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

So this afternoon we will continue and conclude our discussions under the second segment of the discussion panel entitled Enabling and Enhancing Marine Ecosystem Restoration through International Cooperation and Coordination Challenges and Opportunities.
There are six presentations scheduled for this afternoon.
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 remind you 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 panel 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 Duals at un.org.
I now wish to give the floor to our first panelist, Danielle Fries, Cochran, Family Professor of Erp and Environmental Sciences, and Director of the Center for Public Policy Research at Tulane University.
The presentation is entitled Achieving Mangrove Restoration of Scale.
You have the floor.
Thank you very much and thank you for this really kind invitation and the opportunity to talk about mangroves for a few minutes.
Thanks.
If you don't have mangroves in your country, this is what they look like.
A beautiful forest, often found in other countries where salt marshes would be, but we find mangroves primarily in the tropics and the subtropics.
Before we talk about the restoration of mangroves, I want to give an introduction of why we need to restore them in the first place.
Mangroves were considered a few decades ago, one of the most threatened ecosystems on the planet.
Deforestation rates of one to 3% per year, were the estimates back then, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s due to aquaculture and agriculture.
By the late 20th century, we were starting to get a handle on just how much mangrove was being lost, and there was this seminal FAO report in 2007 called the state of the world mangroves, which through a data compilation, suggested we were losing them about 1% per year.
What's been encouraging is that as we get more information, new technologies to map mangroves, that the rates are changing a little bit.
Instead of 1% per year, about ten years ago, we were estimating no 0.5% per year, something like that.
The most recent estimates using high resolution satellite imagery, particularly from 2000 onwards, suggests that it's about no 0.1% per year.
Part of this bending the curve is improvements in technology, but parts of it really are improvements in conservation and restoration.
We published this paper about two weeks ago, which gives maybe the most up to date state of the world's mangroves so far, going back from the 1980s to the present day and actually it looks pretty flat, which is good news for mangroves.
Why is it a little bit different from that curve before? We now have a much better handle on measuring new mangroves.
As mangroves were being deforested at high rates, new mangroves were growing in different areas.
It balanced it out.
By about 2010 seems to be an inflection point and I think here again, we can probably see the impact of conservation and restoration and the value or the better known value of mangroves.
Since 2010, globally, we've had a net gain of mangroves.
A small net gain, but a net gain nonetheless.
Now with this relatively flat curve, that doesn't mean the job is done and that we've solved the mangrove deforestation crisis.
It means that mangrove deforestation and degradation, while they've declined in recent years, are being offset by gains in new mangrove forests in different locations.
The state of the world's mangroves is a very complex and nuanced story, but what we do know is that there has been a lot of loss historically, which means that there is a lot of room for us to do mangrove restoration now and into the future.
So we've tried to get an estimate of how much land is available for mangrove restoration.
This is a model is a few years old now, and it's available here.
We took a bunch of biophysical datasets, the factors that control where mangroves do and do not grow and tried to model where mangrove restoration might be most feasible.
Um, and biophysically, there might be about 800,000 hectares of mangroves available for restoration.
By restoration, I mean, putting mangroves back where they were.
So these are mangroves that were lost, but we can bring them back.
We're not talking about afforestation into new areas here.
But we have had enough mangrove deforestation that there are now potentially 800,000 hectares available for restoration.
And we see this potential starting to be realized and a lot of efforts around the world to try and get us restoring mangroves at that scale.
If I just take as one example, mangrove restoration targets in the nationally determined contributions to the Paris Agreement, there are 38 countries that by the most recent NDC have listed mangrove restoration as a goal or action, and you see that that is pan tropical.
To implement some of these targets, a number of countries have set really ambitious targets for mangrove restoration around the world.
It's great to see this ambition.
It's great to see that mangroves are on the national policy agenda, and that this represents a lot of effort and a lot of resources going into achieving large scale mangrove restoration.
This ambition is something to be really encouraged.
But of course, having potential is not enough and we have to be able to actually do mangrove restoration feasibly at the scales that we really want to in order to make a difference in the state of the world's mangroves.
Unfortunately, mangrove restoration is not the easiest practice.
Mangroves have very specific environmental requirements for their growth, so they have a very narrow window of tidal flooding, of wave action, of salinities that they will grow in effectively.
And so if we pick restorable areas that do not match those conditions, we often see failed plantings.
Um, so restorable areas need to be often fixed in terms of their hydrology before we do any planting, because there's a reason that mangroves are not there in the first place.
So if this is an area that was a mangrove was converted into an aquaculture pond, that means we've dug out a large amount of the sediment to make it into a pond.
It's flooded more regularly or permanently, and mangroves will not exist or establish in those conditions.
Um, so this is difficult because fixing hydrology is a lot more effort than just going out to plant.
It takes a lot of homework.
It takes a lot of figuring out what is the constraint to natural establishment, and why aren't these mangroves naturally growing? These restorable areas tend to be areas that are also under human land use as well.
They might be abandoned aquaculture ponds, for example.
So there's land ownership issues.
There's land tenure, they're often small and patchy.
It's not a nice large area that we can restore all at once.
Instead, when we are doing plantings, what we see a lot of around the world is looking for these large wide areas that are open and look available for mangrove restoration.
These are often mud flats and seagrasses which are less contested in terms of land tenure and governance, and they're large and they're wide and they look like they could have mangroves on it, so let's try.
But unfortunately, there's a reason there aren't mangroves growing there naturally.
Of course, seagrasses and mud flats are essential and critical ecosystems in their own right.
So why is mangrove restoration not as successful around the world as we would like it to be, particularly when we're trying to do it at scale? Or to put it simply, why do we plant the wrong mangrove species in the wrong place? Now, there's a couple of reasons why this could be.
One of them could be a scientific reason that we don't know enough about the biology and ecology of mangroves, so we don't know the most appropriate places to grow them.
I think I'm saying this as a scientist, so I probably shouldn't be saying this because I want more research funding, but we know the science around mangrove restoration.
We know the requirements that they need to grow successfully.
I don't think it's a scientific constraint or barrier.
It certainly is a technical constraint.
Even if we know the science behind a successful mangrove restoration, there are reasons why we can't implement that in that way.
Maybe our success metrics are not correct.
We have these really big targets and we need to achieve them really quickly and we're looking at the clock and we have to do this big project by the end of the year, so we have to do the best we can.
How do we plant such a large area quickly? Where do we get the seed source or the propagate source to plant such a large area? And then one thing that we don't do a very good job at is monitoring and reporting both on the successes but also the failures.
Why was one project successful? Why was one not successful? A lot of the resources that goes into restoration is for the restoration, and then we move quickly on to the next project without learning from the projects before.
Okay.
So those technical constraints are led by a number of higher level boundary conditions.
One is to do with local communities.
Mangrove forests around the world are mostly working landscapes, so there are people living and working within these landscapes.
And so if we close off an area to restore it, but we don't provide an alternative livelihood, for example, then communities may not have a huge incentive to restore successfully, and the same with benefit sharing, and ultimately, we do not want to exclude people from their lands just to grow more mangroves.
Both the community and technical aspects are influenced by broader scale economic constraints.
If these are abandoned aquaculture ponds, for example, there's an opportunity cost of that land use.
We have to make restoration financially more attractive than an alternative land use such as aquaculture.
Then there's the cost of doing the restoration, but there's also the cost of maintaining it and monitoring it through time, which has always been a challenge in many restoration projects.
All of this is ultimately influenced by some really large scale legal and governance boundary conditions.
Are the targets correct for that landscape? Have we gone and done the really hard and complicated work of figuring out the land tenure before we go into a landscape and restore it, or are we doing that as we go along? These are large scale influences that really trickle down both the economics community and then ultimately the technical aspects of doing restoration.
It's not a science question, it's not a technical question.
It's not an economics question on its own.
It's all of these and it's all interconnected.
And normally during mangrove restoration, we focus on the technical ones because those are the ones that are easiest and most tangible to fix.
But it's hard to change the technical constraints without addressing some of these higher level and more complex governance and socioeconomic considerations.
