Granting personhood to oceans via a universal declaration of rights for oceans is seen by some as the only hope of saving them from further exploitation.
Washington DC-based expat Lelei LeLaulu, was born in Samoa, grew up in Auckland, and is a graduate of Auckland University, and is one of the key people involved in the initiative.
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He's also an advisor for the Global Ocean Energy alliance that's trying to help the Pacific Islands to wean themselves off the crippling cost of importing oil by generating energy from the oceans.
The alliance was launched last month in Lisbon by Small Island Developing States (SIDS) heads of government, NGOs and corporates.
His colleague, oceanographer Sylvia Earle, put the peril oceans face into sharp focus, he tells Kathryn Ryan
“Sylvia Earle is probably the greatest oceanographer that we have. And were it not for the fact that she's a woman and works with oceans, she'd be as well-known as David Attenborough.
“And when I brought Sylvia to the World Bank to talk about oceans, and she threw up a picture of the world, of the globe, and said, ‘this is the World Bank’.
“'The problem is that there have been too many withdrawals from the World Bank, but not enough deposits.’
“So, what's happening is that we're destroying the ocean because we haven't given the ocean a voice. And she said, look, we have to protect the oceans. Because if we don't, without a blue, there's no green.”
The aim is to submit a universal declaration of ocean rights to the United Nations General Assembly in 2024, he says.
“It's early times yet, and the coalition is being formed with a rather disparate group of alliance members, everything from an ocean yacht race, through to small NGOs in different parts of the world, and a couple of governments, and also some private sector people.”
Giving personhood to the Whanganui River is a good precedent, he says.
“The ocean has basically been a commodity, it’s been ripped off because no one recognises what it is except the transit area for 90 percent of the world's trade, and also for 16 percent of the protein for people around the world.
“We think that by giving ocean personhood, then people will have to think twice about messing with it.”
And it would give a legal framework to go after people who do damage, he says.
“The Supreme Court of the United States has given corporations personhood, they've given corporations personhood, but oceans which produce 50 percent of the world's oxygen and which sequester over 50 percent of the carbon on Earth, feeds billions of people around the world that has no personhood, that's just another thing which people can use and exploit as they like.
“But once the ocean does get recognition, then things will change. And the thing is that, in advance of getting approval by the UN General Assembly, which is a hugely torturous exercise, as we saw with the drafting of the UN Conference on Law of the seas, it doesn't matter so much, because the fact that it is underway, and the movement grows and grows, people, corporations, and those who would do harm to the ocean know that they're being watched.”
It is a shift away from looking at the ocean purely as a commodity, he says.
“And see it as an integral part of the spiritual, physical and other development of we as humans, because after all, we slunk out of the ocean to where we are today.”
Another project is to unlock the energy potential of the ocean through a process called ocean thermal energy conversion, he says.
“We launched the Global Alliance for Ocean Energy in Lisbon at the UN Oceans conference to basically gather together the islands in a single voice, not just from the governments, but also from the private sector and NGOs. To enough is enough, we have to look at ways of developing technologies, which can give us our energy requirements from the ocean.
“And there's a ton of it. The focus at the moment is ocean thermal energy conversion, OTEC, which essentially means that you're drawing cold water from the depths and then passing it over the warmer surface water producing steam to drive turbines.”
Island nations have an abundance of potential power this way, he says, freeing them from dependence on expensive fossil fuels.
“This is what we hope to give them by harnessing the power of the oceans to generate electricity and power for small island developing states.”