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How can a healthy ocean improve human health and enhance wellbeing on a rapidly changing planet?

Full Report
Seaweeds

Highlights

  • The ocean holds great, though still largely unrecognised and unrealised, potential to improve human health, support mental health and wellbeing, create economic opportunity and advance social justice.
  • These opportunities include new medicines to fight disease; new materials; inspiration for new technologies to support societal development; new ocean-based energy sources; blue food resources that hold promise for ending hunger and reducing food insecurity; and access to nature to support recreation and promote mental health.
  • But the ocean’s potential to benefit humanity is threatened by climate change, pollution, biodiversity loss, inequitable and unsustainable patterns of consumption, and marginalisation of Indigenous Peoples, local communities and other coastal populations. These threats are the result of improper ocean governance. They are driven by a relentless quest for short-term economic gain without concern for human health, natural capital or environmental consequence.
  • Fully realising the ocean’s benefits for human health and wellbeing and safeguarding our common future will require confronting these threats by meeting the commitments of global laws, treaties, conventions and guidelines; building global partnerships and promoting a greater focus on equity and the protection of human rights for all people, including the right to health and a healthy environment.
  • Here, we identify three actions of overarching importance to both ocean and human health:
    • Collaboratively protect, restore and sustainably manage ocean biodiversity, including by ratifying and implementing key international agreements. This will ensure that the great potential of ocean medicines and biotechnology, ocean food sources and access to natural ocean spaces for human health is preserved.
    • Combat climate change and eliminate pollution, including by upholding commitments to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Paris Agreement, the COP28 outcomes, and the UN Global Plastics Treaty. This will benefit human health by slowing climate change, reducing the frequency of extreme weather events, limiting sea level rise, and preserving healthy marine food sources.
    • Improve human health and equity measurement by incorporating evidence and linked indicators of both ocean health and human health and wellbeing into relevant policies and decision-making. This will promote human health by ensuring that measures of both ocean and human health are integrated into broader health monitoring, prevention and evaluation programmes.
  • The following additional actions should be taken across a wide range of sectors and actors to realise the ocean’s potential to benefit human health:
    • Foster the production of new medicines and biotechnology from the ocean by supporting research and development, creating digital DNA libraries and developing biotechnological processes and products that are socially relevant, economically sustainable and environmentally friendly.
    • Build and sustain food security from the ocean by supporting sustainable seafood cultivation and harvest, promoting nutrition-sensitive fisheries management, supporting marine tenure of local communities and Indigenous Peoples, and ensuring community co-creation and genuine involvement in marine planning.
    • Enhance physical and mental health and societal wellbeing by upscaling blue prescription (nature-based health intervention) programmes and developing policies to increase ocean literacy.
    • Enhance the ocean’s contributions to economic growth and equity by scaling up investment in a sustainable ocean economy, incorporating metrics of natural capital and human capital into all benefits evaluations, reforming global finance and trade to provide more equitable access to marine resources, and creating cross-sectoral linkages to encourage co-creation.
  • Achieving these actions will necessitate empowering marginalised voices and creating a sustainable, more equitable economy that benefits all of humanity. Healthcare professionals and the global health sector are uniquely well positioned to advocate for change, advance equity and promote sustained global action to protect both ocean health and human health. Yet at present are they are underutilised in this capacity.
  • We must act now to address this global ocean and human health emergency.
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