Open-ended Informal Consultative Process on Oceans and the Law of the Sea (ICP26)

So this afternoon we will continue and conclude our discussions under the second segment of the discussion panel entitled Enabling and Enhancing Marine Ecosystem Restoration through International Cooperation and Coordination: Challenges and Opportunities. There are 6 presentations scheduled for this afternoon. We intend to hear from the first 3 panelists followed by question and answer session before proceeding with the remaining 3 panelists. We again wish to remind you that the discussions in the panel are informal in order to allow delegations from states, intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations to participate actively in the debate. All panel presentations have been posted on the website of the Division for Ocean Affairs and the Law of the Sea to assist delegations in preparing for discussions. As these panels are also being broadcast over United Nations Web TV, we are also accepting questions from remote viewers. Please email any questions and comments to dualos@un.org. So now I wish to give the floor to our first panelist, Daniel Fryce, Kotzschrein Family Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences and Director of the Center for Public Policy Research at Tulane University. The presentation is entitled Achieving Mangrove Restoration at Scale. You have the floor.

Thank you very much, and thank you for this really kind invitation and the opportunity to talk about mangroves for a few minutes. Thanks. Okay, so if you don't have mangroves in your country, this is what they look like, a beautiful forest often found in other countries where salt marshes would be, but we find mangroves primarily in the tropics and the subtropics. And before we talk about the restoration of mangroves, I want to kind of give an introduction of why we need to restore them in the first place. And so mangroves were considered, you know, a few decades ago, one of the most threatened ecosystems on the planet. Deforestation rates of 1 to 3% per year were kind of the estimates back then, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s due to aquaculture and agriculture. By the late 20th century, we were starting to get a handle on just how much mangrove was being lost, and there was this seminal FAO report in 2007 called "The State of the World's Mangroves," which through a data compilation kind of suggested we were losing them about 1% per year. What's been encouraging is that as we get more information, new technologies to map mangroves, that actually the rates are changing a little bit, and instead of 1% per year— in, you know, about 10 years ago, we were kind of estimating 0.5% per year, something like that. And the most recent estimates using high-resolution satellite imagery, particularly from 2000 onwards, suggests that it's about 0.1% per year. So part of this bending the curve is improvements in technology, but parts of it really are improvements in conservation and restoration. We published this paper about 2 weeks ago, which gives maybe the most up-to-date state of the world's mangroves so far, going back from the 1980s to the present day. And actually, it looks pretty flat, which is good news for mangroves. Why is it a little bit different from that curve before? We now have a much better handle on measuring new mangroves. So as mangroves were being deforested at high rates, new mangroves were growing in different areas, so it balanced it out. By about 2010 seems to be an inflection point, and I think here again we can probably see the impact of conservation and restoration and the value, or the better-known value of mangroves. So since 2010, globally, we've had a net gain of mangroves. A small net gain, but a net gain nonetheless. Now, with this relatively flat curve, that doesn't mean the job is done and that we've solved the mangrove deforestation crisis. It means that mangrove deforestation and degradation, while they've declined in recent years, are being offset by gains in new mangrove forests in different locations. So the state of the world's mangroves is a very complex and nuanced story. But what we do know is that there has been a lot of loss historically, which means that there is a lot of room for us to do mangrove restoration now and into the future. So we've tried to get an estimate of how much land is available for mangrove restoration. And this is a model that's a few years old now, and it's available here. And it's— we took a bunch of biophysical datasets, the factors that control where mangroves do and do not grow, and try to model where mangrove restoration might be most feasible. And biophysically, there might be about 800,000 hectares of mangroves available for restoration. These are— and by restoration, I mean putting mangroves back where they were. So these are mangroves that were lost, but we can bring them back. This is— we're not talking about afforestation into new areas here. But we have had, you know, enough mangrove deforestation that there are now potentially 800,000 hectares available for restoration. And we see this potential starting to be realized and a lot of efforts around the world to try and get us restoring mangroves at that scale. So if I just take as one example mangrove restoration targets in the nationally determined contributions to the Paris Agreement, there are 38 countries that by the most recent NDC have listed mangrove restoration as a goal or action. And you see that that is pan-tropical. And to implement some of these targets, a number of countries have set really ambitious targets for mangrove restoration around the world. And so it's great to see this ambition. It's great to see that mangroves are on the national policy agenda. And that, you know, this represents a lot of effort and a lot of resources going into achieving large-scale mangrove restoration. And this ambition is something to be really encouraged. But of course, having potential is not enough, and we have to be able to actually do mangrove restoration feasibly at the scales that we really want to in order to make a difference. In the state of the world's mangroves. And unfortunately, mangrove restoration is not the easiest practice. Mangroves have very specific requirements, environmental requirements for their growth. So they have a very kind of narrow window of tidal flooding, of wave action, of salinities that they will— that they will grow in effectively. And so if we pick restorable areas that do not match those conditions, we are often going— we often see failed plantings. And so restorable areas need to be often fixed in terms of their hydrology before we do any planting, because there's a reason that mangroves are not there in the first place. So if this is an area that was a mangrove, was converted into an aquaculture pond, that means we've dug out a large amount of the sediment to make it into a pond. It's flooded more regularly or permanently, and mangroves will not exist or establish in those conditions. So this is difficult because fixing hydrology is a lot more effort than just going out to plant. It takes a lot of homework, it takes a lot of figuring out what is the constraint to natural establishment and why aren't these mangroves naturally growing. These restorable areas tend to be areas that are also under human land use as well, so they might be abandoned aquaculture ponds, for example, so there's land ownership issues, there's land tenure, there's— they're often small and patchy, it's not a nice large area that we can restore all at once. So instead, when we are doing plantings, what we see a lot of around the world is looking for these large wide areas that are open, and look available for mangrove restoration. These are often mudflats and seagrasses, which are less contested in terms of land tenure and governance, and they're large and they're wide and they look like they could have mangroves on it, so let's try. But unfortunately, there's, you know, there's a reason there aren't mangroves growing there naturally. And of course, seagrasses and mudflats are essential and critical ecosystems in their own right. So why do we— why is mangrove restoration not as successful around the world as we would like it to be, particularly when we're trying to do it at scale? Or to put it simply, why do we plant the wrong mangrove species in the wrong place? Now, there's a couple of reasons why this could be. One of them could be a scientific reason that we don't know enough about the biology and ecology of mangroves so we don't know the most appropriate places to grow them. I don't think— I'm saying this as a scientist, so I probably shouldn't be saying this because I want more research funding, but we know the science around mangrove restoration. We know the requirements that they need to grow successfully. So I don't think it's a scientific constraint or barrier. It certainly is a technical constraint. Even if we know the science behind a successful mangrove restoration, there are reasons why we can't implement that in that way. Maybe our success metrics are not correct. We have these really big targets and we need to achieve them really quickly, and we're looking at the clock and we have to do this big project by the end of the year, so we have to do the best we can, right? And how do we plant such a large area quickly? Where do we get the seed source or the propagule source to plant such a large area? Then one thing that we don't do a very good job at is monitoring and reporting both on the successes but also the failures. So why did— why was one project successful? Why was one not successful? A lot of the resources that goes into restoration is for the restoration, and then we move quickly on to the next project without learning from the projects before. So those technical constraints are led by a number of kind of higher-level boundary conditions. One is to do with local communities. Mangrove forests around the world are mostly working landscapes, so there are people living and working within these landscapes. And so if we close off an area to restore it, but we don't provide an alternative livelihood, for example, then communities may not have a huge incentive to restore successfully. And the same with benefit sharing, and ultimately we do not want to exclude people from their lands just to grow more mangroves. Both the community and technical aspects are influenced by broader-scale economic constraints, so if these are old abandoned aquaculture ponds, for example, there's an opportunity cost of that land use. These aren't, you know, we have to pay or we have to make restoration financially more attractive than an alternative land use such as aquaculture. And then there's the cost of doing the restoration, but there's also the cost of maintaining it and monitoring it through time, which has always been a challenge in many restoration projects. And all of this is ultimately influenced by some really large-scale legal and governance boundary conditions. So, you know, are the targets correct for that landscape? Have we gone and done the really hard and complicated work of figuring out the land tenure before we go into a landscape and restore it, or are we doing that as we go along? You know, so, and these are large-scale influences that really trickle down both to the economics community and then ultimately the technical aspects of doing restoration. So it's not a science question, it's not a technical question, it's not an economics question on its own, it's all of these and it's all interconnected.. And normally during mangrove restoration, we focus on the technical ones because those are the ones that are easiest and most tangible to fix. But it's hard to change the technical constraints without addressing some of these higher-level and more complex governance and socioeconomic considerations. So it has been a challenge around the world historically and today for mangrove restoration. But to give you some good news, we know how to do it. These are just some of the range of, again, mostly technical mangrove restoration guides. So the science and the technical capacity is there around the world. It would be great to have similar best practice guidelines for the governance and the socioeconomic and the benefit sharing considerations as well. I think that's a space where we can— that still needs to be completed. But certainly on the technical side, we know how to do this. Under a range of different conditions, because no one mangrove restoration project is the same. And there's a lot of capacity to help us do mangrove restoration and share knowledge and share best practices. And I've given just a few examples here, but there are many more. I just wanted to highlight the Global Mangrove Alliance, which is a global collaboration of nonprofits, governments, researchers, industry communities, with some really ambitious goals to halt remaining mangrove loss, restore half of those lost, and double the protection of existing mangroves. The Mangrove Breakthrough, which is a more kind of finance-driven initiative about how do we actually get these projects over the line and how do we mobilize the capital needed to do successful conservation and restoration. We have the International Union for Conservation, Nature Mangrove Specialist Group, that is there to provide support to many of these initiatives and other alliances more bilateral between countries. So we have some of the frameworks there at a global scale. We have the ambition at the national scale and we have the knowledge of the science and technical capacity at the local scale. So to summarize, I think we have a huge amount of potential for mangrove restoration around the world if we do it correctly. And this is the hard work of getting the right mangrove species in the right place at the right time. And so how do we link the biology and ecology and the need for careful planning of restoration with these ambitious targets and the ambitious timelines in which we want to achieve them over? I think that we are certainly in the right direction in terms of capacity and in terms of international assistance and knowledge sharing, but I think there's even more that we can do. Thank you.

