 Well, good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. You're all very welcome. It falls to me to share this session, which enables us to hear from a man who is both a friend, but also a very prominent UN representative for the interests of developing countries in the largest sense, but now with a very strong focus on the issues relating to oceans and the sustainable development and conservation of oceans. I'd like to ask Sarah McGrath of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to come up and say a few words of introduction, Sarah. Good afternoon, and delighted to be here at the first of the 2019 Development Matters series, which the department does in cooperation with our friends and colleagues here in the IIEA. It gives me great pleasure this afternoon to warmly welcome and introduce His Excellency Peter Thompson, the United Nations Secretary Jeb, I'll try that again. The United Nations Secretary General Special Envoy for the Ocean. You must have very long cards, Peter, do you? And I'd like to express my sincere thanks to the IIEA for the invitation to make his introduction. From one islander to another, it is a privilege to introduce a man who's been instrumental in giving a voice to the world's largest natural resource and standing up for the countries and communities that rely so heavily on healthy oceans. After his position as permanent representative to the UN, His Excellency Thompson undertook his presidency of the General Assembly at the United Nations. And during this time, he, together with David, who modestly perhaps forbids from saying it himself, was a driving force behind the implementation of SDG-14 to conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas, and marine resources for sustainable development, drawing greater international attention to oceans, climate change, and sustainable development. He has also been instrumental in elevating the issue of oceans and climate change in the context of sustainable development, in particular through key initiatives such as the First United Nations Oceans Conference in June 2017. Such was the support garnered for this initiative. There's a plan to hold a Second United Nations Oceans Conference proposed for 2020. It's no surprise then that in 2017, Peter Thompson was appointed as the UN Secretary-General's first special envoy for the oceans. I think we can all agree that we can't imagine a more fitting person for such a role. As a persistent champion of our natural environment, I'm sure that I share everyone's enthusiasm to learn more about Peter's ambition to deliver on the sustainable development agenda through the protection of our oceans. I want to say a few words about the shared value of our oceans and the role they play in sustainable development, and how that is, I hope it goes without saying, essential to Ireland, our people, and the countries with whom we work. We're acutely aware of the relationship between our oceans and climate change. Marine life and ecosystems are often the unsung heroes in the fight against climate change and the protection of a healthy planet. Our oceans provide 50% of the oxygen we breathe while also contributing to more regular and predictable weather patterns. Yet we face an unfortunate irony that this invaluable natural resource is being eroded as a result of damaging human activities, in particular climate change, plastic pollution, and overfishing all illustrate what can sometimes seem like a lack of respect for our oceans and the vulnerability of them to unsustainable activities. But if you'll excuse the pond, it does seem that the tide is turning. And to quote Peter Thompson himself, the global consciousness is rallying around the need for humanity to transform its relationship with the ocean. Ireland stands ready to help make that transformation happen. Ireland is committed to the full realisation of Agenda 2030 and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, and as we plan to up the ante on our implementation of action at home and abroad. Ireland's currently supporting a number of initiatives that contribute to the protection of our oceans and increasing the support for small-scale fishers and fishing communities. Inclusive marine fisheries governance and protection of marine biodiversity have been key areas of support. Much of our geographic focus has been on least-developed countries and small island-developing states, which have the most to lose when it comes to ocean damage. At home, we support the growing body of expertise that informs on how to best protect our oceans. And I know we have a number of colleagues from the Marine Institute and other academic institutions who do really crucial work in that regard with us today. I should also mention that Ireland's new policy on international development, which is due to be launched this week, will reflect the growing concern related to climate change and sustainable blue economy. It will set a pathway to safeguard our oceans, both through enhanced climate action and through more dedicated support on oceans, marine biodiversity and sustainable fishing. We plan to work more closely with regions such as the Caribbean and the Pacific, where we will intensify our support for vulnerable islands to address their most pressing concerns surrounding climate change and oceans. In particular, we will identify how we can support community-based adaptation and resilience to limit the severity of climate change impacts. This new policy will build on existing initiatives and efforts that we have started in the last few years. And I would like