The sea regulates the climate, absorbs heat and carbon dioxide, fuels the water cycle and produces part of the oxygen we breathe. This is why the climate crisis hits him twice: it hurts him and at the same time weakens one of the most powerful allies we have to fight it. This is the message that the Marevivo Foundation brings to COP31, the United Nations Conference on Climate Change underway in Antalya, Turkey.
The conference opens with now very small margins. The United Nations report published on October 21 considers exceeding the threshold of 1.5 degrees of global warming indicated by the Paris Agreement as inevitable and, in the most favorable scenario, predicts an increase of up to 1.7 or 1.8 degrees by mid-century. The objective becomes to contain as much as possible the extent and duration of this overshoot, which scientists call overshoot. The Climate Clock, the counter that marked the time left before crossing the threshold, now measures the time left to limit damage already underway.
"We all see fires in the forests, while the fire that consumes the sea remains below the surface", says Rosalba Giugni, president of the Marevivo Foundation. "Ocean warming, marine heat waves and loss of biodiversity - he continues - are silent transformations, with profound consequences for the balance of the planet. We ask that the protection of marine ecosystems return to the center of the international political agenda as a priority for climate action".
At the Italian Pavilion the proposal for an "ecological conversion"
The first appointment is tomorrow at 11.30 local time at the Italian Pavilion, with the speech "One ocean, one future. Ecological transition for ocean health and climate action". Marevivo proposes to tackle the climate crisis immediately, without further postponement, by taking the step that follows the ecological transition already underway: an ecological conversion, that is, a profound change in the way of thinking and living the relationship with nature, which accepts its rules and recognizes that the planet's resources have a limit and that the economy itself is part of the ecological system.
It is the underlying theme of the Foundation's global campaign "ONLY ONE - One Planet, One Ocean, One Health", which links the energy transition, the food transition and the transition to a circular economy to everyone's daily choices. "Today economic logics too often prevail over environmental protection", explains Giugni. "We want to put ecology, the protection of ecosystems and natural capital at the center of political and economic decisions, and also change individual behaviour, because everything is interconnected. The health of the sea, that of the planet and ours are inextricably linked, and their future is only one".
At the Mediterranean Pavilion, meeting dedicated to Marine Protected Areas
At 12.15pm, again tomorrow, at the Mediterranean Pavilion, the second meeting is dedicated to Marine Protected Areas and the proposal that Marevivo addresses to the Mediterranean Action Plan of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP/MAP), the body that coordinates the Barcelona Convention for the protection of the Mediterranean.
Today protected areas mainly protect individual habitats, such as Posidonia meadows, coral reefs or rocky cliffs. The processes that keep them alive, however, travel with currents, which transport larvae, nutrients and plankton from one place to another. Protecting an isolated area is similar to fencing off a garden while leaving the river that irrigates it unattended. For this reason Marevivo proposes to think in "cells of ecosystem functioning": portions of the sea designed by currents, winds and seabeds, within which water and life circulate more than towards nearby areas, and where organisms of all levels are concentrated, from plankton to large predators.
Mapping these cells allows us to plan the use of the sea starting from ecosystems and to design networks of Marine Protected Areas connected to each other, capable of jointly protecting biodiversity and the processes that support it. The proposal starts from the biodiversity inventory in some selected areas, to be used as a basis for management, continues with the mapping of the cells and the ecological connections between them and arrives at the design of coherent networks throughout the basin.
In this design, protected areas also become sentinels of the health of the sea: comparing conditions inside and outside their borders allows us to verify whether protection measures really work. The reference is the European Union Framework Directive on the strategy for the marine environment, which requires achieving good environmental status in all marine waters and indicates the conservation of biodiversity as the first criterion for measuring it. Among the cases presented is Capri, where the new Marine Protected Area offers the opportunity to experiment with this approach.
"A shared sea requires a shared responsibility", concludes Giugni. "The currents cross borders and carry with them the life we want to protect. We ask to move from isolated protected areas to networks that follow natural processes, and to strengthen cooperation within the framework of the Mediterranean Action Plan so that this proposal becomes a regional program covering the entire basin. Healthy ecosystems mean more resilient societies and a common future for the people of the Mediterranean".