I thank Mr. Freiss for his presentation, and I now give the floor to our second panelist, Mark Spaulding, Senior Fellow, President and CEO of the Ocean Foundation, and Senior Fellow at the Center for the Blue Economy. The presentation is entitled Cooperation as the Engine of Restoration: From Shared Seas to High Seas. You have the floor.

Thank you very much, co-chairs Ambassador Maturban and Ambassador Jonas Dottir. Distinguished delegates and colleagues, thank you for the privilege of taking part in this panel. I'm going to rely a little bit on my notes because I've just come from working with the National Science Foundation on ocean observing, so I need to make sure I'm giving you what I promise. I'm going to begin with one idea and then try and show you that it's not a slogan but a method. You cannot restore What you cannot protect. And at the scale of the ocean, protection is only possible when nations cooperate. I head the Ocean Foundation, and for nearly 25 years we have worked in some 40 different countries, not as a grantmaker at distance, but as a builder of relationships and the institutions through which conservation actually happens. I have spent close to 4 decades in this work, and I want to share practical insights, not just theory. It is what I've learned, sometimes the hard way, about how international cooperation on the ocean is built and how it survives. Restoration is the theme of this meeting, and rightly so. But restoration has a precondition we, we tend to skip past. You cannot bring a degraded system back if it's still being pulled apart by pollution, by unmanaged extraction, by neglect. Protection comes first. And because the ocean is a single connected body of water, protection at any meaningful scale cannot be achieved by a single country alone. It requires cooperation and coordination. Let me add one line, and I will come back to it. Cooperation matters most, not least, precisely when national commitments grow uncertain, when the political weather turns. That is exactly when the structures we have built together are tested and exactly when they matter the most. Here is why this is not abstract. Behind me on the screen is the Gulf of Mexico and the Western Caribbean with the dominant currents drawn in. Those arrows are not decoration. The same currents that move water move larvae, fish, turtles, They also move risk across the waters of Cuba, Mexico, and the United States. A healthy reef off of Cuba helps stock the fishery off Florida. A spill travels— a spill anywhere travels everywhere. The line on the map marked border is invisible to everything that actually lives there. 3 nations, 1 ecosystem. The single— that single fact is the reason for the story that I want to tell you. In 2007, the Ocean Foundation set out to create a space, a table, where scientists and managers from Cuba, Mexico, and the United States could sit down together around the sea that they share. We called it the Trinational Initiative. And over the years, we convened 8 working sessions in Cancún, Veracruz, Havana, Sarasota, Corpus Christi, and finally in Mérida, across borders that at the government level were often closed. What held it together was not a treaty, it was trust, built patiently, meeting by meeting, between people who came to respect one another's science and one another's seriousness. That is what science diplomacy actually looks like. It is slow, it is unglamorous, and it works. And it produced things that you can point to. What you see in this slide is Red Gulfal, a network of 11 marine protected areas spanning all 3 countries managed as connected parts of a single system rather than as isolated parks. It produced the sister sanctuary relationship linking Cuba's Guanahacabibes and the Florida Keys and the Flower Garden Banks Parks. Connected science and connected protection so that recovery can happen across the whole system, not only in one nation's lines. And then this: In February 2023, at our offices in Washington, D.C., the government of Cuba signed a memorandum of understanding with the Ocean Foundation, the first such agreement Cuba has ever signed with any United States-based non-governmental organization. Let me tell you why this signature is remarkable, because it is at the heart of what I want to leave you with. That relationship was not built on calm waters. It survived the opening of relations between the United States and Cuba in 2014. It survived the re-abnormalization of relations that followed. It survived Cuba's redesignation as a state sponsor of terrorism. It has survived a renewed maximum pressure policy and an aid freeze that suspended other programs of ours overnight. How does cooperation survive all of that? Not by luck, but by design. We never let it rest on a single government-to-government thread. We built it across many channels at once: universities, international organizations, private foundations, and partners in third countries, so that when any one channel was cut, the others held. That is the reason I most want this body to take from our experience: build cooperation deliberately across many hands. And it will outlast political weather. And this method was not a one-off. The same approach gave us our sister sanctuaries, the Red Gulfwood Network I mentioned, and a 2024 agreement with the Climate Foundation in Mexico, the Climate Strong Islands Network, and partnerships in Africa. Wherever we work, we try to leave behind not a project, but a durable structure for cooperation. Let me connect this to restoration in its most literal sense. Through our Blue Resilience work, we restore coastal ecosystems that store carbon and shield coastlines: salt marshes, seagrass meadows, and mangroves. We co-manage the largest mangrove restoration project in the United States' history. This hands-in-the-mud restoration And even here, the local work depends on shared science and methods across borders. As my colleague mentioned, we spent a lot of time working on hydrology before we ever did any restoration work. And we have the good fortune of having 97% success rate. Now, let me speak directly to the many delegations here from developing states and small island developing states. Restoration is not only a question of will, it is a question of capacity. Too many countries cannot take— fully take part in protecting their own waters, not for lack of commitment, but for lack of tools, training, access to ocean science, and access to technology transfers. So a central part of our work is closing that gap, helping countries to build their own ability to monitor, with field equipment and lab equipment and respond to ocean conditions, and to mobilize the finance to pay for all of it. Cooperation that flows in only one direction is not cooperation. If restoration is to be global, the capacity to do it must be shared. Everything so far has been close to shore, but nearly two-thirds of the ocean lies beyond any national jurisdiction. The high seas. And for most of history, there was no general way to protect it all. That changed this year. On the 17th of January, 2026, the BB&J Agreement entered into force. For the first time, a binding global framework to create protected areas and to require environmental assessments on the high seas. Please permit me one observation as someone who has spent a career inside this system. That same month, one nation—my own—stepped back from 66 international commitments, among them ocean cooperation mechanisms some of us spent years helping to build. 10 days before the World's High Seas Treaty entered into force, a seat at the table was emptied. I do not say this in despair. I say it because it makes the point. The system is working. The treaties are in force. The progress is real. It does not stop when one government walks away. But it does fall on the rest of us, to this body, to keep building. The tide goes out, but it also comes back in. Let me give you one concrete frontier. Across the ocean lie thousands of wrecks from in the last century, many slowly leaking or about to leak, the oil still sealed in their hulls. We call them potentially polluting wrecks. Our approach is simple to state. The wreck is cultural heritage. The goal is to leave it in place, in situ preservation. What we remove is the oil before a corroding hull becomes a disaster. Preserve the wreck, remove the threat. And notice, this is by its nature a problem no country can solve alone. It spans the flag state of the vessel, the coastal state, salvage capacity, and finance mechanisms. Exact— is it exactly the kind of challenge the BBNJ framework can now help us meet, protecting natural and cultural heritage together. So let me close with what I believe cooperation and coordination now ask of us. Four things. Use the pathway that we now have. Bring forward ambitions, early proposals for protected areas on the high seas under the BBNJ. An underused framework is no framework at all. Second, Coordinate, do not compete. UNESCO, the regional seas bodies, and the sectoral organizations align efforts rather than carve up turf. Third, invest in capacity so that every state, not only the wealthiest, can take part in protecting and restoring the coasts and ocean. Fourth, finance it so that a line on a map becomes real protection on the water. I said at the outset that the system is working, and I meant it. The High Seas Treaty is in force. Disciplines on harmful fisheries subsidies are taking hold. A plastics agreement is being negotiated. Monumentum is building— Monumentum is building towards a moratorium on seabed mining. Multilateralism is actually delivering. Our task is not to mourn it, it is to use it. The ocean has taught me patience, that change comes slowly and then all at once. Cooperation is how we are ready when it does. Thank you, and I look forward to any questions you have.

