UN secretary general: Trillions must be spent to tackle climate change

'Trillions of dollars to secure the health of the ocean and thereby the planet and thereby the wellbeing of our grandchildren is needed,' Peter Thomson said. 

The UN secretary general for oceans has said trillions has to be pumped into measures to tackle climate change.

Ambassador Peter Thomson told the Institute of International and European Affairs significant investment was needed to transform how people live from day to day.

He said there was enough renewable energy to power human life many times over.

We don't want millions of billions of dollars to flow into the sustainable blue economy. We want trillions of dollars.

"We need those dollars to secure the health of the ocean and thereby the planet and thereby the wellbeing of our grandchildren," Mr Thomson said. 

CLIMATE & SUSTAINABILITY HUB

"We need the trillions of dollars to decarbonise the global shipping fleet and the ports that service it, funding a transformation that has already begun moving from powering our ships with the filth of bunker oil to pollution-free green hydrogen. 

"We need the trillions of dollars invested to feed the future through sustainable agriculture and farming the ocean to produce new sustainable nutritious forms of future food, seaweeds, phytoplanktons, and other ethical non-fed forms of agriculture.

"We need the trillions because if we invest now in offshore energy, in wind, tidal, wave and other ocean technologies, we'll have all the renewable energy we need many times over to power our ways of life."

Mr Thomson warned that now is the time to accept the exploitation of finite planetary resources is a "dead end street".

"We've reached a point on humanity's path whereupon global transformation to circular recycling systems of production and consumption has become a straightforward matter of survival or not," he added.

The Sustainable Development Goal 14 is a universal target to conserve and sustainably use the oceans' resources. 

Mr Thomson said the "nemesis" of the plan is the continued burning of fossil fuels.

"The massive scale at which we burn fossil fuels, grading the greenhouse gases, blanketing our atmosphere, are commensurately changing the composition of the ocean," he added. 

The ocean is absorbing 90% of the heat from global temperature rises so it should not be a surprise that immense changes are under way, and we now witness such phenomena as escalating marine heatwaves and the death of coral reefs.

He said developing countries also need the funding to adapt to the effects of climate change.

"We all know, where the greenhouse gases have come from," he said. 

"We all know where most of the money is on this planet, and that money needs to be channelled to developing countries, so they can undertake the adaptation required in the face of what's coming at us."

CLIMATE & SUSTAINABILITY HUB