A Letter from the Islands to the UN Ocean Conference 2025
I was born on an island that barely makes it onto your maps. Not that I’m offended. In fact, I am super proud of that.
After all, your satellites were built to track typhoons and shipping routes, not to notice small Indigenous fishing communities sitting quietly on coral reefs, weaving nets from coconut husks and measuring seasons by the dance of moon tides. We’ve never needed anyone’s recognition to breathe, fish, or be. However now, as the horizon thickens with mining barges and the sea darkens with tailings, we are suddenly on the agenda. Just not in the room.
How charming. Hotels with clean towels, good coffee, and simultaneous interpretation in six languages. They call it the UN 2025 Ocean Conference.
However for me, it sounds more like a shipping container of empty promises delivered to those of us who actually live with the sea curling around our ankles every single day.
Critical Mining Threats to Oceans and IPLCs
Let’s start with the new monster you’ve dragged to our waters: mining. Not fishing. Not shipping. Mining. Someone somewhere has decided that the seabed, and the rocks under our feet, contain the precious metals for your so-called green future. Nickel for batteries. Cobalt for electric cars.
I suppose you can save the planet while killing the sea. Congratulations on that innovation.
I’ve seen it myself. Barges anchored near our reefs, loading ore scraped from our hillsides. The dust, red as dried blood, washing down the rivers and spreading into the shallows where children used to swim. Have you ever tasted water after a nickel mine’s been opened upstream? It’s like swallowing rust. The mangroves cough mud. Fish move further offshore, harder to catch, leaner, bitter.
You build desalination plants for your tourists. We don’t have desalination plants on our islands. We don’t fly to the supermarket when the sea gets sick. We don’t open PowerPoints when the land collapses into slurry. We stand barefoot in it, our toes sinking in poisoned sand.
So when you tell me this conference is about protecting the ocean, forgive me for not clapping politely.
Protecting it from whom? Certainly not from those who hold mining concessions like lottery tickets issued by your favourite development banks and climate philanthropists. Certainly not from the consultants who will sip cocktails at Nice and talk about “balancing green growth with biodiversity protection” while our beaches spit iron.
You like to call it “critical minerals.” My people call it slow murder.
Have you noticed how mining companies are always described as “partners” in these events? Stakeholders. Investors. Development actors. Funny, I don’t recall anyone asking us if we wanted partners arriving with dredging machines, pipelines, tailing barges, armed security, or helicopters over our coconut trees.
There’s a word for this, and it’s not “stakeholder.” It’s “invader.”
And the ones they send here — the exploration teams, the contractors — they all have clean boots when they arrive. Give it three months, and the river’s gone sour, the village water tanks filled with bottled water donations from the same company that made the springs undrinkable in the first place.
But they’ll call that “corporate social responsibility,” won’t they?
Let me tell you something that didn’t make the headlines of the Nice Conference. There are children in my community who’ve never seen the river run clear. They’ve grown up with red water, assuming that rust-brown tide is natural. They don’t know that their grandparents used to drink from that river, straight from cupped hands, laughing as fish darted between their fingers. They don’t know that there used to be shrimp runs you could catch with a bucket.
You will gather in conference halls and talk about sustainability. I stand ankle-deep in evidence that you’ve failed already.
The Erasure of IPLCs from Ocean Governance
But it’s not just the mining that curdles the tide for me. It’s the erasure. The way you can talk for hours about “communities” while never letting one into the room unless they’ve swapped their woven sarong for a tailored suit. Look at the guest list. Development agency officials, environment ministers, think tankers with branded tote bags, and perhaps — for flavour — a token islander flown in to say something “inspiring” before being sent back like an exhibit from an ethnographic museum.
Do you know what it feels like to be talked about like a landscape? We’re either climate victims, biodiversity managers, or exotic “beneficiaries.” Never the holders of rights. Never the owners of decisions. Apparently, sovereignty belongs to those who can afford business class tickets to conservation summits.
