Director-General of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the United Nations Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, and other speakers have appealed to the international community to stop using the oceans as a garbage dump, but support the sustainable use of the ocean ecosystem and its resources.

The experts spoke at the ongoing 2025 UN Ocean Conference, a high-level 2025 United Nations Conference holding in France from June 9 to 13, to support the implementation of Sustainable Development Goal 14, which centres on the need to conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development.

The forum is co-hosted by France and Costa Rica, with the theme: “Accelerating action and mobilising all actors to conserve and sustainably use the ocean”.

The conference is attended by over 120 member states and includes various ocean action panels and numerous side events. Okonjo-Iweala, who noted that the WTO’s purpose, as spelt out in its preamble, is to enhance living standards, create employment and support sustainable development, further highlighted the WTO Agreement on Fisheries Subsidies adopted at its 12th Ministerial Conference, which prohibits harmful fisheries subsidies that contribute to overfishing. The agreement aims to align government subsidy policies with sustainability imperatives in the fishing sector. She said the agreement, currently at 101 ratifications, is “only 10 short” of entering into force.

Speaking at a panel on Ocean Sustainability, she disclosed that the WTO had also launched a fund to support least developed countries to manage their fisheries by providing technical assistance.

The UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, warned, in his remarks, that the ocean was absorbing 90 per cent of the excess heat from greenhouse gas emissions and buckling under the strain: overfishing, rising temperatures, plastic pollution, acidification.

He lamented that Coral reefs were dying while fish stocks were collapsing, adding that rising seas might soon “submerge deltas, destroy crops, and swallow coastlines, threatening many islands’ survival.

The Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Inger Andersen, said: “We, the human beings, are the only species that don’t live in a circular economy. The global target is to protect and conserve, at least, 30 per cent of the world’s land, freshwater and ocean by 2030.

The Agreement under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea on the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Marine Biological Diversity of Areas beyond National Jurisdiction will turbocharge that goal.”