So it has been a challenge around the world historically and today for mangrove restoration, but to give you some good news, we know how to do it.
These are just some of the range of, again, mostly technical mangrove restoration guides.
So the science and the technical capacity is there around the world.
It would be great to have similar best practice guidelines for the governance and the socioeconomic and the benefit sharing considerations as well.
I think that's a space where that still needs to be completed.
But certainly on the technical side, we know how to do this under a range of different conditions because no one mangrove restoration project is the same.
And there's a lot of capacity to help us do mangrove restoration and share knowledge and share best practices.
I've given just a few examples here, but there are many more.
I just wanted to highlight the global mangrove Alliance, which is a global collaboration of non profits, governments, researchers, industry communities with some really ambitious goals to halt remaining mangrove loss, restore half of those lost, and double the protection of existing mangroves.
The mangrove breakthrough, which is a more finance driven initiative about how do we actually get these projects over the line and how do we mobilize the capital needed to do successful conservation and restoration? We have the International Union for Conservation Nature Mangrove Specialists Group that is there to provide support to many of these initiatives and other alliances more bilateral between countries.
We have some of the frameworks there at a global scale, we have the ambition at the national scale, and we have the knowledge of the science and technical caacity at the local scale.
To summarize, I think we have a huge amount of potential for mangrove restoration around the world, if we do it correctly, and this is the hard work of getting the right mangrove species in the right place at the right time, so how do we link the biology and ecology and the need for careful planning of restoration with these ambitious targets and the ambitious timelines in which we want to achieve them over.
I think that we are certainly in the right direction in terms of capacity and in terms of international assistance and knowledge sharing.
But I think there's even more that we can do.
Thank you.
I thank Mr.
Fries for his presentation, and I now give the floor to our second panelist.
Mark Spaulding, Senior fellow President and CEO of the Ocean Foundation, and Senior Fellow at the Center for the Blue Economy.
The presentation is entitled Corporation as the Engine of Restoration from Shared Seas to High Seas.
You have the floor.
Thank you very much, Co chairs, Ambassador Mette Band and Ambassador Jonas Dory.
Distinguished delegates and colleagues, thank you for the privilege of taking part in this panel.
I'm going to rely a little bit on my notes because I've just come from working with the National Science Foundation on Ocean observing.
I need to make sure I'm giving you what I promise.
I'm going to begin with one idea and then try and show you that it's not a slogan, but a method.
You cannot restore what you cannot protect.
At the scale of the ocean, protection is only possible when nations cooperate.
I had the Ocean Foundation, and for nearly 25 years, we have worked in some 40 different countries, not as a grant maker at distance, but as a builder of relationships and the institutions through which conservation actually happens.
I have spent close to four decades in this work, and I want to share practical insights, not just theory.
It is what I've learned sometimes the hard way about how international cooperation on the ocean is built and how it survives.
Restoration is the theme of this meeting and rightly so.
But restoration has a precondition we tend to skip past.
You cannot bring a degraded system back if it's still being pulled apart by pollution, by unmanaged extraction, by neglect.
Protection comes first.
Because the ocean is a single connected body of water, protection at any meaningful scale cannot be achieved by a single country alone.
It requires cooperation and coordination.
Let me add one line and I will come back to it.
Cooperation matters most, not least, precisely when national commitments grow uncertain.
When the political weather turns, that is exactly when the structures we have built together are tested and exactly when they matter the most.
Here is why this is not abstract.
Behind me on the screen is the Gulf of Mexico and the Western Caribbean, with the dominant currents drawn in.
Those arrows are not decoration, the same currents that move water, move larvae, fish, turtles.
They also move risk across the waters of Cuba, Mexico, and the United States.
A healthy reef off of Cuba helps stock the fishery off Florida.
Spill anywhere travels everywhere.
The line on the map marked border is invisible to everything that actually lives there.
Three nations, one ecosystem.
That single fact is the reason for the story that I want to tell you.
In 2007, the Ocean Foundation set out to create a space, a table where scientists and managers from Cuba, Mexico, and the United States could sit down together around the sea that they share.
We called it the Tnational Initiative, and over the years, we convened eight working sessions in Cancun, Vera Cruz, Havana, Sarasota, Corpus Christi, and finally in Merida across borders that at the government level were often closed.
What held it together was not a treaty, it was trust built patiently meeting by meeting between people who came to respect one another's science and one another's seriousness.
That is what science diplomacy actually looks like.
It is slow, it is unglamorous, and it works.
It produced things that you can point to.
What you see in this slide is Red Golfol, a network of 11 marine protected areas spanning all three countries managed as connected parts of a single system rather than as isolated parks.
It produced the sister sanctuary relationship linking Cuba, Guana Cahibs and the Florida Keys and the flower garden Banks parks, connected science and connected protection so that recovery can happen across the whole system, not only in one nation's lines.
Then this.
In February 2023, at our offices in Washington, DC, the government of Cuba signed a memorandum of understanding with the Ocean Foundation, the first such agreement Cuba has ever signed with any United States based non governmental organization.
Let me tell you why this signature is remarkable because it is at the heart of what I want to leave you with.
That relationship was not built on calm waters.
It survived the opening of relations between the United States and Cuba in 2014.
It survived the re abnormalization of relations that followed.
It survived Cuba's re designation as a state sponsor of terrorism.
It has survived a renewed maximum pressure policy.
And an aid freeze that suspended other programs of ours overnight.
How does cooperation survive all of that? Not by luck, but by design.
We never let it rest on a single government to government thread.
We built it across many channels at once, universities, international organizations, private foundations, and partners in third countries so that when any one channel was cut, the others held.
That is the reason I most want this body to take from our experience.
Build cooperation deliberately across many hands, and it will outlast political weather.
This method was not one off.
The same approach gave us our sister sanctuaries, the Red Gulf Network I mentioned, and a 2024 agreement with a climate Foundation in Mexico, the Climate Strong Islands Network, and partnerships in Africa.
Wherever we work, we try to leave behind not a project, but a durable structure for cooperation.
Okay.
Let me connect this to restoration in its most literal sense.
Through our blue resilience work, we restore coastal ecosystems that store carbon and shield coastline, salt marshes, seagrass meadows, and mangroves.
We co manage the largest mangrove restoration project in the United States history.
This hands in the mud restoration, and even here, the local work depends on shared science and methods across borders.
As my colleague mentioned, we spent a lot of time working on hydrology before we ever did any restoration work and we have the good fortune of having 97% success rate.
Now, let me speak directly to the many delegations here from developing states and small island developing states.
Restoration is not only a question of will, it is a question of capacity.
Too many countries cannot fully take part in protecting their own waters, not for lack of commitment, but for lack of tools, training, access to ocean science, and access to technology transfers.
A central part of our work is closing that gap, helping countries to build their own ability to monitor with field equipment and lab equipment and respond to ocean conditions and to mobilize the finance to pay for all of it.
Cooperation that flows in only one direction is not cooperation.
If restoration is to be global, the capacity to do it must be shared.
Everything so far has been close to shore, but nearly two thirds of the ocean lies behind any national jurisdiction, the high seas.
For most of history, there was no general way to protect it all.
That changed this year.
On the 17th of January 2026, the BB&J agreement entered into force for the first time a binding global framework to create protected areas and to require environmental assessments on the high seas.
Please permit me one observation of someone who has spent a career inside this system.
That same month, one nation, my own, stepped back from 66 international commitments, among them ocean cooperation mechanisms, some of us spent years helping to build.
Ten days before the world's high seas treaty entered into force, a seat at the table was emptied.
I do not say this in despair, I say it because it makes the point.
The system is working, the treaties are in force, the progress is real.
It does not stop when one government walks away.
But it does fall on the rest of us to this body to keep building.
The tide goes out, but it also comes back in.
Let me give you one concrete frontier.
Across the ocean lie thousands of wrecks from the last century, many slowly leaking or about to leak, the oil still sealed in their holes.
We call them potentially polluting wrecks.
Our approach is simple to state.
The wreck is cultural heritage.
The goal is to leave it in place in S two preservation.