to mention, in particular, just last year, in 2018, Ireland provided one million in support to the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility, which provides insurance payouts to Caribbean countries in the aftermath of natural disasters. The facility has proven to be a core lifeline to post-disaster small island economies, helping them to maintain continuity of governance and basic services and financing immediate recovery and relief efforts. And I couldn't possibly, I think, leave out the Pacific, given who our guest of honour is. So I should also mention that Ireland has provided funding to the Secretariat for Pacific Regional Environmental Program, a regional body in the Pacific, which has been essential to building capacity and technical support for Pacific islands. And through our collaboration with them, 14 small island country delegates from places like Samoa, Fiji, and Kiribati were enabled to participate in the UN Climate Change Negotiations in 2018, effectively sitting at a table where key decisions were made in relation to climate action. And that's in keeping, I think, with something that everyone here will understand from a whole range of areas, which is support for the concept of nothing about us without us, which we have to live abroad as well as at home. We're in the process of looking at options to support the Pacific islands through the Asian Development Bank, and we're also doing further scoping on specific tailored support for the protection of oceans and looking, as I say, at our, how we can work with small islands in the Pacific and Caribbean on building on our collective knowledge, sharing our capacities and enhancing resilience to changing ocean patterns. We want to identify shared lessons and harness solutions that can be multiplied across countries and regions. And on that note, because I think I've already been a bit longer than I promised Owen and Jill, I'll hand over it to his Ex-NC Peter Thompson. Peter. Thank you. Thank you very much for those kind words. First, I'll answer the question, which is probably in most of your minds, is how come this guy is Fijian? He's as white as any Irishman. I'm a fifth generation Fijian. I've been in the Fiji government service most of my life and my parents did and sort of my grandparents and my first ancestor, my great-great-grandfather was a Scotsman who was a master mariner. And I mentioned that because my family arrived through him because he died, they traded out of Fiji in his vessel for a while, but then he died there. And he arrived in the age of sail. And I think this is really important because life was okay for them. They sailed out from, he was from, as I say, our broth in Scotland and made his way out there as did the whole of Australasia in terms of the European settlement by sail. And yet here we are today really struggling to figure out how we're gonna get our global shipping fleet down to 50% of its GHG emissions by 2050 as the IMOs agreed we should. And of course, when you look at the indigenous people of the Pacific Islands, pretty much every island in that vast ocean, and you have to fly over it to understand how vast it is, including New Zealand and Hawaii, was settled by Polynesians and Melanesians and Micronesians who were traveling around back and forward in ocean-going canoes. So, you know, humanity can get by with a lot of these things at which we today think are absolutely essential and not really, and I want to say more about that later. But first I want to thank the Institute for inviting me to come and address you all and thank you all for coming and listening to the words I have to say. Somebody, I better keep an eye on the time and do this when I've accepted, extended my time because you can never shut an ambassador up as David knows, you know, at the United Nations. So somebody, you know, ring a bell or something when I've got three minutes to wind things up. But I want to thank the Institute and I want to thank you all for spending time with us this afternoon on what I regard, obviously, as one of the existential matters for humanity now and the times in which we live, climate and ocean and biodiversity being the big three without getting that right, we're not going to survive. I want to in particular thank Jill and David Donahue. For those of you that do not know, they were real stars in the UN firmament during the time that I was across. I was there for seven years and David and Jill came across and really set the place alight with David in particular, chairing the negotiations, co-chairing the negotiations which resulted in the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda and that is no small feat to get all those countries to agree to that agenda and that agenda is basically with the Paris Climate Agreement our plan for survival on this planet. So it was no small feat. So thank you, Ireland, for sending us David and Jill. Since I'm in the land of Yates, my favorite part, I'm gonna read you a poem and I do this occasionally because I do love this poem. It's by Naruda who got the Nobel Prize as a Chilean Pacific man like me and it's called The Sea. I need The Sea because it teaches me. I don't know if I learn music or awareness. If it's a single wave or it's vast existence or only it's harsh voice or a shining suggestion of fishes and ships. The fact is that until I fall asleep, in some magnetic way, I move in the University of the waves. That's just the first verse, the second and third are pretty good so read it if you've got time. The Sea by Pablo Naruda. What did The Sea teach me? I'm sure