I’m sick of being in someone else’s footnote.
Our names don’t appear in the text of your resolutions. The UN can draft forty pages on “local communities and stakeholders,” yet somehow forget the word “Indigenous” until the third footnote, if at all. Funny how that happens, considering we’ve been here since before your states were even invented.
You’ll talk about oceans as carbon sinks. We talk about oceans as dinner.
And what of rights? What of justice? Your reports speak fluently of rights-based approaches, but they trail off when asked who holds the rights. Apparently, I’m allowed to be part of a case study. I’m allowed to be a smiling face in a glossy brochure on marine resilience. I’m not allowed to say “No” when a mining exploration team comes ashore with government permits in hand.
Where are the declarations of our rights to say no? Where’s the budget line for our self-determination? You don’t fund that because it’s not photogenic. Defiance is harder to sell at donor dinners.
And don’t get me started on how the ocean conservation world treats us when we demand a say. Suddenly, we’re “difficult stakeholders,” “challenging contexts,” or — my favourite — “potential security risks.” As if wanting your children to eat clean fish is terrorism now.
I’m tired of being the scenery for someone else’s environmental victory speech.
And the money. Ah, the money. You’ll hear figures quoted in millions, maybe billions. Global funds, blue bonds, carbon credits for mangrove planting. Fancy things. Do you know how much of that ever arrives here? I’ll tell you: None. Unless you count the occasional per diem for a “local partner” to attend another workshop on “empowering communities.” I don’t need empowerment. I need you to get out of the way while I protect what’s mine.
The Hypocrisy of Fortress Conservation
And yet here you all go again, circling like gulls above a trawler, hungry for the next sustainable development grant cycle.
What’s never mentioned is how conservation funds often follow the very same extractive logic as mining. The donors extract legitimacy. The NGOs extract stories. The consultants extract CV highlights. And us? We get more drone photos of the reefs we’re not allowed to fish anymore.
Do you understand what it feels like to be policed out of your own ocean? By people who flew in on emissions-heavy planes to tell you that catching octopus is unsustainable while their conferences serve shrimp cocktails on fine china?
They say it’s about “balance.” What they mean is, we get the burden, they get the contracts.
And while you sit politely discussing governance frameworks, the real governance is happening here. It’s the elder whose hand rests gently on the bow of the fishing canoe, deciding which parts of the reef are resting and which are open. It’s the grandmother who walks the tide pools at night, marking which sea cucumbers are ready and which should be left for another season. No satellite imagery required. No UN grant attached.
Recognition doesn’t arrive through press releases. It arrives through respect. And you’ve shown very little of that.
The worst part is that they’ll say this conference is “historic.” That this is the year the world came together to save the ocean. I’ve seen these declarations before. They last as long as an Instagram story, but the poison in our beach will be here for generations.
What I see are marine protected areas created with exclusion, ocean conservation plans designed in offices far from the coast, project budgets where 80% disappears before reaching the communities they’re supposedly meant to help. I see conservation dollars used to patrol Indigenous waters against Indigenous boats, while mining ships sail past undisturbed.
They don’t fund our fish traps. They don’t fund our seaweed cooperatives. They fund new signs, new regulations, new fences, new drones, new logos on T-shirts. And maybe — just maybe — a training on “alternative livelihoods,” as if weaving nets and planting pandanus was not a livelihood until the UN said so.
I live surrounded by saltwater, yet I’m constantly told I need to be “capacity built” to understand what I’ve lived with all my life.
The conferences ended with applause. Press releases flew like seabirds startled off a rocky shoreline. The “blue economy” as expected is marketed as hope.
While you sip wine, I’ll be here, teaching children how to spot fish that haven’t yet been poisoned by progress.
They say the tide waits for no one. Neither does the reckoning that’s coming for those who treat our homes like their resource depots and playgrounds for environmental saviour complexes.
We’re not waiting anymore.
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