What we remove is the oil before a corroding hole becomes a disaster.
Preserve the wreck, remove the threat.
Notice this is by its nature a problem no country can solve alone.
It spans the flag state of the vessel, the coastal state salvage capacity, and finance mechanisms.
Is it exactly the kind of challenge the BB&J framework can now help us meet protecting natural and cultural heritage together.
Let me close with what I believe cooperation and coordination now ask of us, four things.
Use the pathway that we now have, bring forward ambitions, early proposals for protected areas on the high seas under the BB&J.
A under used framework is no framework at all.
Second, coordinate, do not compete.
UNESCO, the regional seas bodies and the sectoral organizations align efforts rather than carve up turf.
Third, invest in capacity so that every state, not only the wealthiest, can take part in protecting and restoring the coasts and ocean.
Fourth, finance it so that a line on a map becomes real protection on the water.
I said at the outset that the system is working and I meant it, the High Seas Treaty is in force, disciplines on harmful fisheries subsidies are taking hold, a plastics agreement is being negotiated, momentum monumentum is building towards a moratorium on seabed mining.
Multilateralism is actually delivering.
Our task is not to mourn it, it is to use it.
The ocean has taught me patience that change comes slowly and then all at once.
Cooperation is how we are ready when it does.
Thank you, and I look forward to any questions you have.
I thank Mr.
Spaulding for his presentation, and we move on to the third panelist, Dow Ha it, Director of Senior Expert Institute of Oceanography of Vietnam.
The presentation is entitled Coral Reef Restoration in Vietnam Preliminary Results, Challenges and Opportunities.
You have the floor.
Thank you, co chair.
This delegation, I would like to say to thank to you and to give me the chance to come here to share our information about the coral reef restoration experience in Vietnam.
I come from Institute Rafi, and my institute will have the task to work on the marine ecologic system including the coral reefs.
And I come from Southeast Asia and we have a tropical temperature, very typical tropical region, and we have a very long seasla.
So the coral reip in Vietnam is very, very abandoned.
The area around 1,000 kilometers square, and we have a very high biodiversity of seaweed, hard corns, rib fish, mollusk, gratison Echinom and pliket so on.
And recognize the importance of the eco system including especially the corn rips in Vietnam.
The government decide to to have a MPA system in Vietnam.
And the first 2010, my prime minister, we have 16 MPA approved.
So the marine area is 169,000 hecta and next after 14 years 2014, Prime Minister design total is 27 MPA approved and up to April of this year, 12 MPA officially established In the tropical area, we have a several impact of the coal to the coral reefs, including overfishing, destructive fishing, coastal erosion, sedimentation, and pollution.
Aquaculture development also the big issue, and tourism development or outbreak of predator and bleaching and red tie on natural disaster.
I can show you 22 examples on the bleaching and natural disaster.
It doesn't work anymore.
For example, in ia Zhang Bay in the central part of Vietnam, in the Qiang Bay MPA, we have a disaster like a very big Typhon in 2017 and 2021 and after that, we can see on the coronary breaching in the MPA that time we also have a very big economic loss and human home loss and so on.
The other is the For example, we have a high temperature in or 1998 2010, 2015, 2019 and 2014 in Kangha provin in Central Vietnam or in the southern part of Vietnam provin.
You can see several coron bleaching event by high temperature at that time.
We recognize based on our data, we would recognize a rapid decline in the light hot current cover.
We have data from 2021 and 2024 conceding with the coron bleaching given storm or typhon or outbreak of cod.
And we have a restoration of the under that ocean.
We tried to recall ten location of the Amp in Vietnam, including Kondo Islands and Banks Nia Changay Fukuok Island, Fuk Amp in Chunga Guana Provine, Ku Cham along the coast of Vietnam from north to south.
And we can see the We try to do some initial restoration by using fragment of the current coloni like a concrete, concrete, concrete block, solid that core substratum, or steel rock of the coron debit or sand.
And also, we recognize that the government cannot do own, we try to stimulate local involvement in restoration for.
We try to train on then restoration to empty staff, local fishermen and private sector.
We try to teach them how to do it in the laboratory and how to do under the sea.
And we try, for example, and we try to transferring and training on technical on an restoration and monitoring for MPI staff and local community in four different MPA location like a Koa Chong Fukork and together with some private company, we try to establish nursing site and translating an the degrade inside and outside of MPA.
And also, we're monitoring of the restoration site.
So from that our experience and trial, we can have some preliminary result on current re stories in Vietnam in nine different different location, MPA location.
A and we recognize that we show some experience to rest using artificial material here.
What we learned from the corn rip restoration in Vietnam, we learned that corn restoration on the great rip and corn restoration using artificial structure and establishing corn nurturing site.
And finally, we found that net coron substrate generate cost effectively and efficient material for co restoration in Vietnam.
Further, we tried to establish coron nursery for the long term restoration together with the Fishman and MPI step and also the NGO.
But the challenge and opportunity in Vietnam, we have a climate crisis, smart coronary bleaching and increasing the frequent of severe storm and typhon as we are in tropical area and social economic pressure, overfishing and detracting fishing and coastal sediment pollution also big problem for us, and also outbreak of current predator.
And the other thing is that we have a leggo gap, like a significant deficieient in the ecology standard and APA management and mechanism.
And we have scale limitation.
So because most current projects are fragment and lack long term monitoring, we cannot do any monitoring more than 18 months due to the system of Vietnam, maybe one project only within two year or something, and we have to apply other project for more funding.
However, from the challenge, we have an opportunity.
We have technology innovation like a micro fragment and heat resilient con selection, and we have blue economy and NPA integrating blue cap bond, credit, sustainable ecotourism, and expanding the national network to 27 MPA.
At community call management, the public private partnership, attracting corporate CSR investment, and empowering local communication, community inner management.
I think we have a long story to study on the currently, but really we have problems, so we'll try from small scale one by one by very small funding from money from money very small and we try to live up the scale and we believe that even we do very small thing and keep the long term, that is the scion we need for the ocean big one.
I thank you.
Thank you for your presentation.
We have now heard the first three presentations and we'll close the presentations so that we can take some questions and comments.
So the floor is open for any questions or comments you may have.
I give the floor to the representative of the FAO.
You have the floor.
This is a question to the last speaker from Vietnam but can be shared with anyone.
When we're working in our protected areas, we're typically doing a lot of restoration work either passively or actively.
I'm just wondering what approach the governments will take to reporting on target two and target three.
Where would they draw the line on talking about target two or would they include much of the spatial area where they're protecting assets either passively or actively in the way of restoring what was there, which is a day to day work in a marine park.
Thank you.
Thank you for the question.
Thank you for the question.
I think more than 20 years before the government didn't pay attention and we didn't notice that the coral reef is very important.
But sometime when we have facing this several problem and we have a big economic loss and we recognize very well that if we lost coral reefs, we lost so many things, including the economic and the government tried to actually try to establish the area which have a very sensitive to damage, and of course, it have the coral there.
And when we have the study, we noted that along the Vietnam, we have a several coral need to be to be protected to serve for the environment.
The government tried to first try to decide 12 and then they expanding.
So they want to secure the like the environment and economic condition ecology condition of the sea of Vietnam, and we expected that.
Also, we tried to expand to some of the islands because before the island have not a well study.
But recently we have further more data on the islands in the islands of Vietnam.
So the government tried to establish that.
That's so far I know.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I give the floor to the distinguished representative of Ghana.
Hello.
Thank you very much for the opportunity.
Looking at the map presented by the previous speaker, I did not see Ghana represented as a country that has mangrove and I agree because ours has depleted so much so that it can presumably be captured on the map.
But I come back to the discussions on the floor.
We are talking about collaboration and restoration.
How can we get Ghana to restore its mangrove and get our blue community working with international standards? Thank you.
Thank you for the question.
While I haven't been to Ghana, I know people, they tell me some of the most beautiful mangroves and some of the most important and precious despite some of the degradation that's being experienced throughout West Africa.
First of all, how can it be done international standards? First of all, I think to acknowledge that almost every country that has mangroves has fantastic local capacity on mangrove science on mangrove restoration.
