For decades, global climate policy treated the ocean as a passive backdrop – vast, resilient, and largely beyond the reach of effective governance. Climate negotiations focused overwhelmingly on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, protecting forests, and transitioning energy systems, while the ocean was assumed to absorb humanity’s excesses without consequence. That assumption has now collapsed. At the most recent UN Climate Change Conference, COP30 in Belém, Brazil, the ocean emerged not as an afterthought, but as a central pillar of climate governance. This shift marks a profound transformation in how the world understands climate risk, responsibility, and survival.

The reasons for this change are rooted in science, politics, and lived reality. The ocean absorbs more than 90 percent of the excess heat generated by greenhouse gas emissions and roughly a quarter of annual carbon dioxide output. This buffering role has spared the planet from even more extreme warming, but it has come at a devastating cost. Rising ocean temperatures, acidification, deoxygenation, collapsing fisheries, coral bleaching, and accelerating coastal erosion are no longer abstract future threats; they are present-day crises. As these impacts intensify, the illusion of an inexhaustible ocean has given way to an urgent recognition of its fragility.

At COP30, this recognition translated into concrete political change. The conference marked the moment when the ocean moved from the margins of climate diplomacy to the mainstream of global climate governance. Ocean issues featured prominently in national climate plans, adaptation frameworks, the follow-up to the first global stocktake under the Paris Agreement, and even the evolving architecture of climate finance. What had once been treated as a niche concern became a shared priority across regions and income levels.

A critical force behind this shift has been the leadership of small island developing states and least developed countries. For these nations, ocean governance is not merely an environmental issue – it is a matter of survival, sovereignty, and justice. Sea-level rise threatens to erase coastlines, contaminate freshwater supplies, undermine food security,........

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