The ocean has absorbed around 90% of the heat caused by fossil fuels but has often been an afterthought at UN climate talks, Kilaparti Ramakrishna told Dialogue Earth in an interview ahead of COP31 in Türkiye this month. Ramakrishna directs the Centre for Marine Policy at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, helped draft the UN climate convention and the Kyoto Protocol, and was a lead author on the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report.
He said the trend on the ocean is “absolutely in the right direction”. The Paris agreement of 2015 mentioned the ocean only once, in its preamble. Now there is a Pacific Ocean envoy in Inia Seruiratu of Fiji, an Australian envoy in Tony Warby and the UN’s Peter Thomson for all oceans, and COP30 in the Amazon treated blue and green together.
“But we cannot say we have done the job,” he said. “These are only words on a piece of paper.”
His main practical point concerns national climate plans, known as NDCs. To include the ocean, a country has to know what ecosystems such as mangrove forests and kelp forests are sequestering now, and how much more a given action would add.
He also wants the overlapping bodies sorted out: the high seas biodiversity agreement, the Convention on Biological Diversity, the UN climate convention, the International Seabed Authority and regional fisheries organisations, along with the decarbonisation of shipping. He called for one coherent strategy across them, and said COP31 should at least acknowledge the link.
Ramakrishna said the ocean is needed for climate solutions but warned against creating new problems in the process, and said negative effects on the environment must be kept to a minimum.
Photo: PatríciaR / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.5)
Source: Dialogue Earth
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