IMO Secretary General: 'our ocean is under threat'

On World Maritime Day 2025, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) and its Secretary General Arsenio Dominguez have adopted a message seeking to be supportive of environmental protection, economic strength and safety initiatives from shipping. 

"As the largest sector operating in the ocean space, shipping has a central role to play in the protection of the marine environment and management of ocean resources," a statement from IMO said. 

Transporting 80% of global trade, shipping is currently in the process of attempting to adopt into law a framework that would determine pathways for the sector to gradually reduce emissions from its operations to a net of zero or close to zero.

But emissions and the related warming of the climate and the oceans are not the only source of human threats, with the IMO citing plastic pollution, acidification, overfishing.

"Our oceans are struggling to keep up with human pressure," Secretary Dominguez says in a video produced for World Maritime Day 2025. "The ocean’s decline isn’t a coincidence, it’s driven by human activities."

But, Mr Dominguez says, humans have the power -- the opportunity and the obligation -- to reverse these multiple threats to the ocean environment.

IMO says it has a long-standing commitment to protecting the ocean, through its global regulatory framework "supporting cleaner, safer seas, and a growing portfolio of technical assistance initiatives to support ocean protection in 176 Member States".

The organisation says its theme "emphasises the link to wider global efforts to protect the ocean including the conclusion of UN Agreement on the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Marine Biological Diversity of Areas beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ Agreement), the negotiation of a new instrument to address plastic pollution and the third UN Ocean Conference in June 2025".

Days before IMO celebrated World Maritime Day, the BBNJ agreement, the treaty, formally known as the Agreement under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea on the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Marine Biological Diversity of Areas beyond National Jurisdiction, was ratified after being adopted by UN member states in June 2023 following nearly two decades of negotiations.

And in August, negotiations around a global treaty to address plastic pollution stalled, without producing a treaty text and deep divides persisting among UN member states over production, products, finance and voting.