like all of you knocking around in rock pools around Dublin Bay, it taught you a lot when you were a kid. In Fiji, we learned to swim pretty much as soon as we learned to walk and of course when you've got your first mask on and you saw what was there on the coral reef right in front of your home, there's a million types of life just teeming there. It was the lesson was what a joy and what a wonder it is to be a human being living on planet Earth and that just filled your life with this wonderful possibilities and obviously something you wanted to hand on. What's it teaching us today? It's teaching us a very different lesson. Apart from anything that reef that I was describing of my home in Suva is now bleached and does not have a very hopeful future really if the warming trends are continuing and also the polluting trends that we've got. So that reef has gone but there are other more important lessons which is that the ocean is acidifying and that's gonna make it very hard for life in the ocean and as carbon dioxide dissolves into the ocean those of you who are not chemists like me you'd understand that as the water becomes more acidic it makes it harder and harder for calcium carbonate based life such as shellfish and vertebrates like us to form and so life is becoming more and more difficult as the acidity rates increase and they are increasing 30% since pre-industrial times but they're increasing and accelerating rates every time we measure it seems to be a worse situation. So that of course is also very bad for corals which are being heavily affected by that. Then we've got the fact that the ocean is warming again and trends which seem to increase every time we take a new measurement. More than 93% of the atmosphere is heating due to greenhouse gas effects has been absorbed by the ocean and that as I say is happening in an accelerating rate and what do we see? We see melting glaciers, melting ice sheets, we see the ocean temperature rising and what does that do? Of course there's only one ocean that's all one big bathtub and the level of the ocean goes up as a result of all those factors and that of course is very bad news for a lot of countries. Three of our neighbors in the South Civic, public of Marshall Islands, public Kirpas and Tuvalu are all projected to not be able to sustain human society by the end of this century which is tragic when you think that there's thousands of years of human culture, own languages and all the rest will just be obliterated when that happens and that's happening in various other parts of the world and while it's tragic for those countries think about what that sea level rise means for the river deltas of the area of the planet placed like Bangladesh, Mekong Delta, great food baskets with many, many millions of people living there, land which will be underwater with the rising sea levels and it's anybody's guess how high those are gonna go. At the moment we're saying I'll meet her by the end of the century but it could be a lot more. You also got to when you, and this affects Ireland when you think about warming oceans with effects on the currents of the ocean and I remember reading 20 or 30 years ago about the fact that the Gulf Stream made one day fail as a result of the warming of the ocean and I thought of the time science fiction but already we're noticing that the weakening of the Gulf Stream and there's something obviously that Norway and others are having a very close look at. We've got deoxygenation happening at a frightening scale. We've got dead zones proliferating in the ocean. We've got as you know, eutrophication placed like Florida with the algal blooms and the West Indies tourist industry under huge strain because of the effect of the Sargassum weed which is just coming in like it's never done before in history in great football fields of this dense seaweed which is toxic once it starts rotting on your beach and of course there's no place for a tourist to be paying big hotel rates for like they were before and I've stayed on these beaches and you just, you cannot continue with that and that is being put down to ocean warming but also from excess fertilizer coming off the South American continent and causing these blooms of the Sargassum seaweed. So things are changing out there and it's not good. Meanwhile of course I'm doing a lot of work with the World Bank at the moment on how to fund sewage schemes and this seems like pretty prosaic stuff but the fact is I could give you a list tomorrow of a thousand towns just in my region that need sewage schemes because they're currently pumping raw sewage into coastal ecosystems which are destroying again the coral reefs but also the complex marine ecosystems and lagoons and that's happening throughout the developing world so again work that we need to do. Then for talking pollution I don't need to speak to you about plastic pollution the whole world knows about that now but even the people who depend on the fish are killing them by discarding their fishing gear discarding fish and gear, ghost gear as it's called is a huge problem throughout the world and I believe here on the Irish coast as well. So all of these things of course are man-made because climate change is anthropogenic and all of us have got skin in the game. You know I mentioned pollution one thing that a lot of people don't consider is underwater noise and how difficult that is for the marine ecosystems that are out there. Ships noise, sure. You know 90% of our trade is carried by ships so all those ships going by what are they doing to the marine ecosystems