People are doing it.
It might be small scale, it might not have the big and it might not be well known, but it's happening on the ground.
I want to acknowledge that first because there are fantastic mangrove scientists, mangrove communities, mangrove managers, and practitioners around the world who are doing really hard work every day and it doesn't need always an international group to come in and tell them how they're doing it.
There's a huge amount of local knowledge, which we really should celebrate.
That being said, there are a lot of international organizations that are there to provide support to those groups within those landscapes.
I gave some examples of them.
And I'd be happy to share some of the resources.
All of the resources I showed on the slide are all freely available, so those guides are there.
Of course, it's not just about having a guide or best practice principles.
It's how you implement it and how you train it.
That is harder and it's resource intensive, but there's lots of really great examples from FAO, from CFO EAC doing on the ground hands on training.
Um, on mangrove restoration, on blue carbon assessments.
What is really good about these trainings is that it is two way.
It's not just a one way delivery of training, but also it builds local networks.
I've been involved in some of these.
I was based for most of my career in Singapore, so in Southeast Asia.
I was involved in a number of these trainings from CaFOAA and others, and it built really great local communities and networks and communities of practice within regions.
I think that's, um, really what I would love to aspire to is to see more regional networks of practice sharing knowledge and not just the one way delivery of how one group thinks restoration should happen because mangroves makes them really special and unique is how variable they are around the world.
We have these best practice guidelines that give us the big boundaries of what should happen.
But it's really using that local knowledge to make sure that the restoration intervention is correct for that landscape.
Thank you.
If I can build on that, the Ocean Foundation's Ocean Science equity program works in Ghana.
Part of what they are hoping to do is create the climate or the conditions for restoration and success.
As the name implies, it's about science and it's about equitable science, ensuring that the scientists of Ghana's institutions have the field equipment or laboratory equipment they need, making sure that they have the tools to calibrate that equipment in the field, not having to send it back to the manufacturer.
Making sure that the operational costs of that equipment is such that it is affordable and for example, we brought down the cost of pH sensors from $25,000 US to $2,500 US.
The whole idea here is that as my colleague said, some of this is establishing the conditions about the water quality, the hydrology before restoration begins.
But also, we are studying whether the policies are in place.
What governance is there to, as I said earlier, have the protection that will precede the restoration.
We enjoy very much working in Ghana and thank you for Ghana's cooperation with us as an organization.
Thank you.
I now give the floor to Place 12.
Please introduce yourself.
Thank you.
Thank you to all the panelists for the very interesting talks.
My name is Elizabeth Sinclair.
I'm from the University of Western Australia.
This is really regarding mangroves and we all know they have a pretty narrow window in which they grow.
I'm wondering when you've got restoration sites, at what point do you decide to perhaps give up on a mangrove, switch species, give up on the site altogether or try to fix the hydrology, which is going to be challenging with sea level, or do you consider working with seagrass or salt marshes, an alternative coastal ecosystem that might be more suited to that site.
Thank you.
That's a great question.
I love mangroves, but I do love other coastal ecosystems too, I promise.
Really what is most important is that you have whether it's the right species or the right ecosystem in the right place.
If the conditions to what used to be a mangrove, but it's now being so modified that it's now no longer suitable, but there is another ecosystem, then we might not call that restoration, but it's certainly within a seascape.
It's bringing back something that is beneficial to obviously the local ecology but to the people living in that landscape as well.
Certainly, if conditions have changed that there is now a natural seagrass there where there used to be a mangrove, it doesn't mean we have to make a decision there, and to see the benefit of whether that really is suitable for restoration of mangroves, or whether we should be putting those efforts into locations that are maybe going to be more feasible, both the mangroves and having less of an impact on the surrounding coastal environment.
Thanks.
We participated in one of the largest mangrove restoration projects in history in the United Arab Emirates.
Our role was to evaluate what worked and what didn't work because there were many plants put in the ground and some worked incredibly well and some failed tremendously.
I think it's from that effort that we really learned about improving hydrology and thinking about the entire balance of the system.
But we are truly being confronted with sea level rise and the Potential that we may have to think about seagrass in a place that mangroves used to be.
That is part of our job is to come in and look.
We do restore or conserve all three of those blue carbon ecosystems, and we really try and ask our questions about where is the retreat going to happen? Is there room for the mangroves to move inland? Is there room for things to change as sea level rise happens? Thank you for your question.
I thank the panelists and the delegates for questions and answers.
We will now proceed with the remaining three panelists for this afternoon.
I now wish to give the floor to our fourth panelist, Margaret Miller, Chief Science Officer, S Corp International.
The presentation is entitled Cooperative Opportunities and Challenges in Coral Seating.
You have the floor, miss Miller.
Good afternoon.
I want to acknowledge and thank the co chairs here for their attention to this topic and for the opportunity to share with you this afternoon.
The coral reef crisis is real.
You've heard quite a bit about it already this week, so I'm going to touch on a few of those points again.
But obviously, this coral reef crisis, the degradation and coral reef systems throughout the globe profoundly affects human communities welfare and well being.
Um, and many of these threats that have caused this degradation are ongoing or in fact worsening, and so we might ask, why should we invest in restoration if the problems aren't fixed yet? I want to emphasize very clearly that we need to be about fixing the problems with utmost urgency.
I Because restoration will never be successful unless those problems are fixed and those environments can be viable for the organisms that need to build those ecosystems.
However, we also need to save all of the pieces that are needed to rebuild those ecosystems once some of those problems can be fixed.
This involves coral restoration.
Because the IUCN has identified in their recent red list assessment, almost half of global coral species are in fact at elevated risk of extinction right now.
This, restoration then is the activity by which we can buy time for the problems to be fixed without losing the pieces of those crucial ecosystems through extinction of which the risks are quite real.
This was recognized by the International Coral Reef Society, the global Scientific Society that exercises expertise and management advice and conservation advice about coral reefs.
In the 2021 report, the figure that you see here on the right shows the simultaneous need for addressing threats, both climate threats globally, local threats that we've also heard quite a bit about this week, but investing in active restoration that is maintaining coral populations at the same time.
It's not one or the other, it's all three and we need to be about all three in a diligent way.
There are multiple modes of propagating corals as we seek to reinforce their populations.
Fragmentation is a commonly used practice throughout the world.
You heard a little bit about some exciting projects in Vietnam that are using this approach.
Specifically, corals, especially branching ones can break off a bit of themselves and become a new coral.
This can be extremely effective and it's particularly effective.
Its benefits are in providing the accumulation of biomass relatively quickly.
Corals can grow quite quickly this way.
And so the ecosystem benefits related to habitat provision or coastal protection are best served by this fragmentation approach.
It's leveraged, as I said, throughout the world in coral gardening and coral nurseries.
You've heard quite a bit about these activities this week as well.
Oh, sorry.
Thank you.
The alternative way that corals make new corals is through making baby corals.
Many species spawn their eggs and sperm into the water column.
The fertilization and larval development happens in the water column.
Those larvae are mobile throughout the oceans over a period of days to several weeks, and then those coral larvae have to find their way back to a suitable reef habitat and settle and metamorphose and become new colonies in a new place.
This is the process by which coral metapopulations generally are connected Um, but this approach for restoration that is using baby corals or coral larvae, provides greater potential in terms of adapting to changing environments because you have the formation of new genetic recombinations in these offspring.
But corals are also quite prolific and they can spawn and there's a potential for very large numbers of propagules to be produced in each corals spawning event.
There is great potential for scaling through these large numbers of offspring.
Thank you.
There we go.
Coral seeding, an active restoration method essentially is about developing tools and processes to assist at the many complicated early life stage that corals experience.
That involves these many steps.
Collecting the spawn as they're release naturally from coral populations.
This generally happens a few nights a year.
Um, rearing the larvae that result in some contained way, allowing those coral larvae to settle often on artificial substrates that we can design that have micro habitats that can improve their survivorship.
Then that artificial substrate serves as a vehicle that we can transfer those coral colonies back to the reef.
