Open-ended Informal Consultative Process on Oceans and the Law of the Sea (ICP26)

Distinguished delegates, good morning.
This morning, we will commence our discussion under the second segment of the discussion panel entitled in Enabling and Enhancing Marine Ecosystem Restoration through International Cooperation and Coordination, Challenges and Opportunities.
There are six presentations scheduled for this morning.
We intend to hear from the first three panelists, followed by a question and answer session before proceeding with the remaining three panelists.
We again wish to recall that the discussions in the panel are informal in order to allow delegations from states, intergovernmental, and non governmental organizations to participate actively in the debate.
All presentations have been posted on the website of the Division for Ocean Affairs and the Law of the Sea to assist delegations in preparing for discussions.
As these panels are also being broadcast over United Nations web TV, we are also accepting questions from remote viewers.
Please email any questions and comments to dos at un.org.
I now wish to give the floor to our first panelist, on Lee, Representative of New York Liaison Office, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, UC.
The presentation is entitled Advancing Marine Ecosystem Restoration through Enhanced Maritime Security and Crime Prevention.
You have the floor, ma'am.
Thank you, co chair for giving the floor, distinguished delegates, dear colleagues and excellencies.
Good morning.
UODC would like to express its appreciation to Iceland and Mauritius as co chairs of the 26th meeting of the informal consultative Process and our distinguished panelists.
UODC is pleased to be here today to highlight the importance of preventing and combating criminal exploitation of marine resources through strengthening law enforcement at sea and crime prevention in support of marine ecosystem restoration.
The fishery sector is critical for food security, poverty alleviation, and human prosperity worldwide.
In 2022, global production in the sector reached 92.3 million tons with an estimated landing value of $159 billion.
The expansion of the fisheries sector and the broader blue economy has increased explosion of maritime species to organized crime activities.
Crimes that affect the marine ecosystem are diverse and interconnected, including crimes in the fisheries sector, pollution crimes, and illegal dumping at sea, organized criminal exploitation of marine living resources, including species trafficking, maritime crimes affecting marine protected areas and broader blue economy sectors and corruption and illicit financial flows.
At the UNODC, we see this as one of the major threats to the marine ecosystem restoration efforts.
To effectively address these challenges, integrated marine or ocean management must be complemented by a robust criminal justice approach, ensuring the environmental governance is reinforced through investigation, prosecution, and adjudication of maritime crime.
The effective prevention investigation, prosecution of crimes affecting the marine ecosystem requires a coordinated approach along the entire criminal justice chain linking action at sea with follow up on land.
Key actors to be strengthened include maritime law enforcement agencies, prosecutors and the judiciary, customs and border authorities, port inspection systems, and financial investigation and anti corruption units.
UNODC supports members these efforts to strengthen relevant legal framework and capacities of the above mentioned agencies.
Through more than a decade of work in this area, UODC has identified key challenges.
Most of these challenges are very similar to what are encountered when addressing other crimes that affect the environment and therefore experience from those areas can be also used and informed to the responses in this area.
So first, a central challenge is a strong link to illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, also known as IUU fishing.
Certain forms of which may constitute criminal offenses under national law.
Estimates suggest that around one in five wild cat marine fish originates from IU fishing, generating up to $36.4 billion in illegal profits annually.
Frequently organized criminal groups are involved with illicit activity at stake closely linked to crimes on such as fraud, document forgery, tax evasion, corruption, illicit financial flows, and trafficking in persons.
These activities disproportionately affect small island and developing states, which often face significant constraints in monitoring and enforcement across vast marine or maritime zones.
Second, significant knowledge gaps persist regarding the skill, ology, and also regional patterns of these crimes while IUU fishing is relatively well documented.
Understanding of pollution crimes, illegal dumping at sea and illegal resource exploitation remains limited, so highlighting the need for a stronger evidence base to inform policy and environment and enforcement.
The third, weak and fragmented legal frameworks remains a major constraint.
Offenses are often treated as administrative violation with low penalties, contributing to the perception of low risk and high profit.
Strengthening criminal justice responses and enforcement would improve deterrence and compliance.
Fourth, enforcement capacity remains limited with gaps in resources, training, and equipment, and insufficient integration of criminal justice approach into ocean governance.
Fifth, corruption plays a significant role as high value resources and complex regulatory systems create opportunities for bribery, regulatory evasion, and illicit financial flows.
Sixth, limited cooperation at national, regional and international levels.
F constraint responses with agencies often operating in silos despite the transnational nature of maritime crime.
Lastly, awareness of the crimes and of the need for criminal justice response remains uneven, limiting more integrated approach and cooperation.
Against these challenges, I would like to share three examples on how UODC is supporting member states to address these challenges.
First, the UODC Fish N Project, which is funded by the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation.
It is UODC's flagship project on crimes in the fisheries sector.
To date, the FishNet Project has supported 17 countries at the national level and 29 countries at the regional level and focused on ten countries in Africa and Southeast Asia.
The efficient net raises awareness, strengthens legislative framework, build capacity and strengthens anti corruption efforts on capacity building, the project follows from crimson to court approach with technical assistance provided to agencies on land and at sea.
For example, building capacities of law enforcement to identify, stop, and inspect shipments to carry illegal goods and strengthen interagency cooperation.
The support to member states also include value chain analysis and corruption risk assessment.
So as a first step in its technical system to address these crimes in the fishery sector, U ODC support to requesting dates to identify value chain stages, which include preparation for fishing and fishing, also harvesting landing processing sales, transport of fish product, delivery of fish and fish product to consumers and also to identify agencies involved at each stage of this value chain, relevant control mechanisms and entry points for crime.
So the purpose of adopting a value chain approach is twofold.
Firstly, it allows for the identification of numerous points along the chain at which different types of crime typically occur.
Secondly, it allows for the highlighting of potential entry points by the law enforcement interventions in identifying investigating and prosecuting crime throughout the sector.
So this value chain analysis provides recommendations and also serves as a basis for targeted technical assistance.
I would also like to share some tools or resources developed on this project and would like to highlight two products.
The long term fish guide on addressing corruption in the fishery sector is a tool for conducting corruption risk assessment and developing mitigation measures.
Another key resources is legislative guide for combating crimes in the fishery sector developed with food and agriculture organization expertise, which supports practitioners in strengthening legislative framework through model legislative provisions.
All publications can be accessed from our UNODC environment website.
The second example on our work is on combating marine species trafficking.
South Asia is both a source and transit hub for illegal wildlife and marine products due to biodiversity and proximity to high demand markets.
Organized criminal networks move, poached, and illegally harvested marine species and products using smuggling techniques.
So UODC has delivered privileged training in South and Southeast Asia on crime scene management, evidence collection, handling of digital and forensic wildlife evidence, financial investigations, open source investigation, and regional and international cooperation.
Third example is on strengthening human security in fishing communities, which put more efforts on crime prevention.
So UODC and FEO through the United Nations Human Security Trust Fund, have developed integrated intervention to protect communities from criminal exploitation and ensure safe marine environment in coastal communities in the southwest of the Domintic Republic.
The pilot project delivered a comprehensive assessment of human security challenges in targeted communities, proposed socio economic responses within the rule of law framework, including private sector partnerships and society whole of government security policies.
So with three examples, now, I would like to turn to the way forward.
How can international cooperation and coordination be strengthened to combat crime affecting marine ecosystems and support restoration efforts? Key areas for action include the use of technology such as satellite imagery and AI tools to improve monitoring and traceability and to reduce IUU fishing, as well as draw information sharing platform to improve transparency and coordination.
First priorities include strengthen partnerships among government, international organizations, academia and private sector, promoting sustainable fishing practices and enhancing interagency and regional cooperation.
Community engagement is also critical for monitoring and reporting of illegal activities.
In addition, promoting investment in the blue economy can support sustainable use of marine resources and coastal livelihoods.
As mentioned just now, relating to the challenges, there are still policy and legal gaps.
So policy reforms are needed to close gaps and strengthen enforcement and compliance.
So all of these efforts can create enough enabling conditions for more effective marine ecosystem restoration and long term ocean sustainability.
So I thank you for your attention and welcome the further discussions on the specific issues.
Thank you.
Thank you for your presentation.
I now wish to give the floor to our second panelist, Alan Kay Piggch, Executive Director for the Institute for Ocean Conservation Science and endowed Professor of Ocean Conservation Science at Stony Brook University.
The presentation is entitled Restoration of an Ecosystem, the Shinnecock Bay Global Hope Spot.
You have the floor.
Thank you very much.
It's my great honor to address you and I would like to start by giving my thanks and respect to the co chairs, my fellow panelists, distinguished delegates, and other attendees.
I'm going to share a story with you today about a place that I've been working for quite a long time.
I think that this story sends a global message of hope and also shows that hope is contagious.
It demonstrates that it is possible to restore an entire ecosystem.
It's not too late to undo the damage that we've done to many parts of the ocean.
But it requires good science.
This is coming from a scientist, of course, persistence, financial support, and strong protection, as we heard, because it's not just the quantity of the protection that's important, but the quality.
We have to be sure that the places that we protect are well enforced.
Okay.
I joined the faculty of Stony Brook University in the year 2008 and I started looking for a project that I could do that was accessible locally.
Shinecock Bay came to mind, not least of which because Stony Brook University has a marine science station there with a fleet of research vessels and a state of the art marine laboratory.
Shinnecock Bay is also a place that is ecologically, economically and culturally very significant.
It's home to the Shenocock Nation, which has been there for millennia and there are generations of bay men who have plied the waters.
Snocock Bay is connected to the Atlantic Ocean through the inlet, the Shinocock Inlet, and has an eastern and western part of the bay.
So what I learned when I spoke with my colleagues was that Shinocock Bay was in a world of hurt.
For decades, there were annually occurring harmful algal blooms.
This picture illustrates a brown tide.
It really is very brown.
The brown tides resulted because of a lack of sunlight that could penetrate the water, the loss of seagrasses.
There also had once been a thriving clam fishery in Shinocock Bay, but the clams were overfished and the clam population had collapsed and the clams had provided filtration capacity, which removed many of the nutrients that fuel these harmful algal blooms.
This was a very, very degraded ecosystem.
My colleagues and I decided to set out on a project to try to restore this ecosystem, and we called it the Shinocock Bay Restoration Program.
And the heart of our restoration strategy are what we call hard clam sanctuaries.
These are analogous to marine protected areas, except that they're full of hard clams and we had to buy the clams because as I said, the clams had been fished out.
We planted these clams in high densities and we got the authorities to agree that these would be no take, that they would patrol the waters and make sure that those clams stayed there.
We couldn't afford all the clams that it would take to filter the water to get rid of the armholgal blooms, so we had to rely on the clams doing the work.
We hoped that they would survive, they would reproduce, their offspring would reproduce, and in time, there would be a large enough population of clams to filter the water remove those nutrients and do something to make a dent in the harmful algae blooms.
We also later on were able to build oyster reefs and eelgrass.
In about five years, it was clear that the restoration was succeeding in improving water quality.
The brown tides used to extend over the entire summer, even sometimes into the fall.
As the years went by, they got shorter and shorter and shorter in duration until finally in 2017, there was no brown tide at all.
We wondered, is this just a lucky year or is this a pattern? But it turned out it was actually a pattern.
The last brown tide was seen in 2016.
While for many years, Shinecock Bay looked like this, today, it looks like this.
In part, because of the successful restoration of the water quality, Shinnecock Bay was named a global hope spot by the international organization, Mission Blue.
This is the first hope spot in the State of New York, and there are champions for each hopesot.
It's co championed by Stony Brook University and the Explorers Club.
I am the champion for Stony Brook University.
One of the questions that I had, that's a great beginning to the story, but what happened after that? What about the rest of the ecosystem? We saw an improvement in water quality and clarity, but what about the fish? What about the other species that live there? The question I asked was, and if so, when will these direct restoration efforts that we put into place by putting clams in the water, putting eelgras seed in the water, when will they have a broader ecosystem impact? Because we weren't going to have hatcheries and produce fish and put fish in the water.
They had to come back on their own.
