Christodoulides to attend UN ocean conference

President Nikos Christodoulides is to attend the United Nations’ third ocean conference in the French Mediterranean city of Nice this week.

Presidential press office director Victor Papadopoulos said on Sunday that while in Nice, Christodoulides will attend the conference’s plenary session, and will “make a series of interventions, both in the context of the conference and in other meetings on the sidelines”.

He added that the conference will “focus on the completion of multilateral processes, such as the ratification of the agreement on biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ) and the negotiations for the international agreement against plastic pollution”.

On this matter, he pointed out that Cyprus signed the BBNJ agreement in 2023 and submitted its ratification last month.

In addition, he said, discussions will be held on “financing and the ‘blue economy’”, the name given to economic activity linked to the ocean, seas, and coasts, with the aim of achieving the UN’s 14th sustainable development goal, which is to “conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas, and marine resources for sustainable development”.

He added that Christodoulides will address an event at the conference hosted by the European Commission upon the invite of Commissioner for oceans and fisheries Costas Kadis, who was nominated to the commission by Christodoulides.

That conference, he said, will also be attended by representatives of the governments of Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, and the Netherlands, while European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen will also attend the conference to present the European ocean pact.

The commission adopted the ocean pact last week, saying that it “brings together European Union ocean policies under one single coordinated framework”.

The pact has six priorities, namely “protecting and restoring ocean health”, “boosting the competitiveness of the EU’s sustainable blue economy”, “supporting coastal and island communities and outermost regions”, “enhancing maritime security and defence”, “advancing ocean research, knowledge, skills, and innovation”, and “strengthening EU ocean diplomacy and international ocean governance”.

The commission said on Thursday that the pact will be “complemented by an ocean act” by 2027, and that this act “will help to ensure the implementation of the priorities of the pact”.

In addition to that conference, Christodoulides will also participate in a high-level summit of Mediterranean, Gulf, and other states convened by French President Emmanuel Macron.

That summit will be attended by representatives of the governments of the EU’s Med9 states – Croatia, Cyprus, France, Germany, Italy, Malta, Portugal, Slovenia, and Spain – as well as representatives of 12 other governments.

Those 12 will be Algeria, Egypt, Germany, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates.

Ahead of the conference, UN under-secretary-general for economic and social affairs Li Junua, who is set to serve as the event’s secretary-general, stressed its importance.

“The ocean is facing an unprecedented crisis due to climate change, plastic pollution, ecosystem loss, and the overuse of marine resources,” he told UN News.

“We hope the conference will inspire unprecedented ambition, innovative partnerships, and maybe a healthy competition,” he added.

Meanwhile, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot, described the conference as “a historic moment of collective action”.

“This kind of mobilisation in favour of the ocean has never happened before,” he wrote in French newspaper Le Figaro, adding that at the end of the conference, its participants will adopt an “action plan for the ocean”.

This, he said, will be “a strong political declaration, but above all, tangible commitments made by states, companies, communities, and civil society”.

The first ocean conference took place in New York in 2017, while the second took place in Lisbon in 2022.

The Lisbon conference saw Macron make a surprise call for a moratorium on deep-sea mining, which, if carried out, would involve deploying heavy machinery to the ocean floor to extract potato-sized nodules containing cobalt, manganese, and other rare metals.

“We have … to create the legal framework to stop high sea mining and to not allow new activities putting in danger these ecosystems … but at the same time, we need to promote our scientists and explorers to better know the high seas … we need to better understand in order to protect,” he said at the time.

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