The Marina and Founder of The Ocean and Us, Farah Obaidullah, explains in an interview with Efe that “drives a campaign to request the moratorium of deep water mining” that has collected 350,000 signatures because this industrial activity could have “incalculable damage” now and for future generations.
The interview occurs a few days after the start of a new meeting of the International Authority of the Sea Fund (International Seabed Authority, ISA) in Kingston (Jamaica), which will be chaired by Brazilian oceanographer and diplomatic diplomatic Leticia Carvalho.
Obaidullah worked for eleven years as responsible for oceanic campaigns in Greenpeace, where he participated in actions both on land and in the sea. Among its greatest achievements are the development of the presence of the NGO in Western Africa and that of a strategy for the region, as well as the complaint of fishing crimes (INDNR) worldwide.
The defense of the ocean and the relationship of women with the sea led him in 2017 to found the non -profit organization Women4oceans (women for the ocean), which the W4O directory achieved, where it brings together more than 5,000 women from more than seventy countries with the objective of “connecting them and amplifying their voice” to boost impact actions by a sustainable ocean.
Subsequently, Women4oceans became called The Ocean and Us (the ocean and us), with the aim of reaching a more wide, more inclusive and diverse audience, and whose work seeks to create bridges between people, science and decision makers, to implement collective solutions for the conservation of a space that occupies 74% of the planet.
Now W4O is the name of a project led by The Ocean and Us within the European project “’Win Big-Women in the Blue Economy” to empower women in the different sectors of the blue economy.
Currently, he carries out the ‘Ni Di to deep water’ mining campaign to achieve a moratorium on mining in the seabed that has compiled so far 350,000 signatures, and intends to increase many more worldwide, in order to avoid industrial activities in the Clarion-Clipperton area, located in the Pacific Ocean, in front of Mexico and Hawaii, which covers an area of the size of the United States.
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Campaign against deep water mining seeks to expand awareness
Industrial mining would lead to “irreversible damage” for local communities and biodiversity from Alaska to Chile, to seabed ecosystems and carbon storage disturbance, he argues.
Obaidullah points out that most people “know that he lives on a blue planet, where more than 70% of the space is ocean”, which plays “the most important role in determining everything and is decisive in the climatic crisis, because many of the extreme meteorological phenomena that are experienced are due to the changes that occur in the ocean.”
Because on the planet “everything works in an interconnected way, the ocean, the earth’s surface and the atmosphere that surrounds us”, and emphasizes that it is an interrelation where “nothing happens without a consequence”, although “many times seeing things with land lens can make that perspective lose.”
It points out that there are currently several risks to the ocean: the climatic crisis with the temperature rise, acidification and oxygen loss, in addition to the soprepesca and plastic pollution, by maritime transport, by oil spills, as well as the runoff of agriculture and nitrogen of chemicals, or that of noise that disturbs marine life, among many others.
All these factors “affect the weather and biodiversity”, but also have a “cascade impact” on food networks, food security and the livelihoods of fishing communities, because according to United Nations estimates “99% of fish populations are totally overexploited.”
It emphasizes that the ocean provides “half of the oxygen we breathe”, although “usually talk about tropical forests such as the lungs of our planet, the other right lung is the ocean. It provides us with every second breath we take. ”
“The ocean provides food, income, well -being and peace.” Therefore, he concludes, “it is extremely important that the ocean is healthy.”
Obajdullah is the main author and editor of the book “The Ocean and Us” (Springer), in which she collects the opinion of more than 35 ocean experts and explores the complex relationship between humanity and the ocean.
With EFE information.
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