Today is June 8 - World Oceans Day on the United Nations calendar. A perfect day to revive my blog which I've kept sleeping for eight months.
My message to the UN on this day is "change the name". Today should be called World Ocean Day, not oceans. The ocean supplies the oxygen in every second breath we take; billions of us rely on it for food, fresh water, energy, medicine, transport and trade; it covers 70% of the Earth's surface and supports all life on Earth. If we want people to protect it and use it wisely, we've got to stop managing the ocean on a sectoral basis and modernize ocean governance to meet contemporary and emerging challenges. And this won't happen if we do not look at the ocean as one single interconnected system.
The main reason why I've been very lazy with my blog in the last eighteen months, and completely silent for eight months has been my current responsibility as Deputy Executive Secretary of the Global Ocean Commission. In that capacity, I had to write extensively with incredibly tight deadlines, first taking the lead to prepare the Commission's Policy Options Papers and other documents, and since the month of March preparing the Commission report which will be made public in New York on 24 June. So much to do, I completely ran out of steam for the blog. On Friday we were able to put the report to rest, which goes tomorrow to the printer and translators.
The adjective "global" in Global Ocean Commission does not only refer to the widespread geographical representation of the commissioners. A key message we're trying to convey is that there's only one "global ocean".
If you think that talking of "one ocean" will cost you a bit at the beginning, a very practical thing you can do is update your spell check programme, so that it automatically removes the s in the ocean.
