Item Link: Access the Resource
Date of Publication: September 5
Year of Publication: 2023
Publication City: London, UK
Publisher: Springer
Author(s): Editorial
Journal: Nature
A few powerful nations are undermining progress towards global ocean sustainability. Scientists can help hold them to account.
It is a heart-breaking litany. As the world warms, its oceans are acidifying — they have become 30% more acidic during the industrial era. The area covered by low-oxygen marine ‘dead zones’, which are almost devoid of life, has more than quadrupled1 since 1960. By 2025, the amount of plastic in the seas is expected to total 150 million tonnes 2. Even now, only 3% of the ocean is strongly protected by marine reserves.
None of the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is on track to be achieved by 2030, as Nature has been reporting in this series of editorials. But progress on a few, including the 14th goal — to conserve and sustainably use the oceans — has actually been going backwards since the 2015 UN summit at which the SDGs were agreed.
Read the full article here.
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