The Brest summit connection

PRESIDENT Abdel Fattah El Sisi’s participation in the work of the One Ocean Summit that convened in France’s northwestern port city of Brest last Friday acquires special significance as Egypt is preparing to host the world summit on climate change in November this year. By all standards, action to preserve ocean ecosystems and curb the adverse effects of global climate change are organically inter-linked though much of the world’s public attention has for decades tended to primarily focus on the issue of carbon emissions. The Brest summit has helped highlight the role of oceans right in the international community’s existing and plans to forestall the aggravating risks of global climate change remaining only partially contained. With oceans constituting more than 70 per cent of the Earth’s surface and given that marine and coastal diversity factors considerably in the livelihoods of more than 3 billion people inhabiting the planet’s land mass and islands, the preservation of oceanic ecosystems represents a certainly indivisible component of all international moves to conserve the environment, including in the foremost climate change action.

Noting Egypt’s due awareness of this organic link between protecting oceanic ecosystems and resisting climate change, President Sisi stressed in his speech to the Brest summit that Cairo stands keen to enable the upcoming global climate change summit (COP27) to emerge also as an international platform for constructive dialogue on ways and means of curtailing the undesirable effects of climate change on marine life and diversity. And it was in reflection of this orientation that President Sisi announced Egypt’s joining of the Brest summit’s declaration and initiatives pertaining to the promotion of multilateral commitments to the protection of oceans and seas.

Multilateral action and effective international coordination continue to be the key for the fructification of ongoing and forthcoming efforts to conserve the Earth’s environment especially in view of the observation that no sole continent stands immune against the dire consequences of climate change. As far as oceanic ecosystems are concerned, Unesco’s announcement, during the Brest summit, of a call for its 193 member-states to include ocean education in school curricula by the year 2025 reflects growing global awareness of the necessity of expanding ocean conservation awareness in a way that covers individual human practices as well.

Year after year, the link between climate change and the importance of maintaining oceanic ecosystems draws growing international attention at all political, economic and scientific levels – all the more so if these world’s water surfaces continue to bear, as UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told the Brest summit, much of the burden of the triple crisis that our planet is now facing: climate disruption, pollution and biodiversity loss. Wider global dialogue on this triple crisis enriches the consultations and preparations now under way for convening the COP27 summit in Egypt later this year.