Securing ocean life for sustainable development

Life in the ocean plays a critical role in supporting human health and wellbeing across the planet. The Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services’ (IPBES) Conceptual Framework (CF) synthesizes the complex interlinkages supporting peoples’ wellbeing, focused around access to and use of contributions from nature, how these are shared among people, and how choices and practices affect these. Developed concurrently with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), the IPBES CF helps identify interlinkages among the SDGs, describing the flow of benefits from nature, through economic practices, to societal actors, and how these may be governed. This talk will revolve around contributions from IPBES’s Nexus and Transformative Change Assessments, released in December 2024, to motivate the level of commitment from countries and actors around the world to deliver on SDG14, reverse declines in ocean ecosystems and support sustainable development, through multiple pathways balancing actions across nature, economy and society.