UN Oceans Conference: Day 1

United Nations Ocean’s Conference Day 1

The United Nations Ocean’s Conference is the first conference to address the Sustainable Development Goal 14: Life Below Water.  There are 17 sustainable development goals that target critical areas of development for global sustainability (https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/?menu=1300) . The 7 targets of focus for the oceans goal are: marine pollution, environmental restoration, ocean acidification, overfishing, marine protected areas, subsidies, small island developing states. A major goal of the conference is to build on existing successful partnerships and stimulate innovative and concrete new partnerships by involving all stakeholders such as governments, United nations system, other intergovernmental organizations, international financial institutes, NGOs, civil society organizations, the private sector and academic institutions. 

The research program that I am co-oping with, the Nereus Program, is funded by the Nippon Foundation. The Nippon Foundation is the largest NGO of Japan and does a lot of world health (find out more about the Nippon Foundation here) The foundation, as a major NGO, has a participatory role in the United Nations and were able to provide the Nereus directors and fellows passes to the Oceans Conference.

On the first day of my co-op I was told that it was a possibility of me receiving a pass to the conference and since then it has been back-and-forth on whether I would be able to attend. And about two weeks before the conference, I was told that I had a pass! The director of the Nereus Program and the program manager were able to secure me a pass by saying I was a necessary presenter at the booth that they will have at the UN (not actually necessary, but I was super grateful for the way in!). 

I booked the plane tickets and looked into hotel rooms. Due to the last minute confirmation of my attendance, the hotel rooms were ridiculously expensive and I only had the amount of extra conference money that Northeastern provided to me to pay for the travel. I contacted my grandmother, who lives about an hour outside of the city, to see if I could stay with her. She kindly agreed to host me, and I saved some serious $$$$.

I arrived on Monday night, took the train to my grandmothers, had dinner, woke up and headed to the UN Tuesday morning. Tuesday was the second day of the conference and most of the Nereus members had arrived on Monday. I met up with the program manager, we took a quick look at the schedule and headed directly into a side event called "Innovative and Sustainable Ocean Based Economy", presented by the OECD, the government of Sweden, WWF, and Sotenas symbiocenter. This event featured the innovation of a Sweden land based recirculating aquaculture center that uses the algae produced to create solar panels! It was so cool to hear about the new innovative technology and the multiple areas of sustainability targets that it could achieve. 

We met up with other Nereus members after this side event. I talked briefly with a phD student fellow from Stockholm University and we went to the side event called “ The Coral Triangle-Partnerships to achieve SDG14 (and more!) in the  World's Epicenter of Marine Biodiversity".  To read more about this side event, check out the Nereus programs facebook page on the event! OR the link here: http://www.nereusprogram.org/un-ocean-conference-day-2/

We grabbed some lunch and I then attended the side event titled “Blue economy: Opportunities and Challenges” presented by the World Bank. The term “blue economy” has become very popular and there are several definitions surrounding the term. The World Bank side event sought to define the term. They published a book written by a fellow UBCer,  Marja Vierros, summarizing the current literature defining blue economy and providing their own definition.

In the afternoon, I worked at the UNDP Ocean Lab booth. From 2-5, the Nereus Program were allocated the space to present the recently published report, "Oceans and Sustainable Development Goals: Co-benefits, Climate Change and Social Equity" . To accompany the report, an animation company were contracted to create a visualization of the major “bubble” chart showing the co-benefits of achieving the targets of SDG14. This animation was on the flat screen of the booth and I would explain to anyone interested what the chart represented and how to learn more. We handed out a lot of reports (>400!) and encouraged people to attend the side event focusing on the report. In addition, we had an Ipad set up for passerbys to play with our interactive visualizations. We had two global heat map visualizations that can be found via this link here . One visualization shows the amount of international agreements each country has signed in ocean governance. When you click on a country, you can see the major treaties signed and the major themes represented. The other visualization is based off of Dr. William Cheung’s work and shows the future ocean conditions if everyone in the world lived like the country selected for 10 years. People really enjoyed seeing these visualizations and were impressed with the amount of data stored in these. I really enjoyed interacting with the various UN attendees and discussing our work. Everyone was very respectful, interested, and constructively critical.

    

At around 5, we went to the main lobby and enjoyed some hors d'oeuvres and wine. We noticed Sylvia Earl (!!!) was in this area as well, and my director approached her and gave her a copy of our report. I followed him and introduced myself to her (how could I not!). She was super nice and talked to Yoshi for a while. She then said, “what would the ocean be without fish”, which Yoshi (an anthropologist) quickly responded with, “what would the ocean be without people” . She apparently was not very receptive of this response and it was cool to see them debate. 

The UBC Nereus group headed to dinner at a close by pub and we all enjoyed debriefing our time at the UN and relaxing after a big day. I took the train back to my grandmothers. At the bus stop, I recognized a man who was discussing with a Nereus member and introduced myself and offered to give him a ride home. My grandma graciously drove him to his hotel and he was very very thankful. Turns out, he works for Sylvia Earl at Misison Blue and is a really interesting man. The next day he gave me two shell necklaces that he had received from the government of Palau to thank me and my grandmother. It was a very kind gesture.