29 October 2024
The French masquerade on ocean protection at COP16
29 October 2024
During the high-level segment of the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP16) which starts today in Cali, world leaders are expected to make strong commitments and implement real, effective, and immediate measures to protect biodiversity. This is a vital emergency: as the IPCC reminds us, preserving ecosystems is the second most effective lever that needs to be activated to effectively combat climate change and its flood of disasters. However, governments have failed to grasp the importance of preserving ecosystems in the face of climate change. France in particular is playing the hypocrite, as Nature pointed out in its editorial last year, by making half-hearted commitments for the ocean’s protection and using false concepts to avoid taking responsibility. This French masquerade must stop. Time is running out.
Since the United States didn’t ratify the Convention on Biological Diversity, France has a particular responsibility at COP16 as world’s leading maritime power. Its responsibility should be translated into actions and should be visible in its contribution to achieving international marine biodiversity protection objectives. However, while each country had to submit ambitious proposals ahead of COP16 to explain how it would contribute to the international goal of protecting 30% of the ocean by 2030. France’s contributions fell far short of this ambition: on July 31, 2024, in the midst of the Olympic Games euphoria, the outgoing government quietly published France’s national objectives and commited to “strengthening the protected areas strategy to achieve 10% of areas under strong protection“. While this wording may seem ambitious at first glance, it maintains a mortiferous status quo and threatens the COP16 negotiations.
A well-orchestrated masquerade
By stubbornly promoting the empty shell of “strong protection”, France is playing with semantics, circumventing the European definition of “strict protection,” and allowing the industrial fishing lobby to further trawl in supposedly “protected” marine areas. Scientific recommendations and the IUCN are unequivocal: industrial infrastructures and activities, especially industrial fishing, are prohibited in a marine protected area. By promoting its concept of a “strong protection”, France is seeking to deprive the COP16 negotiations of their ambition by making sure no international commitment is taken to impose a ban on trawling in marine “protected” areas.
On top of that, France aims for “good management of 30% of protected areas“. But the only thing it manages is the complete annihilation of marine life in these areas, by attacking the European Commission’s Ocean Action Plan, by repeatedly spreading lies, by claiming that industrial fishing is already banned in its “protected” areas, while it has the EU’s most trawled area. All means are used to maintain a system that allows an outdated fishing industry, artificially sustained by massive subsidies, to continue its destruction.
Despite the urgency to act, France is playing a dangerous game, pretending to be a champion of biodiversity, presenting itself as a good student while secretly undermining any international ambition to protect the ocean, and fighting tooth and nail to let destructive fishing methods ravage marine ecosystems.
An experienced champion of double standards
France is once again pursuing its poisonous diplomatic strategy, mixing grand commitments with negotiation sabotage. A strategy already tried and tested during COP15, in Montreal. In February 2022, France had indeed co-founded the “High Ambition Coalition for Nature and People“, alongside the UK as “Ocean Champion”, to advocate for the 30% protection of waters and lands by 2030. Yet, at COP15 in Montreal, it sabotaged the international ambition to define what this protection entailed concretely. Behind the smokescreen of a spectacular numerical target, France thus did its utmost to uphold the interest of industrial fishing lobbies. Gone were the European objectives and scientific recommendations on “strict protection”. Gone was the ban on bottom trawling in these Marine Protected Areas to ensure a decent income for artisanal fishers while protecting fragile ecosystems.
More recently, in April 2024, this poisonous diplomacy took a new turn, with France swiftly threatening its ally, the UK, with retaliation after the latter announced a ban on bottom trawling in marine protected areas home to vulnerable habitats. France engaged its diplomatic efforts to push the European Commission to warn the UK of reprisals if the reign of bottom trawling was to be challenged.
It is time to act.
The cards are on the table and the new French government, which will be hosting the third United Nations Ocean Conference in Nice in a few months, needs to immediately change course to make sure France will not play the devil’s advocate in international negotiations. As extreme climate events and scientists’ warnings about climate and biodiversity collapse become daily occurrences, we can no longer afford empty words and toxic diplomatic manoeuvres. As international scientists reminded us “we are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. (…) Despite these warnings, we are still moving in the wrong direction”. This COP16 must be the time to act and to end the pretence: acting to protect the ocean means acting to protect ecosystems, which means acting for the climate and acting for the future. The ocean is a vital ally, sequestering carbon, regulating the water cycle and supporting life on Earth. We know what to do. We must protect it. Our lives depend on it.