I thank Mr. Spaulding for his presentation and we move on to the third panelist, Dao Ha Viet, Director, Senior Expert, Institute of Oceanography of Vietnam. The presentation is entitled Coral Reef Restoration in Vietnam: Preliminary Results, Challenges and Opportunities. You have the floor.

Thank you, co-chair.

I would like to say thank you, UN, to give me the chance to come here to share our information about the coral reef restoration experience in Vietnam. And as I come from Institute of Oceanography, and my institute have the task to work on the marine ecology system including the coral reefs. And I come from Southeast Asia and we have tropical temperature, very typical tropical region and we have a very long sea coast, coastline. So the coral reef in Vietnam is a very, very abandoned. The area around 1,000 kilometers square and we have a very high biodiversity of seaweed, hard corals, reef fish, mollusks, craters and echinoderms and polychaetes and so on. And recognize well the importance of the ecosystem including especially the coral reefs in Vietnam, so the government decide to have an MPA system in Vietnam. And the first, 2010, my prime minister, we have 16 MPA approved. So the marine areas, 169,000 hectare. And next, after 14 years, 2014, Prime Minister design totally 27 MPA approved and up to April of this year, 12 MPA officially established. And as a tropical area, we have several impact of the coral reef— to the coral reefs, including overfishing, destructive fishing, coastal erosion, sedimentation and pollution. Aquaculture development also the big issue and tourism development or outbreak of predator and bleaching and red tide or natural disaster. And I can show you two experience— two example on the bleaching and natural disaster. It doesn't work anymore. Oh, okay. You touch it. So for example, in Nha Trang Bay in the central part of Vietnam, in the Nha Trang Bay MPI, we have a disaster like a very big typhoon in 2017 and 2021. And after that, we can see On the coral reef, like, breaching in the MPA. And that time, we also have a very big economic loss and human home loss and so on. And the other is the— for example, we have a high temperature in 1998, 2010, 2015, 2019, and 2014 in Quang Hoa Province in central Vietnam in the southern part of Vietnam province, you can see several coral reef bleaching events by high temperature at that time. And we recognize, based on our data, we could recognize the rapid decline in the live hard coral cover. So we have data from 2021 and 2024, coinciding with the coral reef bleaching event, storm or typhoon. Or outbreak of code. And we have restoration of the coral reef under that situation. We try to recover 10 location of the MPA in Vietnam, including Con Dao Islands and Binh Dinh Coast, Nha Trang Bay, Phu Quoc Island, Phu Quoc MPA in Nha Trang Bay, Quang Ngoc Province, Koh Lacham, along the coast of Vietnam from north to south. And we can see the— we try to do some initial restoration by using fragment of the coral colonnade, like a coral concrete block solid that a coral substratum or still rock of the coral Debit or send. And also we recognize that the government cannot do all, so we try to stimulate local involvement in coral restoration. First, we try to train on the coral restoration to MPI staff, local fishermen, and private sector. We try to teach them how to do it, in the laboratory and how to do under the sea. And we try, for example, and we try to transfer, transferring and training on technical on coral restoration and monitoring for MPI staff and local community in 4 different MPI location like Kulaucham, Phu Quoc, And with— together with some private company, we try to establish nursery site and transplanting corals, the degraded reef inside and outside of MPA. And also we monitoring of the restoration site. So from that, our experience and trial, We can have some preliminary results on coral reef restoration in Vietnam in 9 different location, MPA location. And we recognize that we show some experience to restore restoration using artificial material here. And what we learned from the coral reef restoration in Vietnam, we learned that coral restoration on the Great Reef and coral restoration using artificial structure and establishing coral nursery site. And finally, we found that net coral substrate are generally cost-effectively and efficient material for coral restoration in Vietnam. And further, we try to establish coral nursery for the long-term restoration together with the fishermen and MPI step— step. And also the NGO. But the challenge and opportunity in Vietnam, we have a climate crisis, so much coral reef bleaching and increasing the frequency of severe storm and typhoon as we are in tropical area. And social economic pressure, overfishing and destructive fishing and coastal sediment pollution also big problem for us. And also outbreak of coral predators. And the other thing is that we have a legal gap, like a significant deficiency in the techno— technoecology standard and API management and mechanism. And we have scale limitation. So because most current projects are fragmented and lack long-term monitoring, like we cannot do any monitoring more than 18 months due to the system of Vietnam, maybe one project only within 2 years or something, and we have to apply other project for more funding. However, from the challenge, we have an opportunity. We have technology innovation like microfragment and heat resilient coral selection. And we have Blue Economy and MPI, integrating Blue Carbon Credit, sustainable ecotourism, and expanding the national network to 37 MPI. And community co-management, the public-private partnership, attracting corporate CSR investment and empowering local communication. Community in a reef management. And we try— I think we have a long story to study on the coral reef, but really we have problems, so we try from small scale, one by one, by very small funding from one man, from money, from money very small, and we try to up live up the scale and we believe that even we do very small thing and keep the long term. That is the science we need for the ocean we want. I thank you.

Thank you for your presentation. So we have now heard the first 3 presentations and we'll pause the presentations so that we can take some questions and comments. So the floor is open for any questions or comments you may have. I give the floor to the representative of the FAO. You have the floor.

This is a question to the last speaker from Vietnam, but can be shared with anyone. When we're working in our protected areas, we're typically doing a lot of restoration work, either passively or actively. I'm just wondering what approach the governments will take to reporting on Target 2 and Target 3. Where would they draw the line on talking about target 2, or would they include much of the spatial area where they're protecting assets either passively or actively in the way of restoring what was there, which is a day-to-day work in a marine park? Thank you.

Thank you for the question. Thank you for the question. I think more than 20 years before, the government didn't pay attention and we didn't notice that the coral reef is very important. But sometimes only when we have facing this several problem and we have a big economic loss and we recognize very well that if we lost coral reefs, we lost so many thing. Including the economic. And the government try to— actually try to establish the area which have a very sensitive to damage. And we— of course, it have the coral there. And when we have the study, we noted that along the Vietnam, we have several coral reefs area need to be protected. To be protected, to serve for the environment. So the government try to first try to decide 12 and then they expanding. So they want to secure the environment and economic condition, ecology condition of the sea of Vietnam and we expected that. Also, we try to expand to some of the islands because before, the islands have not well studied. But recently, we have further more data on the islands, coral reef in the islands of Vietnam. So the government try to establish that. That's so far I know. Thank you.

Thank you. I give the floor to the distinguished representative of Ghana.