Well, we had to do science.
We had to actually monitor what was happening in the water to see what was going on.
We started our studies in 2011 with a method called bottom trawling.
This is a method used for a long time in commercial fisheries and it's also used for many fishery surveys around the world.
A net is dragged along the water, brought to the top of the vessel.
The species are identified, measured, and weighed and over time, the catch per unit effort that we see over the years gives us an indication of how the abundance of fish is changing.
In 2020, we were able to add a new method called E DNA.
E stands for environment.
I think most of you know what DNA is.
In the case of Shinocock Bay and other water bodies, e DNA is you take a water sample and in that water sample are fragments of DNA of all the species that live in the water.
By filtering the water, extracting the DNA, processing those samples, I can tell you all the species that are there.
So EDNA is non invasive, non destructive, and as we've seen through our studies now for several years, it's also better at detecting the full spectrum of marine life.
Then finally, in 2024, our latest method is to use autonomous uncreed surface vessels to monitor the biodiversity in the bay.
The first expedition occurred in 2024 and this shows you the technology that we used.
This was the first time ever that an uncrewed surface vehicle that is solar powered, self riding was integrated with an autonomous EDNA sampler.
This combination could go out on its own, sample the bay, bring back the samples, and they would come back preserved and then we could do the rest.
Some of the added value of these technologies is that we could sample night and day, autonomous vehicles don't need to sleep.
We were able to sample in sensitive habitats and difficult to access locations, and this was an emissions free, noise free, high resolution sampling, which means it's a very environmentally responsible way of monitoring marine life.
We've experienced many methodological advancements over the years that we've been studying and we now bring together direct observations, molecular signals, ecosystem modeling to build a more complete view of biodiversity in Snoock Bay.
What have we learned? Over the years, I'll talk first about the trawling data because we have the longest dataset for this particular method.
We have found more than 100 species of fishes in our bottom trarawls, but I focus here on 13 that we find in abundance every single year because we use these as our indicator species to look at changes in abundance.
If you look at the two species in the upper left, bay anchovian and Atlantic silvers, these are examples of what we call forage fish.
Why forage fish? Because they can feed on plankton.
Not very many species can and all the other organisms that are predatory feed on these forage fish.
They're the species that are fed on.
They're the base fish of the food web.
And then in the lower left, you see a summer flounder.
This is a predatory fish.
It eats other fish.
This is a species that has a longer life history and also requires there to be plenty of little fish in the water in order for it to thrive.
Here's some results.
If you look at the left panel, the Eastern Bay, you see from 2011 through to the present time, biodiversity, an index of biodiversity called the Shannon Wiener biodiversity Index.
For a while we didn't see much change, but then suddenly in 2018, boom, the biodiversity or the number of species in the water started to skyrocket.
This was just after the brown tides were eliminated and the hard clamps that we had planted were reproducing naturally.
We also saw for the Western Bay a statistically significant increase in biodiversity, though not as pronounced as in the Eastern Bay.
Our EDNA studies, we've only been conducting those since 2020, as I said, so it's a shorter time series.
The orange line also shows a doubling of species diversity between the years 2020 and 2025 from our EDNA data.
The troll data and the EDNA data are telling us the same story.
Species diversity is greatly improving.
Now, I know this looks complicated, but bear with me for a minute and just look at the colors.
When you look at the far left 2020, you see a lot of blue and the blue are those forage species.
We thought that the forage species would be the first to come back because they feed on plankton and they have short life cycles.
In fact, we see a lot of blue, we see a lot of those, but we don't see in 2020, very many of those predatory species.
Those are in orange and yellow.
But as we go to the current time, we see an increase in those predatory species, and there's really a renaissance of the entire ecosystem going on.
Not just the forage species, but all the other species that depend upon them are increasing in Shinnecock Bay.
The EDNA shows a very similar story.
I won't go into this in detail, but we've also looked at ecosystem modeling and the models tell us the same story.
If you look at early restoration periods compared to the recent restoration, the total biomass in the system went up by 36% and the system is more mature than it was at the start.
So we now see that Shinecock Bay is transitioning from a degraded, simplified ecosystem to a more diverse, productive, structurally complex, and economically valuable estuary.
We can come to this conclusion because we've used multiple lines of evidence.
As I've talked about, the biodiversity has increased, the species richness has increased, the indicator species have returned, and we see marked shifts in community composition, and new technologies and advancements are beginning to transform how we monitor ecosystem restoration impacts.
I told you that I would explain how hope can be contagious and success can breed success.
Shinnecock Bay was named a hopespot in the year 2022.
Within a year, the second hope sppot in New York was designated and this also depended on shellfish restoration, the New York New Jersey Harbor Estuary hopespot.
Last year, the Chesapeake Bay was named a hopespot.
Also a system that has harmful algal bloom problems and depends heavily on shellfish restoration as a way of trying to restore the ecosystem.
But it goes further than that because there are now over 160 hope spots all around the globe.
Most of these hope many of these hope spots are undergoing restoration efforts and sharing information, sharing techniques, sharing practices.
I can just give a few examples in the short time that I have.
But for example, in Indonesia and Nus Panita, coral restoration is being done combining fieldwork, training, monitoring, and community based conservation.
In Spain and the Balearic Islands, seagrass restoration is occurring with international partnerships that are supporting the efforts.
This is a recognized Unesco World Heritage site.
In Papua New Guinea and Kimbibay, we have mangrove restoration, and in Chile in the Humbol archipelago, kelp restoration.
I've had just a chance to give you a small sampling of what is going on in the broad range of hope spots that are designated by Mission Blue.
We now have a community that's collaborating on ecosystem restoration of all types, and this is very powerful and something that can be built upon.
I'd like to conclude my presentation with just a few words.
I hope that you've seen that, again, it's not too late.
We can make a difference, but also that hope is contagious, that success breeds success, and most importantly, the nations of the world have made some very important commitments to improve the marine environment.
The UN has agreed to 30% of the ocean should be protected by the year 30 2030.
That's coming up right away.
High Seas Trey will soon come into effect, which will allow marine protected areas to be developed in the high seas.
There are a lot of positive developments that have happened in terms of commitment, but these commitments must be followed through on because that is the only way that they will actually make a difference.
We not only need quantity, we need quality.
Today, we just recently reached 10% of the ocean is protected in protected areas, but only 3% is strongly protected.
The other protection is very, very weak.
And we've got way more to go.
Thank you again for your attention.
I hope you enjoyed my story and I hope that you take this message of hope with you and apply it wherever you may work and live.
Thank you.
Thank you very much for your presentation.
I will now give the floor to our third panelist, James Cairo, Chief Scientist, member of the International Blue Carbon Scientific Working Group, Kenya Marine and Fisheries Research Institute.
They are unfortunate you're unable to be with us in person today, but have kindly recorded their presentation regarding Mai works, how Blue Carbon Trading scheme is restoring and protecting mangroves in Kenya.
I ask the Act to proceed with the presentation.
Thank you.
Hi.
Thank you for inviting me for this 26th meeting of UN open ended informal consultative process on ocean under the of the sea.
My name is James Cairo from Kenya.
In this session of enabling and enhancing marine ecosystem restoration through international cooperation and coordination, I'll be discussing about how we have how money actually talks, how blue carbon trading is driving man restoration and community development in Kenya.
First of all, I have to indicate mangrove are one of the many bro carbon ecosystem.
We do have mangrove seagrasses and salt marshes as a key brew carbon ecosystem.
In my talk today, I'll be discussing about mangrove forests and the threats facing them in Kenya, which parallel to what will be happening in the way.
Mangrove suffers from deforestation, conversion, and pollution.
Here in Kenya, mangroves are affected mostly by overexploitation of wood resources.
So our project is addressing how we can sustain the supply of mangrove goods and services through the sales of carbon trading.
Our project is based in Vanga at the south coast of Kenya and its objective is to restore and protect mangrove through the sales of carbon trade.
The project is verified by Pri vivo System and standards and credited for 20 years since 2019.
The project sequester around 9,000 tons of carbon per year, which are sold in the international blue carbon market.
The activities of Wang proof Forest involves restoration of degraded mangrove areas, avoided deforestation through surveillance of forest against the activities.
We do a lot of education and awareness, and we do forest monitoring.
These activities do generate eligible carbon credits that are then sold to the voluntary carbon market.
Community could indicate how much carbon we have generated or we have sequestered since 2019.
The project area being protected by the community under Bugaboo Forest is 460 hectare.
From this forest, we are sequestering 9,000 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year.
The total credit generated from 2019 is 20,000 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.
When these are sold cumulatively in 2019, the community have been able to earn about $400,000 How is this money shared? This money follows a specific beneficiary scheme, which is governed by the Plan vivo standard.
At least 60% under Pn vivo standard, at least 60% of the revenue generated it should go to the community and our project, Bangalo Forest, is doing above this.
We are actually the community is benefiting from more than 90% of the benefits accrued from the sales of carbon credit and even the benefits that we are generating, the percentage is even higher by the national value, which is 40% from the national regulation.
In this muro, we are able to show how community have been generating income 2024-2026.
You can see this indicate the project transparency.
You can see that the money received in 2024, 2026, 2025 is around 12,000 Kenya shillings.
And that money that mural is displayed in the strategic part of the village so that everybody who wants to know how the the money generated is distributed is shared.
The money that had been received through sales of carbon credit is used to support local development projects in water and sanitation, in education, In a health in hospital, like in this picture, you can see school children, you could see the water programs, you could see the schools in the lab.
In 2022, for instance, the schools in Vanga showed a progressive improvement in performance and the schools was able at least to send two students to national school, which is a direct outcome of the Banga Blue Forest program.
What are the ecological impacts of our project? From 460 hectas that are protected by the bugaboo forest, we are able to restore we have been replanting mangrove.
A 50,000 seedreos have been replanted in the degraded sites with a 70% to 80% survival rates.
And through these activities, we have been able to show an increased biodiversity as indicated by high fish catch.
We also indicated high crustacea biodiversity, and we have also shown a high mollusk population, which ideally is showing that the project is benefiting both community and biodiversity outcomes.
What is our takeaway message from the blue forest? We have been able to show that restoring and protecting blue carbon ecosystem like mangrove has the potential to provide low cost opportunity to mitigate carbon emissions.
The pricing is a climate action with multiple benefits.
These benefits, you can summarize them as climate benefit, biodiversity benefit and community benefits.
Carbon credits generated from activities or projects that avoid, reduced or remove carbon dioxide emission.
Each credit is equal to one ton of avoided, reduced, or removed carbon.
Potential emissions from blue carbon could be avoided at $3 4-10 carbon dioxide tons of carbon dioxide, making it economically viable and socially acceptable.
There is need to enhance understanding at all levels of the true value of blue carbon ecosystem and need to protect them for the climate, community, and biodiversity benefits.
Thank you.
I would like to ask the Secretariat to pass in our thanks to Mr.
Cairo for his presentation.
So we have now heard the third panelists on this morning's session, and we will pose presentations for questions and comments.
So the floor is now open.
I give the floor to the distinguished representative of Monaco.
Thank you, Mr.
Co chair and thank you for the panelists.
As usual, ICP is giving up very substantive impact.
On the work we do on the oceans and the law of the sea.
This is why this meeting has always been very important to member states to assess what it's actually working and how we can improve cooperation.
I want to thank miss Lee, Professor Pikich and doctor Cairo for the hope indeed that they have provided us with those success stories.
I have a question for each of you and I will start with miss Lee.
You know what struck me with the first slides that you showed.
Is that everything was lack or weak except for corruption.
I think we identify exactly where we have to work and I congratulate you in the very important data based results that you have been showing.
I would like to know how does it work? Do countries approach you or considering that the data you have available You approach governments to offer your services.
How long has the FishNet project been in place and I really took is that a value chain approach and the lessons learned.
Do states know about that? Can you be more proactive? In if you have the funds because the capacity you probably have, but sometimes financing is lacking.
But to considering what you've been doing with 17 states, without waiting for those in need to approach you, could you be more proactive to get to the others.
Professor Pikich, we go a long way and I remember When decades ago we worked on a toolkit for marine protected areas.
