Experts call for reducing marine debris by up to 90% by 2030

Reduce marine debris between 50% and 90% and developing a global high-tech monitoring system are the two essential objectives posed by a panel of international experts from the HIM-HER-IT to achieve clean oceans by 2030.

This is stated in the “Manifesto for a Clean Ocean”, presented by the International Group of Experts of the UN Decade of Ocean Sciences for Sustainable Development in a series of conferences sponsored by the German Ministry of Education and Research and by the Unesco.

The manifesto, which recalls that the oceans cover 71% of the Earth’s surface, advocates increasing the circularity of the economy in the face of the increasing industrialization of the oceans and promoting mobilization to manage marine pollution in ways that allow a balance between a profitable “blue economy” and a clean ocean.

Experts identify the main pollutants that threaten the oceans: waste and plastics, oils and chemical spills, fertilizers and pesticides, sewage and pharmaceutical waste, radioactive materials or invasive species, among others.

The group, under the direction of biodiversity experts Angelika Brandt and Elva Escobar Briones, stresses that “this process should lead us to define and attract financial and other support to meet a set of initial objectives for 2025, followed by objectives by the end of the Decade of the Ocean in 2030 ″.

“By 2025 we want to identify possible ways to know what solutions are feasible. By 2030 we want to achieve measurable improvements in monitoring and a clear reduction in emissions and damages through a spectrum of technical and behavioral strategies ”, the experts point out.

Jesse Ausubel, director of the Human Environment Program at Rockefeller University in New York and lead author of the manifesto, says that “we want to move in this decade from increasing the environmental problems of the oceans to decreasing them.”

This declaration is part of the “Decade of the Oceans”, a UN initiative presented in January 2021 that is defined as a “once in a lifetime opportunity” for actors from around the world to come together to generate knowledge and promote alliances to seek scientific solutions that promote the sustainable development of marine ecosystems by 2030.

This initiative, coordinated by Unesco’s Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC), seeks to lay the new foundations between science and policy in order to strengthen the sustainable management of the oceans and coasts, promoting international cooperation for the development of scientific research. and the application of innovative technologies.

In his presentation, the UN Secretary General, António Guterres, recalled that if action is not taken now, by 2050 there will be more plastics than fish in our seas.

The “Decade of the Oceans” aims to respond to challenges such as marine pollution, the protection of ecosystems and biodiversity or sustainable food and fisheries through scientific innovations to lead to cleaner, more resistant and safer oceans.