Hello. Thank you very much for the opportunity. Looking at the map presented by the previous speaker, I did not see Ghana represented as a country that has mangroves. And I agree because ours has depleted so much so that it cannot presumably be captured on the map. But I come back to the discussions on the floor. We are talking about collaboration and restoration. How can we get Ghana to restore its mangrove and get our blue community working with international standards? Thank you.

Thank you for the question. While I haven't been to Ghana, I know people who have, and they tell me some of the most beautiful mangroves and some of the most important and precious, despite some of the degradation that's been experienced throughout West Africa. First of all, how can it be done in international standards? First of all, I think to acknowledge the that almost every country that has mangroves has fantastic local capacity on mangrove science, on mangrove restoration. People are doing it. It might be small scale. It might not have the big, you know, it might not be well known, but it's happening on the ground. So I want to acknowledge that first because there are fantastic mangrove scientists, mangrove communities, mangrove managers and practitioners around the world who are doing really hard work every day, and it doesn't need always an international group to come in and tell them how they're doing it, right? There's a huge amount of local knowledge which we really should celebrate. That being said, there are a lot of international organizations that are there to provide support to those groups within those landscapes. I gave some examples of them, and I'd be happy to share some of the resources. All of the resources I showed on the slide are all freely available. So those guides are there. Of course, it's not just about having a guide or best practice principles, right? It's how you implement it and how you train it. That is harder and it's resource intensive. But there's lots of really great examples from FAO, from CIFOR-ECRF doing on-the-ground, hands-on training on mangrove restoration, on blue carbon assessments. And what is really good about these trainings is that it is two-way. It's not just a one-way delivery of training, but also it builds local networks. So, I've been involved in some of these. I was based for most of my career in Singapore, so in Southeast Asia, and I was involved in a number of these trainings from C4NASSA and others, and it built really great local communities and networks and communities of practice within regions. And I think that's really what I would love to aspire to, is to see more regional networks of practice sharing knowledge and not just the one-way delivery of how one group thinks restoration should happen. Because mangroves, what makes them really special and unique is how variable they are around the world. We have these best practice guidelines that give us kind of, I think, the big boundaries of what should happen, but it's, it's really using that local knowledge to make sure that the restoration intervention is, is correct for that landscape. So thank you.

If I can build on that, um, the Ocean Foundation's Ocean Science Equity Program works in Ghana. Part of what they are hoping to do is create the climate or the conditions for restoration and success. As the name implies, it's about science and it's about equitable science, ensuring that the scientists of Ghana's institutions have the field equipment or laboratory equipment they need, making sure that they have the tools to calibrate that equipment in the field, not having to send it back to the manufacturer, making sure that the operational costs of that equipment is such that it is affordable. And that we— for example, we brought down the cost of pH sensors from $25,000 US to $2,500 US. The whole idea here is that, as my colleague said, you know, some of this is establishing the conditions about the water quality, the hydrology before restoration begins. But also, we are studying whether the policies are in place, what governance is there to, as I said earlier, have the protection that will precede the restoration. And we enjoy very much working in Ghana, and thank you for Ghana's cooperation with us as an organization.

Thank you. I now give the floor to panelist 12. Please introduce yourself.

Thank you. Thank you to all the panelists for the very interesting talks. My name is Elizabeth Sinclair. I'm from the University of Western Australia. This is really regarding mangroves, and we all know they have a pretty narrow window in which they grow. I'm wondering if you— well, when you've got restoration sites, at what point do you decide to perhaps give up on a mangrove species, switch species, give up on the site altogether, or try to fix the hydrology, which is going to be challenging with sea level, or do you consider working with, say, seagrass or salt marshes, so an alternative coastal ecosystem that might be more suited to that site? Thank you.

That's a great question, and I think it, you know, I love mangroves, but I do love other coastal ecosystems too, I promise. And really what is most important important is that you have whether it's the right species or the right ecosystem in the right place. So if the conditions to what used to be a mangrove, but it's now been so modified that it's now no longer suitable, but there is another ecosystem, then we might not call that restoration, but it's certainly within a seascape. It's bringing back something that is beneficial to obviously the local ecology, but to the people living in that landscape as well. And certainly if conditions have changed, that there is now a natural seagrass there where there used to be a mangrove, it doesn't mean, you know, we have to make a decision there, right? And to see the benefit of whether that really is suitable for restoration of mangroves or whether we should be putting those efforts into locations that are maybe going to be more feasible, both for mangroves and having less of an impact on the surrounding coastal environment.

Thanks.

We participated in one of the largest mangrove restoration projects in history in the United Arab Emirates. Our role was to evaluate what worked and what didn't work because there were many, many, many plants put in the ground and some worked incredibly well and some failed tremendously. And I think it's from that effort that we really learned about improving hydrology and thinking about the entire balance of the system. But we are truly being confronted with sea level rise and the potential that, you know, we may have to think about seagrass in a place that mangroves used to be. And that is, is part of our job, is is to come in and look. We do restore or conserve all 3 of those blue carbon ecosystems. And— but we really try and ask our questions about, you know, where is the retreat going to happen? Is there room for the mangroves to move inland? Is there room for things to change as sea level rise happens? Thank you for your question.

I thank the panelists and delegates for questions and answers. We will now proceed with the remaining 3 panelists for this afternoon. I now wish to give the floor to our 4th panelist, Margaret Miller, Chief Science Officer, Secor International. The presentation is entitled Cooperative Opportunities and Challenges in Coral Seeding. You have the floor, Miss Miller.

Good afternoon.