Again, this morning you insisted on the quality, and this is very important.
You really showed how natural based solutions can be put in place and become effective.
Now, you're coming from a very well known public university research university with of course capacity.
I do remember when you presented those EDNA autonomous unproved surface vessels that you have been working with in Shenocock Bay Restoration.
Because obviously Stony Buke University as a financing min, but how can you replicate what you've been doing away from the New York area because it's a success story.
You've shown a few spots in Indonesia in particular.
I think what is also very important that you have been partnering with the indigenous population.
I think this is very important to have local people involved because they know better.
They have some memory of centuries of being part of the community.
So in terms of cost because to replicate, you need capacity building, you need enforcement.
So how when you work with those government that have been partnering with the hope ports, in terms of capacity resources and partnership, how do you approach them? Then a doctor Cairo, the blue carbon trading is really shows that mangrove restoration is essential.
When we were in Lisbon for the UN conference, I remember a project in Colombia that has also been very successful because people don't want to leave the area where they have always been living.
And once they are provided with solutions, they can well implement them and stay in the area where they live.
You mentioned deforestation, corruption again, and pollution.
How did you start that project? What I mean is that it's because we've been talking about blue carbon economy for years now.
But it's very interesting and I would like to know how did we start? Did you approach the patterns? Do you work with international institution? A regional institution like African Union or how is the World Bank that has been active in the blue economy has been involved with your project? Because it can give ideas to others.
How did you manage to start this and have success? Again, I think that it's very satisfying to listen to those presentation as they really translate into success stories of policies that we have been trying to champion here at the at the UN for decades.
So thank you very much.
Thank you.
I give the floor to the distinguished representative of Iceland.
Thank you very much, Co chair.
Thank you to all the panelists.
Sad that doctor Cairo is not with us here today.
But we can use a moment and just echo the sentiments mentioned by Her Excellency, the permanent resident of Monaco, to Professor Pick.
It's a message of hope and greatly needed at this time.
But I just wanted to propose a question to miss Lee.
And thank you as well very much for your presentation, especially the discussion on opportunities for improvements.
You did mention the legal gaps, but it was mentioned mainly within the context of policy.
But I want to ask specifically, especially around the IUU fishing and the question of weak legal frameworks.
Whether you are meaning that it is a lack of framework or there's a weak framework within the international or domestic legal frameworks, perhaps even both and perhaps maybe you could give us a little in general terms, what specifically is needed to remedy that weakness, whether it is actually a lack of regulation of laws or perhaps it is a lack of criminal accountability.
That is to say that the punishment perhaps doesn't fit the crime.
A little reflection on that would be very interesting.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I now give the floor to the distinguished representative of Belgium.
Thank you so much and also in needed for the interesting presentation.
I had a question for both panelists or speakers.
My first question builds a bit on what Representative Iceland said, mainly indeed that with the IU fishing, if you go at high seas, is there then a bit of a lack of framework or an overarching body to oversee that? How would you see who is responsible or how can we improve to find solutions for that? Then to Professor Pitki.
I'm very interested in the E DNA sampling.
It's also something we're doing in Belgium, but I was wondering about the cost of the device that is being used and whether it would work more at open sea as well, the wave attenuation is, of course, a bit higher probably than in in base.
Thank you.
I see no other requests for the flow, so I will give go to our distinguished panelists for their response.
But before I do that, let me point out to the distinguished representative of Monaco doctor Cairo is not in fact online.
He had a prerecorded video.
The Secretariat will reach out to doctor Cairo and convey the question and follow up on this.
Distinguished panelists, you have the floor.
Thank you very much, Co chair for giving me the floor and also I would like to express appreciation for the comments and also for the questions from excellency and from distinguished delegates.
In relation to the question and comments from her Excellency, ambassador of monarca, it is really good question in relation to also how UN system to raise awareness of their efforts to provide it to member states to work together with member states to address some specific challenges in this context is the project on the fishnet is really a good question.
For UODC all of these technical assistance project or capacity project are funded by voluntary contributions from specific donors.
Normally, we deliver this technical assistance based on firstly, UODC has mandates.
Secondly, we deliver support to requesting member states.
So it's really member states driven.
We couldn't impose assistance to a member states.
Here it's very important that we need to let member states who may have this political will to know the existence of this project.
Firstly, for this project, it was established in November 2016 for the phase one, and then after four years, based on the evaluation, schedule and the continuous contribution, Phase two has been developed.
So it focused on nearly the whole criminal justice chain from crime prevention to law enforcement capacity building investigation, and then capacity of prosecution and also support to the judiciary for the adjudication.
So in this regard, all of the document of this project are available on the UNODC website on the environment website.
This is also part or component of UNODC comprehensive to prevent and also to combat the crimes that affect the environment, which covers forestry, fishery, and illegal mining and logging, et cetera So of course, I listened carefully the proposals from all the advice from the Excellency embedment monocle, and I will transfer the information to our project manager who is located in Nairobi to do more awareness raising and to do more advocacy.
Thank you.
So in relation to the second question on the legal gaps in preventing and combating the crime that affects the marine ecosystem or relating to the maritime crime, So from our researches, we have also observed some, you know, the legal framework gaps at the national level.
For example, as I mentioned just now, that some offenses in the fisheries sector are related to fisheries operations such as fraud, the document for the forgery tax evasion are treated as an administrative violation means very low penalties are not reach the threshold of the criminal offenses, so the penalty may not really determine you know the potential perpetrators compared to the high profit.
And also in this area, UN has already adopted and also effective two relevant UN conventions, the UN Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime and the UN Convention Against Corruption.
But for UN Convention against Transnational organized crime, it needs a threshold of criminal offenses with at least four years of deprivation of liberty.
So in this regard, if the offenses with penalty lower than that, the UN Convention Against transnational organized crime and the tools for international cooperation provided by it cannot be used in practice, although it has already more than 190 parties.
So the third question relating to oversee the illicit fishing in high sea, I think it's really challenging because when we discuss the support to member states, we based on our mandates.
For example, in ODC, we based on mandates contained in the conventions, such as the convention against transnational organized crime and also corruption and also the mandates given to us by the General Assembly or other meeting bodies.
So based on this now over focused ID support member states at the national, regional and international level to address crimes that are established in international law.
So thank you very much.
Thank you.
It seems I have the floor now.
Great.
I will try to answer the questions from the distinguished representative from Monaco and Belgium at the same time, if that's okay.
One of the things I would like to clear up is that Universities may appear to be well funded, but when it comes to research, we rely on external funding to do all the research.
Even I mentioned that Stony Brook University, we have a fleet of research vessels.
If I want to use one, I have to pay by the hour or the day for the use of those vessels because the university doesn't have the, the money to operate them without those grants.
So For many of my colleagues, federal grants are critically important and as many of you may know, in the United States, federal funding for research has not been fantastic in the last year or so.
We rely heavily on support from foundations, philanthropic support of all kinds.
I would have to say that I've been very fortunate that my program has been pretty well funded and I've been able to do this work.
Okay.
I want you to clear that up.
In terms of the indigenous component, I didn't have a chance to talk about it in my talk.
I love to talk about it usually because it's been a very important part of the work that we've done.
It's interesting that the members of the Shinoog Nation and I first connected over the idea of EDNA.
Why? Because a basic principle of indigenous wisdom that I find throughout the world is the principle of least harm.
That whatever you do, you should do it with the least harm.
And when they heard me talk about EDNA and how it was non invasive, non destructive, and provided powerful knowledge, we bonded over that concept and they wanted to be involved in a project like that.
Hope begets hope when it came time for the Chesapeake Bay, the Chesapeake Bay also has many indigenous and the Chesapeake Bay is much more complicated and larger than Shinnecock Bay.
There are many states surrounding it and I think there are about 26 tribes of various kinds.
And they all wanted to know from our Shinnecock colleagues, collaborators, what was their experience like? Should they get involved in this? In fact, the fact that we had that relationship led to the Rapahanic tribe, for example, and other tribes in the Chesapeake region agreeing to work in the Chesapeake Bay Hope Spot with the investigators.
I think EDNA in particular is a methodology that is amenable and is valued by indigenous as well as non indigenous individuals.
Okay.
I'll talk a little bit about the USV.
You asked, can this work on open ocean waters? In fact, I found out about one part of the integrated contraption.
The USV is the data explorer.
I found out about it when I was asked to design a study to test various uncrewed vehicles that could detect and deter illegal fishing.
I wanted to bring that up because this vessel was actually initially used and is still being used to detect and deter illegal fishing in marine protected areas, particularly in other places.
That's when I first became familiar with it and I was really impressed with this technology for many reasons.
One, it is solar powered.
And that means that not only does it not emit greenhouse gases, but you don't have to fuel it.
It can be used in very remote areas without needing to carry fuel around, which is a problem in many parts of the world to use vessels that require fuel.
It also can withstand hurricane force winds itself ring.
If it does flip over, you saw that red hoop.
If it is flipped over by a wave, it will right itself and it's also uncrewed no lives are put at risk and it can be used under very tough environmental conditions.
I think it's a technology that is highly useful in many places that other technologies would not be.
Okay.
What else did you ask? The other thing about being able to be used in remote areas, another thing that even though I've developed this in Shinnecock Bay, which is local, my thought always was that this would be a useful technology that could be used anywhere.
With the EDNA part, we integrated an EDNA sampler that's also autonomous and it preserves the samples that it takes.
You program it and it goes to the places you ask it to go to.
It takes the samples and it preserves them.
And that preservative enables us to be able to keep the samples at room temperature for at least two months, up to six months depending on the ambient temperature.
The higher the temperature, the less time you have.
That's a pretty long period of time.
You could be in a very remote area and take your samples, keep them at room temperature, and then collect them and ship them for the final steps of the DNA processing.
A lot of things about this technology make it useful in remote parts of the world in all parts of the world.
What else did I forget? I guess the other point is, I think it's important that we understand what's in the water.
If we don't know what's there, how do we know how we're doing? How do we know if we're making progress? How do we know if things are getting worse or getting better? We need some way to do it.
Every method has its pros and cons.
I have become very interested in the technologies that I'm using because I think they're widely available, because they're environmentally responsible.
And also, I think that they are cost effective when you take all the costs into account.
What's the alternative to using an uncrew surface vessel? This vessel, this vehicle is only 12 feet long.
It's small.
It would be easy to ship to another location, for example, it has been shipped to another location.
It only takes two people to deploy it into the water and two people to retrieve it once it comes back and it comes back with all its samples preserved.
That's pretty good deal.
When you think about a big research vessel, That vessel costs a lot more money to make, a lot bigger crew to operate, a lot more money to maintain and operate and a lot of labor to run.
Plus people have to be on the ship using the equipment and in some cases, lives are put at risk if the conditions are difficult.
So I think again, when you look at costs, you can't just look at them in isolation.
You have to look at the costs relative to other ways of understanding the ocean.
I hope I've answered most of what was asked of me.
If not, please come to me afterwards.
Thank you.
I thank our panelists for their additional remarks.
I see we have a request for the floor from panelist number ten.
So can you please introduce yourself.
Hi, I'm Bruno de Bascne by Marine biology from Brazil.
My question is about the use of the clams in the oysters and about DNA.
I think clams and oysters can be a super interesting nature based solution, but I wouldn't wonder if they want to get all the contaminants from the water and how this can get to food chain or to cummins that would fish these clams and oysters.
And about the EGNA The DNA banks that have the codes that you compare after you sample, I sometimes feel we don't have many standards of what do you should do or worry when you're going to submit a DNA that you just collected for a new species.
I'm from Brazil and almost none of our species are in this databases, so it's very complicated for us to use EDNA even if we want we have to build this bank first.
Can you talk about that, please? Sure.
Happy to talk about both.
In terms of the health effects, you also need if you're concerned about human health, whether you have a hard climb sanctuary or you just have people living in an area that has shellfish, if there's any chance that you could have a human health issue, you should have monitoring.
Going on.