Now, my organization has really focused on developing these tools and practices to enable coral seeding to be undertaken through field based techniques, many coral reef areas in the world are never going to have access to large laboratories or large aquaculture facilities.
Although those approaches are also being pursued with coral seeding and industrial aquaculture settings.
Our focus has been on field based techniques that can be implemented um, pretty much anywhere in the world.
This is a little bit what some of those look like.
Collecting coral spawn, as I said, spawn is usually released just one or two evenings a week, not a week per year.
You see, some of my colleagues in the Dominican Republic undertaking in vitro fertilization here in the center.
But that step can be undertaken on the back of a boat, on a beach, in a parking lot, wherever you need to do it.
But then those embryos and larvae can be placed in field enclosure such as you see here for that larval duration and settlement onto some of those artificial substrates.
So Sea Corps my organization has really focused, as I said, on developing these sorts of technologies and tools based on ecological research, but then also taking those tools and processes and putting them in the hands of local restoration practitioners through an implementation network.
This is a training model that we have developed primarily in the Caribbean so far.
Um, As you might infer, there's a lot to learn about coral seeding and making it successful.
We've developed this training model through relatively long term partnerships with these implementation partners, involving several years of experience, both including online training, in person events, both common in person events, but also accompanying groups in their own locations through several spawning events, working with them to develop sustainable funding streams, and then handing those activities off to those local partners.
We're very proud that several of these local groups have now become trainers themselves and are propagating these skills and capacities with additional partners in their own countries.
This is a little bit what our network looks like at the moment.
As I mentioned, you can see our history is greatest and this model has been developed to the greatest extent in the Caribbean.
We've been working there over the past eight to ten years with these partners now in about ten different Caribbean countries that are implementing coral seeding.
Um, and this is based on, I would say, multiple decades of coral restoration activity in this region.
The coral decline started many decades ago in the Caribbean and has been ratcheting for a long period of time.
This has created a demand for coral restoration over a relatively long time frame as well.
This is a relatively mature group of practitioners that have been involved in coral restoration for a while, a relatively mature pipeline in terms of the management and permitting decisions around coral restoration.
As we have more recently begun the very first steps of expanding this training model into other regions of the ocean, particularly the West Indian Ocean region, we now have a team operating in Mauritius, actually, but also the Pacific Islands region.
Um, these environments, there's a reason, there's a good reason they haven't needed coral restoration too much.
But I guess one point of advice that I would mention, we need to begin building capacity in these areas before coral restoration is needed because it's going to be a lot easier and a lot more successful if we begin sooner.
But within these other regions of the world where coral restoration hasn't been perceived as needed, it hasn't been needed as much.
The coral degradation has not been as great.
Resilience is retained in some of those ecosystems to a greater extent.
But both the practitioner and the management and permitters just simply have less experience and are starting from a different baseline in these other regions.
The consequence of this, more time and more funding are likely going to be required in these other regions to be successful and gain these network capacities in coral seeding.
I'm going to move back to the Caribbean now.
You've heard quite a bit about the state of the dire state of Caribbean coral reefs over this week.
I know several of the earlier presenters had talked about the extreme heat waves that hit the Caribbean in 2022 and 2023.
These were, I guess, a decade or so ahead of when we were predicting heat waves of this magnitude to occur.
Nonetheless, they've coincided as well in the Caribbean with extreme effects from snowy coral tissue loss disease, which has affected an unprecedented diversity of coral species.
So many of the species in those systems have been devastated at the same time by disease.
From a population perspective, mass mortality of parent corals often results and we're seeing this certainly in most Caribbean reef building species with generalized recruitment failure.
Just since 2023, I would argue that this has taken the large open metapopulations of coral species within the Caribbean and very rapidly converted them to small isolated populations.
This requires a very rapid change in the conservation and restoration approaches and paradigms that we need to work with these species.
Think about the way that zoos and aquariums and things implement controlled breeding and conservation breeding programs for highly endangered mammals.
It involves a tremendous amount of record keeping, but it also crucially involves moving those organisms around in a way that those breeding plants can be the most advantageous to prevent threats such as genetic drift and inbreeding risk to affect the future of those populations.
So similarly, we're now in a situation where we really need to consider moving corals around as a basic tool of restoration and conservation planning.
I believe this paper was referred to earlier in the week as well, but the concept of assisted gene flow and genetic rescue for corals, particularly Caribbean, is an issue we need to be doing now.
Um, One approach to this is one that my organization is leading with the concept of developing networks for exchanging coral larvae.
Larvae represent a relatively low risk approach for moving corals around.
They represent much lesser biosecurity risk than moving whole corals around for various reasons, and they're amenable to shipping around.
You can put them in a bottle and FedEx them across the ocean.
You can put them in your luggage and carry them with a traveler.
This is a very tractable thing to do, in many ways and highly needed.
Um, Again, the investment in developing capacity and coral seeding throughout this region provides a ready made network of groups that are ready and saying, yes, we need more parents in our breeding programs and are ready and willing to begin the relatively long road involved in having to navigate this extensive permitting a pathway that's been referred to several times this week as well.
But I'm going to emphasize this to you based on our consultations and research on the local basis and all of those different countries, there are a lot of steps.
This is a very long road to be able to move even these the coral larvae around that represent, as I said, a relatively low biosecurity risk.
But several of these crucial barriers relate to important conservation mechanisms that are overseen by the UN, specifically CIEs and the biodiversity conventions.
And the Nagoya Protocol.
I think you've heard this before this week, but I'm going to emphasize these points where both CDEs and the CBD Nagoya protocol, represent significant barriers that could be eased.
I think one approach to easing these barriers could relate to this concept of having pre approved networks of vetted organizations that are engaged in reciprocal exchange.
Again, both Sits and Nagoya are based on a model of a bilateral negotiation for each transfer from a donor country to a user country.
I think that there could be a very different model that would facilitate these conservation usages where it's a model of reciprocal exchange, that means the genetic benefits are being shared mutually across that network.
And I think such a concept could greatly facilitate some of the current barriers.
I encourage that to be part of our conversations.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much for your presentation.
Now we turn to our fifth panelist, San Abel Arbelian Policy Officer, Marine Environment Department, Government of Belgium.
The presentation is entitled Greater North Sea Basin Initiative, Working Truck Nature.
You have the floor, sir.
Thank you so much, Co Chair, and also for the opportunity to speak during this week.
I've been fortunate or lucky enough to have been listening to all of the other presentations this week and some of the things that of course came by resonated as well, where there was a call or a need for more cross border collaboration, but also more cross sectoral collaboration where it cannot be restoration alone.
I'm going to tell a story about how we try to set up a mechanism in the Greater North Sea Basin.
As you can see on the first slide, the countries that are participating currently are France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, the UK, and Ireland.
The red stripes represent the geographic area that we are currently operating.
First, I will give a bit of background to why it was necessary to establish such initiative.
Within the North Sea, it's one of the most heavily used seas in the world.
We have great ports of Amsterdam and Antwerp that are passing by.
There's lots of wind energy.
For these nine countries, the sea is crucial for various functions, not only for nature, winter and fisheries, but also shipping and infrastructure.
However, we have limited physical and ecological space at the North Sea.
There is need for well coordinated marine spatial planning that also takes into account the greater regional level.
Also, when we look at some of the directives that we have for Marine Strategy Framework Directive, we can see that we are far from reaching good environmental status.
Oh, sorry.
Yeah.
What is the Greater North Sea Bas Initiative? It is actually an informal initiative between the nine greater North Sea countries that I mentioned, which is supported by the European Commission.
What we're trying to do is to cooperate in dealing with the spatial and ecological squeeze in this tiny area while taking into account some of these transitions such as climate change, biodiversity loss, sustainable food production, clean and safe operations at sea.
We believe that sectoral and national approaches limit currently the effectiveness of dealing with these above mentioned challenges.
Important to notice is, as I said before, it's an informal initiative, we don't operate, we don't have a mandate to take decisions or force laws upon anybody.
The idea of the Greater Northea Bas Initiative is to foster collaboration, stimulate informal dialogue, and to accelerate some of the work that might be already going on while working together with all the other organizations that are active in our basin.