underneath the ships and that's only just now being understood and IMO has been quite responsible about that as well in terms of trying to quiet ships so that we do less damage because the scientific proof is now showing that marine ecosystems are being badly affected by this. We always knew that naval sonar was also very damaging it was responsible for beaching whales and that sort of thing but perhaps the one that is less well understood and is probably the most damaging of all of these seismic air guns that the oil and gas industry is using which scientific studies are now showing are causing immense damage deforming the zooplankton or just outright killing zooplankton on which so much of the ocean's ecosystem depends. So again, man management, trust the science and let's get good governance in place for underwater noise. On fisheries, again Ireland has a, I think a prominent role to play. You are a fishing nation, you are an island nation. The fisheries side of things is not in good shape. We've set up these RFMOs around the world some of which are doing a great job, others are not. We have measures that it can improve things but we have to take them. I refer in particular to the FAO Port State's measures agreement which basically is designed to stop illegal fish being landed around the world. Now, there is $23 billion worth of illegal fish landed in our ports every year. $23 billion, all of us have been receivers of stolen goods at some stage in our life eating fish and chips or whatever. Now that can be beaten by the Port State's measures agreement because that basically provides that any country that signs up to it and I'm happy to say that Fiji and Ireland have that we inspect the prevalence of the fish that's landed in our ports. One of the things we're driving for now is to get everybody signed up on that by next year. Why next year? SDG 14.4 in illegal fishing matures next year. So if we're gonna be faithful to the sustainable development goals which David and others put together we've got to end that illegal fishing and I'm gonna be meeting with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs here in Dublin this afternoon to talk about the Cork Ocean Summit which is coming up in June this year. And one of the things I'm wanting to really stress to the Irish government is that this gathering in Cork could be an excellent opportunity to really ram home the point that we've only got a year to see 14.4 respected the way we all agreed it will. I end illegal fishing and the best way we're doing that as I say is get everybody to sign up for the PSMA. Another good one would be the fisheries subsidies. That again is a SDG 14, I think 14.6 that matures next year. That says that we're supposed to end harmful fisheries subsidies. At the moment we're subsidizing to the tune of I think it's around 20 billion dollars industrial fishing fleets to go out there and catch diminishing fish stocks. Where is the sanity in that? We're giving subs, it's like paying your burglar to come and rob your house. You're giving subsidies to supposedly nice fisher folk but 80% of those subsidies are going to big industrial fishing fleets that are going out and pillaging the coastlines of whole continents, Africa in particular. So in those harmful fisheries subsidies and we will see that fleet diminish somewhat and we'll also help artisanal fishers because they'll no longer be having those subsidized industrial fleets coming and raping their fisheries in. So that's fisheries. That's all about man management really. Everything that I've described there. There is nothing where nature is the cause of all this. It's us that's putting it on nature. As I said, we've got a plan and that plan has been agreed to by all of us through painstaking agreement, the Paris Climate Agreement you all know about and the Sustainable Development Goals which I referred to earlier were not something arrived at lightly. These were many years of negotiations night after night until we arrived at this plan of 17 Sustainable Development Goals, one of which as you know is SDG 14, the ocean goal. And faithfully implemented that plan by 2030 I absolutely believe as a grandfather that by 2030 faithfully implemented the Paris Climate Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals will not have delivered the utopia which we'd love to see for our grandchildren but it will have turned the corner that oil tanker which as you know when you give the order for it to turn it's gonna take a long, long time to turn around but by 2030 faithfully implemented our plan will see us turning that corner. We will have to live with the effects of everything we've been doing since the Industrial Revolution for at least another 100 years and things are gonna continue to get worse but we will have turned the corner and we'll be heading to a better place by 2030 if this plan is faithfully implemented. So SDG 14 kind of reference was made in the introduction to the 2017 UN Ocean Conference. That was a game changer. I think it was the first time that we really got all the governments of the world together with the best of our science, the best of our NGOs, the best of our civil society, private sector. Everybody was welcome there and came into New York for that week. And that was the game changer in terms of awareness. After that anybody who said the ocean doesn't have problems that there is this decline in the ocean's health going on. Anybody who did not accept that was either in denial or was just apathetic. And so the work since then, having created that awareness is to find the