Meetings Other Relevant Events
The Triennial Oceans & Seas Global Conferences are planned to be held respectively in 2017, 2020, 2023, 2026 and 2029, with the intention of holding the conferences in five different geographical regions over the course of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
At the first conference, currently scheduled to be held from the 5th to the 9th of June 2017 in Fiji, the intention is to organize proceedings into five clusters relating to marine pollution, ecosystems, fisheries, climate change effects and oceans governance. These clusters break down further into strands that comprehensively cover all aspects of SDG 14. For example under marine pollution there are strands relating to land-based polluting activities, nutrient pollution, and marine debris. The fisheries cluster obviously includes strands of illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, subsidies, destructive fishing, marine protected areas, and so on. All of these separate strands will be intricately interwoven into the complex net of SDG14’s ambition.
The intention is for the conferences to be inclusive of the world ocean community as a whole. Member States, UN entities, IGOs, NGOs, CSOs, and the knowledge and business communities, are all expected to participate. If SDG14 is going to succeed, and succeed it must, we have to harness the best knowledge, solutions, energies, economic resources and political will that humanity can put forward.