We do have monitoring in the area where I live, and the levels of red tide and brown tide algae are monitored and when they reach a certain level, then shell fishing is closed and alerts go out So we haven't had a brown tide, as I said, in many years, but we still do get some red tides, which can be fatal to people in the very early spring because at that time of year, the water is very cold and the clams don't operate as efficiently at filtering the water.
So we have had some issues with red tides and it's short term.
The waters are monitored and no one is allowed to go fish for the clams or oysters and so we haven't had any health problems.
The other point that you made about the databases, that's very important.
In order to know with E DNA, what species is this, you have to compare the DNA sequence that you get from the sample with a DNA sequence that is in some databank.
A reference databank.
The individual from Brazil is quite right that many parts of the world are understudied and we don't know that much about we don't have enough information and those areas of the world really should be a priority when we come to learning about our world, we need to enhance those databases.
I empathize with your issue.
It can be solved with further science and support.
Thank you.
We will now proceed with the remaining three panelists for this morning.
First, we will hear from fourth panelist, Rory O'Leary, Head of Marine Strategic Policy in the Department of Climate, Energy and the Environment and the government of Ireland.
The presentation is entitled Enabling and Enhancing Marine Ecosystem Restoration through International Cooperation and Coordination, Challenges and Opportunities from Ireland's perspective.
You have the floor.
Thank you very much, co chair, and thank you to both co chairs and the Secretariat for the very kind invitation to present here today.
Good morning, delegates, representatives and fellow panelists.
It's a privilege to speak on a subject that is equally urgent and hopeful, the topic of marine ecosystem restoration.
My name is Roy O'Leary.
I'm head of Marine Strategic Policy, and I'm based in the EU, International and Marine Affairs Division of the Department of Climate, Energy, and the Environment within the government of Ireland.
Over the course of the next 15 minutes or so, I'll speak about the challenges and importantly the opportunities for enabling and enhancing marine ecosystem restoration through international cooperation.
I'll speak mainly from the policy perspective because that's the role I hold.
Hopefully, I will leave you with a sense of what success could and should look like.
Yeah.
To frame the context of my presentation from Ireland's national perspective, Ireland's maritime area is significant, far exceeds our land mass and the health of that space is fundamental to who we are as a nation.
As an island on the edge of the Atlantic, our identity, our climate, and our culture to a large part is defined from the sea.
While Ireland's economy is not as directly reliant on our maritime industries as perhaps other island states are, we're certainly looking at the economic potential of it a lot more and the awareness of what it is and what it means to us is certainly increasing.
We've heard already this week that marine ecosystems upon which we depend they're under immense pressure.
It's no different from Ireland's perspective and across Europe.
Biodiversity loss, climate change, overexploitation, pollution, habitat degradation, ocean acidification, and invasive species are all weakening the resilience of our marine systems.
In Ireland, we're committed to multilateral cooperation.
We acknowledge that some problems can really only be solved by collective and collaborative approach.
This is particularly relevant in the marine context.
Marine ecosystem restoration cannot succeed through isolated national action.
The ocean is interconnected by its nature.
As we've heard already over the past few days, currents, species migrations, pollution pathways, and climate impacts don't recognize borders.
Therefore, restoration does require international cooperation.
It's not an optional extra, it's a fundamental condition for success.
In Ireland, our national actions, or European Union obligations, regional cooperation, and our international commitments don't sit in isolation.
We see these as all deeply interconnected, and the effectiveness of each depends on the strength of all.
Ireland is delivering across multiple governance frameworks simultaneously.
I'll speak more about this in the challenges section.
Firstly, as a committed member of the European Union, we're bound by the legislative framework that is implemented.
We take a role in shaping that legislation very seriously.
The Marine Strategy Framework Directive is a comprehensive legal framework aimed at protecting ecosystems and biodiversity, and it mandates us to develop and implement coordinated national strategies to achieve good environmental status.
The Nature Restoration regulation explicitly has restoration in its title, and this is a good thing.
It says binding time bound targets that are driving real action both on land and at sea.
These targets are challenging, restoring 30% of degraded habitats by 2030, increasing to 60% by 2040 and 90% by 2050.
In the world of policy, the legal framework tends never to be static and as ever, we're closely monitoring and engaging on the development of a new legal framework entitled the EU Ocean Act.
This has been proposed by the European Commission to unify and strengthen the EU's maritime and ocean policies.
The Act is designed to streamline governance, modernize marine spatial planning, enhance ocean observations, and drive policy coherence in particularly in respect of the MSFD Directive and assist Directive, the Maritime Spatial Planning Direct.
This is a real opportunity for us in Ireland and also for EU member states to drive that coherence on a fragmented governance framework.
In addition to those regulations and legislative framework, we also actively participate in sea basin strategies across the EU.
One is the Atlantic strategy and the other is the Greater North Seas Basin Initiative.
Both of these strategies for cooperation across a range of topics including marine biodiversity and nature among the participating states, particularly at the sea basin level.
We move then to the broader regional cooperation of Osbar, which provides a regional architecture for protecting the Northeast Atlantic.
Ireland is active both as a participant, but also at the technical level where we lead and chair various working groups within these structures.
Then the international level, Ireland has ratified the BB&J Agreement, and we look forward to the first BB&J cop next year.
As you can see from the previous slide, Ireland's maritime area, the opportunity to extend the marine protection beyond national jurisdiction certainly is significant.
I've left our domestic delivery and obligations to the end of this slide, not because they're less important, probably quite the opposite.
For us to be a credible advocate at EU, regional and international level, in respect of marine protection and restoration, we have to deliver on our domestic obligations.
Within this delivering 30% of our maritime area as marine protected areas by 2030 is the cornerstone of our domestic delivery.
But currently we're at 10% nationally, so we acknowledge we have a distance to travel in the short space of time.
Just speak about the challenges a little bit.
Enabling marine ecosystem restoration through genuine international cooperation is not a simply a policy objective, it's a necessity.
Restoration is no longer a niche in environmental aspiration is becoming central to many things across climate, food security, economic resilience, and global sustainability.
We've heard much of that this week.
Ireland, we're very candid about the challenges and many of these challenges have been articulated very well already this week.
I'll run through some very briefly.
These are not necessarily exhaustive, but these are the key ones that I've picked from our perspective.
The first one is governance.
Governance across national, regional and international levels remains complex and at times very fragmented.
Marine governance is notoriously fragment in that respect.
We're no different than Ireland.
As in many countries, responsibility for marine affairs can be distributed across multiple departments and agencies, fisheries, marine planning, marine biversity, Offshore energy, ports, aquaculture, climate policy often operate within separate institutional structures.
Fragmentation at the domestic level, and at the international level can slow restoration efforts and create conflicting priorities.
For example, we may simultaneously pursue offshore renewable energy expansion, biodiversity protection, fisheries interests, and coastal developments in the same maritime space.
All very important objectives, all key priorities.
Each objective is legitimate, but without that integrated maritime spatial planning and coordinated decision making, tensions may inevitably arise.
In the international context, this complexity is magnified.
Different countries have different regulatory systems, different economic priorities and capacities.
Coordination at the international level can therefore be slow and politically difficult at times.
Second challenge is the complexity of the problem.
Marine restoration is scientifically complex, and I must compliment and commend many of the scientific interventions this week for trying to bring a complex area into a more understandable and asimable nature, and it's not easy.
Unlike terrestrial restoration, where outcomes are often more visible and measurable.
Marine ecosystems can be difficult to monitor and predict.
Restoration projects can take time, many years to show ecological benefits.
The ecological complexity of marine systems layered with the biodiversity and climate crisis also mean restoration may not be straightforward or quick.
In Ireland, we're still developing baseline marine bioversity data for many habitats.
With this robust baseline information, measuring progress becomes difficult.
Climate change can add another layer of uncertainty.
Restoring habitats in rapidly changing ocean conditions raises difficult questions at times.
Are we restoring ecosystems to historical states that may no longer be fully viable? How do we redesign restoration strategies that adaptive and climate resilient? These are not simple technical questions.
They're very strategic.
They require international scientific collaboration, they require expertise, and they require a detailed understanding.
The complexity is translating that into the policy space and articulating what can be a very complex problem into a neat solution for a political system.
This brings me to the political system.
We have competing social and economic pressures right across the system that can slow progress.
We obviously need to balance environmental ambition with socioeconomic realities.
Coastal communities depend heavily on marine industries, particularly fisheries and aquariculture.
Restoration sometimes can be receiveceived as a restriction rather than an opportunity.
It creates a critical policy question in many spaces.
How do we ensure that restorations, supports communities rather than alienates them? The answer in many ways lies in adopting a just transition approach, and we've heard many examples of that this week, which has been really positive.
But we must continue with this communities must be partners in restoration, not passive recipients of decisions made elsewhere.
There has to be ownership at the local level.
Local communities, in particular, fishers, will often possess generations of ecological knowledge.
Coastal stakeholder holders should be involved in planning and monitoring and implementation, and restoration must create those economic opportunities through sustainable fisheries, ecotourism, blue carbon initiatives, and nature based employment.
At the political level and at the policy level, if restoration is viewed as anti community or in some way conflicts with community objectives, politically it will probably fail.
But if it's viewed in the opposite light, if it is viewed as community enhancing, it can succeed sustainably.
Finally, in respect of the challenges and perhaps most acutely and linked to the previous point is financing discussed again this week.
Financing restoration at the scale required remains a significant and unresolved challenge.
In closing that gap will require coordinated investment and genuine burden sharing across nations.
Many restoration projects remain small scale pilot initiatives.
While valuable pilot projects alone cannot reserve systematic ecosystem decline, they are really important in showing the pathway forward, but we must be able to scale up and scaling up requires investment and requires choices around that.
Ireland, like many countries, faces competing budgetary pressures and priorities on an annual scale, housing, health, education, but demonstrating the economic necessity and the real value of restoration is really essential in that competing landscape.
How we articulate the need for that in a system that has many demands is really pivotal.
Fortunately, the evidence does increasingly support this case.
We're now seeing more acknowledgment that healthy marine ecosystems provide wider societal and economic benefits through fisheries productivity, coastal protection, carbon sequestration, tourism, climate resilience right across the board.
Restoration should not be viewed merely just as an environmental cost.
It's really an investment in natural infrastructure and natural capital.
Okay.
So despite those challenges, Ireland, we see genuine and growing opportunity.
It's a real opening for progressive nations to demonstrate leadership, not just in rhetoric, but in action.
Ireland, we've consistently positioned ourselves as a strong advocate for ocean sustainability, for multilateralism and science based policy.
As an Atlantic nation with strong diplomatic engagement, Ireland feel we can help bridge across Europe, North Atlantic in global marine governance discussions.
We can foster dialogue, engagement, and common understanding, just like we're doing this week, which is fundamental to long term success.
Over time, this engagement does take a bit of resilience.
It takes patience, but it is really essential in laying the groundwork and the foundations for long term agreement and success.
The next opportunities around public awareness.
Public awareness of ocean health is certainly rising that creates space for deeper engagement and long term support.
Ensuring effective ocean stewardship, which brings all of society with us is core to Ireland's governance structure.
We reach out a lot to try to enhance and improve ocean literacy.
Public understanding of marine ecosystems remains limited because much of the time degradation might be invisible.
People readily notice deforestation on land or habitat destruction, but they may not always see seabed degradation bleed to water line as easily.
But this is changing.
Building public support for restoration requires communication, education, and citizen engagement.
We believe that restoration can be not only an environmental project, but a national story about stewardships, resilience, and responsibility.
In my previous slide, I mentioned the challenge of fragmentation.
One of the opportunities that we have, and I spoke to in previous slides in respect of the European framework and the EU Ocean Act is around integration of marine policies.
We have to drive that integration a lot better.
We have to re support the use of the integrated ecosystem based approach when we consider environmental, social and economic needs in the decision making process.
I'll give you an example from the perspective.
Our ambitions for offshore wind are significant, and we feel if developed responsibly, offshore renewable infrastructure could coexist with ecosystem restoration and even contribute positively to marine biodiversity through careful planning and habitat management.
But to achieve this, it requires integrated maritime spatial planning and strong environmental governance from the outset.
