The Future Policy Award
The Future Policy Award celebrates policies that create better living conditions for current and future generations. The aim of the award is to raise global awareness for these exemplary policies and speed up policy action towards just, sustainable and peaceful societies. The Future Policy Award is the first award that celebrates policies rather than people on an international level. Each year the World Future Council chooses one topic on which policy progress is particularly urgent.
Future Policy Award 2012
Celebrating the world’s best ocean and coastal policies
In 2012, the World Future Council’s Future Policy Award will celebrate the world’s best policies for oceans and coasts.
Viewed from space, the earth is a blue planet. Over 70 per cent of the planet is covered in oceans and major seas. They contain ecosystems such as coral reefs that harbour as much life as our richest rainforests. Humanity depends on the ocean for its survival: oceans provide more than half of the oxygen we breathe. One third of our population lives in coastal areas in 123 countries around the world. Over a billion people rely on oceans as a source of protein and over half a billion people are dependent on oceans and coasts for their livelihoods.
- © Okeanos - Foundation for the Sea
Our oceans are truly one of our global commons.
Oceans and coasts are among the most threatened ecosystems in the world. Overfishing, pollution and climate change are acting together in a way that until recently had not been recognised. The seas are degenerating far faster than anyone has predicted.
Eighty per cent of fish stocks are fully or overexploited and we are at the very limit of fish we can take from the ocean, yet we are consuming more fish per person than ever before. Pollution from mercury, persistent organic chemicals and micro-plastics continues to spread from the land to coastal waters and out into the open seas. And increases in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are changing ocean chemistry, making it inhospitable to ocean life.
Decision-makers have a critical role to play, as poor management of marine environment is the root cause of biodiversity loss and degradation of these vital ecosystems.
Indeed, now is the time to act and save our blue planet.
2012 is a critical year for ocean and coastal policy. In June 2012, governments will be convening the UN Earth Summit in Brazil, twenty years after the first UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro. In October, governments from 193 countries will convene in Hyderabad, India to agree policy measures on coastal and marine biodiversity at the 11th Conference of Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD COP-11).
The Award Ceremony
- © Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority
The winning policies will be announced at the United Nations Headquarters in September 2012. The announcement will be followed by the awards ceremony on 16 October, convened by the World Future Council in partnership with the UN Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and with the support of the Okeanos Foundation at the eleventh meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in Hyderabad, India.
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