12th by EEZ.
These island nations are increasingly rebranding themselves. “We may be small island developing states, but we are also large ocean developing states. We are a lot bigger than we think we are,” Camillo Gonsalves, minister of finance of St Vincent and the Grenadines, told a meeting of the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States in 2020. “We must cast our eyes outward and recognise that the beach or the coastline is not the edge of our world, but the beginning of the immense untapped resource that can sustainably fuel our growth and development.”
The realisation that surrounding seas may harbour vast untapped wealth has added another dimension to the “blue acceleration”, called ocean grabbing. This is where a country attempts to extend its marine territory by claiming dots of land or discovering hitherto-unknown bits of continental shelf: under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, countries can claim areas of continental shelf as their own even if they lie beyond 200 nautical miles from the shore.
Russia set the ball rolling in 2001 when it claimed 1.2 million square kilometres of the Arctic Ocean along an the undersea Lomonosov Ridge, which it says is an extension of Siberia. Denmark begs to differ, claiming that the feature it calls Lomonosovryggen is an extension of Greenland.
Since then, 83 other countries have submitted claims to the UN, totalling over 37 million square kilometres of sea floor. Some have succeeded. In 2012, Australia claimed and was later granted more than 2.5 million square kilometres of seabed around a remote cluster of uninhabited islets in the Southern Ocean. “It has literally been a scramble for the seabed,” says Jean-Baptiste Jouffray at Stockholm University in Sweden.
What makes the oceans different?
Switching to more sustainable development on land is hard enough, but the OECD report sets out nine things that make this even more difficult in the marine environment.
1. The sea is much larger than the land surface, subject to different legal regimes and with natural processes, species and ecosystems that cross between them.
2. Water is less transparent than air, making remote sensing of the oceans and the seabed more difficult.
3. The sea is more three-dimensional, adding to the complexity of mapping, planning and managing processes and activities within it.
4. It is fluid and interconnected, allowing for easier transport of pollutants and alien species.
5. Marine species travel further, making the management and tracking of resources more difficult.
6. Marine species can shift location rapidly, so measures to protect them in one place may be less effective as time goes by.
7. Nutrients and pollutants can cycle in the ocean for decades, making it harder to assess the long-term impact of human activities.
8. There is a lack of ownership and responsibility in much of the ocean, making regulation and exclusion of non-authorised activities harder.
9. Humans don’t live in the ocean, requiring the development of new technologies for its exploitation and making law enforcement more difficult and costly.
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