The lesson is important.
Restoration and economic development should not automatically be framed as oppositional.
With proper coordination, they can be mutually reinforcing.
We have the opportunity to ensure that strong frameworks being put in place will provide the foundation and the conditions for scaled implementation.
To be credible, we have to implement and deliver.
We have to be brave and sure we can deliver and momentum, as mentioned earlier, is really crucial in respect to this.
We do have to go through correct procedures.
Sometimes perfection can be the enemy of the good and can slow down delivery.
The more we implement, the more we demonstrate how restoration can work positively at whatever scale, we can learn from it, we can use it to educate, we can use it to inform, and we can perhaps use it to learn lessons and do things better.
If we do this, the more we will move towards a level of collective success.
I'd like to end on that word success and then positively.
That success will not come from single actions, it is incremental.
It does require sustained political and public support over the long term.
It requires building genuine capacity and knowledge in skills and education equitably across the global community.
As a policymaker, my role is to make the relevance of marine restoration and protection enduring.
So there's no discussion about whether it should be a priority or not.
It's accepted as such.
Like in every nation, governments and administrations change.
But from the policy perspective and my seat, my challenge is to ensure that the support endures for the collective objective of marine ecosystem restoration and all that embraces.
Globally, marine restoration capacity is highly unequal.
As we've heard already this week, many developing coastal and island states face severe degradation while lacking the financial and technical resources.
Though Ireland is a small country, we feel we champion fairness and we continue to promote fairness in international marine governance.
Working through both the EU, the United Nations international partnerships, we can advocate and support more equitable access to science, financing, and restoration technologies.
Because in our view, marine restoration is not just an ecological issue, it's a question of global solidarity.
Finally, to build this capacity, we have to be able to share it.
We have to support that culture of sharing across nations.
Data, expertise, resources, which are central to our understanding of marine ecosystems that treats ocean restoration as a common and collective endeavor and need to be accessible to all.
A recently announced EU Ocean Eye Initiative is an example of a critical tool to generate the observation data needed to track and support restoration progress across the various frameworks.
Ocean E's International Alliance model and the global ocean observing system that supports are exactly the kind of collaborative architecture that success depends on.
We can build on the unity and working together, we feel we can solve these complex problems internationally.
With the right approach and hard work, I believe we can succeed.
Thank you, colleagues for listening, and I thank the co chairs once again for your consideration.
I thank Mr.
Leary for his presentation.
I now give the floor to our fifth panelist, Owen Day, Executive Director, Clear Caribbean.
The presentation is entitled Enabling and Enhancing Marine Ecosystem Restoration through International Cooperation and Coordination, Challenges and Opportunities, a Caribbean perspective.
You have the floor.
Good morning, distinguished delegates and thank you, co chairs for inviting me to this important meeting and giving me the opportunity to share some lessons that we've learned from doing coral restoration in the Caribbean and to highlight some of the challenges and opportunities going forward.
Clear Caribbean is a not for profit organization working at the nexus of sustainable livelihoods and ecosystem restoration across the Eastern Caribbean since 2016.
We are a regional leader in community based coral restoration and develop the first Caribbean vocational qualification in coral restoration initially with the government of St.
Lucia and then the Cracm Secretariat.
We employ 53 local coral gardeners that together have outplanted 35,000 corals.
A lot of the work I want to talk about today comes from ten years of doing community based coral restoration in St.
Lucia and St.
Vincent and the Grenadines.
This work has been funded by the Caribbean Biodiversity Fund and supported by the German Federal Ministry of the Environment.
Nature protection, climate action, and nuclear safety through the International Climate Initiative and KFW.
We've also worked with many other donors and local partners and private sector partners.
I just want to mention the Sandals Foundation in particular, who've been supporting our work for the last ten years.
Trade wins charters also who've become very generous in their support.
Why are we focusing on corals? Well, we've heard a lot this week about the enormous value that they provide to communities.
There's been many studies done.
They are the most valuable ecosystem in the world by far.
Estimates of the average value around $350,000 per hectare per year.
These are the ecosystem services they provide to tourism, fisheries, and coastal protection.
So they are important for the economies but also the food security.
Of course, they are the most biodiverse ecosystem in the world with 25% of all marine species depending on them.
In the Caribbean, there are only about 60 coral species, far less than in the Indo Pacific where there's well over 600 and this is because corals arrived much later in the Caribbean region.
Among these species, two very important corals, I want to mention, elk corn coral in the middle, the larger one, and staghorn coral, the busher one surrounding it are two of the most important corals in the Caribbean because they provide this unique habitat for small fish and for biodiversity.
They were also the most dominant corals for millennia.
The marine ecosystem of the Caribbean evolved with the shallow reefs being dominated by lkhorn.
80% of the shallow reef was dominated by lkhorn and staghorn in slightly deeper water.
But in the 1980s and 1990s, a disease came through the Panama Canal.
And killed about 95% of these two species.
This had a huge impact on Caribbean fish life in particular.
Subsequently, there was a regional effort to work on restoring these particularly important coral species.
And many groups around the region develop various techniques.
These are some examples of our coral nurseries we have in St.
Lucia and in St.
Vincent and the Grenadines.
These are all in water nurseries using tables, steel frames, ropes or trees where we can propagate very large numbers of corals with hy genetic diversity.
Of course, we work with the community.
The community takes ownership of these nurseries of the whole process.
We employ coral gardeners, we pay them $60 a day.
Um, one day a week.
For many of them, that's a very important part of their weekly income, and I have been humbled by the passion and the dedication that I've seen from local people when they get involved in ecosystem restoration.
They become ambassadors for conservation in their communities.
This is young and old men and women.
It's a huge privilege working with them.
Um Coral restoration is also something that works.
I wonder if this video is going to play.
All these corals were planted and in three years completely transformed a reef that was totally dead into one that was brought back to life.
A bit like forestry, you can really make an enormous difference to the whole ecosystem in a relatively short time frame.
These corals grow fast.
People think corals grow incredibly slowly.
The staghorn grows 30 centimeters in a year.
The corals are about 3-years-old.
Um, it definitely is something that is as effective as reorestation U.
But in 2023 and 2024, as we heard from previous presentations, there was the worst heat wave ever recorded in the Caribbean, which caused the worst coral bleaching event.
You can see on the diagram on the left, the dark purple areas in the Eastern Caribbean, we had temperatures well over 31 and the measure of heat stress, which is expressed in the unit called degree heating Weeks, reached over nearly 25, which was completely unprecedented.
In fact, the scale used by NOA for heat stress went up to 20, so they had to recalibrate their scales in order to allow for these exceptional heat wave that we've been having.
Degree heating weeks of about ten are considered very serious, 15 caused large mortality at 25, it's catastrophic.
Not surprisingly, the whole of the Caribbean experienced devastating losses of coral.
95% of all the corals we've worked with died.
Many species are now functionally extinct.
It's not an exaggeration to say that Caribbean reefs are collapsing.
And they are now totally dependent, I would argue, on restoration efforts.
The impacts from heat waves are, of course, compounded by other stresses like pollution, overfishing, and ocean acidification.
But all is not lost, and this is the wonder of nature is that already we are seeing some corals that survived thriving.
The photographs were taken a month ago in our nurseries in St.
Lucia, where many of the survivors are growing very well.
These are survivors because they are genetically more resilient to high temperatures.
Um, these corals need to be shared and we have just received, I'm delighted to say, a permit from the government of Solua to share these corals with our colleagues in St.
Vincent and the Grenadines so that we can increase the genetic diversity in our nurseries and bring these heat resistant corals to other countries.
This is something that is absolutely essential.
One of the main recommendations that scientists are calling for in the face of these catastrophic losses of coral, not just in the Caribbean, but around the world is what's called assisted gene flow, or basically genetic rescue for corals.
Very simply, this is not genetic recombination technology.
This is not playing around in a lab.
This is simply moving corals from hot areas to cooler areas.
It's the managed movement of corals from warmer to cool areas to introduce heat tolerant genes that will help coral populations adapt to rising ocean temperatures.
You can either move fragments of adults or you can move the gametes.
This has started already in Florida with corals from Honduras, but this is something that we need to do not only to make sure that the survivors in hot areas have a chance, some of the genotypes, but also to bring in these heat resistant genotypes to the cool areas.
The Caribbean has these quite strong thermal gradients.
Here we see the south coast of Cuba, for instance, around north coast of Jamaica the Cayman islands, It's much warmer.
This is the climatology, the maximum monthly mean temperature, which is an indication of what corals have adapted to withstand.
We really do need to move these corals.
I'd like to just point out a paper that came out last year in science that I highly recommend the references on the slide that really emphasizes the need for this movement of coral assisted gene flow.
But the challenge we're facing is based on policy, and this is because the current permitting regimes were not designed for genetic rescue and they are slowing down the interventions that we're trying to do.
Things like the CTEs Convention, I'm sure you're familiar with the Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species, the Nagoya Protocol and other biosafety and quarantine frameworks focus very much on the risk, not on the rescue.
This is something that needs to change.
Of course, we need to be careful about spreading disease, but if we don't move them, these corals are all going to die.
Currently, there are no bilateral or regional agreements for the routine low risk exchange of coral genotypes between countries.
Permits are very slow.
It took us one year to get a permit.
I would like to commend the government of St.
Lucia for issuing this permit.
But it was extremely slow and our partners in the government had to work very hard to convince layers of bureaucracy that this is something that needed to be done.
Um, conservation policy in many countries still treats local only stock as the gold standard.
In Jamaica, for instance, you can't move corals along the coastline between parishes.
In Martinique, you're not allowed to even touch corals, so this is preventing their rescue, their restoration.
So what do we need? We need policy actions, regional protocols for the safe exchange of resilient coral genotypes between Caribbean states.
We need streamlined, science based permitting for assisted gene flow with clear criteria for biosecurity safeguards.
We need to integrate AGF international biodiversity strategies and the SO protocol implementation guidance, and we need dedicated international funding for the infrastructure required for AGF.
The Caribbean is one eco region, and if we look at the currents and we know this from studying fish larvae and diseases, there's a huge amount of movement across the region to fragment this region with artificial jurisdictions is not helping the conservation and restoration of these ecosystems.
We need to rethink these regional policies.
The infrastructure that we need is also missing.
I won't go into too much detail here, but we need to have regional biobanks or gene banks of these resilient corals.
These can be either on land or they can be in the sea.
It's much cheaper to have nurseries in the sea and if you have several of them, you lower the risk of losing everything if you have a hurricane.
Our nurseries survived the hurricane in 2024 Hurricane Beryl because we moved everything into deep water.
You can also save your precious genotypes by just moving them into deep water temporarily.
We need quarantine and biosecurity measures to screen diseases and make sure that if we do move corals, we're not spreading disease.
Although I think the risk of disease in the Caribbean although we've had terrible diseases, they are spread because there's a huge amount of traffic, ballast water is moving.
Stony coral tissue loss disease, the most catastrophic disease traveled around because of ballast water.
There already is a lot of movement in the region.
We shouldn't prevent the rescue of corals because we are overly concerned about some of these other risks.
We need spawning labs ideally close to where reefs have resilient corals.
We obviously have to be realistic about where we're going to do this.
We're not going to be able to save all of the Caribbean's coral reefs, so we need to be strategic in where we have our restoration sites, and these have to be pollution free.
We have to find sites where there are fewer local stresses like overfishing and pollution.
One of the frustrations I've had is one of the key sites we work in the Tobago Keys Marine Park in St.
Vincent and the Grenadines, there are very, very large numbers of yachts.
Not surprisingly, because the fish population is good, the corals are beautiful still.
And many people come, but they come and they leave their sewage behind.
This is also a problem in Raja Aampat, perhaps the world's most biodiverse coral reef of Papua New Guinea, where liver board boats are causing a huge problem of coral disease.
It's ridiculous.
We hope to address this problem in our forthcoming program I just wanted to share these are the sites we're seeing across the Eastern Caribbean and huge numbers of boats, catamarans that are basically hotels where you can have 14, 18 people in these large boats that can go very shallow, very close to shore and many of them, although they have holding tanks, are discharging sewage.
