Transcriber: Martina Verdún Reviewer: Denise RQ
I'm an ocean optimist,
and I want to explore what that means.
While asking myself what this optimism was all about,
I wondered whether it was
the British stiff upper-lip, "Everything will be just fine,"
or growing up in a very positive family
where there was always a solution to every problem,
or whether quite frankly, I'm just in denial.
I know for one thing I'm not naive.
I've been really fortunate to travel the world,
see a lot of the ocean first hand.
I've seen desperate fishermen blasting the reefs to catch the last few fish,
devastating a beautiful, diverse landscape in a matter of seconds.
I've seen beaches clogged with plastic, harbors full of litter.
I've seen the desperate look in the fishers' eyes
as they come back at the end of the day
with a tiny catch which is nowhere enough to feed their family the next day.
I've seen the more insidious impacts of climate change,
even in the most remote, best protected parts of the ocean,
coral reefs bleaching white, dead and dying,
because of increasing sea-surface temperatures.
It's not just these far-off, glamorous, tropical places;
it's right here at home.
It's impossible to go to a beach in Cornwall, or anywhere in the UK,
or in fact, most places in the world,
without seen rubbish and plastic along the shore.
My children are growing up learning how to do beach cleans
rather than just enjoying a healthy, natural environment.
It’s not just these images I take with me,
and I carry around the world with me;
I also know from the data, there's papers, graphs, charts, and information
that show that the ocean is in really deep trouble.
So why considering all of this and all that I've known I've seen?
Why am I still and ocean optimist?
I've put it down to three reasons:
the first of these is the power of the individual.
Anywhere you go,
there are people from all walks of life who are making a difference.
Against all odds, they are making things happen.
When I got involved, 20 years ago, in marine conservation,
I was fortunate to work with one these individuals
who led and continues to champion the cause for the tiny seahorse;
the quirkiest, most extraordinary of fishes doesn’t really look like a fish,
and it's not really very good at fishy-like things, like swimming;
but these extraordinary fish have some incredible characteristics.
They mate for life.
The male becomes pregnant, brooding the young in its pouch
and giving birth to beautiful, perfectly-formed tiny seahorses
which, as a woman and a mother of two children,
certainly is an attractive characteristic.
(Laughter)
But the problem is these trades have meant
that seahorses have become a globally-traded commodity
with tens of millions of seahorses;
over 70 countries involved in a trade for traditional Chinese medicines
for curiosities, souvenirs, and for the hobby trade as live animals.
They also live in shallow seas around the world,
some of the most vulnerable coastal habitats that there are.
The future looked bleak for the seahorse,
until this one individual,
then three of us, and then, a small team came together
and actually decided to do something about it.
Together, we've helped establish global-trade legislation
that makes the trade more sustainable for seahorses,
we've developed technology
that helps people around the world monitor seahorse populations,
and we've worked in seahorse hot spots with communities
to set up seahorse sanctuaries
that protect not just seahorses but all the other marine life with them.
Within these communities,
there are equally powerful individuals committed to make a change
for their marine life
and to build and restore their livelihoods.
In 20 years, we've set up over 40 marine-protected areas,
these sanctuaries where not just seahorses
but corals, mangroves, sea grasses, and the incredible biodiversity
that we see in the region and in the oceans
are starting to recover and really come back.
So, never underestimate the individual.
Reason number two I'm an ocean optimist is the power of collaboration.
Conservation is inherently really tricky
You're either trying to stop destructive practices,
you're tryng to change behaviors or attitudes,
you're trying to find that tricky balance
between the use and abuse of natural resources.
Conservation is flourishing in some ways.
There wasn't even a degree on the topic when I was in university,
and now there are many,
but it's still a tiny business, comparatively;
and desperately under-resourced,
so too often conservation organizations are pitched against each other
instead of with each other
to compete for the tiny resources and profile for their particular issue.
Collaboration is much easier to say and much harder to actually do,
yet, I've been really fortunate to be involved in several collaborations
that have shown that it's time to put aside egos and logos
and get on with the job in hand,
which is saving the ocean and indeed, the planet.
I wanted to talk about one of these collaborations
which is where six conservation organizations have come together
to protect the oceans further
with the focus on the UK overseas territories.
Our overseas territories contain 94% of all the UK's biodiversity.
It makes the UK responsible for more penguins than any other nation,
and we rank number seven in coral reef nations.
They're quite extraordinary.
We have the largest living coral atoll in the world.
I've been fortunate to visit two of these:
the Chagos Archipelago, right in the middle of the Indian Ocean,
and the Pitcairn Islands in the remote South Pacific.
