Paris-Saba:
The city of Nice in southeastern France is hosting the third UN Ocean Conference on Sunday, attended by world leaders. French President Emmanuel Macron intends to turn it into a summit to mobilize efforts.
According to Agence France-Presse, around fifty heads of state and government, including Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, will gather in the southeastern city on the shores of the Mediterranean on Sunday. A naval parade will be held as part of World Oceans Day celebrations, before the conference opens on Monday.
Discussions, which will continue until June 13, will focus on seabed mining, the international treaty on plastic pollution, and regulating overfishing.
US Boycott
Macron told Ouest-France newspaper that this summit aims to "mobilize efforts, at a time when climate issues are being questioned by some," expressing his regret that the United States will not participate.
It is believed that the United States, which has the largest maritime domain in the world, will not send a delegation as it did to the climate negotiations.
It is worth noting that at the end of last April, US President Donald Trump unilaterally decided to open up the possibility of mining in international waters in the Pacific Ocean, bypassing the International Seabed Authority, an intergovernmental body to which the United States is not a member due to its failure to ratify the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.
In the draft final declaration, which had been under negotiation for months, the countries acknowledged that "work is not progressing at the pace or scale required."
France has set ambitious goals for this first UN conference held on its soil since the COP21 climate conference, which Paris hosted in 2015.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said that France "seeks to make the conference equivalent for the oceans what the Paris Agreement was for the climate ten years ago."
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