If we look at our governance structure in the middle, the key bits of our doing are the working tracks that deliver content to be considered by the steering group.
Within the steering group are present the working track leads like myself for nature and also the national Cory coordinators.
However, the collaboration needs to be enforced on multiple levels.
We are presided by an executive board of the Directors General, mostly of the MSP Director Generates or fisheries or nature Director Generates.
Very important that this collaboration is not only on the lowest level, but it also works its way up as such, even till the highest level where we organize two or three year ministerial conference where the ministers get together.
As you can see below and on the site, we are supported by the European Commission through the assistance mechanism, which provide money for the secretariats, who help us with making plannings, making notes for meetings, also organizing our stakeholder event this year, and we work closely together with external stakeholders, important ones such as Osbar NSC, ISIS, the regional Fisheries collaboration, regional Fisheries Management organizations, and so on.
They take part in the working tricks or we communicate with them at an ad hoc basis.
If we look at the working tracks, there are currently five established.
We have nature restoration and conservation where we are looking to set up a program for cooperation regarding the enhancement of restoration and nature across the different countries.
Cumulative impact assessments.
A lot of countries have established their own approach when it comes to cumulative impact assessments, and there is a challenge in harmonizing them.
That's what this track is trying to do.
We also have the multi use track, which is looking to set up criteria and sharing best practices on co use, the long term perspective fisheries track to create insight in key fisheries areas and socioeconomic food impacts at the spatial scale at North Sea.
They have done a very impressive study this year where they basically gathered all the information of where fishing revenues are being brought by countries.
This is data that is normally only available at the national level to bring this together so that fisheries could also be better represented when taking these marine spatial decisions at the regional level that affect them all.
Lastly, we also have the knowledge sharing trick, which oversees and assists all of the other tricks.
They coordinate the exchanges of best practices.
They aid us when we need to make graphics or data, and they also oversee our plans and assessments.
And going now to the nature track specifically, what we have been doing, we started out with a gap analysis process in 2024.
The first thing we did was identify some challenges that are shared by GNSBI countries since it is only useful to work together on things that people are interested in and that more countries are affected by than just one.
Then we prioritize these most urgent challenges and we identified some solutions, which are the actions that we were going to take first.
Then after that, after we have set these actions, we tried to evaluate the opportunities to implement these actions.
Also taking note again of what is happening already around us since we don't want to duplicate efforts that have been ongoing in other forum.
From the gap analysis, six priority shared barriers emerged, such as lack of joint political will to prioritize nature, the need for understanding the value of nature, the lack of sea basin wide maps of biologically valuable and sensitive areas, insufficient cooperation on nature restoration projects and conservation plans between countries, the complicated relationships between and within administrations regarding sectoral demands.
I think the example of permitting is one of them that has been mentioned multiple times already this week.
And also the lack of targeted and effective communication regarding the benefits of nature.
While we know that these are open doors to kicking, there are very hard and persistent barriers, so we need to be able to act on them.
For that, we made an action on each of these that will tackle the barrier.
Since we have limited capacity at first, we don't plan to tackle all actions at the same time, but try to work on three actions to take forward, which were the lack of political will, the requirement for the CBC maps, and also the corporation of nature.
It's on that corporation of nature that I will now dive a bit deeper.
In how we are enforcing or strengthening it.
First, it starts with knowing who your counterparts are in countries.
We tried to set up a phone book of restoration of policy leads to look across countries.
This is also very challenging since people sometimes switch fast from jobs and it also need at multiple levels because people who decide policy on the regional level are not the ones that are doing it on a national level, let alone the practitioners who are doing the restoration in the field.
We also provided a platform for sharing information where we work together on and we established dialogues between sectors that are affected by restoration.
This year in Berlin, we had our first joint meeting with the fisheries Tech and we came up with some ideas on how we will work better together into the future.
One thing that popped up very fast was, of course, we are connected in a way that fisheries also depends on natural resources.
In order to set forward their activities, they need to make sure that fisheries are preserved.
So we are looking now into how to further identify critical fish habitat areas not only for the commercially fish species, but also for the prey species upon which those commercially dependent fish species depend.
Fourth, we are also generating new knowledge.
We heard some some remarks already also this week with regarding to indicators.
So we commissioned work by ICs on options for current indicators for using across different countries.
Fifth, we are also working together to develop and implement an international restoration project.
Lastly, while we're doing that, of course, actively working with the management organizations that exist already such as Ospar.
To give an idea, what we're trying to do with the cross border restoration task group, which has been set up this year is to develop and implement one or two joint cross border restoration projects within the Greater North Sea Basin.
While it might not sound as a new idea, what we generally see is that countries they tend to organize via project calls separately different projects and then implement them in their country.
The idea now is, can we do a project across borders from the start? What are the challenges that are coming with that? So The idea of our working track or for this task group is to identify and resolve some of these challenges to share experience and things that will definitely come up are, for instance, permitting, but also regulation, funding for different countries.
How do we monitor? The approach is practical.
We do a bit learning by doing.
Our initial focus would be the flat oyster since that's a species that comes in almost every country.
If it works well, this approach, we intend to repeat it with the second species being sea Cross.
When looking at the generating knowledge part, we requested ISIS to come up with some indicators for nature restoration that could be used by multiple countries.
We recently, or at least the EU countries have adopted the nature restoration regulation at EU level and so a lot of countries are starting with implementing nature restoration projects.
Of course, if we need to report against them, it helps that we can compare results.
I have also a background in marine plastics and there we saw for microplastics, everybody bought their technical fancy equipment already and only afterwards we realized, they are measuring in different ways and we can't compare results.
That's something that we're trying to avoid.
The question we asked ISIS was, is it possible to identify a core set of existing indicators which are already in use because, of course, it cannot cost extra money.
Is there sufficient data for those indicators? How are they also linked to the Koming global biodiversity Framework, Ospar and EU legislation? Lastly, are there any gaps that are identified within the suitable existing indicators that we can fast track? Since we don't have the time to go into detail to this request, the report has been published and if you want, you can contact me afterwards also to receive it.
What do we see of challenges that arose when we were doing this work is that, of course, you're working with different countries who also have different priorities but also have different ecosystems.
It's sometimes hard to find a common goal.
There's also, of course, the different regulatory regimes across the sea basin, we have EU countries versus non EU countries and that it's been mentioned before, there is an actual need to work across sectors.
So nature restoration priorities also need to be included marine spatial planning, which at this point in time is very difficult.
Lastly, it is a costly affair, so financing is something and what we also see if you want to build trust amongst different administrations, it's very difficult to do so when staff keeps changing.
That's another bit that we saw as a main challenge where people don't stay in their same post for a long time.
However, we also have opportunities, of course, such as the existing cooperation with frameworks like Ospar who already have a lot of experience, who also put in effort to help us.
Likewise, when we need to take a decision to which we don't have the mandate, we can forward it to their framework.
We also have the global biodiversity target two to which every country is adhering within the Greater North Sea Bas Initiative and the informality, which is helping us.
Normally, when we are sitting down with our fisheries colleagues, we are pitted against each other from the start, but because of the informality, we actually now have a space to talk to each other in a friendly way without having to defending our national standpoints.
And lastly, it's also something that we see that we have shared challenges across the different sectors.
Everybody is asking for a bit of space and so we're trying to better understand each other and see, can we share some spaces? If you get this space for fisheries, do we then maybe have an opportunity for nature elsewhere? So that was also very clear are the data issues.
That regionally, there's not that much data available as we would have thought from the start.
However, at a national level, a lot of these data is existing.
It is just not being shared.
That's also a main focal point for this year's DG meeting.
Lastly, I want to show some of the lessons learned.
Learning how to really work across sectors, it's very valuable and very interesting as well and worthwhile our time.
However, you need to do it with respect and understanding.
There are different ways of working within these sectors and the informality as such helps to then first on a human based level, get to trust from each other and then start discussing on some shared challenges.
The third point also reflects that it's the people that influence policy.
