Podcast Ocean Collaborations has issued #34 with Arthur Dahl on 27 July 2026

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Listen to the full episode with Arthur Dahl here:
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On Apple Podcast: https://lnkd.in/emnE69ZJ

Is the United Nations' DNA actually broken when it comes to the ocean?

Jan Maisenbacher asked Arthur, who at 84 years old has spent over half a century inside the UN system. His answer? We need more than a reform - we might need a "Second UN Charter."

If you are a professional frustrated by the "sovereignty trap" and the slow pace of institutional change, this episode of Ocean Collaborations is recorded for you.

We explore a theory of change that many in science and policy still hesitate to talk about: Faith.

Arthur and Jan dive deep into:
- Why national sovereignty is the biggest hurdle to High Seas protection.
- The "Inner Compass": Why science tells us how, but faith tells us why.
- Institutional Transformation: Moving from voluntary "promises" to binding global accountability.
- Indigenous Wisdom: What we can learn from Pacific leaders who never separated the spiritual from the scientific.

Arthur Dahl isn't just a marine biologist; he’s a bridge-builder who believes that until it "touches the heart," the data won't move a (blue/regenerative) economy.

Arthur's commentary on the state of the oceans

As we struggle as a human society to acknowledge that we are a single human family inhabiting a small fragile planet, we can turn to the ocean as a symbol and demonstration of the unity of the Earth system. While we apply different names to parts of the ocean (Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Arctic, Antarctic), they all represent parts of a single ocean system. The Atlantic Meridional Oceanic Circulation (AMOC), which climate change may be shutting down, brings warm water up the east coast of North America, where it cools in the Arctic, sinks and flows south along the bottom to the Antarctic, circulates there and then moves northward again becoming a warm-water current. Oceanic species migrate through all the oceans. Despite small local variations, ocean water has a similar salinity everywhere. The unity of the ocean is obvious.

Since humans are a terrestrial species, we have been very slow to explore the ocean depths, and much still remains unknown, although technology is giving us new tools to discover what is down there. For example, the manganese nodules that carpet parts of the deep ocean bottom are not just accumulations of rare metals waiting to be harvested by greedy mining companies. The chemical reactions that precipitate minerals on their surface release the oxygen that supports other bottom life. They are like the lungs of the deep sea, maintaining whole ecosystems only now being discovered. What a tragedy it would be to mine them for short-term profit and exterminate the ecosystems that depend on them.

The perspective of “developed” economies that growth in wealth is all-important, and the social and environmental impacts of that activity are externalities for which economic actors have no real responsibility, is a fiction and unsupported assumption that is driving planetary destruction, including of the oceans. This contrasts with the deep knowledge and respect for the ocean among many Indigenous and island peoples, who see themselves as an intimate part of nature and feel strong emotional and spiritual ties to the ocean that surrounds them. I had the privilege of living for more than a decade among them, working to apply their deep knowledge and respect to ensure ocean sustainability, whether on their surrounding coral reefs now in great danger, and offshore in their fisheries or their ocean knowledge necessary for navigation.

With the rapid rise in greenhouse gases and the consequent global warming and climate change, we are coming to appreciate the critical role that the ocean plays in the impacts we are now suffering through extreme heat and drought, storms and wildfires, floods and rising seas. The ocean absorbs most of the heat being generated by our excesses. Ocean temperatures are higher than they have ever been.

A terrible tragedy is the ongoing collapse of tropical coral reef ecosystems around the world. Such reefs are perhaps the most highly-evolved and productive ecosystems, with thousands of species cooperating in symbiotic relationships to build their own environment like human cities, maintaining highly-productive capture of solar energy, and recycling scarce materials in largely closed systems. They provide an excellent example on how we should organise human society. Alas, reefs have evolved to live close to their maximum temperature, and the ever-warmer ocean is pushing them beyond their limit, bleaching and killing the corals and causing ecosystem breakdown, described by scientists as the first major tipping point that we have already crossed towards environmental collapse.

In addition, warmer water expands and glaciers are melting, raising sea levels around the world and threatening to drown low-lying countries and cities. Higher ocean temperatures create more powerful and destructive storms. Ocean interactions with the atmosphere displace air currents and disrupt climate and weather patterns, making agriculture unpredictable and driving food insecurity. Science has warned of these impacts for decades, as I did myself as coordinator of the UN System-wide Earthwatch, but the vested interests in fossil fuels and the wealth so generated are still preventing action to avoid the worst. We are already in the midst of a human-caused climate catastrophe largely mediated by ocean processes. We cannot say that we have not been warned.