大象传媒

The side event 鈥�Navigating Common Waters: Ocean Science Diplomacy for a Sustainable Common Future鈥� promoted the role of ocean science diplomacy as a venue for balanced cooperation and enhanced implementation of SDG14 across the 2030 Agenda. The session showcased innovative solutions to unite actors from across sectors, regions, and generations, ensuring a balanced Global North-Global South approach amid a shifting global order where ocean governance is ever more crucial for sustainable and equitable development.

• Download a PDF of the side event summary.

Key issues highlighted concerned:

1. Creating a narrative of the social phenomena between ocean science and international relations to overcome global challenges.
2. The Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) agreement is a vivid example of global cooperation and ocean science diplomacy, which can be used as a tool to improve north-south relations, strengthen ocean-related research, and to promote gender equality and intergenerational gaps.
3. Ocean science diplomacy can provide a framework to tear down the walls between scientific disciplines and between sectors to ensure more interdisciplinarity.
4. The triple crises of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution all converge in the ocean.
5. Education for ocean science diplomacy needs to be strengthened to navigate common waters and global ocean agreements and treaties.
6. Fragmentation of ocean science is a real challenge that needs to be addressed. To reimagine the future, we must change the science system.
7. Ocean science diplomacy is not only a tool, but a bridge between science and justice. This entails addressing the imbalance in funding between north and south to close the gaps in science inequity.

Key recommendations for action:

1. Create a global framework for ocean science diplomacy. This may be modelled on the recently published report on shaping a science diplomacy for Europe (EU Commission, February 2025)
2. Provide the next generation of ocean scientists with a toolbox to impact more strongly on policymaking.
3. The countries of the global north (e.g., the EU, Norway, Canada, Japan) must commit to a stronger collaboration with the global south in all aspects of ocean science and diplomacy.
4. Put traditional knowledge, scientific knowledge and other types of knowledge on an equal footing so as to work together to provide the ocean science diplomacy of the future.
5. The countries of the global north must provide funding for more joint global south and north initiatives in ocean science diplomacy to fulfil global commitments for the ocean as manifested in SDG14, Life Below Water, and the UN Ocean Decade.

The side event was organised by the University of Bergen (UiB) in Norway and the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Oce芒nicas (INPO) in Brazil, with co-organisers the International Science Council (ISC), the International Association of Universities (IAU), United Nations Academic Impact (UNAI), the EU Science Diplomacy Alliance, and the Nippon Foundation-University of Edinburgh鈥檚 Ocean Voices Programme.