Turning Around the Politics of the Ocean
| Published date | 01 September 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/20419058231198578 |
| Author | Chris Armstrong |
| Date | 01 September 2023 |
12POLITICAL INSIGHT•SEPTEMBER 2023
The ocean plays a crucial role in
sustaining life on Earth. The sea’s
plankton absorbs carbon and
churns out oxygen on a truly
massive scale. The ocean’s great currents
regulate temperatures and weather patterns,
making our world much more hospitable
to life. Hundreds of millions of people
worldwide are nutritionally reliant on sh.
Unfortunately, our economies are steadily
undermining the environmental health
of the ocean. Climate change is wreaking
havoc in two ways. First, it is spurring
the warming of the ocean, leading to a
ight of sh populations away from the
equator, as well as the melting of ice sheets.
Second, it is slowly acidifying the ocean.
This is disrupting marine food webs, since
zooplankton – small crustaceans which are
key to marine ecosystems – are less able
to grow or heal in more acidic water. That
could also have major knock-on eects for
sh, and for people who rely on the ocean
for sustenance.
Further threats include harmful shing
practices such as bottom trawling, as
well as plastic pollution, and pollution
from agriculture (which has caused the
emergence of multiple ‘dead zones’ in the
ocean, that are largely devoid of life). Seabed
mining, which appears to be moving closer
to reality, could also cause untold damage
to seabed ecosystems, by creating sediment
plumes which smother creatures living on
the sea oor.
Alongside this multifaceted
environmental crisis, the ocean faces
another. This is a crisis of inequality.
The ocean is big business: under what
economists call the ‘Blue Acceleration’,
Turning Around the
Politics of the Ocean
The High Seas take up much of the Earth’s surface but sit beyond
the control of any nation-state. In the face of climate change – and
overfishing – Chris Armstrong argues that we need a new politics to
protect the ocean.
ocean industries are growing at a faster rate
than the overall global economy. But there
are winners and losers, because the ocean
economy is even more unequal than land-
based economies.
Some countries lack access to the sea
in the rst place (because they are land-
locked). Others are locked out by the high
costs of entering technologically complex
industries. Not all countries have the
technology to engage in oshore fossil
extraction, for example, or the mining of the
seabed. Meanwhile, shing is dominated
by just a few countries which can aord
to subsidise large shing eets. It is little
surprise, then, that in each of the major
sectors of the ocean economy, ten or fewer
companies account for almost half of all
global revenues.
The High Seas
These challenges are perhaps most evident
on what international lawyers call ‘the High
Seas’. This refers to all parts of the ocean
which are beyond 200 nautical miles of any
Political Insight September 2023.indd 12Political Insight September 2023.indd 1214/08/2023 12:2414/08/2023 12:24
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