The Marion Dufresne off the “port” of Crozet. East Island in the background. Photo by Dimitri Damasceno, Wikimedia Commons.
World Oceans Day (WOD), the initiative proposed in 1992 by Canada at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and officially recognized by the UN in 2008, aims to catalyze collective action for a healthy ocean and a stable climate.
The Sea Around Us MSc student, Anna Luna Rossi (fourth from the left), with her NGO Reserva colleagues and actress Auli’i Cravalho at UNOC 2025.
By Anna Luna Rossi.
June 2025 marked the third edition of the United Nations Ocean Conference, hosted in Nice, France, and co-organized by France and Costa Rica. UNOC3 falls within the Ocean Decade initiative to create a framework for communicating and using ocean knowledge to generate real-time actions for safeguarding our marine resources.
French President Emmanuel Macron, being interviewed at UNOC 2025. Image by France.TV.
During an interview with French national television, President Emmanuel Macron was confronted with images from David Attenborough’s Ocean documentary, which shows the gigantic nets of bottom trawlers operating in the Mediterranean dropping hundreds of tonnes of all kinds of fishes on a boat after razing the seafloor and everything in their way.
Los Roques National Park in Venezuela. Photo by …your local connection, Flickr.
A new Paper Park Index (PPI) developed by researchers at the University of British Columbia’s Sea Around Us initiative helped identify 49 marine protected areas (MPAs) across the world where enough fishing takes place to contravene the protection status officially assigned to such sites.