At the end of the day, it comes down to who you know at which time and the fact that I now can call fisheries colleague from Germany who I normally don't have contact with is of major value for the Northea Basin but also for other colleagues who are now getting in touch with different sectors.
As a fourth, it's important to not make assumptions about what you know already because we thought we have been monitoring for 30 years in the North Sea Basin.
We have pretty good ecological data available to us, but when you dig down to it, we basically don't know that much as we thought, and so we need to question some of these assumptions that we made, but also assumptions that we have towards the other players around the table that fisheries don't want to just do fisheries, for instance, compared to nature, but that they also have a livelihood and that they are willing to work together with us, which we can also see.
Then the last two ones where cooperation, of course, takes time and needs capacity.
Been said before, it goes slow and it can weather political storms, but it needs to be able to get the mandate.
I think especially in these times where budgets are being cut, it's one of the difficulties, but which we also now see after three years, we do manage to get results and we do manage to go farther than we would have done if we all stayed working nationally.
The last message that I would give is to say start small and go with the energy.
So see where there's energy and willingness to work on topics that are interesting to countries.
It's of no use to come in to start a great project, but then no buy in and that people tend to fade off into the background along the way.
I think that's also one of the strengths where we had where we saw if a certain bit didn't have enough energy to continue it, we would pivot so that we do have the necessary cooperation to show the results along the way.
Thank you for your attention and you can always contact me or my colleague Emily afterwards.
Thank you very much for your presentation.
Some of these lessons learned could probably be used in diplomacy as well, I think.
Thank you so much.
We will now hear from the sixth and last panelist for this afternoon, Jamil Ahmad, Director for the UNEP New York Office.
The presentation is entitled From Rch to Reef, the UN Tcadeon Ecosystem Restoration and UNEPs work in Marine and coastal ecosystems.
You have the floor, sir.
Thank you, co chairs and Excellency's distinguished guests a pleasure to present to you the work of UNEP in this area.
We go to the dark.
Our planet is often called the blue planet, yet we rarely stop to consider just how much we owe to the ocean.
Every second breath that we take comes from it.
It regulates our climate, feeds billions of people, protects our coastlines, supports livelihood and economies, and connects communities across the globe.
For millennia, the ocean has sustained humanity from coral reefs and mangroves to seagrass meadows and coastal wetlands.
Today, however, many of the ecosystems that support life on Earth are under growing pressure from climate change, pollution, and unsustainable use.
Yet, this is not the story of decline.
It is a story of hope because nature possesses an extraordinary capacity to recover when given the chance.
It is this belief that sits at the heart of the UN decade of ecosystem restoration.
Proclaimed by the UN General Assembly for 2021, 2030 and led by UNEP and FAO, the decade of ecosystem restoration is a global movement to prevent halt and reverse ecosystem degradation.
Restoration is no longer seen simply as environmental activity.
It is increasingly recognized as an investment in resilience, livelihood, food security, climate adaptation, and sustainable development.
At its core, the decade serves as a global coordination and mobilization platform.
It is designed to bring together countries and a wide range of actors, including indigenous people, local communities, civil society, academia, the private sector, and international organizations around the world with one shared vision, restoring ecosystems for people, nature, and climate.
This work is linked directly to the global commitments, including the sustainable development goals, the Kunming Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, the Paris Agreement on climate and other multilateral environmental agreements with countries committing to restore 1 billion hectres by 2030.
To support this transformation, the UN decades focuses on three main pathways.
Number one, building a global movement by raising awareness, driving behavior change, and empowering generation restoration.
Two, generating political will by engaging ministers, strengthening policies and unlocking finance.
Third, building technical capacity through science, indigenous knowledge, standards of practice, and robust monitoring systems.
These efforts are supported through a set of concrete delivery tools.
These include 12 restoration challenges, which are thematic priority areas led by partner organizations, the FERM monitoring platform, which tracks progress towards the global biodiversity Framework, target two.
Multiparter trust fund that helps catalyze finance for restoration action, and an advisory board, five task forces and a network of more than 300 partners to support this work.
Last but not least, the World Restoration flagships, which is a platform to recognize the most ambitious and impactful restoration initiatives globally.
The UN World Restoration Flagship Program under the UN decade recognizes, promotes large scale ecosystem restoration initiatives that demonstrate measurable ecological and socioeconomic impact and serve as a model that can be replicated globally.
Since its launch, 27 initiatives have been recognized with eight new being launched this year.
Together, these flagships show that restoration is already happening at scale with around 18.1 million hectors under active restoration and another 75 million hectors committed.
This demonstrates that restoration is not just a vision for future, but something already delivering tangible impact today.
One of the biggest challenges we face in marine ecosystem restoration is that we still do not have a complete picture of what is happening globally.
According to countries reporting to the Convention on biological Diversity, around 193 million haters had been placed under restoration by 2025.
However, almost all of this reported restoration, which is almost 98%, focuses on terrestrial ecosystems.
In contrast, freshwater, marine and coastal ecosystems together account for just 2% of reported restoration efforts.
Through the UN World Restoration Flagship Program, eight of the 27 recognized flagship focus on coastal ecosystems spanning across Africa, Asia, Australia and Oceana, and Europe and Latin America.
Together, these initiatives demonstrate a wide range of restoration approaches, including coral reef, mangroves, and coastal habitats, marine biodiversity and fisheries restoration, and integrated island and seascape restoration.
These flagships show that marine restoration can deliver measurable benefits for biodiversity, climate resilience, sustainable livelihood and coastal communities while providing valuable models that can be replicated.
One new flagship example is the restoring the Northern Mozambique channel.
Stretching across one of the world's most biodiverse marine regions, this initiative works to restore and protect interconnected coastal and marine ecosystems, including coral reefs, mangroves, and seagrass habitat.
Although relatively small in size, it contains around 33% of all coral reef found in the Indian Ocean and serves as a critical nursery and seabed of marine life across the region.
However, this ecosystem faces increasing pressures from climate change, agricultural runoff, and over exploitation of resources.
But what makes this initiative remarkable is its regional approach.
Comoros, Madagascar, Mozambique, and Tanzania are working together to restore and manage interconnected land and seascape across the region.
Currently, nearly 87,000 hectors are already under restoration and protection efforts.
Looking ahead, the initiative aims to restore 4.85 million hectareas by 2030.
This is expected to increase household incomes, create jobs, community enterprises, and strengthen climate resilience since supporting long term sustainable development across the region.
Let's zoom into some of the progress of small island developing states, our C's World Restoration flagship under the UN Date.
This particular flagship is working across Vanuatu, Comoros, St.
Lucia, 2023-2027 and it aims to restore ecosystems from rich to reef while fundamentally repositioning restoration as an engine for sustainable growth, resilience, and prosperity.
What makes this flagship distinct is the fact that it does not treat restoration as a standalone activity.
It embeds it within a whole whole of government transition to a sustainable blue economy.
We are doing this to three main components.
First, enabling environment.
Because successful restoration doesn't happen in a vacuum, here, the flagship uses UNEP soon to be published sustainable Blue Economy transition framework to support states with their SBE transition with a nationally owned roadmap on how countries can move from A to B.
I'll explain this shortly.
Second, national and local action.
How do we then operationalize a nature positive blue economy? Here we work with governments on key assessments to inform decision making, as well as directly with communities and businesses to implement restoration actions and unlock livelihood on the ground.
Third, sits through cities engagement and mobilize additional investment.
The result of all these components will be tracked through the decades official monitoring platform, the framework for ecosystem restoration monitoring, ensuring alignment with SDGs and global target, including the GBF target two towards 30 30.
Now a quick snapshot of what this looks like in practice.
Importantly, these results are also contributing to the global blue ecosystem challenge for oceans under the UN theate, enabling a shift towards nature positive blue economies that secure ecosystems and biodiversity assess for a wide ranging social benefits.
In Commoce, for example, transformational progress under the flagship financing includes the country's new nationally validated sustainable blue economy policy and implementation framework.
In St.
Lucia, the country's first sustainable blue economy rapid readiness assessment is underway.
