Tag Archives: oceans

Members of a global coalition formed by 195 organisations on 45 countries are raising the alarm about the threat of geoengineering to delicate, life-sustaining ocean ecosystems worldwide. Ambassador Peter Thomson, UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for the Ocean The Hands Off Mother Earth (HOME) Campaign is calling on civil society and government officials worldwide to vigorously oppose marine geoengineering experiments. A ...

The Civil20 (C20) Summit concluded in Hamburg, Germany on Monday, June 19, 2017 with over 300 civil society groups from around the world urging the world’s largest and richest countries, the G20, to commit to firm and immediate action on global challenges like climate change, inequality and regulation of financial markets. This comes three weeks ahead of the G20 Summit ...

The 193 Member States of the United Nations unanimously agreed to a set of measures that will begin the reversal of the decline of the ocean’s health as the five-day Ocean Conference came to a close in New York on Friday, June 9, 2017. The outcome document, together with more than 1,300 commitments to action, observers say, marks a breakthrough ...

The vital link between oceans and climate change is among the issues at the forefront of discussions at the United Nations Ocean Conference taking place in New York from June 5 to 9, which is being attended by the UN’s top climate change official, Patricia Espinosa. The Ocean Conference highlights the necessity of adopting integrated approaches to better monitor the ...

With recent commitments made by governments around the globe, the world is on track to protect over 10% of the globe’s marine areas by 2020, announced Dr. Cristiana Pașca Palmer, the Executive Secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). This target was agreed by Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in 2010, and was also adopted by Member States ...

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) on Thursday, February 23 2017 launched a global campaign to eliminate major sources of marine litter – such as microplastics in cosmetics and the excessive, wasteful usage of single-use plastic – by the year 2022. Launched at the Economist World Ocean Summit in Bali, Indonesia, the “#CleanSeas campaign” is urging governments to pass plastic reduction policies; ...

The world dumps the equivalent of one garbage truck of plastic into the ocean every minute, the United Nations heard on Wednesday, February 15 2017 at the start of a two-day meeting to prepare for this June’s Ocean Conference that will aim to help safeguard the planet’s oceans and help them recover from human-induced problems. “When leaders from across Governments, ...

Ocean warming is affecting humans in direct ways and the impacts are already being felt, including effects on fish stocks and crop yields, more extreme weather events and increased risk from water-borne diseases, according to what has been called the most comprehensive review available on the issue, launched on Tuesday by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) at ...

Around 1830, just decades after the start of the Industrial Revolution, something happened around the world: As factories fueled by coal power spread across much of Great Britain, humans began to change the chemistry of the atmosphere, adding carbon dioxide to the air in small but increasing amounts. Not long after, the planet’s oceans started to warm up, kicking off ...

Plastic pollution seems to be everywhere, from Atlantic beaches to Arctic sea ice to huge swirling vortexes of trash in the Pacific Ocean. Plastics can be found in every shape and size, from microscopic particles to whole refrigerators full of plastic parts. But plastic itself isn’t the enemy, experts insist, saying rather that it’s the way people handle it that ...