Home ›› 03 Jul 2022 ›› Editorial
According to a report published in The Business Post yesterday, Foreign Minister AK Abdul Momen reiterated Bangladesh’s commitment to preserve and sustainably use ocean resources at the UN Ocean Conference in Lisbon recently.
While delivering the country statement at the plenary session of the conference the foreign minister attached importance to marine science for eradicating poverty, contributing to food security, conserving the world’s marine environment and resources, helping to predict and respond to natural and anthropogenic events and promoting the sustainable development of the oceans and seas in his statement.
Being a riverine country with considerable access to the sea in the south and southeast part of the country, Bangladesh must make optimum use of ocean resources, keeping the preservation of marine ecology as the priority.
While Bangladesh has cracked down on overfishing, the concept of safeguarding marine life and oceans is relatively new. As part of the efforts to prevent overfishing, especially Hilsa fries, a moratorium is imposed for certain periods every year.
To tackle illegal and unregulated fishing, the government of Bangladesh declared an area totalling about 8.8 per cent of its exclusive economic zone as the marine protected areas and implemented in its National Plan of Action in 2019.
In addition, Bangladesh announced new actions aimed at ensuring safe ship recycling by 2023 and is the first amongst developing countries to take the initiative to ban manufacture of single use plastic shopping bags.
In trying to achieve the targets of SDG 14, the ship breaking industry, the second largest in the world, needs to enforce measures that minimise coastal pollution by toxic chemicals. The shipbreaking industry in Bangladesh employs over two hundred thousand workers, providing half of all steel in Bangladesh.
Although this industry is a vital economic pillar, there have been concerns from environmental watchdogs about maritime pollution due to the often careless disposal of hazardous ship waste.
Environmentalists have been vocal about marine life preservation with several calling for limited tourism in the St Martin’s island, the only coral island in Bangladesh.
SDG 14 is interlinked to the sustainable harvesting of blue economy, which aims to use ocean resources in an environmentally friendly way to create employment and alleviate poverty in the coastal regions.
In the last ten years, tourism infrastructures have proliferated across the country. Although how many of these are green remains unanswered.
With tourism comes the issue of sea litter – a major threat to ocean life. A massive amount of waste is discarded into the sea and inland water bodies – a culture which can only be countered with mass sensitisation.
One other dimension is sustainably managing and protecting marine and coastal ecosystems to avoid significant adverse impacts, including strengthening their resilience, and taking action for their restoration in order to achieve healthy and productive oceans.
The notion of ecologically friendly ocean based tourism is still in in its infancy here and while the government has a duty to take the issue to all levels of society, large tourism operations from hotels to resorts to economic zones need to adopt a pro marine life approach. Tourism operations that cause the least disturbance to marine ecology need active promotion.
The other dimension to SDG 14 is the increase and sharing of scientific knowledge, research capacity and transfer of marine technology. Developed nations that have a holistic approach to ocean preservation and its sustainable use should come forward and help countries like Bangladesh not only with knowledge but also with latest technology.
Large business conglomerates diversifying their businesses and looking to get involved in novel initiatives should be invited with special incentives to develop coastal resorts and other ventures using state of the art green technology. It must be said that while the SDGs involving eradication of poverty, hunger and ensuring education and gender parity received widespread publicity, preserving ocean life and under water ecology has been somewhat a neglected area.
The need to protect oceans and its resources has to be included at all levels of academia to ensure widespread understanding.