In Vanuatu, the SBE transition process is also underway in partnership with Blue Prosperity, Vanuatu and the FAO and with FAO, a myriad of activities will follow.
This flagship is not just about restoring ecosystems, it is about transforming the enabling environment for restoring restoration to succeed.
The experiences emerging from the flagships also reflect a broader lesson.
Many countries know where they want to go.
The challenge is often understanding how to get there.
Ocean based development can no longer follow business as usual pathways that degrade ecosystems and deepen inequality.
That is why UNP has developed the Sustainable Blue Economy Transition framework.
This practical planning tool helps governments develop tailored pathways using nature based solutions to build resilience and human prosperity with planetary boundaries.
Specifically, the framework helps governments and countries develop integrated policies, transition strategies and implementation and investment plans.
To support early informed and inclusive action, the framework is complemented by the Sustainable Blue Economy Rapid Readiness Assessment, RRA.
The RRA provides governments with a pragmatic starting point for assessing existing policies, institutions, capacities, and financing arrangements through a structured and participatory process.
It also helps setting shared vision, clarify priorities, identify gaps, and enabling actions, and build momentum for deform.
An effective SBE RRA will provide a high level snapshot of a country current blue economy, identify key aspects and opportunities associated with the SBE transition, highlight the key challenges and barriers hindering progress towards NSBE and assess the status of the key SBE enabling conditions.
Also deliver a developed set of actions to catalyze progress towards a sustainable blue economy.
UNIPS transition framework and RRA tool have been piloted in the range of countries including currently in the CIS ecosystem Restoration Flagship Project in Comoros, St.
Lucia, and Vanuatu.
Of course, enabling conditions are not only about planning and finance, they are also about governance.
Marine protected areas offer one of the best options for maintaining or restoring the health of oceans and coastal ecosystems, particularly when they form part of holistic policy and integrated ecosystems.
UNEPSs guide enabling effective and equitable marine protected areas shows how integrated governance can combine the role of national governments, local communities, and market schemes to enhance the effectiveness of marine protected areas.
There is no one size fits all solution.
The guide therefore provides a flexible approach to governance that can be tailored to specific marine protected areas.
It uses real life studies, case studies covering a variety of marine protected areas.
A second critical enabling condition is finance.
When political will exist, restoration cannot scale without investments.
The Global Fund for coral reefs, GFCR is the world's leading coral reef finance platform mobilizing public and private capital towards protection and effective management of the world's most climate resilient coral reef system, backed by a public private coalition of states, UN agencies, financial institutions, philanthropies, impact investors, conservation actors, and civil society, the fund blends, grants, concessional and risk tolerant instruments and private investments.
By 2030, the GFCR aims to support at least 400 businesses and finance solutions across 22 coral nations.
UNEP co chairs the executive board of GFCR and currently leads a monitoring evaluation, and communications for the fund.
Finally, no discussion on restoration would be complete without recognizing the importance of communities.
Small grants programs is an innovative community based initiative for conservation, restoration, and sustainable use of marine ecosystems.
With an investment ranging 50000-150 thousand per project, the program delivers tangible environmental and socioeconomic benefits.
It strengthens governance, build local capacity, and enhances climate resilience.
Across regions, its impact is clear.
In Madagascar, communities are leading marine management.
In the Gambia, awareness of seagrass conservation is growing nationally.
In Kenya, communities are advancing blue carbon solutions and generating carbon credits.
In Belize, coral restoration is reviving endangered species while building local expertise.
In the Philippines, inclusive governance is improving marine protected areas, and in Haiti, mangrove restoration is strengthening resilience and livelihoods.
These are not isolated successes.
They are scalable, replicable solutions.
Ultimately, the program is not just about restoring ecosystem, but also about enabling communities to lead and create lasting benefits for both people and nature.
To conclude, marine ecosystem restoration is ultimately not just about recovering habitats, it's about creating the conditions for people and nature to thrive together.
Across the examples here today, a common lesson emerges that restoration succeeds when it is supported by strong governance, informed planning, sustainable financing, meaningful community engagement, and international cooperation.
The scale of challenge before us is immense, but so too is the opportunity.
By working together across sectors, institutions and borders, we can move beyond isolated restoration projects and build the resilient nature positive economies and societies that our oceans and our communities and our future generations depend on.
I thank you.
Thank you for your presentation.
This was the last of the panelists for today, so please the floor is now open for questions and comments.
I recognize the panelist, please.
You have the floor.
Can you hear me? Yeah.
Thank you.
This is a comment and a question from Margaret.
Really good presentation, really exciting to see the work you're doing.
In fact, I've been meaning to call you for a long time.
It's great to meet you.
I'm hoping we can talk afterwards.
But I'm glad you emphasize this really critical need for regional collaboration to be sharing genotypes.
I hate to be banging the same drum several times, but I really hope this is a message that sinks in and gets put into the report from this meeting that we are now at a point where corals are many species are functionally extinct.
By that I mean they are no longer able to reproduce in the wild.
We know this so that their fate is entirely in the hands of restoration.
Restoration of corals is possible, it is scalable.
We know we can do it, but what we urgently need are the countries to work together to allow sharing of these resilient genotypes because genetic diversity is key for adaptation.
It's a very simple message and it's a shame there are more delegations from the Caribbean region where I work and where you work.
I know it's been a busy week, but I would very much hope we can find a political champion in the region.
I think I have one or two ideas that could take this idea forward to the relevant agencies like the Carcom, the Caribbean Community Secretariat, the Organization of Eastern Caribbean states, which are harmonizing policy in the Eastern Caribbean and hopefully we can get some traction there.
But I just wanted to thank you and I just more of a comment really rather than a question, but I hope we can continue this discussion and know that in the Eastern Caribbean, you have a partner willing to share genotypes that will be very eager to push this with the governments.
Lucia, I should argue, should be commended.
They have provided us a permit to share corals with St.
Vincent and the Grenadines.
Um, similarly, St.
Vincent and the Grenadines have also provided written proof permitting to receive corals, new genotypes.
There is a willingness to collaborate and would hope we can build on that with other partners.
Thank you.
Thank you, Mr.
Jay, for your comments.
I don't see any other speakers.
Miss Miller, do you want to comment? Yeah, I'll just comment on the end of that, I guess, doctor Day and I have not coordinated ahead of this.
I guess to be clear, we're coming at it from independent perspectives.
But the road map, the figure that I showed that has so many permitting pieces of it, I think it's an important point to emphasize these local practitioners are dealing both with local manager decision as well as national authorities that are making decisions under the internationals um conventions.
There are these multiple levels of conversation and convincing that fall upon those local practitioners to try to carry out on top of all the other work that they're doing.
That's really the nature of a lot of the challenges, the many levels.
Biology there's important considerations around biological risk and those conversations are really important to have at all of those levels.
But the local managers need to be convinced as well as the national authorities that are making the decisions under the SIDs and the Nagoya protocol.
It's a big challenge.
Thank you.
Thank you, miss Miller.
Any other speakers that want to take the floor? If not, then we have reached the end of our discussion under this panel segment and we have then also concluded our consideration of the topic of focus for this 26 meeting on marine ecosystem restoration in the discussion panel.
Once again, I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the panelists for their informative and thought provoking presentations.
My co chair and I also wish to thank all delegations for their participation in the interactive discussions.
Let us thank in the usual manner, our distinguished panelists of this afternoon.
Tomorrow morning, we will resume at 10:00 in plenary to consider Agenda Item four on interagency cooperation and coordination.
Under this item, we will hear a statement by the focal point for UN Oceans, miss Eleanor Hamskd, Under Secretary-General for Legal Affairs and the United Nations Legal Council.
Time permitting, we will proceed to consider Agenda Item five entitled Process for the Selection of topics and Panelists so as to facilitate the work of the General Assembly and Agenda Item six entitled Issues that could benefit from attention in the future work of the General Assembly on Oceans and the Law of the Sea.
We will then close the meeting after hearing a statement by the Director of Do los on the ICP trust fund.
Before adjourn the meeting, are there any messages from the Secretariat? No.
Then I thank you for today and the meeting is adjourned.