It’s time for a change: Centering community voices for ocean decision-making

By: Sheila Babauta, Ayana Melvin, and Mehak Arora. Originally published on saipantribune.com.

While the three of us come from different communities and backgrounds, as women of color working in ocean advocacy we are all frustrated with the status quo of exploiting the ocean without replenishing it. Our communities have a long history of caring for the ocean—and the shared experience of being cut off from it.

We see harmful barriers across American waters firsthand. In the Mariana Islands, the U.S. military continues to carry out destructive training and testing activities on land and nearby waters supporting its title of largest fossil fuel consumer in the world. The paid entry to Misquamicut Beach in Rhode Island is a reminder that access to the coastline can be limited for anyone who is lower income, Black, Indigenous, and from other communities of color. Our country’s inland education often fails to acknowledge the fact that everyone is connected to the coast.

We’re working to steward our shared waters and increase access to them, but we need to see more systemic change to address the systemic problems of colonialism and racism. We have been left out of ocean and environmental policy decisions that directly impact our lives. We want a seat at the table, with equal decision-making power.

Last week, we participated in the international Our Ocean Conference, where global leaders set an agenda for the water we’re all dependent on for food, for spiritual practices, for the oxygen we breathe, for the joy of a beach day. But it’s a conference where the decision-making has already happened—the commitments and announcements made had already been debated and resolved in other rooms, by other people.

While we were encouraged by several international commitments—such as Greece’s commitment to ban bottom trawling in all of its marine protected areas by 2030—we were left disappointed in the wake of commitments from the U.S. The U.S. announced $508 million in commitments to protect our ocean. Of that amount, approximately $37.6 million went toward the advancement of MPAs though none focused on area-based protections. For comparison, at the 2023 Our Ocean Conference in Panama, the U.S delegation announced $6 billion in commitments to address threats to our ocean, doubling their pledges from 2022. Protecting nature allows it to thrive and allowing nature to thrive allows people to thrive. There should be more and more effectively managed marine protected areas to move the world toward the necessary goal of protecting 30% of the world’s waters by 2030—a goal that Pacific Island leaders initially proposed that has now been adopted by Western governments.

Historically, though, conservation has been used as a tool of colonialism. We have the opportunity to use the laws of conservation to enshrine Indigenous practices and make marine spaces more accessible for everyone—if we rethink how government agencies can share power with local communities. Who was part of the decision-making to identify where the boundary lines are drawn? Who has the power to manage them once they are established?

We hope that this decade is full of announcements about new areas of the ocean that will be safe from oil and gas exploration, deep sea mining, overfishing, and other harms facilitated by government approval. Our voices—from communities of color—must be a part of the decision-making process from the beginning. We want to see power redistributed to community leaders, not one person representing a diversity category. From this starting point, it will be possible to identify where and how to protect coastal and ocean waters that don’t reinforce harmful power structures.

In the past, monument boundaries have made traditional fishing practices the subject of debate when they could have been thoughtfully enshrined from the beginning. Marine sanctuaries and monuments are sites for scientific research and exploration, but without intentional planning they default to locations for parachute science. They should be an opportunity to bring young, local scientists into the field and establish themselves as experts on their home environment.

We know that redistributing power can work: the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument now follows traditional management practices created by Native Hawaiians, who have equal power to federal agencies in monument decision-making.

The Biden Administration has put forward plenty of ocean policies including an entire strategy focused on embedding a justice approach into federal decision-making. It calls for developing a diverse, equitable, and inclusive ocean workforce and applying Indigenous knowledge to federal research. It’s time to move these ideas off the page, and quickly.

These aren’t new asks, but they are more urgent than ever. Last year set global records for ocean surface temperature and sea level rise. Climate change isn’t just on the horizon: it’s here, and it’s supercharging the typhoons that strike the Mariana Islands and the hurricanes that flood Louisiana.

This Our Ocean Conference, the Biden Administration missed a critical opportunity to follow through on prior promises; center and celebrate Indigenous, Black, and local community efforts; and position the U.S. as a leader in ocean protection. The Mariana Trench Marine Monument was created 15 years ago and still doesn’t have the planning documents needed to actually manage the site. The plan should center Indigenous leadership in the Marianas and legally establish co-management of the monument. The U.S. remains one of the few countries in the

world that hasn’t signed onto the United Nations Global Plastic Treaty.

And there are community-led proposals for new and expanded marine protected areas that the Biden Administration could act on: the Chumash Heritage site is waiting on designation as a national marine sanctuary. The Gullah-Geechee Nation has proposed a series of projects to buffer their Atlantic coastline home while protecting local foodways and traditions.

The current harm to the ocean—the overfishing, the coral bleaching, the plastic pollution—is the result of decisions made by people, including government leaders who attended this global conference. Many have chosen inaction as a decision.

Our reciprocal relationship with the ocean falls apart when we see it as a resource to extract from instead of the site of local practices, traditions, and benefits. To rearrange our priorities, it’s time for new perspectives, new urgency, and new ambition to guide marine conservation.

Sheila Babauta works for the Friends of the Mariana Trench on Saipan, CNMI. Ayana Melvan works for Aquarium Conservation Partnership in Rhode Island, USA. Mehak Arora works for Earth Echo International in Texas, USA.