I want to acknowledge and thank the co-chairs here for their attention to this topic and for the opportunity to share with you this afternoon. The coral reef crisis is real. You've heard quite a bit about it already this week, so I'm going to touch on a few of those points again, but obviously this coral reef crisis, the degradation in coral reef systems throughout the globe profoundly affects human communities' welfare and well-being. And many of these threats that have caused this degradation are ongoing or in fact worsening. And so we might ask, why should we invest in restoration if the problems aren't fixed yet? And so I want to emphasize very clearly that we need to be about fixing the problems with utmost urgency. Because restoration will never be successful unless those problems are fixed and those environments can be viable for the organisms that need to build those ecosystems. However, we also need to save all of the pieces that are needed to to rebuild those ecosystems once some of those problems can be fixed. And this involves coral restoration because the IUCN has identified in their recent Red List assessment almost half of global coral species are in fact at elevated risk of extinction right now. This need, well, restoration then is the activity by which we can buy time for the problems to be fixed without losing the pieces of those crucial ecosystems through extinction of which the risks are quite real. This was recognized by the International Coral Reef Society, the global scientific society that, which exercises expertise and management advice and conservation advice about coral reefs. In the 2021 report, the figure that you see here on the right shows this, the simultaneous need for addressing threats, both climate threats globally, local threats that we've also heard quite a bit about this week, but investing in active restoration, that is maintaining coral populations. At the same time. It's not one or the other, it's all three, and we need to be about all three in a diligent way. So there are multiple modes of propagating corals as we seek to reinforce their populations. Fragmentation is a commonly used practice throughout the world. You heard a little bit about some exciting projects in Vietnam that are using this approach. Specifically corals, especially branching ones, can break off a bit of themselves and become a new coral. And this can be extremely effective and it's a particularly effective— its benefits are in providing the accumulation of biomass relatively quickly. Corals can grow quite quickly this way. And so the ecosystem benefits related to habitat provision or coastal protection are best served by this fragmentation approach. And it's leveraged, as I said, throughout the world in coral gardening, coral nurseries. You've heard quite a bit about these activities this week as well. Oh, sorry about that. Thank you. So the alternative way that corals make new corals is through making baby corals. And so corals, many species spawn their eggs and sperm into the water column. The fertilization and larval development happens in the water column. Larvae are mobile throughout the oceans over a period of days to several weeks. And then those coral larvae have to find their way back to a suitable reef habitat and settle and metamorphose and become new colonies then in a new place. So this is the process by which coral metapopulations generally are connected. But this approach for restoration, that is using baby corals or coral larvae provides greater potential in terms of adapting to changing environments because you have the, the formation of new genetic recombinations in these offspring. But corals are also quite prolific and they can spawn and there's a potential for very large numbers of propagules to be produced in each coral spawning event. And so there is a great potential for scaling through these large numbers of offspring. Yeah, thank you. There we go. So coral seeding, an active restoration method, essentially is about developing tools and processes to assist at the many complicated early life stages that corals experience. And so that involves these many steps. Collecting the spawn as they're released naturally from coral populations. This generally happens a few nights a year. Rearing the larvae that result in some sort of contained way, allowing those coral larvae to settle often on artificial substrates that we can design that have microhabitats that can improve their survivorship. And then that artificial substrate, serves as a vehicle that we can transfer those coral colonies back to the reef. Now my organization has really focused on developing these tools and practices to enable coral seeding to be undertaken through field-based techniques. Many coral reef areas in the world are never going to have access to large laboratories or large aquaculture facilities, although those approaches are also being pursued with coral seeding and sort of industrial industrial aquaculture settings. Our focus has been on field-based techniques that can be implemented pretty much anywhere in the world. This is a little bit what some of those look like. Collecting coral spawn, as I said, spawn is usually released just once or one or two evenings a week, not a week, per year. You see some of my colleagues in the Dominican Republic undertaking in vitro fertilization here in the center. But that step can be undertaken on the back of a boat, on a beach, in a parking lot, wherever you need to do it. But then those larvae— embryos and larvae can be placed in field enclosures such as you see here for that larval duration and settlement onto some of those artificial substrates. So, SEACORE is my organization, has really focused, as I said, on developing these sorts of technologies and tools. Based on ecological research, but then also taking those tools and processes and putting them in the hands of local restoration practitioners through an implementation network. And this is a training model that we have developed primarily in the Caribbean so far. As you might infer, there's a lot to learn about coral seeding and making it successful. And so these have been— we've developed this training model through relatively long-term partnerships with these implementation partners involving several years of experience, both including online training, in-person events, both common in-person events, but also accompanying groups in their own locations through several spawning events, working with them to develop sustainable funding streams, and then handing those activities off to those local partners. We're very proud that several of these local groups have now become trainers themselves and are propagating these skills and capacities within— with additional partners in their own countries. And so, this is a little bit what our network looks like at the moment. As I mentioned, you can see our history is greatest, and this model has been developed to the greatest extent in the Caribbean. And we've been working there over the past 8 to 10 years with these partners now in about 10 different Caribbean countries that are implementing coral seeding. And this is based on, I would say, multiple decades of coral restoration activity in this region. The coral decline sort of started many decades ago in the Caribbean and has been ratcheting for a long period of time, this has created a demand for coral restoration over a relatively long timeframe as well. And so this is a relatively mature group of practitioners that have been involved in coral restoration for a while, a relatively mature pipeline in terms of the management and permitting decisions around coral restoration. As we have more recently begun the very first steps of expanding this training model into other regions of the ocean, particularly the West Indian Ocean region. We now have a team operating in Mauritius, actually, but also the Pacific Islands region. These environments, right, there's a good reason, there's a good reason they haven't needed coral restoration too much. But I guess one point of advice that I would mention, we need to begin building capacity in these areas. Before coral restoration is, quote, needed. Because it's gonna be a lot easier and a lot more successful if we begin sooner. But within these other regions of the world where coral restoration hasn't been perceived as needed, it hasn't been needed as much, the coral degradation has not been as great, resilience is retained in some of those ecosystems to a greater extent. But both the practitioner and the management and permiters just they simply have less experience and are starting from a different baseline in these other regions. And so the consequence of this, more time and more funding are likely gonna be required in these other regions to be successful and gain these sort of network capacities in coral seeding. So I'm gonna move back to the Caribbean now. You've heard quite a bit about the state of Caribbean, the dire state of Caribbean coral reefs over this week. I know several of the earlier presenters have talked about the extreme heat waves that hit the Caribbean in '22 and '23. These were, I guess, a decade or so ahead of when we were predicting heat waves of this magnitude to occur. Nonetheless, they coincided as well in the Caribbean with extreme effects from Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease, which has affected an unprecedented diversity of coral species. So, so many of the species in those systems have been devastated at the same time by disease. And so from a population perspective, mass mortality of parent corals often results— and we're seeing this certainly in most Caribbean reef-building species— with generalized recruitment failure. And just since 2023, I would argue that this has taken the large open metapopulations of coral species within the Caribbean and very rapidly converted them to small isolated populations. This requires a very rapid change in the conservation and restoration approaches and paradigms that we need to work with these species. Think about the way that zoos and aquariums and things implement controlled breeding and conservation breeding programs for highly endangered mammals., right? It involves a tremendous amount of record keeping, but it also crucially involves moving those organisms around in a way that those breeding plans can be the most advantageous to prevent threats such as genetic drift and inbreeding risk to affect the future of those populations. And so similarly, we're now in a situation where we really need to consider moving corals around as a basic tool tool of restoration and conservation planning. I believe this paper was referred to earlier in the week as well, but the concept of assisted gene flow and genetic rescue for corals, particularly Caribbean, is an issue we need to be doing now. One approach to this is one that my organization is leading with the concept of developing networks for exchanging coral larvae Larvae represent a relatively low-risk approach for moving corals around. They represent much lesser biosecurity risk than moving whole corals around for various reasons. And they're amenable to shipping around. You can put them in a bottle and FedEx them, you know, across the ocean. You can put them in your luggage and carry them in a— with a traveler. And so this is a very tractable thing to do in many ways and highly needed. Again, the investment in developing capacity and coral seeding throughout this region provides a ready-made network of groups that are ready and saying, yes, we need more parents in our breeding programs, and are ready and willing to begin the hard— the relatively long road involved in having to navigate this extensive permitting pathway that's been referred to several times this week as well. But I'm going to emphasize this to you based on our sort of consultations and research on the local basis and all of those different countries. There are a lot of steps. This is a very long road to be able to move even these corals around, coral larvae around that represent, as I said, a relatively low biosecurity risk. But several of these crucial barriers relate to important conservation mechanisms that are overseen by the UN, specifically CITES and the biodiversity conventions and the Nagoya Protocol. So, I think you've heard this before this week, but I'm going to emphasize these points where both CITES and the CBD Nagoya Protocol represent significant barriers that could be eased. I think one approach to easing these barriers could relate to this concept of having pre-approved networks of vetted organizations that are engaged in reciprocal exchange. Again, both CITES and Nagoya are based on a model of bilateral negotiation for each transfer from a donor country to a user country. And I think that there could be a very different model that would facilitate these conservation usages where it's a model of reciprocal exchange. That means the genetic benefits are being shared mutually across that network. And I think such a concept could greatly facilitate some of the current barriers. So I encourage that to be part of our conversations. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much for your presentation. Now we turn to our fifth Our next panelist, Sanne Arbelien, policy officer, Marine Environment Department, Government of Belgium. The presentation is entitled Greater North Sea Basin Initiative: Working Track Nature.

You have the floor, sir.

