Reflecting on the ocean campaign at COP28

December saw me travel to Dubai for COP28 to promote ocean scientists and the conference’s official hub of ocean expertise - the ‘Ocean Pavilion’. It was convened by two of the world’s most prestigious ocean research organisations: Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. And it was an enormous privilege to help them tell their story.

Being at COP28 made the globe feel very small. It is one thing to be tapping out press releases about ocean science from the moderate climes of South East England. It is quite another to be pitching experts to talk about rising sea levels when you have just chatted in the coffee queue with a delegate from the Philippines, swapped notes with a campaigner from Indonesia, taken a group pic for a team from Chile…

And I won’t forget the moment I spotted a woman in stunning indigenous dress descending an escalator, at the same moment that another - brazenly toting OPEC*-branded merchandise - was rising. (You couldn’t make it up).

It is fitting then that the team behind the Ocean Pavilion went to Dubai with the message that 'the ocean connects us all'. Because it certainly felt that way.

Joining the team at Greenhouse Communications as a media consultant, I engaged journalists from across the globe. At COP, our ocean scientists explained to international audiences (including via Sky News, Bloomberg, AFP, France 24 and the BBC) that the ocean has been an unsung climate hero absorbing most of human-generated heat and a third of our carbon. But that the ocean is now beyond its limit. Graph-busting marine heat waves, coral-bleaching, shifting currents, species loss… these things all mean that this was a COP when we really needed to see meaningful progress.

Opinion pieces we placed in the New Scientist, SG Voice and Oceanographic Magazine sounded this call.  The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal echoed our messages too.  

Unbelievably, the ocean wasn’t mentioned in COP decision texts until last year. And as covered by the BBC’s climate and science reporter Georgina Rannard in her excellent pieces for the news website and Radio 4’ Inside Science, the Ocean Pavilion’s ‘Dubai Ocean Declaration’ called for the ocean and its potential climate solutions to be captured in the global stocktake document. And it was, notching up multiple mentions in the final decision.
 
But the ocean cannot save us single-handedly. Words mean nothing if we continue to burn fossil fuels with abandon.

(And yes, this was the COP venue sitting next to the city's super motorway - 20 lanes wide in some places - and amid the low-hanging yellow pollution haze of one of the world’s largest oil facilities.)
 
Does the final decision text go far enough? Of course not.

I can’t put it better than Kilaparti Ramakrishna of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who told nature news outlet, Mongabay:

"Unless we end our reliance on fossil fuels and begin removing legacy carbon from the atmosphere, the ocean cannot continue to protect us from the climate crisis. The ocean can help in our search for solutions, but only if we end our assault on the ocean and the rest of the planet.”

And so there is much, much further to go.

(*Opec is the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.)