Ocean supplement: what I have learned on the oceans

The sounds that a racing sailboat makes at night when moving at speed are unnerving. Noise is a constant companion below deck: the crash of waves breaking on the hull; the sheets cracking in the wind; the grinding of the boat against the water. On deck, the vast blackness that envelops the boat amplifies this unearthly soundscape and the apparent isolation from humanity. The effects of humanity, however, are all around.

As a sailor I am fortunate enough to have raced boats all over the ocean. The sea is my passion, and from the Pacific to the Atlantic I’ve been dismayed to witness its rapidly declining health. Our oceans cover more than two-thirds of the planet and contain most of the Earth’s biodiversity, yet only a tiny fraction—less than 3 per cent—is protected, compared with 15 per cent of land. Scientists confirm that in some parts of the ocean today, up to 90 per cent of large fish—such as nature’s equivalent of a high-speed boat, the tuna—are gone. Many countries are taking steps to curb over- and illegal fishing, both by their fleets and in their waters, but progress is painfully slow. Experts warn that even 10 years from now, it will be too late to save many species and marine ecosystems from irreversible damage. Conservationists now see large-scale marine reserves, where no extractive activities are permitted, as an essential part of efforts to protect the ocean from the onslaught of our increasing impact on them.

Working with governments and communities reliant on a healthy ocean for their livelihoods, my family’s foundation has been privileged to help demonstrate the importance of these pockets of protection as breeding and feeding grounds for endangered and chronically over-harvested species.

We are proud to be leading a new kind of philanthropy which brings both business acumen and expertise to bear in developing solutions to the mounting pressures on global resources created by a combination of ever-surging demand and ever-more powerful extractive technologies. In recent years, through our support of new research, we have been helping to show the scientific and conservation value of marine protected areas—first, following the creation by the British government in 2010 of the world’s largest marine reserve around the Chagos archipelago in the Indian Ocean, and then in Belize, following the protection of Turneffe Atoll in 2012.

But designating a marine reserve is only the start of the process. Designing and maintaining cost-effective monitoring and surveillance tools to help enforce marine protected areas is a vital component to their success across the globe. Working with US and UK-based specialists, we have piloted ground-breaking satellite-based initiatives to monitor suspected illegal fishing activity. These technologies have evolved rapidly in recent years and are now able to analyse multiple sources of live data, which can be integrated with information about a vessel’s history, its ownership and its country of registration, to provide a dossier of up-to-the-minute data to alert officials to the movements of suspicious vessels.

For the past three years, the Pew Charitable Trust’s Global Ocean Legacy campaign, in collaboration with the Bertarelli Foundation, has worked with the Easter Island Rapa Nui community, some 2,500 miles off the coast of Chile, to promote conservation of their marine environment.

Easter Island’s waters are known to contain rare biodiversity, nutrient-rich waters, and geological hot spots with exceptional wildlife that thrives in extreme temperatures—in fact, more than 142 species that are found nowhere else on Earth have been identified here.

In recognition of this, and to highlight the importance of ocean protection, Chile is this year hosting the Our Ocean conference on 5th and 6th October in the coastal city of Valparaiso. Organised last June for the first time by US Secretary of State John Kerry, Our Ocean brings together world leaders, scientists, advocates, and the international policy and oceans community to determine paths forward for protecting the marine environment.

At last year’s event participants announced new partnerships and initiatives valued at over $1.8bn, as well as new commitments to protect more than three million square kilometres of ocean. This demonstrates how a combination of private philanthropy, science, technology and most important of all, community engagement, is slowly changing the narrative of decline in our oceans.