Thank you so much, co-chair, and also for the opportunity to speak during this week. I've been fortunate or lucky enough to have been listening to all of the other presentations this week, and some of the things that of course came by resonated as well, where there was a call or a need for more cross-border collaboration, but also more cross-sectoral collaboration where it cannot be restoration alone. And so I'm going to tell a story about how we try to set up a mechanism in the Greater North Sea Basin. As you can see on the first slide, the countries that are participating currently are France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, the UK, and Ireland. The red stripes represent the geographic area that we are currently operating in. First, I will give a bit of background to why it was necessary to establish such initiative within the North Sea. It's one of the most heavily used seas in the world. We have great ports of Amsterdam and Antwerp that are passing by. There's lots of wind energy. And so these— for these 9 countries, the sea is crucial for various functions, not only for nature, wind, and fisheries, but also shipping and infrastructure. However, we have limited physical and ecological space at the North Sea, so there is need for well-coordinated marine spatial planning that also takes into account the greater regional level. Also, when we look at some of the directives that we have for Marine Strategy Framework Directive, we can see that we are far from reaching good environmental status. Oh, sorry. Yeah, so what is the Greater North Sea Basin Initiative? It is actually an initiative, an informal initiative between the 9 Greater North Sea countries that I mentioned, which is supported by the European Commission. And what we're trying to do is to cooperate in dealing with the spatial and ecological squeeze in this tiny area while taking into account some of these transitions such as climate change, biodiversity loss, sustainable food production, clean and safe operations at sea. So we believe that sectoral and national approaches limit currently the effectiveness of dealing with these above-mentioned challenges. Important to notice is, as I said before, it's an informal initiative. So we don't operate with, we don't have a mandate to take decisions or force laws upon anybody. The idea of the Greater North Sea Basin Initiative is to foster collaboration, stimulate informal dialogue, and to accelerate some of the work that might be already going on while working together with all the other organizations that are active in our basin. If you look at our governance structure in the middle, the key bits of our doing are the working tracks that deliver content to be considered by the steering group. Within the steering group are present the working track leads like myself for nature and also the national country coordinators. However, the collaboration needs to be enforced on multiple levels, so we are provided— presided by an executive board of the directors general, mostly of them the MSP director generals or fisheries or nature director generals. It's very important that this collaboration is not only on the lowest level, but it also works its way up as such, even till the highest level where we organize 2 or 3 yearly ministerial conference where the ministers get together. As you can see below and on the side, we are supported by the European Commission through the assistance mechanism, which provide money for the secretariat who help us with making plannings, making notes for meetings, also organizing our stakeholder event this year. And we work closely together with external stakeholders, important ones such as OSPAR, ENSEC, ICES, the Regional Fisheries Corporation, Regional Fisheries Management Organizations, and so on. They take part in the working tracks, or we consult— we communicate with them at an ad hoc basis. If we look at the working tracks, there are currently 5 established. So we have nature restoration and conservation, where we are looking to set up a program for cooperation regarding the enhancement of restoration in nature across the different countries. Cumulative impact assessment— a lot of countries have established their own approach when it comes to cumulative impact assessments, and there is a challenge in harmonizing them. And so that's what this track is trying to do. We also have the multi-use track, which is looking to set up criteria and sharing best practices on co-use. The long-term perspective of fisheries track to create insight in key fisheries areas and socioeconomic food impacts at the spatial scale at North Sea. They have done a very impressive study this year where they basically gathered all the information of where fishing revenues are being brought by countries. This is data that is normally only available at the national level to bring this together so that fisheries could also be better represented when taking these marine spatial decisions at a regional level that affect them all. Lastly, we also have the knowledge sharing track, which oversees and assists all of the other tracks. So they coordinate the exchanges of best practices, they aid us when we need to make graphics our data, and they also oversee our plans and assessments. When going through now to the Nature Track specifically, what we have been doing, we started out with a gap analysis process in 2024. So the first thing we did was identify some challenges that are shared by GNSBI countries. Since it is only useful to work together on things that people are interested in and that are more, um, that more countries are affected by than just one. Then we prioritize these most urgent challenges and we identified some solutions, which are the actions that we will going to take first. And then after that, after we have set these actions, we try to evaluate the opportunities to implement these actions, but also taking note again of what is happening already around us, since we don't want to duplicate efforts that have been ongoing in other fora. From the gap analysis, 6 priority shared barriers emerged, such as lack of joint political will to prioritize nature, the need for understanding the value of nature, the lack of sea-basin-wide maps of biologically valuable and sensitive areas, insufficient cooperation on nature restoration projects and conservation plans between countries, the complicated relationships between and within administrations regarding sectoral demands. I think the example of permitting is one of them that has been mentioned multiple times already this week. And also the lack of targeted and effective communication regarding the benefits of nature. While we know that these are open doors to kicking, there are very hard and persistent barriers. So we need to be able to act on them. And for that, we made an action on each of these that will tackle the barrier. Since we have limited capacity at first, we don't plan to tackle all actions at the same time, but try to work on 3 actions to take forward, which were the lack of political will, the requirement for the sea-based maps, and also the cooperation of nature. It's on that cooperation of nature that I will now dive a bit deeper in how we are enforcing or strengthening it. First, it starts with knowing who your counterparts are in countries. So we tried to set up a phone book of restoration of policy leads across countries. This is also very challenging since people sometimes switch fast from jobs, and it also needed multiple levels because people who decide policy on the regional level are not the ones that are doing it on a national level, let alone the practitioners who are doing the restoration in, in the field. We also provided a platform for sharing information where we work together on, and we establish dialogues between sectors that are affected by restoration. This year in Berlin, we had our first joint meeting with the Fisheries Track, and we came up with some ideas on how we will work better together into future. One thing that popped up very fast was, of course, we are connected in a way that fisheries also depends on natural resources.. So in order to set forward their activities, they need to make sure that fisheries are preserved. So we are looking now into how to further identify critical fish habitat areas, not only for the commercially fished species, but also for the prey species upon which those commercially dependent fish species depend. Fourth, we are also generating new knowledge. We heard some, uh,— some remarks already also this week with regarding to indicators. So we commissioned work by ICES on options for current indicators for using across different countries. And fifth, we are also working together to develop and implement an international restoration project. Lastly, while we're doing that, of course, actively working with the management organizations that exist already, such as OSPAR. To give an idea what we're trying to do with the Cross-Border Restoration Task Group, which has been set up this year, is to develop and implement one or two joint cross-border restoration projects within the Greater North Sea Basin. While it might not sound as a new idea, what we generally see is that countries, they tend to organize via project calls separately different projects and then implement them in their country. The idea now is, can we do a project across borders from the start and what are the challenges that are coming with that. So the idea of our working track or for this task group is to identify and resolve some of these challenges, to share experience, and things that will definitely come up are, for instance, permitting, but also regulation, funding for different countries, how do we monitor, and the approach is practical. So we do with learning by doing. Our initial focus would be the flat oyster since that's a species that comes in almost every country. If it works well, this approach, we intend to repeat it with the second species being seagrass. When looking at the generating knowledge part, we requested ICES to come up with some indicators for nature restoration that could be used by multiple countries. We recently have, or at least the EU countries, have adopted the Nature Restoration Regulation at EU level. And so a lot of countries are starting with implementing nature restoration projects. And of course, if we need to report against them, it helps that we can compare results. I have also a background in marine plastics, and there we saw for microplastics, everybody bought their technical fancy equipment already, and only afterwards we realized, oh, they are measuring in different ways., and we can't compare results. So that's something that we're trying to avoid. So the question we asked, um, ICES was, is it possible to identify a core set of existing indicators which are already in use? Because of course it cannot cost extra money. Is there sufficient data for those indicators? And how are they also linked to the Kunming Global Biodiversity Framework, OSPAR, and EU legislation? Lastly, are there any gaps that are identified within the suitable existing indicators that we can fast-track. Since we don't have the time to go into detail to this request, the report has been published, and if you want, you can contact me afterwards also to, to receive it. So what do we see of challenges that arose when we were doing this work is that, of course, you're working with different countries who also have different priorities but also have different ecosystems. So it's sometimes hard to find a common goal. There's also, of course, the different regulatory regimes across the sea basin. So we have EU countries versus non-EU countries, and that it's been mentioned before, there is an actual need to work across sectors. So nature restoration priorities also need to be included within marine spatial planning, which at this point in time is very difficult. Lastly, it is a costly affair. So financing is something, and what we also see If you want to build trust amongst different administrations, it's very difficult to do so when staff keeps changing. So, that's another bit that we saw as a main challenge where people don't stay in their same post for a long time. However, we also have opportunities, of course, such as the existing cooperation with frameworks like OSPAR who already have a lot of experience, who also put in effort to help us. And likewise, when we need to take a decision to to which we don't have the mandate, we can forward it to their framework. We also have the Global Biodiversity Target 2, to which every country is adhering within the Greater North Sea Basin Initiative, and the informality which is helping us. Normally when we are sitting down with our fisheries colleagues, we are pitted against each other from the start, but because of the informality, we actually now have a space to talk to each other in a friendly way without having to defending our national standpoints. And lastly, it's also something that we see, that we have shared challenges across the different sectors. Everybody is asking for a bit of space, and so we're trying to better understand each other and see, can we share some spaces? Do— if you get this space for fisheries, do we then maybe have an opportunity for nature elsewhere? And something that was also very clear are the data issues, that regionally there is not that much data available as we would have thought from the However, at a national level, a lot of this data is existing. It is just not being shared. So that's also a main focal point for this year's DG meeting. Lastly, I want to show some of the lessons learned. So learning how to really work across sectors, it's very valuable and very interesting as well and worthwhile our time. However, you need to do it with respect and understanding. There are different ways of working within these sectors, and the informality as such helps to then first on a human-based level get to know, trust from each other, and then start discussing on some shared challenges. And the third point also reflects that it's the people that influence policy. So at the end of the day, it comes down to who you know at which time. And the fact that I now can call a fisheries colleague from Germany who I normally don't have contact, have contact with, is of major value for the North Sea Basin, but also for other colleagues who are now getting in touch with different sectors. As a fourth, it's important to not make assumptions about what you know already, because we thought we have been monitoring for 30 years in the North Sea Basin, we have pretty good ecological data available to us. But when you dig down to it, we basically don't know that much as we thought. And so we need to question some of these assumptions that we made, but also assumptions that we have towards the other players around the table, that fisheries don't want to just do fisheries, for instance, compared to nature, but that they also have a livelihood and that they are willing to work together with us, which we can also see. And then the last two ones where cooperation, of course, takes time and needs capacity. It's been said before, it goes slow and it can weather political storms., but it needs to be able to get the mandate. I think especially in these times where budgets are being cut, it's one of the difficulties, but which we also now see after 3 years, we do manage to get results and we do manage to go farther than we would have done if we all stayed working nationally. And the last message that I would give is to say start small and go with the energy. So see where there's energy to and willingness to work on topics that are interesting to countries. It's of no use to to start a great project, but then no buy-in and that people tend to fade off into the background along the way. And I think that's also one of the strengths where we had, where we saw if a certain bit didn't have enough energy to continue it, we would pivot so that we do have the necessary cooperation to show them the results along the way. Thank you for your attention, and you can always contact me or my colleague Emily afterwards.