This is something that we could easily stop using technology.
This was investigated by a report done by the United Nations Environment Program and other partners looking at the problem of sewage from yachts and quantify the scale of the problem.
One of the recommendations it made was for a technology called the Blue valve system that would allow the monitoring of where discharges happen.
I don't want to go into the details, but it's a tamper proof sensor that goes onto the discharge valve on a boat and it monitors the location of where the boat is when a discharge is made.
That data is transmitted via the cellular network.
To a web server and it can be seen on an app.
Now we're going to be developing this technology with charter boat companies who want this to be the norm.
We have many other partners.
It'll be funded through our program with the Caribbean biodiversity Fund.
The beauty of this technology is that it's cheap and it's very easy to roll out.
It also allows people on boats to comply more easily with pollution laws and can provide information how they can support conservation and restoration work in the region.
We are quite excited that we might be able to stop pollution from yachts going forward.
Just to conclude on all these various points I've made, I want to highlight four main items that takeaways from this presentation.
The first is that we do need to scale up restoration.
We've heard some wonderful hope stories this morning and I love the idea of hope being contagious.
It is contagious.
We need to scale up and have transboundary collaborations.
We need to make it a livelihood for people.
Coral restoration can become a livelihood.
And the tourism sector is willing to pay for that as well.
It's not just grant dependent.
We are developing sustainable financing mechanisms with sandals, with trade winds so that we can work sustainably with creating new livelihoods.
Assisted gene flow, I've mentioned and emphasize is absolutely critical if we are to safeguard the future of corals and help them adapt because what we're basically talking about here is assisted evolution.
We're moving corals from areas where they've already adapted to higher temperatures into cooler areas.
Finally, using technology to prevent pollution, it's something that we will need policy, we will need support from governments and we'll need regional standards for that as well.
Thank you very much for your attention.
I thank Mr.
Day for his presentation, and I give the floor to our sixth and last panelists for this morning, Nicola Ferri, Senior Legal and Compliance Advisor, General Fisheries Commission for the Mediterranean.
The presentation is entitled Advancing Marine Ecosystem Restoration in the Mediterranean and Black Sea.
You have the floor.
Thank you, Mr.
Co chair.
At the outset of my intervention, I would like to convey to you and the other co chair the utmost gratitude of the Executive Secretary-General Fisheries Commission for the Mediterranean, GSCM of the FEO, Mr.
Miguel Bernal.
We are extremely pleased that you have chosen us among the panelists of this important meeting, the 26th meeting of the ICP, and we are delighted to bring some information about the progress that the GSEM has been doing at the regional level on my restoration to the attention of the distinguished delegates attending the meeting.
Um, briefly, let me just introduce a little bit what the GSEM is and what the GSEM does.
First of all, I stand to be corrected.
I think we are the only RFO attending this meeting.
So we're going to bring some practical information on the work that is done by these organizations relative to Mo restoration related efforts.
We are also one of the few RFMOs that is the acronym for regional Fisheries Management Organization.
I'm sure most of you are aware of that.
We are one of the few six to RFMOs established within the institutional remit of the FL.
Then before I delve into the topic of my presentation, I need to just put forward a caveat here.
My colleague, doctor Kim Friedman is here representing the FOO.
It will be also intervening delivering your presentation.
Now, what the FOO does at a global level on this topic and other topics provides guidance and stewardship to us.
As an RFMO belonging to the FAO, we are to stick to the general policies and the work of the organization.
The focus is regional.
Geographically speaking, the mandate of the GSCM concerns the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.
But thematically and substantially speaking, we do follow the guidance of the FO, as of now, I would like to refer you to the presentation by doctor Friedman.
It will be providing the general background of the efforts of the organization on restoration related topics and priorities.
Now, going back to my presentation, so we're going to metaphorically delve into the waters of the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea.
We do have a mandate on fisheries and aquaculture.
In these two basins.
That's another important element I would like to stress because almost the totality of the RFMOs have a mandate on fisheries only.
This dual mandate on fisheries and aquaculture, exists only in FL established RFMOs because again, it's part of the FAO Constitution.
Article 1 of the FEL Constitution refers to both fisheries and aquaculture.
We are expected as an FEL established RFMO to work on both fisheries and aquaculture.
As you will see on the next slide, that is actually an asset when it comes to marine restoration because aquaculture is also important to that and it can contribute to efforts by countries.
When it comes to countries, you can see on your left side of my left side of the screen, your left side of the screen.
The list of the GSA and contracting parties, 24 of them.
We have all the repiring countries of the Mediterranean Sea, we have four repiring countries of the Black Sea.
We also have five cooperating non contracting parties.
And the main objectives of the GSCM as per our agreement, I will expand on that on the next slide are focusing on federating the efforts of our contracting parties on the conservation and sustainable use of living marine resources at different levels of biological, social, economic, and environmental, and at the same time, for the reasons I have already explained, to sustainably develop aquaculture in the region.
Speaking more about our legal framework, I personally believe looking at the case, the other RFMOs out there that it is an enabling one when it comes to my restoration.
First of all, we do have an agreement, the constituty treaty of the GSCN that was updated, somehow, amended in 2014, as a result, also the work of the General Assembly on the performance review of the RFMOs.
This agreement is one of the few, to my knowledge, where you have clear references to, you know, healthy marine ecosystems and the need of the GSCM to also promote that in the context of the general agenda on sustainable development and blue growth.
I'm just quoting from the agreement, some of the functions in Article 8 of the GSCM that are relevant to marine restoration include minimization of the impacts of fisheries and ecosystems, implementation of an ecosystem approach to fisheries, the protection of VME vulnerable marine ecosystems.
The agreement has been then further operationalized through the adoption of the strategy in 2020.
It's a ten year strategy.
We call it the 2030 strategy because it was aligned with major goals at the UN level and the strategy provides more granularity to the work of the GSCM on restoration.
Uh, just cursorily mentioning some of the main aims of the strategy.
We're building the stocks, reducing the pressures on the biodiversity, Mediterranean, Black Sea biodiversity, strengthening the resilience of marine ecosystems that are found in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.
And together with the aims, you also have the means.
These include participatory processes to engage the fishers of the gardens of the sea.
It's a quote from what's written in the strategy, I'm not paraphrasing.
Restorative aquaculture practices, and nature based blue farming, decarbonization, reduction of abundant loss or otherwise discarded fishing gear, and action to address climate change and invasive species.
Now the thing is that the strategy opens the door to voluntary contributions by organizations and countries.
We are of course, an organization driven by the countries, but we are also supposed to pick up some of the lack and do something about it.
You can see some of the program and activities that have been carried out in the context of the strategy which are consistent with the GSEM agreement and resonate with our efforts in marine restoration, the work on the establishment of fisheries restricted areas, mult annual management plans, restorative aquaculture, mitigation of pollution, the management of non indigenous species.
I will mention all of that in the upcoming slides.
I would like just to stress and emphasize that Among the contributors to this work through voluntary commitment, we have reasons Monaco.
I'm referring to Monaco because Monaco does not fish.
The last fisher in Monaco died in 2011.
You might ask the question, why is Monaco member of the GSCM? Because our agreement is not just about fisheries and yes, we are a country driven organization, which means that countries like Monaco can come to our meeting and say, I want you to also work on this.
If it resonates with the GSCM agreement, clearly if Monoco comes to our commission and says, I want you to work on the development of a nuclear weapon, I'm sorry, we cannot do that.
I mean, we do not have any mandate on that.
I'm just exaggerating.
But the thing is that Monaco came to us and made a number of requests such as, we want you to work on oceans pollution.
The impact of fishing vessels, strollers, in particular, acoustic impact on the species.
We want you to work on the setting up of fishing restricted areas.
Fish restricted areas is one A B&T.
I mean, if created, if establishing ASP or national transition, it perfectly resonates with part three of the BB&Ggments.
What I'm saying is that it's also the responsibility of the countries to come to our forum and say, we want you to work on this and that, then we would have to go to engage consistent with the strategy and the GSCM agreement.
I'm going to expand on the different points.
Let me start with the marine ecosystem before I explain what we are doing for the fisheries, because this is where the fisheries are found in the marine ecosystems on the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.
I would be focusing on the work that we have been doing again, this fishery restricted area, as I mentioned a few times already.
Actually part of that is going to be extremely relevant for the bottom trolling warship in three weeks from now.
Again, I think the GSEA will be contributing to that as panelists explaining our efforts to remedy the impacts of bottom fishing on vulnerable marine ecosystem and habitats.
So far we have established a total number of 11 fish restricted areas.
These are again very varied inments.
There are three main categories.
The blue ones that you can see on the screen are for the protection of essential fish habitat.
I would say those are the more strictly related to conservation of fisheries.
The second one is four categories for the protection of EMEs.
They are established where These ecosystems exist and it goes without thing.
It's in the very name of the instrument.
You cannot fish in there.
There is a reason why we call them fishery restricted area.
The yellowish brownish one, I don't know what color that is, but you can see the bigger one by far on the map.
That is a band on bolling beyond 1,000 meters of depth.
It was adopted in 2005, so the GSEO was a pioneer.
We were the first RFMO to ban bottom tralling in certain depths.
For your information, again, we will discuss more of that at the proper forum, which is the tralling the bottom features worship.
But there are now discussions among our constituents to somehow increase the ban and add the band starting from 800 meters.
Hopefully a decision is going to be taken on that at the next annual session of the commission in November, Oober end of October 2026.
The result of these measures together, you can see that the coverage, it's quite impressive.
We're talking about almost 2 million square meters of surface throughout the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, which are under protection.
So that speaks a lot about how we are contributing to marine restoration.
The result of these measures so far, and this is scientifically demonstrated and proven, even though I'm not a scientist, I'm reporting information and getting from the scientists in our team is that we are seeing increased ecosystem recovery and stock rebuilding.
Is not to be taken as an isolated measure.
The result in particular, the stock rebuilding is also the consequence, a positive consequence of the management plans that we'll be presenting in the next slide.
One clear example of that is the striking recovery of European a and lobster in and around the Yabuka Pompid FRA.
You can see one of the blue ones in the Adriatic top right, the one on top right end of the screen, Pompid.
Um, now, I was mentioning the management plan, so you have the spatial approach, measures for the protection of the marine ecosystems, and then we have clearly, that's our bread and butter, measures for the protection and the restoration of the fish stocks, the commercial fish stocks.
Now, the Mediterranean is, uh uh host of some 120 commercial species.
So it's a lot of work, unlike, for instance, the North Sea where you have six commercial species.
To this has been historically the pattern.
We do have to deal with a huge amount of species, which means a lot of stock assessments, a lot of data, a lot of analytical work.
And additional complexities that are to be taken into account.
So generally speaking, we try to contribute to achieving and maintaining overall a sustainable level of exploitation of the different resources, the commercial one.
But then there are, I would say, a number of species which are regarded as being more important for commercial purposes.
So clearly, we need to focus on those depending on the demands by the countries that we adopt measures for the management of these species.
The main measure adopted by the GSCM for management purposes is mult annual is the mult annual management plans.
These plans contain different, you know, uh, uh, I would say different measures.
You have scientific measures, you have technical measures, you have measures related to the control of the vessels.
It's a fully encompassing package that throughout the years allows the country to see progress, but most importantly to adapt.
Like every year we can revisit the management plans depending on new findings from stock assessment and so on and so forth.
You have a number of the measures I just mentioned, catch and F or limits, parts or temporary measures, and so on and so forth.
You can see on the map the different species that are covered by these management plans.
It's very different species.
You have turbid in the Black Sea, deep water regimes in the Union Sea, in the Leven Sea, and the Liscons.
We also have real.
We just issued a publication of real.
In this case, it is a management plan which is not about the harvesting of recal.
It has a very different purpose.
But for consistency reasons, we call it a management plan.
On aquaculture, we are zeroing in on restorative aquaculture.
This has been on the rise recently because we need to try and encourage countries to rely more on aquaculture to take away some of the pressure of the commercial stocks.
The focus has been on making sure that aquaculture can contribute to efforts for also the conservation of the marine ecosystem.
