HRH The Prince of Wales : Patron Surfers Against Sewage

Society is currently focused on tackling the Covid-19 crisis, with health concerns and impacts rightly at the forefront of public consciousness and action. However, the ocean health crisis hasn’t gone away, and has the potential to worsen should ocean conservation fall by the wayside during these unprecedented times. It is clear that crises coexist and we must take a holistic approach to restoring health to people and planet. It’s imperative that we come out of this crisis ready and prepared to tackle plastic pollution, drive forward marine protection and demand climate action to protect our ocean.

We cannot let the post-crisis world implement an economic growth at any cost model, where ocean protection is relegated, and a deteriorating environment goes unchallenged. We must demand a sustainable, green and blue recovery. We don’t need business as usual, we need unusual businesses, which put the environment and communities first.

In the face of daily news streams filled with environmental alarm and anxiety, it has never been more important for our collective actions to drive the change we need to see in the systems, structures and products that govern our daily lives. This decade must be a new dawn for radical truth about the scale of destruction that society currently imposes on nature. However, more importantly, it must be a decade of radical hope and action, where our collective force pushes back at this self-destructing system and demands ambitious new regenerative environmental policy, legislation and business practices.

The year marks the start of the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development, and the UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration, which provide us with a powerful signal to unite with even more energy and vigour than ever before. We must be committed to decade devoted to the ocean, taking ambitious environmental action and supporting the most progressive businesses with a thriving ocean and planet embedded in their ethos and bottom line.

Consensus has been reached amongst world leaders on the scale of the challenge and international goal-setting is now at an all-time high. However, these commitments must come to life today. We need rapid and meaningful action, driven by progressive and ambitious government policy and legislation that incentivises true behaviour change amongst business leaders. As individuals our collective actions can help drive this change, but it is those in charge of the structures around us that must transform their business models for a healthy planet.

Amongst the maelstrom of environmental news of biblical proportions – the wildfires; the flooding, the plagues of locusts; the pandemics; and the collapsing ice-sheets – the signs, examples and way-markers exist, lighthouses simultaneously illuminating the huge dangers ahead but also marking the channels for a more sustainable future, where the ocean and people thrive. We know that ambitious, legislation and international agreement can deliver planetary and species recovery, from whale populations rebounding¹https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/10/16/good-news-humpback-whale-population-back-after-near-extinction/3997894002/ to the success story of some birds of prey²https://www.rspb.org.uk/globalassets/downloads/documents/positions/species/birds-of-prey-on-a-wing-and-a-prayer.pdf. Highly protected marine areas are shown to increase biomass by up to 400%, with fish shown to grow larger and produce more offspring³https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/momentum-grows-ocean-preserves-how-well-do-they-work-180961690/. We must call for more of this, and fast.

“For most of history, man has had to fight nature to survive; in this century he is beginning to realize that, in order to survive,
he must protect it.”

Jacques Yves Cousteau

The rewilding and full protection of our natural world will be central to a sustainable future where we exist in equilibrium with the planet. We need to enforce and monitor highly-protected ecosystems; we must restore mangroves, kelp forests and seagrass meadows to sequester carbon⁴https://www.iucn.org/resources/issues-briefs/blue-carbon; we must plant trees in the face of global heating⁵https://www.cornwall.gov.uk/environment-and-planning/grow-nature/about/forest-for-cornwall-programme/; and give biodiversity the space to recover.

It is the time for Generation Sea to act. We need to protect the ocean for future generations by harnessing the power of the current generation using our energy to agitate, demonstrate and mobilise. We are part of a new wave of action calling for domestic and international agreements to protect the world’s oceans with more widespread, monitored and enforced protections. It is now vital that we help drive research, consensus and action in the coming decade to deliver measurable improvements in ocean health, tackling the four major issues of plastic pollution, water quality, climate change and rewilding.

At Surfers Against Sewage, we will ensure that you can take action with us from the beach front to the front benches of Parliament. Our delivery model creates ocean activists everywhere, and supports a grassroots local approach to the global issues facing our oceans. We will continue to take the big issues where people often feel overwhelmed, and provide steps and actions they can take. We will provide our volunteers and supporters with tangible actions they can take to be a part of this change, from community level actions on single-use plastic to challenging decision makers on climate change in Westminster. Together we will demand a decade of radical action that will protect the ocean.

This year also marks our 30th anniversary, allowing us to celebrate the progress we have already helped deliver for the ocean, and embrace how our influence and community can play an even more important role in the coming decade, using our heritage of radical activism and hope.