Thank you very much for your presentation. Some of these lessons learned could probably be used in diplomacy as well, I think. Thank you so much. We will now hear from the sixth and last panelist for this afternoon, Jamil Ahmad, Director for the UNEP New York Office. The presentation is entitled From Ridge to Reef: The UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration and UNEP's work in marine and coastal ecosystems. You have the floor, sir.

Thank you. Thank you, co-chairs and excellencies, distinguished guests. It is a pleasure to present to you the work of UNEP in this area. Do we go to the last one? Yeah. So our planet is often called the blue planet, yet we rarely stop to consider just how much we owe to the ocean. Every second breath that we take comes from it. It regulates our climate. Feeds billions of people, protects our coastlines, supports livelihood and economies, and connects communities across the globe. For millennia, the ocean has sustained humanity, from coral reefs and mangroves to seagrass meadows and coastal wetlands. Today, however, many of the ecosystems that support life on Earth are under growing pressure from climate change, pollution, and unsustainable use. Yet this is not the story of decline. It is a story of hope, because nature possesses an extraordinary capacity to recover when given the chance. And it is this belief that sits at the heart of the UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration. Proclaimed by the UN General Assembly for 2021-30 and led by UNEP and FAO, the Decade of Ecosystem Restoration is a global movement to prevent, halt, and reverse ecosystem degradation. Restoration is no longer seen simply as an environmental activity. It is increasingly recognized as an investment in resilience, livelihood, food security, climate adaptation, and sustainable development. At its core, The decade serves as a global coordination and mobilization platform. It is designed to bring together countries and a wide range of actors, including indigenous people, local communities, civil society, academia, the private sector, and international organizations around the world with one shared vision: restoring ecosystems for people, nature, and climate. This work is linked directly to the global commitments including the Sustainable Development Goals, the Kunming-Montréal Global Biodiversity Framework, the Paris Agreement on Climate and other multilateral environmental agreements with countries committing to restore 1 billion hectares by 2030. To support this transformation, the UN Decade's focus is on three main pathways. Number 1, building a global movement by raising awareness, driving behavior change, and empowering at Generation Restoration. 2, generating political will by engaging ministers, strengthening policies, and unlocking finance. And 3rd, building technical capacity through science, indigenous knowledge, standards of practice, and robust monitoring systems. These efforts are supported through a set of concrete delivery tools. These include 12 Restoration Challenges, which are thematic priority areas led by partner organizations; the FERMM monitoring platform, which tracks progress towards the Global Biodiversity Framework Target 2; Multi-Partner Trust Fund that helps catalyze finance for restoration action; and an advisory board, 5 task forces, and a network of more than 300 partners to support this work. And last but not least, the World Restoration Flagships, which is a platform to recognize the most ambitious and impactful restoration initiatives globally. The UN World Restoration Flagship program under the UN Decade recognizes promotes large-scale ecosystem restoration initiatives that demonstrate measurable ecological and socio-economic impact and serve as a model that can be replicated globally. Since its launch, 27 initiatives have been recognized, with 8 new being launched this year. Together, these flagships show that restoration is already happening at scale with around 18.1 million hectares hectares under active restoration and another 75 million hectares committed. This demonstrates that restoration is not just a vision for future, but something already delivering tangible impact today. One of the biggest challenges we face in marine ecosystem restoration is that we still do not have a complete picture of what is happening globally. According to countries reporting to the Convention on Biological Diversity, around 193 million hectares had been placed under restoration by 2025. However, almost all of this reported restoration, which is almost 98%, focuses on terrestrial ecosystems. In contrast, freshwater, marine, and coastal ecosystems together account for just 2% of reported restoration efforts. So through the UN World Restoration Flagship Program, 8 of the 27 recognized flagship focus on marine and coastal systems— coastal ecosystems spanning across Africa, Asia, Australia, and Oceania, and Europe and Latin America. Together, these initiatives demonstrate a wide range of restoration approaches, including coral reef, mangroves, and coastal habitats, marine biodiversity and fisheries restoration, and integrated island and seascape restoration. These flagships show that marine restoration can deliver measurable benefits for biodiversity, climate resilience, sustainable livelihood in coastal communities while providing valuable models that can be replicated. One new flagship example is the restoring the Northern Mozambique Channel. Stretching across one of the world's most biodiverse marine regions, this initiative works to restore and protect interconnected coastal and marine ecosystems, including coral reefs, mangroves, and seagrass habitat. Although relatively small in size, it contains around 33% of all coral reef found in the Indian Ocean and serves as a critical nursery and seabed of marine life across the region. However, this ecosystem faces increasing pressures from climate change, agriculture runoff, and over-exploitation of resources. But what makes this initiative remarkable is its regional approach. Comoros, Madagascar, Mozambique, and Tanzania are working together to restore and manage interconnected land and seascape across the region. Currently, nearly 87,000 hectares are already under restoration and protection efforts. Looking ahead, the initiative aims to restore 4.85 million hectares by 2030. This is expected to increase household incomes, create jobs, community enterprises, and strengthen climate resilience, since supporting long-term sustainable development across the region. Let's zoom into some of the progress of Small Island Developing States, or SIDS, World Restoration Flagship under the UN Decade. This particular flagship is working across Vanuatu, Comoros, Saint Lucia from 2023 to 2027, and it aims to restore ecosystems from ridge to reef while fundamentally repositioning restoration as an engine for sustainable growth Resilience and Prosperity. What makes this flagship distinct is the fact that it does not treat restoration as a standalone activity. It embeds it within a whole-of-island, whole-of-government transition to a sustainable blue economy. We are doing this through three main components. First, enabling environment, because successful restoration doesn't happen in a vacuum. Here, the flagship uses UNEP's soon-to-be-published Sustainable Blue Economy Transition Framework to support SIDS with their SBE transition, with a nationally owned roadmap on how countries can move from A to B. I'll explain this shortly. Second, national and local action. How do we then operationalize a nature-positive blue economy? Here we work with governments on key assessments to inform decision-making,, as well as to directly with communities and businesses to implement restoration actions and unlock livelihood on the ground. And third, cities-to-cities engagement and mobilize additional investment. The result of all these components will be tracked through the decade's official monitoring platform, the Framework for Ecosystem Restoration Monitoring, ensuring alignment with SDGs and global targets including the GBF Target 2 towards 2030. Now a quick snapshot of what this looks like in practice. Importantly, these results are also contributing to the Global Blue Ecosystem Challenge for Oceans under the UN Decade, enabling a shift towards nature-positive blue economies that secure ecosystems and biodiversity assets for wide-ranging social benefits. In Comoros, for example, transformational progress under their flagship financing includes the country's new nationally validated Sustainable Blue Economy Policy and Implementation Framework. In Saint Lucia, the country's first Sustainable Blue Economy Rapid Readiness Assessment is underway. In Vanuatu, the SBE transition process is also underway in partnership with Blue Prosperity Vanuatu and the FAO— and with FAO, a myriad of activities will follow. This flagship is not just about restoring ecosystems, it is about transforming the enabling environment for restoring— restoration to succeed. The experiences emerging from the flagships also reflect a broader lesson. Many countries know where they want to go. The challenge is often understanding how to get there. Ocean-based development can no longer follow business-as-usual pathways that degrade ecosystems and deepen inequality. That is why UNEP has developed the Sustainable Blue Economy Transition Framework. This practical planning tool helps governments develop tailored pathways using nature-based solutions to build resilience and human prosperity with planetary boundaries. Specifically, the framework helps governments and countries develop integrated policies. Transition strategies and implementation and investment plans. To support early, informed and inclusive action, the framework is complemented by the Sustainable Blue Economy Rapid Readiness Assessment . The RRA provides governments with a pragmatic starting point for assessing existing policies institutions, capacities, and financing arrangements through a structured and participatory process. It also helps setting shared vision, clarify priorities, identify gaps, and enabling actions, and build momentum for reform. An effective SBERRA will provide a high-level snapshot of a country's current blue economy, identify key aspects and opportunities associated with SBE transition, highlight the key challenges and barriers hindering progress towards NSBE, and assess the status of the key SBE enabling conditions. Also deliver a co-developed set of actions to catalyze progress towards a sustainable blue economy. UNEP's Transition Framework and RRA Tool have been piloted in a range of countries, including currently in the SIDS Ecosystem Restoration Flagship Project in Comoros, Saint Lucia, and Vanuatu. Of course, enabling conditions are not only about planning and finance, they are also about governance. Marine Protected Areas offer one of the best options for maintaining or restoring the health of oceans, and coastal ecosystems, particularly when they form part of holistic policy and integrated ecosystems. UNEP's guide, Enabling Effective and Equitable Marine Protected Areas, shows how integrated governance can combine the role of national governments, local communities, and market schemes to enhance the effectiveness of marine protected areas. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. The guide therefore provides a flexible approach to governance that can be tailored to specific marine protected areas. It uses real-life studies, case studies covering a variety of marine protected areas. A second critical enabling condition is finance. When political will exists, restoration cannot scale without investments. The Global Fund for Coral Reefs, GFCR, is the world's leading coral reef finance platform mobilizing public and private capital towards protection and effective management of the world's most climate-resilient coral reef system. Backed by a public-private coalition of states, UN agencies, financial institutions, philanthropies, impact investors, conservation actors, and civil society, The fund blends grants, concessional and risk-tolerant instruments, and private investments. By 2030, the GFCR aims to support at least 400 businesses and finance solutions across 22 Coral nations. UNEP co-chairs the executive board of this— of GFCR and currently leads monitoring, evaluation, and communications for the fund. Finally, no discussion on restoration would be complete without recognizing the importance of communities. Small Grants Program is an innovative community-based initiative for conservation, restoration, and sustainable use of marine ecosystems. With an investment ranging from $50,000 to $150,000, per project, the program delivers tangible environmental and socio-economic benefits. It strengthens governance, builds local capacity, and enhances climate resilience. Across regions, its impact is clear. In Madagascar, communities are leading marine management. In The Gambia, awareness of seagrass conservation is growing nationally. In Kenya, Communities are advancing blue carbon solutions and generating carbon credits. In Belize, coral restoration is reviving endangered species while building local expertise. In the Philippines, inclusive governance is improving marine protected areas. And in Haiti, mangrove restoration is strengthening resilience and livelihoods. These are not isolated successes. They are scalable, replicable solutions. Ultimately, the program is not just about restoring ecosystem, but also about enabling communities to lead and create lasting benefits for both people and nature. To conclude, marine ecosystem restoration is ultimately not just about recovering habitats, it's about creating the conditions for people and nature to thrive together. Across the examples shared today, a common lesson emerges: that restoration succeeds when it is supported by strong governance, informed planning, sustainable financing, meaningful community engagement, and international cooperation. The scale of challenge before us is immense. But so too is the opportunity. By working together across sectors, institutions, and borders, we can move beyond isolated restoration projects and build the resilient, nature-positive economies and societies that our oceans and our communities and our future generations depend on. I thank you.