These places are not only isolated and poorly known,
but they're like living in a wildlife documentary
landing on a deserted island, the cacophony of noise,
of the sea birds as they fly all around you,
diving amongst the incredible diversity and sheer abundance of fish
and seeing what life looks like on a pristine coral reef.
The Chagos Archipelago, 500 kilometers south of Maldives,
is one of the largest protected areas in the world -
640,000 square kilometers of ocean.
It has the greatest fish biomass of everywhere in the Indian Ocean
and the cleanest seawater ever recorded on Earth.
It surely is worth protecting,
Working with this collaboration,
we've been looking to achieve the same level of protection
for the Pitcairn Islands in the South Pacific
and the Ascension Islands in the Atlantic.
Collaboration translates to a lot of hours, a lot of hard work,
respecting each other's differences, diversity, and complementary skills.
There's some arguments, a lot of banter, but a common goal and mission
that has united us to achieve great things and work together collaboratively.
The second collaboration I wanted to talk about is slightly more unusual
and that's about carpets.
Yes, carpets.
We've worked with the world's leading carpet tile manufacturer
who have an incredibly ambitious sustainability agenda,
but also a desire to see how a carpet tile could address social inequality
which has combined with our ambition
to help coastal communities in developing countries
who have very few options and live well below the poverty line.
The solution was to focus on a huge problem of ocean waste
around discarded fishing nets.
We've worked with these communities
to collect nets off the beaches and out of the ocean,
to recycle those nets into nylon and nylon yarn
that is then used to make carpet tiles.
By setting up this supply chain,
we've been able to develop a business model
that actually pays the communities for collecting these nets.
To achieve that in a sustainable way, we set up community banks,
where they can save and access financial service
that is previously, completely impossible for such isolated coastal communities.
In just three years of piloting this project,
we've helped 50,000 people,
we've collected over 100 tons of discarded fishing nets.
If you can't visualize that in weight, that's around the world twice,
as a functional fishing net;
and that's just the beginning.
Our ambition is to scale up and to diversify.
We're already expanding from our work in the Philippines to Cameroon,
and we want to collect 1,000 tons of nets a year, help a million people,
and protect a billion square meters of ocean.
The third reason I'm an ocean optimist
is because the ocean quite simply is amazing.
Just take a second and pull up an amazing ocean memory,
whether it's fishing with your granddad,
watching a sunset with a loved one, dabbling in a rock pool.
The ocean is truly extraordinary, and if we can have a common goal,
where we see that ocean as healthy, our beaches clean,
fish abundant and providing for everybody, - whales, dolphins, seahorses-- thriving
then we can work together to achieve that goal.
But we often feel the problems are too big for us,
that it's somebody else's problem,
that somebody else must have the answer and be able to solve it,
that our individual actions cannot have an impact.
But I want to take one example to change that thinking,
and that's around the single-use plastic water bottle.
This is me in the Chagos Archipelago, an uninhabited island,
over 300 plastic bottles after just 20 minutes
on a deserted, uninhabited island.
There is no a way.
Plastic bottles - all of us use about 200 a year,
every single one of us in this room;
about one third of those are recycled,
and those plastic bottles last 1,000 years.
In the UK, they're the most common item of marine litter on our beaches.
About 8 million tons of plastic is entering our ocean every single year,
and there's going to be more plastic than fish by the year 2050.
So what can we do about it?
It is a problem we can solve, and we're starting to do that.
In 2015, we worked with the luxury department stores, Selfridges,
who now no longer sell plastic bottles to their customers
taking away that choice.
We've worked with individuals, with groups,
with my own organization, London Zoo, Whipsnade Zoo;
we no longer sell plastic bottles.
People can make that individual choice to use a refillable bottle instead.
This just goes to show that there is no formula to being a conservationist.
You don't have to be a marine biologist or a scientist like myself;
it just depends what you want to do.
Everybody can help the ocean, everybody can be a conservationist.
So I'd like to end this
by taking my three examples of why I'm an ocean optimist,
and asking you to take three actions away from today.
Number one: switch to a refillable bottle.
We even gave you one, so you have no excuse.
Number two: in Cornwall, we're all close to the beach,
and the UK is an island nation.
Next time you're next to a canal, the river, or on the beach,
take a few minutes to clean it up,
make our ocean a healthier, more beautiful place.
Finally, like me, be an ocean optimist;
an individual, out there to make a difference,
seeking collaboration and working with others,
and looking for a brighter future for our amazing ocean.
Thank you.
(Applause)