Clarifying the transformative potential of the human right to a healthy ocean
Hub Director Elisa Morgera has collaborated with Nathan Bennet (WWF), with whom she also works on the Ocean Defenders project, and UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the Environment David Boyd on the article “The human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable ocean.” Published on npj Ocean Sustainability, the article seeks to engage ocean scientists, managers and decision-makers to explore the transformative potential of the human right to a healthy environment to enhance ocean governance.
Key messages
In a nutshell, the article argues that the human right to a healthy environment helps to ensure that no-one is left behind in ocean governance, and that transformative changes to protect the ocean are effective and equitable, drawing on diverse life experiences, worldviews, values and knowledge systems.
The article reflects on how the human right to a healthy environment including a healthy ocean, can help catalyse marine protection and increase the accountability of States, by clarifying the obligations of public authorities to protect the marine environment, including at the ocean-climate nexus, as a matter of human rights.
The article also indicates how the human right to a healthy environment, including a healthy ocean, can improve the inclusiveness of ocean governance, by prioritising human rights holders in situations of vulnerability, those that have suffered structural marginalisation and historic dispossession of marine territories, notably Indigenous Peoples, small-scale fishers, and other traditional ocean users.
Finally, the article underscores the importance of the human right to a healthy environment, including a healthy ocean, for regulating ocean economy practices, including as part of a just transition, by clarifying the responsibilities of ocean-related business to contribute to protect the marine environment and assess the impacts of their activities on human rights.
Outlook
UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the Environment David Boyd commented:
“Oceans dominate the Earth, yet have been under-studied from a human rights perspective. Sparked by the recent UN recognition of the human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment, that is beginning to change but there is much work ahead to clarify rights-based approaches to ocean governance and conservation.”
Nathan Bennet (WWF) states:
“We all depend on the ocean. It is time to recognise that a clean, healthy and sustainable ocean is a human right. Governments and industry must take action to protect this right.”
Hub Director Elisa Morgera reflected:
“The momentum is growing, both among environmental practitioners and among human rights experts, to engage with the inter-dependencies of human rights and a healthy ocean. The Hub has already produced a significant amount of inter-disciplinary and transdisciplinary evidence with ocean-dependent communities on the challenges, but also generative approaches to protect human rights in the context of blue economies, just transitions and marine conservation, with particular attention to women and children. We are also identifying how ocean science, ocean literacies and ocean governance can support the full realisation of the human rights that are dependent on a healthy ocean and more effective environmental and climate change responses by valuing diverse life experiences, worldviews, values and knowledge systems.”
The human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable ocean Publication authored by Nathan Bennet, Elisa Morgera and David Boyd (2024), in npj Ocean Sustainability volume 3, Article number: 19
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