Thank you for your presentation. This was the last of the panelists for today, so please, the floor is now open for questions and comments. I recognize the panelist, please, you have the floor.

Can you hear me? Yeah. Thank you. This is a comment really and a question for Margaret. Really good presentation, really exciting to see the work you're doing. In fact, I've been meaning to call you for a long time, so it's great to meet you. I'm hoping we can talk afterwards. I'm glad you emphasized this really critical need for regional collaboration to be sharing genotypes. And I hate to be banging the same drum several times, but I really hope this is a message that sinks in and gets put into the report from this meeting that we are now at a point where corals are— many species are functionally extinct. By that I mean they are no longer able to reproduce in the wild, and we know this, so that their fate is entirely in the hands of restoration. And restoration of corals is possible. It is scalable. We know we can do it. But what we urgently need are the countries to work together to allow sharing of these resilient genotypes, because genetic diversity is key for adaptation. It's a very simple message, and it's a shame there aren't more delegations from the Caribbean region where I work and where you work. I know it's been a busy week, but I would very much hope we can find a political champion in the region. I think I have one or two ideas that could take this idea forwards to the relevant agencies like CARICOM, the Caribbean Community Secretariat, the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States, which are harmonizing policy in the Eastern Caribbean, and hopefully we can get some traction there. But I just wanted to thank you, and, well, it's more of a comment really rather than a question, but hope we can continue this discussion and know that in the Eastern Caribbean you have a partner willing to share genotypes that will be very eager to push this with the governments. Saint Lucia, I should argue, should be commended. They have provided us a permit to share corals with Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. And similarly, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines have also provided written proof permitting to receive corals, new genotypes. So there is a willingness to collaborate and would hope we can build on that. With other partners. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr.

J., for your comments. I don't see any other speakers. Ms. Miller, do you want to comment?

Yeah, I'll just comment on the end of that, I guess. I— and Dr. J. and I have not coordinated ahead of this, I guess, to be clear. We're coming at it from independent perspectives. But the sort of the roadmap, the figure that I showed that has so many permitting pieces of it. I think it's an important point to emphasize these local practitioners are dealing both with local manager decision as well as national authorities that are making decisions under the UN, you know, the international conventions. And so there are these multiple levels of conversation and convincing that fall upon those local practitioners to try to carry out on top of all the other work that they're doing. So that's really the nature of a lot of the challenge is the many levels. There is sort of— there's always— there's biology— there's important considerations around biological risk, and those conversations are really important to have at all of those levels. But the local managers need to be convinced as well as the national authorities that are making the decisions under the CITES and the Nagoya Protocol. So it's a big challenge. Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Müller. Any other speakers that want to take the floor? If not, then we have reached the end of our discussion under this panel segment. And we have then also concluded our consideration of the topic of focus for this 26th meeting on marine ecosystem restoration. In the discussion panel. Once again, I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the panelists for their informative and thought-provoking presentations. My co-chair and I also wish to thank all delegations for their participation in the interactive discussions. Let us thank in the usual manner our distinguished panelists of this afternoon. Now tomorrow morning we will resume at 10 o'clock in plenary to consider Agenda Item 4 on interagency cooperation and coordination. Under this item we will hear a statement by the focal point for UN oceans, Ms. Eleanor Hamashkelt, Under-Secretary-General for Legal Affairs and United Nations Legal Council. Time permitting, we will proceed to consider Agenda Item 5 entitled Process for the selection of topics and panelists so as to facilitate the work of the General Assembly. And agenda item 6 entitled Issues that could benefit from attention in the future work of the General Assembly on oceans and the law of the sea. We will then close the meeting after hearing a statement by the Director of DOALOS on the ICP Trust Fund. Before I adjourn the meeting, are there any messages from the Secretariat?

No?

Then I thank you for today, and the meeting is adjourned.