Climate: More resolutions on paper from the 3rd 2025 UN Conference in Nice, France

Dagbani Usman
Johannesburg, S.A.
September 28, 2025

T he third UN Ocean Conference, held in Nice, France, from June 9th-13, 2025. This event brought together 150 countries, 60 heads of state and government, over 2,000 scientists and over 30,000 institutions and environmentalists. The ocean is vital for humans, animals, and plants. It covers three-quarters of the Earth’s surface, contains 97 percent of the Earth’s water, and represents over 50 percent of living things.

Oceans play a vital environmental and economic importance too. Natural resources, including food, medicines, and biofuels, have created the green and blue economies. Over 150 million jobs depend on export, import, and consumption of ocean-based goods and services, including tourism, offshore wind energy and marine biotechnology. But this gigantic regulating and life-saving machine is in crisis. It faces challenges from widespread pollution, declining fish stocks, rising temperatures and many perils over its biodiversity. Marine ecosystems, which are vital to over 3 billion people are also under threat.

Goals of the conference

The 2025 United Nations Ocean Conference ensures the implementation of the UN Sustainable Development Goal 14 (‟Life Below Water”), which aims to conserve and use the oceans, seas, and marine resources. The Nice (France) event brought together governments, United Nations institutions, intergovernmental organizations, and international financial institutions. It also convened civil society organizations, academic institutions, the scientific community, and the private sector. Philanthropic organizations, indigenous peoples, and local communities also took part in the event. Before Nice, the conference had convened in New York (2017) and Lisbon - Portugal (2022).

These conferences monitor and benchmark five critical conservation areas by looking at how stakeholders act on coastal eutrophication, a principal cause of overgrowth of algae, which affects aquatic ecosystems. They gather data on water quality, biodiversity and their effects on human health, while measuring ocean acidification and ocean warming, which in recent decades, have been the main causes of rising sea levels. Finally, the conference works with countries to reduce plastic pollution and overfishing.

In Nice, the discussions focused on pressing and emerging issues, such as the sustainable management and restoration of ecosystems and scientific cooperation, knowledge, and education. The conference also concentrated on the mobilization of finance for ocean action, sustainable fisheries, and the ratification and implementation of ocean-related international law.

Sustainable Development Goal 14 (Life Below Water)

In 2015, the UN General Assembly adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. This agenda is a universal call for action to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure that people enjoy peace and prosperity. It contains 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 mutually-reinforcing targets to be achieved by 2030. SDG 14 has ten targets, the most prominent of which are ensuring sustainable use of the oceans, protecting the marine ecosystems, biodiversity and livelihoods. These targets have to align with the other SDGs and targets and also with pre-existing climate agreements.

But according to the European Union, only 10 percent of the SDG 14 (Life Below Water) targets are on track or met. The 2024 report on the Sustainable Development Goals documents a slow progress towards its goals¹. Factors that have contributed to the slow implementation of SDG 14 include limited funding, fuzzy targets, and insufficient monitoring. In addition, the biggest polluters are not accepting a proportional burden sharing of conservation costs.

Resolutions

Despite past implementation challenges, the 2025 UN Ocean Conference in Nice yielded the ‟Nice Ocean Action Plan”. This is a framework that aims to combine political declarations with over 800 voluntary commitments from governments, scientists, and civil society. The Nice Conference builds on previous agreements, including the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. This framework is an outcome of COP 15 in December 2022. It committed signatories to the establishment of protected areas to safeguard biodiversity hotspots. The ultimate goal is that these hotspots will represent 30 percent of the ocean by 2030. In May 2024, the UN designated 199 conservation zones and 18,200 marine protected areas, which together cover over only 8.12 percent of the ocean.

Another major agreement was the World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement on Fisheries Subsidies of June 2022. The Agreement aims to curb these harmful overfishing and illegal fishing practices. Since April 2025, 69 country signatories have agreed to comply with this agreement on fisheries subsidies.

Another milestone is the 2009 Agreement on Port State Measures (PSMA), which is the first binding international agreement that targets illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing. The PSMA requires parties to control foreign vessels that enter or use their ports. Since July 2024, 101 States, including the European Union totaling 60 percent of port States, have endorsed the agreement.

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