Summit on Ocean Biodiversity: Collaboration is critical
If not now, when?
If not us, who?
Last month, a group of people you’d never expect to see in the same room—religious leaders and scientists, investment managers and non-profit leaders, Indigenous peoples from Alaska and Guam and Black Americans from Baltimore and Atlanta—came together at the National Museum of Natural History with one common goal: To push our national leaders to think critically about how to address the crisis affecting the health of our oceans.
A healthy and vibrant coral reef at the Palmyra Atoll, one of the Northern Islands located roughly one-third of the way between Hawaii and American Samoa (Credit USFWS)
The Summit on Ocean Biodiversity, organized in collaboration with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration by Emmett Duffy from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, featured 100 guests from a wide range of sectors.
“We know that biodiversity, the world’s living species and habitats, are at the heart of human health, our well-being, and our prosperity,” said Gabrielle Canonico of NOAA. “These living ecosystems provide our food and medicine, support a favorable climate, and are central to our history and our cultures.”
Gabrielle Canonico, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. (Photo by Jeremy Norwood, Jan. 23, 2024)
But these living systems are under threat. As Canonico explained, “The degradation of nature is accelerating in the face of climate change and human activity, and it’s closely aligned with our inequities and security.”
One thing the summit made clear is that it will take people with resources, people with connections, and people with heart to save our oceans—along with people with the organizational skills to bring them together.
The conversations held during the summit demonstrated that government and philanthropic decisionmakers are finding the value of community knowledge, bringing more voices to the table, and building solutions to the ocean biodiversity crisis that will help the whole world.
Angelo Villagomez (Photo by Jeremy Norwood, Jan. 23, 2024)
The final panelist to hold the dais that day may have offered the best explanation for why the world is struggling so much to keep the vast diversity of animals, plants and other organisms in our oceans alive and healthy. Angelo Villagomez, owner of the best manbun in the room (as declared by a co-panelist), admitted to being a little intimidated by “all these famous ocean people” before him. Villagomez is Chamorro, a member of the Indigenous peoples of the Mariana Islands in the South Pacific. “You may not know this, he told the summit audience, “but Chamorros are the stewards of 10 percent of the United States’ exclusive economic zone—Almost one million square kilometers.” That’s more than two Californias combined.
He then asked all the attendees from U.S. territories, including Puerto Rico and Guam, and all the native Hawaiians and Alaskans, to raise their hands. Only about half-a-dozen did so. Villagomez looked around and said, “The six or seven of you in the room are the stewards of about 80 percent of the ocean that abuts the U.S.” He paused before continuing with the inflection of a teacher in classroom. “But the rest of you, the stewards of remaining 18 percent of the oceans, are where the jobs are, where the colleges are, and where all the decision-makers are. But the people raising their hands are the ones who are going to have to live with the decisions that the people in this room are making.”
Hermina Glass-Hill of Oceana (Photo by Jeremy Norwood, Jan. 23, 2024 )
Earlier in the summit, Hermina Glass-Hill, an inner-city Atlanta native and a representative for Oceana, which bills itself as the largest international advocacy organization dedicated solely to ocean conservation, offered a solution for this imbalance.
“We have to be truthtellers about why these inequalities exist,” she said. “We must build relationships with communities and build trust with communities, so they can buy into why it’s necessary, why it’s critical, to protect this sacred resource that nourishes and protects all of us. Who are the people at the table? How do we help them gain access? How do we hear their stories and integrate their stories into the overall solutions of protecting the ocean?”
Andrew Steer of the Bezos Earth Fund and Jane Lubchenko of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. (Photo by Jeremy Norwood, Jan. 23, 2024)
Both Villagomez and Glass-Hill spoke from the same spot occupied by Andrew Steer just a few moments before. Steer is the CEO of the Bezos Earth Fund, a $10 billion fund dedicated to fighting climate change and protecting nature. (Last year, the Fund donated $12 million to the Smithsonian to help us measure the carbon stored in the world’s forests.) Steer is one those decisionmakers whose choices will have an outsized impact on Indigenous and other coastal communities. Steer led a chorus of speakers who expressed optimism for the future.
Steer told the crowd, “We have a truly historic opening right now, and that doesn’t happen by chance.” He explained how four eastern Pacific nations (Ecuador, Colombia, Costa Rica and Panama) committed to creating the largest transnational protected marine area in history. Now, he said, western Pacific nations want to follow their example.
Lt. Gov. Josh Tenorio of Guam (Photo by Jeremy Norwood, Jan 23, 2024)
Lt. Gov. Josh Tenorio of Guam shared Steer’s optimism. He said, “If we can overcome wars, famine, modernity, and western colonization, we can find ways to stay on these islands we have lived on for thousands of years.”
Jane Lubchenco, Deputy Director for Climate and Environment, at White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, cited the same optimism when she spoke of the solutions the White House is supporting. “We’ve identified kernels of insights where communities have come up with a lot of clever ways to restore and protect the ocean,” she said.
“A new narrative that is beginning to emerge, based on science, based on the work of so many of you in the room, is that…the ocean is so central, so key to what we want to achieve, [to] what we need to achieve, that it’s too big to ignore, it’s not too big to fail, and it’s not too big to fix,” Lubchenco concluded. “But it is too central and too important to ignore.”
Watch the Summit on Ocean Biodiversity
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Posted: 5 February 2024
