Reaching the 2030 goal of a sustainable ocean, through shared governance, must belong to everyone

Ocean Futures 2030, an initiative of the University of Bergen, and the French Embassy in Norway, organized an event on September 17th dedicated to the emerging ocean governance framework, anchored on the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) and the recently adopted Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) agreement.

The event speakers shared their thoughts on those agreements and sectorial perspectives on the new ocean governance framework, discussing important issues on the road to effective ocean governance. Listening to them made me realize the diversity of views on proceeding forward. Gathering these perspectives is essential to mobilizing society to reach the 2030 Agenda goals. But if not done carefully, we risk ending up in a siloed discussion that won't get us anywhere closer to the goals by 2030.

Thinking about this risk reminded me of Solaris, Stanislaw Lem's 1967 sci-fi novel, where a whole new science, Solaristics, tries for decades to reveal the secrets of the mysterious ocean planet Solaris, only to be discarded because, having failed to uncover the essence of the alien ocean, it grew into a useless cacophony of hypothesis and pseudo-theories. Solaris reminds us that there is a high risk of failing to reach a destination if we don't understand the basic nature of the way ahead. When I think about the road to an effective governance of the ocean, the critical point is that the ocean is, by nature, a shared and undivided space.

Nations and states have drawn maritime boundaries on maps, but the map is not the territory: the ocean resists being divided; things move freely in it;  there's no "their" ocean and "our" ocean; there is only one ocean. But herein lies the actual challenge: there's "our" scientific knowledge and "their" traditional knowledge; there's "our" traditions and "their" technologies; there are small-scale economies and industrial scale economies; there are centuries of inequality; there are cultural and ideological differences; there are many divisions – invisible on the maps – that, in the end, do divide the ocean in "ours" and "theirs."

The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea recognizes these divisions, emphasizes the equitable sharing of benefits, and mandates capacity building and technology transfer to erase them. The recent BBNJ agreement, one of its subsidiary texts, dedicates one of its four parts to capacity building and technology transfer. This treaty also puts traditional knowledge on par with scientific knowledge, a necessary step to bring together different ways of understanding the ocean. But their noble intentions will never materialize if we fail to implement the wide-reaching GBF and BBNJ.

We need capacity building, we need technology transfer, and we need cooperation to implement these agreements. If we don't achieve this, those boundaries will not be erased. Our path to 2030 will then be but a maze of conflicting views, not so different from Solaristics, as Lem, writing about the end of its golden age, reminds us: "… and Solaristics became an increasingly tangled maze where every apparent exit led to a dead end. In the climate of general indifference, stagnation and despondency, the ocean of Solaris was submerging under an ocean of printed paper."

Is there a risk of our 2030 goals for the global ocean disappearing under a sea of useless paper? Yes, there is. If we don't quench our divisions, alien to the ocean's common and shared nature, we will end up with an ocean governance as useless as Solaristics.

During the Ocean Futures 2030 event, I learned that the Towards IPOS initiative is working to bridge these divisions through the concept of an International Panel for Ocean Sustainability, that uses dialogue and cooperation to create a shared knowledge of the ocean. This is the right way forward to erase all other divisions.

We can only reach the 2030 goal of a sustainable ocean, as SDG14 , Life Below Water, envisages, through common and shared governance that excludes no one and belongs to everyone.