solutions. And that's what we're all about at the moment. And I'm happy to say that I'm in a different country, two countries usually every week and everywhere I go, there are people working on solutions, be it governments or civil society or science. Everybody's in our private sector, trying to find the solutions. And when I set off on this special envoy journey, I said to Secretary General Guterres, you know, there is no civil bullets here, any of these problems. And he said he understood that. And I said, you know, let's agree that our policy here is that, yes, we're pursuing SDG 14, that's my role, but let a thousand flowers bloom, you know. Wherever anybody's got good ideas, let's back them. And a lot of them are gonna fail, but who cares? You know, let's just get this positive movement going around the world. And I think you can see that happening now. A lot of failures, but a fantastic amount of energy and ideas being put now into solutions. How are we tracking? As I said, four of the 10 targets of SDG 14 mature next year. One of those, I'm very confident that we will get there, which is 10% of the ocean to be covered by marine protected areas by 2020. Back in 2017, we're about 5.7, we're currently at about 7.5, and UNAP assures me that we'll get to 10% by next year. So that's a good one, and as was mentioned, I think downstairs over lunch, the movement really is towards 30% of the ocean being covered by marine protected areas. And where I expect that to happen is at the convention on biodiversity, the COP, which will be held in Beijing at the end of next year. So there will be an ongoing conversation from the Secretary-General's climate summit this September through to the Ocean Conference, which is gonna be held in Lisbon in 2020, and I'll tell you a little bit about that, through to this Beijing Conference of Biodiversity. That conversation about 30% of the ocean being in marine protected areas by 2030 will, I'll make sure that that conversation goes through and is brought into being in Beijing. Why is that important for all three of those conferences? If you take something like coral, it's the climate which is gonna be the demise of coral. We don't get things right. The Ocean Conference is the assessment of where we've got to on coral, and then the Biodiversity COP with 30% protection being the aim there, obviously one of the big solutions. A second one which matures next year, target matures next year is the illegal fishing one which I referred to, and the plan there is to get that PSM agreement signed up by everybody. Then there'll be nowhere for illegal fish to be landed. The third one is the ending harmful fisheries subsidies which I referred to, and we're working with WTO there to try and get that done by next year. And the fourth one is, and I always get a mental blank, but I can always remember three fisheries, what's the other one, MPA, it'll come to me in a sec. But we're proceeding pretty well on track, I would say on most of them. And one of the reasons that is so is that at the first Ocean Conference there were about 1400 voluntary commitments made, now 1500 voluntary commitments. And they have been progressing and we've been working with everybody who made a voluntary commitment. What we did was we divided them up into nine families which roughly makes sense under SDG 14. There's one on marine science, there's one on coral and mangroves, there's another one on fisheries, there's nine of them all together. And they're all headed up by international figures who have led them through very successfully through to the conference next year where we will have our moment of honesty as to how we're actually performing in terms of the implementation of SDG 14. So that big moment which I refer to is gonna be in Lisbon, second to the 6th of June next year. There is currently a mandating resolution being worked through the General Assembly of the United Nations. I expect that to be through by middle of next month at the latest. From that point onwards we are gonna be focusing everybody's attention towards Lisbon. I just wanted to underline how important that conference is for us all because we're used to the sort of drama of the climate change conferences. But an Ocean Conference only comes along rarely, this is the only second time it's ever happened. You read about Ocean Summits all the time and as I mentioned there's one, there's a summit happening in Cork in June and so on. But there's only one time that everybody, like every nation and all of their science and civil society and everybody else comes together. That's when you have a UN Ocean Conference. Why? Because you have to get the General Assembly of the United Nations to pass a resolution to say we're gonna have this conference. That means everybody in Russia and America included. Which is not the case with every other summit that you ever read about. It's always sort of groups of various people. Usually it's a sea of white faces like this that I'm addressing. But happily we had, as Dave and I were discussing last night, very successful conference in Africa in Nairobi last November where 10,000 Africans turned up for the Sustainable Blue Ocean Occultions. Anyway, there's only one that everybody is united at and where we can make decisions and make assessments as to the state of the ocean and that's at a UN Ocean Conference and that's happening next June. So I look forward to being there with you. One of the things that's gonna be presented at that conference is a report that a high level panel on sustainable ocean economy is putting together now. That