The very use of the qualifier restorative speaks about that.
It's an aquaculture industry that is willing to contribute and is contributing directly to ecosystem recovery while supporting at the same time, this increase in sustainable food production that we need to also counterbalance the reduced pressure of fishing activities on the stocks and the marine stocks.
Uh, the GSEM is on the ground supporting total number 21 countries to adopt more sustainable practices.
We have seven aquaculture demonstration centers that are used for the promotion of these practices.
So we organize practical activities, meetings, demonstration activities, and this is where we try and showcase nature based solutions on bivalves, macro algae, cucumbers, other species as well, and to also raise awareness on the benefits of certain positive practices such as water filtration, the nutrient cycling and the habitat creation.
As science progresses on aquaculture, there is a lot of knowledge that can be shared with countries.
In our region, we have Egypt, which is currently the sixth global producer of aquaculture, farm product and the first one in Africa.
Aquaculture is big in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.
Now, if you look together at this blend of macro areas of work at the GSCM and you can try and understand how we address environmental pressures that are unfortunately present at the level of the Mediterranean sea.
I'm not going to be mentioning tourists, but listening to you, I can easily like what you are presenting to places such as iconic places of the mass such as the Alba Island or Cabri where you cannot even dive in the sea in the morning because of the yacht.
I let you your imagination run free and understand why you cannot die.
You don't want to dive in there.
And it's terrible and there is no way you can stop it because this is very affluent people.
You cannot tell a millionaire, you are not coming here, you are not docking your yard.
You know what I'm saying? But these are also the kind of problems that at times the local communities, they come to us and say, can you do something about it? Well, you need to talk to the representatives or your government in our commission because we cannot take action on what civil society is saying, but it is also the kind of problem when it comes to environmental pressure that should be taken into account in the future and hopefully we will be able to take into account.
Just to give you a few examples of the pressures that have been addressed and are being addressed by the GSCM, pollution and climate related impacts, we have abandoned loss and otherwise discarded fishing gear.
Again, this is a major compass of work for the FOO, so we're following the guidance of the FO, but at the same time, we're somehow tailoring this work at the regional level.
And then we have emissions from fisheries and aquaculture on the marine environment.
There are two decisions.
You say, Well, these are beautiful words, a tiger paper, whatever.
No, there are two decisions that have been adopted.
These are binding decision by our contracting parties.
One is about gear marking.
There are several decisions on gear marking, but different from those so nothing new under the sky.
But the decarbonization roadmap that we have adopted is the first one ever to be adopted by an RFMO and it's really about the emissions from the fishing vessels and hopefully it's going to be providing the kind of inspiration that we need for the other RFMOs to follow our example and act on that.
Then we have the, Well, I would say pressing issue of non indigenous species.
Because of the Swisz Canal, again, I can relate to your presentation.
You mentioned the ballast water.
We have an issue with biofouling.
What enters through the Suz Canal at times finds an ecosystem niche in the Mediterranean and we are seeing that with the blue crab.
You've probably heard of that.
The blue crab is basically taking over the entire Mediterranean, not the entire, but a big portion of the Mediterranean Sea.
Our countries are struggling.
It's difficult to eradicate, it destroys pretty much everything.
And we are still asking ourselves a number of questions.
So that is why we have set up, you know, a research program.
You need science before you can take action and, you know, to avoid also the risk of doing something which is going to actually make the situation even worse.
So we are working actively on that.
We're also, creating an and monitoring knowledge and coordination up because we are looking at the blue crab and we are being reported and underlying fish is being spotted and many other non invasive species.
This can be incredibly disruptive for the conservation of the marine ecosystems and it's very difficult when this species is fine and ecosystem is impossible actually basically to get rid of them.
You should address the sources of the problem, just biofouling that goes beyond our mandate and it's mostly with the IMO.
Now, through funding that we have received from the Global Environmental facility, I mentioned before, Monaco is one of the countries, we also have the European Union, Spain is one of our contributor, France, Italy, but we also have organizations, most notably the Global Environmental facility, the global Environmental facility has been funding two ongoing mult annual projects, one for the Black Sea and the other one for the Med Sea.
Those are twin projects.
Because the global environmental facility, as the name suggests, it's really keen on promoting environmental protection.
The name of both projects contains reference to ecosystem based management.
This is something new to the GSEM.
I mean, most RFMOs don't get funds from the GEF.
Like you think of the F, the international water focal areas.
The main recipients of F funds are the Regional Sis Convention.
In this case as well, we have been pioneering a change, I would say of hard even the RFMO can contribute to the conservation of the marine environment under the IW focal area.
This is why to the F, we launch this partnership through two separate projects, but at the same time, the JeF is coming with specific priorities, if the project is to be approved, it has to resonate with the programming directions of the F and these are way more environmentally oriented as some of the old fisheries mantras and policies are.
The core objectives are these projects are about safeguarding biodiversity and protecting critical habitats and strengthening ecosystem based fisheries management.
There are four key areas of intervention.
The essential ones are integrating modern monitoring, controlling and surveys technologies, combating IU fishing, supporting small scale fisheries and participatory governance.
Then there is another one that we are working together with UNAMA, which is the Regional Seas Convention mandated to protect the marine ecosystems of the Mediterranean Sea, and that is about the protection of the marine ecosystem.
I'm referring only to the key areas intervention under the mandate of the GSEM.
And the enabling factor it's to somehow take the main findings out of this work to promote and foster national and regional capacity development.
There is a lot of work focusing on human development and capacity in our countries.
After all these very encouraging words, what is the result of all of that? I mean, is there any positive trends that I can't report to you or this is just me making things up? Well, these are scientific data.
It comes from a bi annual publication that we have been issuing for the last ten years, it is called the State of Mediterranean and Black Sea Fisheries.
It is the regional version of the State of the State of global Fisheries and aquaculture by the FAO.
We try to replicate and mirror that for a region, but it's the same methodology that the FAO uses at the global level.
The Sophia publication by the FFO and we call it in our acronym, publication for the Mediterranean sea fisheries.
The number is there from 2013 where we had a ratio of 87% on average of stocks in overexploitation, we were able to go down to 52% in 2023.
That's pretty impressive if you consider the biological time that is required for fish stocks to recover.
You know, to achieve that in ten years, it's, I would say it's pretty encouraging as a message.
Again, it is the result of this combination and blend of measures focusing on both the marine ecosystems and the species.
You can see some of the most iconic species were being protected.
We have percentages there for the common soil in the Adic sea, turbid in the Black Sea.
These are all species under the management plans in 10 minutes.
I'm just about to wrap up.
You have on the right end of the screen the exploitation and the biomass degrees that has been spotted.
Just a picture of the publication, it can be downloaded on our website.
I would invite you to just take the time, GSCN you can Google it.
You can download it and read it.
There are plenty of graphs and plenty of useful information.
Thank you very much for your attention.
Sorry if I took more time that was allocated to me.
I'm sorry for that.
Thank you, Mr.
Perry, for your presentation.
The floor is now open for questions and comments.
The first speaker on my list is the distinguished permanent representative of Monaco.
Please you have the floor.
Thank you very much.
I want to again thank the three panelists for their presentation.
Years ago, I had the chance to visit the Bay Island in Honduras and the coral bleaching is definitely affecting the area.
I think we do need to balance the tourism and protecting what makes that destination appealing to tourists.
I was wondering because the report on sewage discharge makes some recommendation, but there is a principle polluter payer.
Can you enforce that because that new technologies that you showed us that can be used from a cell phone application and everything.
But since this is forbidden from those vessels to discharge sewage, are they rules are enforced? Are they fined for doing that when it is forbidden? Because I the blue Vive is certainly one of the instruments that can be used.
But first, I think that the rules should be enforced.
Then for Professor Ferrier, yes, it's true that we don't have artisanal fishermen anymore, but the fourth generation of that family is now offering a a certified retail, move from local fishmonger to retail.
You know, the Mediterranean Sea is part of our cultural identity.
So even if we don't have fisheries anymore, it's very important for Monaco to be also part of the solution because we have a lot of constraints with ting.
And there is no particular convention addressing that subject.
I think it as you mentioned, it's very sensitive because tourism is one of the important resources for all the Mediterranean states.
And, you know, bluefin tuna for some time was forbidden to be proposed in restaurants in Monaco to allow stocks to be reconstituted.
As for the work on coral to make the link with the previous presenter, uh, The Scientific Center in Monaco is doing a lot of work on that because it's essential not only for the sustainable livelihood of all the reefs, but also for very specific industries.
We have a program where the luxury brand Chanel is co financing research on that coral.
So and also we gave a try to aquaculture decades ago.
But now we have two biologists.
It's 15 years now that they launched sea products, oysters in particular and other seafood that are raised by the pier in Monaco.
Usually those oysters are found in Brittany off the coast of France, but that's why non pollution right by one of the main harbors is essential because there is a lot of movement from the sea that allows those oysters to grow.
So we have a lot of interests.
That's why for us it's essential to participate in GFCM.
I have a specific question because so much was mentioned and so much is being done specifically for the Mediterranean and the Red Sea.
But in what appear to be the main gaps and shortcomings that states that are part of that regional fishery management organization should be working on in a better way.
Enforcement and what we don't do well enough.
Thank you.
Thank the distinguished Delegate of Monaco.
I now have Romania followed by FAO and Mexico.
Romania you have the floor, please.
All right.
Thank you so much.
First of all, thank you, co chairs for facilitating our discussions and thanks to all the panelists for the very insightful information that you gave us.
I have a specific question for Mr.
Perry, but if any other panelists have more information about that that they can give me, that would be amazing.
I come from the MFA from the headquarters, pardon my disconnection on the specificities of the subject, but about the Black Sea.
I've heard that since the Russian aggression in Ukraine started, the biodiversity in the Black Sea is suffering a lot.
And I heard also about species of dolphins that are dying because of the pollution caused by the war, because of the drones, because of the sounds.
It's a biohazard right now as far as I know.
I was curious if within the competencies of the GFCM if there are any actions that are undertaken right now in order to protect the species and the fish in the Black Sea from the hazards of the war, if there are any future actions that will be taken, any perspectives on that? How can we imagine because it's absolutely amazing what the Black Sea gives us.
It's very sad to see what's going on right now.
I was curious what's going on right now if you have any perspectives.
Thank you so much.
I thank the distinguished delegate of Romania and now give the floor to the representative of FAO.
Please, you have the floor.
Thank you very much.
I just want to speak to Owen Day's presentation about shipping corals across the Caribbean which are sites controlled.
Just to encourage countries and observers to bring these stories to the Ctes meetings because there is what's known as simplified procedures, which is a way of shipping samples not for commercial use.
But unfortunately, this discussion for easing the process of shipping these samples has not got a weight of evidence behind it and is lagging in the cooperation amongst Ctes parties.
I just want to speak on behalf of and maybe fisheries or also trying to ship samples of species which are listed by ctes and these samples cannot be shipped easily, which means that less research and less opportunity for conservation is happening.
If we can bring these stories to the sites meetings and try and get that weight of evidence to speed up their handling of simplified procedures for samples not for commercial use, that would allow these conservation measures to happen and we wouldn't have the backfire effect that we're having now of a measure being put in for conservation actually doing the opposite.
Thank you very much.
I think the distinguished delegate from FAO.
I now give the floor to Mexico.
Please.
You have the floor.
Thank you very much, Madam Chair, co chair.
I would like to say a few words in relation to my delegation's position.
I'd like to thank all of the panelists for their very interesting presentations.
We consider that restoring marine ecosystems requires robust, coherent and coordinated governance frameworks that are able to integrate ecological connectivity, transboundary cooperation, and the cumulative effects of multiple pressures.
We note that one of the main difficulties for the effective restoration to take place is the fragmentation of institutions, instruments, mandates, and jurisdictions and competencies, and training and capacity.
All of this can make it more difficult to achieve consistent and complementary responses that are results oriented.
In Mexico, we want to highlight also that the effective participation of indigenous populations, coastal communities, and women is essential to ensure that measures respond to local needs and avoid disproportionate impacts.
