How do we value ecosystems? How do we assess, monetize and protect them with new practices that are constructive and sustainable? How do we move forward? — We have focused on how to assess the value of ecosystems, how to monetize that value as a legitimate balance sheet line, how to create financial instruments by which capital markets and incentives can be directed away from conventional, polluting, destructive use of natural resources on land and sea toward…

222 Solutions to Heal, Restore and Sustain Our Ocean — If climate change solutions have been hampered by structure and performance that have not resulted in return on massive funding commitments to climate change and ocean protection to an extent that has demonstrated success and progress on the ground and in the water, what can we do to change the…

Hint: It’s not because of climate change — by Mia Bennett for Cryopolitics originally published as a Geopolitics feature on Cryopolitics.com In 2017 the Economist published an article headlined, “The Arctic as it is known today is almost certainly gone.” The write-up underscored how climate change and sea ice melt were causing the region as we know it…

What must we change to change our strategy for climate change? — The OUR OCEAN Conference 2022 assembled on the small island nation of Palau this month. OUR OCEAN is a recurring international gathering of governments and environmental organizations intended to “protect ocean health and security, to stand up and declare ocean stakeholder commitments.” This year, according to its official final announcement…

Climate change is accelerating change to all global systems. Do we have the power and the will to break the systemic corruption of the global water cycle and take risks to intervene and change? — In the international policy discourse about climate change, there is a recurring, very odd distinction in use between “climate” and “ocean,” as if these are two separate phenomena, and climate being the over-arching concept, with the ocean as a subsidiary contributor. But isn’t it just the other way round? The…

originally published May 9, 2022 by Timothy G. Nelson for The Maritime Executive [This article is the second part of a two-part series on the legal history of deep-sea mining. The first part may be found here.] During the 1970s, a U.N. conference, “UNCLOS III,” was commissioned to draft a…

published May 9, 2022 by Timothy G. Nelson for The Maritime Executive In June 1974, a large and bulky ship, the Hughes Glomar Explorer, exited Long Beach, California, sailing westward into the Pacific. Boasting an enormous drilling tower, and owned by the notorious and reclusive billionaire, Howards Hughes, the vessel…

The taiga is an enormous boreal forest and wetland at the top of Canada and part of the Russian federation. It, like the Amazon rainforest, is more valuable sustained than exploited. — Last week we discussed the vast bio-region of the Amazon river, forest, and watershed, that constitutes a biodiversity concentration with enormous potential for carbon sequestration, environmental sustainability, and supply of clean water, food, and other support for a multi-national indigenous population. …

When we look to the great biodiversity regions around the world, we look first to the Amazon, that spectacular cross-boundary watershed that descends from the Andes to the ocean across the multi-national borders, multiple ecosystems, and remote interior villages to great coastal cities on the east coast of South America…