panel is 12 Heads of Government and I have the honor of sitting on it as well. It's led by the Prime Minister of Norway. It has people like Prime Minister of Japan, President of Mexico, President of Chile, President of Indonesia. There's a very carefully selected geographical grouping of Heads of Government who are guiding the work of that and then an international panel of some 20 world experts who are writing the report on how to get the balance between protection and production right in a sustainable ocean economy and that report will be presented. It'll be one of the main presentations at the opening of the UN Ocean Conference next year. So we're placing a lot of weight on that report. A couple of items I'd like to just mention before I close and they're controversial and I understand this is Chatham House rules, isn't it? Sort of, sort of. Okay, well they're both rather controversial. One is deep sea mining which I'm sure you're all aware that we're approaching the era of deep sea mining, maybe. It's happened twice before but everybody's very serious about it this time. I used to be president of the International Sea Bed Authority actually on two occasions and I was one of the ones who was pushing for the mining code to get done and the reason for that was of good governance. I mean if you have an UN class, we have an International Sea Bed Authority which is supposed to be the authority of everything that's down there outside of EEZs and we had not put the mining code in place. In other words we did not have law for what? Certain companies, Lockheed Martin and others wanted to do which was to go down and extract the minerals. So my big thing was under good governance you've got to get the laws in place. So the good news there I suppose is that the mining code is almost completed. It'll probably be ready by next year. The worry for a lot of people is that once you've got the mining code in place those that have had their exploration contracts because we've been giving out exploration contracts for 10 years or more will quickly apply for mining licenses which will then be, can be available now we've got our mining code or by then we'll have a mining code. So there's some very powerful forces. Under those applications what happens is that a company let's say Lockheed Martin for example has to be sponsored by a sponsoring state and they are by, while John Cameron was Prime Minister the UK did an arrangement with Lockheed where they are the sponsoring state for Lockheed's exploration contracts and will presumably be for their mining contracts. China has got a whole bunch of exploration contracts there, Japan, Korea, Belgium is really at the forefront and all these people have got the technology being developed at the same time to be doing this seabed mining. Now coincidentally the United Nations in December 2017 passed by consensus in other words, all of us agreed that we would have a decade for a United Nations decade for marine science for sustainable development, it's called. And the idea there is that we catch up on this big blankness in our knowledge about what's actually down there. How does the deep sea marine ecosystem work? How does it interact with the water column as a whole? What would be the effect, if you're talking seabed mining of digging up the seabed which has been that way for millions and millions of years and we now know there's a lot of life down there and living in extreme conditions without oxygen or light or anything like that. So different kinds of life on this planet. What would be the implications of us digging all that up and then finding 10 years in that, oh actually we've created an ecological disaster here, pity we didn't know about that. Wouldn't there be a logic in waiting as I believe the European Parliament has called for actually in a resolution last year that we have a moratorium and that we let the decade run its course and find out the answers to these questions before going down and doing any mining. It could be that the decade says, hey actually, let's say polymetallic nodules. That's not gonna disturb the marine ecosystem to such a degree that you can't go down and pick up those metallic. That may be the conclusion, the decade. But until we've had the decade, we don't really know the answer to that question. So unfortunately I got caught on camera saying that in Davos, so I suppose I can say it again here because as an envoy, I'm not really supposed to be. Could I just just remove the Q&A now? Very good, I've got one more controversial one which I'll hide then. I was gonna talk about geoengineering but I can bury that one. And look, I'll just finish by saying, I'm really looking forward to the discussion this afternoon with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs because I do think that that quark summit can be very, very influential on our assessments next year in Lisbon on how we're doing on getting the fisheries industry around the world to be more responsible on such things as overfishing. So yeah, with that, I will close and go to Q&A but all this sounds so pessimistic and my wife gives me a hard time since I get back home saying, can't you offer a bit more hope? But I do believe that, as I say, we have a plan and what we've got to do is just be hard-nosed and do the necessary over the next 10 years to make sure that plan comes to its fruition and we put our relationship with the ocean back into the one of respect and balance which our forefathers and foremothers, if that's the right word, had back in those days of sale when I first. Thank you so much.