Healthy oceans are a human right (commentary)

Months after a container ship went down off the coast of India, toxic pollution still contaminates the water and plastic pellets still wash ashore. Meanwhile, cleanup efforts continue, fishing restrictions remain, and legal claims crawl through the courts.

When one shipwreck can unravel a season’s income or undermine health and public safety, it’s clear that ocean decline is a human rights story as much as an environmental one. In 2022, the United Nations affirmed the basic human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment. The idea is straightforward: people’s fundamental human rights to health, food, security and even life rely on a healthy environment. But we are still far from ensuring that these rights are protected for the coastal communities living with the consequences of ocean decline every day.

Corporations have devastated livelihoods of fishing communities in the Niger Delta by spilling crude oil, discharging toxic effluents, and gas flaring. Image via the Coalition for Human Rights in Development. Coastal communities are on the frontline Across the global ocean, local pressures like overfishing, oil spills, pollution and habitat loss from destructive development are colliding with planetary threats like climate change and plastic pollution, eroding basic rights to food, health, safety and culture.

Consider just a few examples of how coastal communities bear the brunt: West Africa: In Senegal and Ghana, small-scale fishing has long anchored coastal life. Today, large distant-water and industrial fleets are impinging on small-scale fishers’ resources and rights. When they take too much, when access deals...This article was originally published on Mongabay