This is why it's fundamental that we strengthen integration across scientific disciplines, data sources, and systems of knowledge, including traditional knowledge with a view to improving the planification, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of restoration projects.
We also highlight the need to promote equitable access to scientific information and sociographic data, monitoring tools, and the technology that is necessary in order to support marine ecosystem restoration.
Capacity building or capacity creation should address national priorities of states, especially developing countries.
It should also include technical, scientific institutional normative capacity as well as well as monitoring capacity.
In this regard, we welcome the entry into force of the BBNJ.
From our view, this offers a unique opportunity to strengthen intersectorial cooperation in zones beyond national jurisdiction through area based management, environmental impact assessment, capacity creation, and transfer of marine technology.
It is necessary to mobilize sufficient and predictable and innovative resources for marine restoration is sufficient to address the needs and priorities of states.
Mexico believes that international cooperation and coordination should allow us to move from isolated projects to sustainable, measurable, replicable, and tailored marine restoration measures while at the same time protecting and promoting protection of the oceans and ocean sustainability.
Those essentially are the remarks of my delegation.
I want to ask the fourth panelist, Mr.
Owen Day of Clear Caribbean.
In your interventions, you mentioned that one of the main challenges is a lack of public policy or precisely this fragmentation that I was referring to that is necessary to drive such projects in the Caribbean.
I wanted to ask what is your experience as regard the escaso agreement that is in the Caribbean and it establishes a framework specifically setting out capacity and cooperation.
I wanted to know your perspective operationally in the organization, how this has played out and what can we do to make implementation of the Esso Agreement more effective regionally and globally.
Thank you.
Delegate of Mexico.
I now give the floor to the Distinguished Delegate of Belgium.
Please, you have the floor.
Thank you so much, sir.
Also thank you panelists for the interesting presentations.
I had a specific question to Mr.
Ferry.
It's very impressive to see already the surface of areas where there's fisheries measures that have been taken.
If I understood correctly, of course, the RMO is a mix between EU and non EU member states where within EU member states, you have the common fisheries policy which is in place.
I was wondering, is there a big difference in trying to setting these fisheries restricted areas that are inside EU competence and then outside these areas.
Then as a second question in general, what are the most challenging parts in trying to set up these fisheries restricted areas? The distinguished Delegate of Belgium.
I don't see any other speakers requesting the floor, so I will give the floor back to our panelists starting here on my right with Mr.
Ory and moving on.
So please, Mr.
O'Leary, if you want to start.
I think the questions were more addressed to sorry.
Well, to respond to the question from the distinguished delegate from Monaco regarding the challenge of enforcing pollution laws, this is a huge problem around the world where you can designate no discharge zones.
You can create laws that says you can't discharge sewage within this area.
That happens in the Caribbean, in the Mediterranean, all over.
But the challenge is, how do you prevent people from discharging when no one is there to observe it? Boats now by law have to have holding tanks.
So when you flush the toilet, it goes into a tank which you then can empty and the recommendation is for vessels that are smaller than 400 tons that are not subject to ma pole.
Larger vessels have to be 12 miles offshore.
Smaller vessels, depending on the country, can be 3 miles offshore or in some countries, it varies.
It can be 500 meters in Bermuda to 3 miles or 12 miles in in Turkey.
The challenge is, how do you monitor this? That's where the blue valve system comes in is you can retrofit a sensor on the valve so that it's a tamper proof system.
You can monitor the location of where that is happening.
Now, of course, you need the collaboration of the yachting sector, and that's where, in fact, we've had a very good response.
The yachting sector is aware there's a problem.
The charter boat companies want to stop this problem.
But of course, you will need legislation as well to make it compulsory.
And in order for that to happen in countries like St.
Vincent and the Grenadines and St Lucia, where there's very limited capacity for enforcement, you have to make this mechanism effective, cheap, but also a way of generating income for the marine parks.
The idea is that you make it compulsory for boats entering a park to have this technology and a percentage of the cost of that technology goes towards the marine park.
We're developing these mechanisms, but I think there are ways of overcoming this so we can have effective enforcement and simple notifications to the relevant authorities and to the owners of the boats when there is an illegal discharge and then a fine is given.
For charter boat companies, that's easy for them to administer because they just withhold part of the deposit.
Paid for by the charter boat customer.
This is a problem that's very relevant to the Mediterranean as well.
I'm in touch with people in Croatia and in Italy, and I think this could be something that could be very useful in many places where there are a lot of boats.
Um, To respond to the next question from the distinguished delegate from FAO, Kim, we were talking about this earlier, the simplified procedures regarding sites.
I completely agree we do need to find ways of speeding up the process of getting permits.
Cité was put in place to protect nature.
It's now a hindrance to the rescue of nature.
And so, you know, the risk is now neglecting the rescue.
And the greatest risk now is inaction.
So we need to find ways to speed up that process.
My experience is that sites is not generally that much of a hurdle.
We can, you know, we request a permit and generally it comes relatively quickly.
No, the Naoya Protocol was more of an issue because there's a financial component to that.
Some countries are thinking, well, if we have these resilient corals, why should we be sharing them? This is something where there really is a need for regional agreements, maybe with Carrico or the OECS Secretariat, that they will share these coral genotypes for the benefit of all.
And not have this hesitation about whether or not they want to make them available for free.
Finally, the question from the distinguished delegate from Mexico regarding my experience of working in the Caribbean in coral restoration.
There are mechanisms to try and encourage more collaboration, but these are largely coordinated by US based organizations.
Not that I have a problem with that at all.
It's just that it often doesn't address some of the cultural and socioeconomic challenges we have in the small Peninsular Caribbean where it's a very different scenario.
I would really urge that to be more south to south, so to speak, collaboration in the Caribbean on this.
We have very good friends in Cuba, in Jamaica, all over the Eastern Caribbean, in Belize and we are talking more and more about the need now not only for sharing knowledge and sharing information, but sharing coral.
Genotypes, which is key and that's where we need governments to help that.
Thank you, Mr.
Day.
Can I ask Mr.
Ferres there were several questions addressed to you in addressing them in a concise way.
You have the floor.
Thank you, Madam Co chair.
Yes, I will address the questions that were asked to me directly in the chronological order of the speakers in my tank starting with the Excellency, Madame Picot, thank you very much for you, putting a spotlight on what the real problem is.
It might sound childish to a certain extent, but it also relates to the clarifications just provided by the distinguished panelists who intervened before me.
It also resonates with some of the remarks by the distinguished delegate from Mexico.
You have the GSCM agreement, that is a treaty by all definition.
It's a primary source of international law.
It is ratified by the 24 contracting parties to the GSCM, it is there.
Then the GSM Agreement foresees a secondary source of international law.
We can adopt binding recommendations.
Binding means that the countries must follow up.
Article 14 0.1 of the GSEM agreement specifically states that the contracting parties of the GSEM must transpose the binding recommendations adopted every year in the national legislation.
Now with few notable exceptions, including the European Union that every year adopts a Council resolution transposing each and every single recommendation adopted the GSEM which on average is 1515 every year.
It's a lot of legal work.
We don't see that happening in the other countries.
What is the aftermath of that? You mentioned the right word, enforcement.
Now, the policies are there.
Management is there.
As the Director of the Fisheries Department of the FEO Manu Baran said several times, we have done our own work on management.
The problem is not the management measures.
The problem is, are we good enough in enforcing and complying with the management measures in place.
So when you then go to the ports and you speak with the enforcers, inspectors and national officers who are supposed to ensure that the fishers stick to the regulations in place, they tell you, my country did not transpose this into the national legislation.
What do you want me to do? Just to show them the report to the GSEM and say, hey, it's here.
It doesn't stand any legal value.
We cannot take action on that.
What happens is that you have all the legal work, the groundwork is there, but then the countries there is the disconnect at the country level, the national legislation is not there, which is why over the last five years, we have really focused on supporting the developing countries, the norn European countries in adopting national legislation and updating international legislation.
We made a huge effort, including thanks to some of the contribution by Monaco, to level the playing field, borrowing from some words used a lot in the European Union.
But this is work in progress.
Then clearly the legal aspect leads to the technical one.
We need better technology.
I mean, the human resources are limited.
You cannot think of having and deploying 50 spectors every time the vessels are coming back to ports.
You need better technology for these people to be able to run it from an office.
The developments and technologies encouragement, it's encouraging, but we are still not there.
In an area like the GSEA where we have on average, not on average, we had 10,000 give or take fishing vessels in our authorized record of vessel.
You can imagine this is a major challenge, but it starts with the legislation.
And I think it's similar also to some of the issues mentioned by the representative of UNODC.
Now, moving on to the question by the distinguished delegate of Romania.
Now, I think that the answers plural to some of the questions you have posed will be provided an answer very time soon.
Now, I'm going to be starting with the dolphins.
The Dolphins is not our mandate.
There is another organization hosted by Monaco called Akbans.
They have a specific competence on Cetaceans throughout the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.
We do have a cooperation agreement with them, but it's up to them to do this work.
I can tell you that writing a report on cetaceans and dolphins in the Black Sea.
I don't think that the report is there is still work ongoing.
I know that they are consulting some people in our scientific team, but probably some of that is going to be addressed in this report.
I would invite you to refer also to the website of Acans, you will probably find some information there.
As for the impact on the stocks, the measure that was agreed within the GSEM was to establish an a dock body for the Black Sea.
This body is going to be meeting in three weeks from now, but next week they will start looking at the data on the fish stocks.
Now, you probably remember in the first slide, second slide of my presentation, I mentioned the contracting parties 2024 Ukraine joined the GSCM last year.
We would expect the Ukrainian data scientists and people to bring information.
We cannot just go out there and search on Google and say, I just found this dataset.
It has to come from the representative of the countries.
We would expect them to share the data, then the data is presented to the other scientists and discussed together.
Russia is not a member of the GSM, Georgia is cooperating contracting party.
Russia is not so we don't know.
Clearly, Russia can attend this meeting, so we don't know what kind of discussions they can bring their own data.
But I would invite you to just be in touch with your people in Bucharesti because they will be attending the meeting.
It's the first meeting ever of this body.
I'm sorry, I do not have an answer now.
I'm not a scientist.
Maybe my scientists, they do have some information, but I'm not privy to that.
And finally, the elephant in the room, question by Belgium on how that resonates with the common fishery policy.
Well, you know better than I do that fisheries is one of the two exclusive competencies of the European Union.
But the positive side of things for the U is that it entails an external action.
The common fishery policy is about internal action.
Then they use RFMOs like GSCM to somehow project key provisions in the common fisheries policy at the more general level, regional or global.
And our fishery restricted areas are fully in line with the main measures in the common fishery policy.
So what we see is that the EU is actively promoting.
I think at the beginning, there was some skepticism because in particular, there is a resisty within the industry.
But the Yabuk popit comes from an initiative of the European Union.
Then what the main challenge is, is the industry convincing the industry when usually on average, it takes three years for a proposal on fisher city to be adopted.
It is stable.
The first one, it is always rejected because there is a country with an industry and this is not happening.
The second time, they try and cut some corners, they reduce the surface, they create a buffer zone.
But at the end of the day, we are winning over the fishers.
What we have seen, for instance, in the case of the Jaap is that the very fishers from Italy who are opposing it are now saying, we can see the positive results of this restoration effort.
We do expect for the upcoming annual session in October to have at least two more proposals on the setting up of these measures.
This is extremely encouraging because it means that the fishers are engaged because then again, if there is no enforcement in the area, the fishers are not respecting the fact that you are not supposed to fish in Again, it's for nothing, but the data fairly strong and I hope we will see more of those measures in the future as we move forward.
But thank you very much for the question.
I hope I was clear enough.
Thank you so much to all of the panelists.
We have now reached the end of the speaker's list for this morning and we will continue our discussions on this second panel segment this afternoon at 3:00.
Any special message from our secretaria? No.
Well, thank you.
Then my co chair and I wish to thank once again our panelists, all of them, and of course, all delegations for the pertinent questions and comments.
Let us thank in the usual manner, our distinguished panelists of this morning.
Thank you.