Among the 6000 representatives who attended the United Nations Ocean Conference (UNOC) in Lisbon in the last week of June, a small group of 20 men and women active in artisanal and small-scale fisheries across 6 continents made some waves.
Coordinated in advance, a “little babel” of small-scale fishers gathered in Lisbon with a “Call to Action” which demands that governments set up national strategic action plans, inspired by Guidelines to Secure small-scale fisheries, to implement priority actions by 2030.
While the UNOC has the ambition to put the focus on the need to conserve and sustainably use the oceans, small-scale fishers reminded the rest of stakeholders that they are “the most numerous users of the ocean” and that they have been using it sustainably for centuries. One of the points of SDG 14, which governments have committed to, is to secure access to resources and markets to small-scale fisheries, but the agenda and subsequent final declaration showed that priorities are elsewhere.
However, small-scale fishers from the Pacific, Asia, Africa, Central and South America and Europe, coordinated and managed to organise, intervene or attend and question many of the 300 side-events organised around the official program of the conference. They took every opportunity to raise the 5 key issues they want the governments to urgently act on, as shown in the following summary.
1) Urgently secure preferential access to small-scale fisheries, and co-manage 100% of coastal areas
2) Guarantee the participation, foster recognition and support the empowerment of women in fisheries
3) Protect small-scale fisheries from competing Blue Economy sectors
4) Establish transparency and accountability in fisheries management
5) Build the resilience of communities to face climate change and enhance the prospects for youth
Banner photo: almost all the group of small-scale fishers present at UNOC, on Thursday 30 June, after their last coordination meeting.
Closing the funding gap for biodiversity conservation is one of the critical topics at the 16th Conference of the Parties (COP 16) to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), hosted in Colombia in October 2024. The funding gap has been estimated at $700 billion in Goal D of the Kunming-Montreal Agreement, based on a report, “Financing Nature”, published in 2020. Taking the example of fisheries and ocean conservation, this article shows the $700 billion figure is based on highly dubious calculations and assumptions. The author argues the funding gap report is not a serious effort to estimate the needs for supporting conservation efforts. Instead, it is a performative publication marketing opportunities for private investment and market-based mechanisms. Therefore, the $700 billion figure should be rejected by those opposed to the continuing financialisation of conservation.