UNOC3 Multi-faith Declaration
This Declaration represents a landmark interfaith commitment to marine conservation and ocean protection ahead of the 2025 UN Ocean Conference (UNOC3) in Nice, France. It was developed through a rigorous collaborative process involving representatives from diverse faith traditions and organizations, marine conservation experts, and policy specialists. It articulates shared spiritual values for ocean protection while providing concrete policy recommendations to support marine conservation goals.
The declaration will be officially launched at UNOC3 in June 2025, where it will serve as a foundation for faith-based advocacy in marine conservation.
Representatives from the following organizations served as drafters and reviewers of the text:
• Anglican Communion
• Baha'i International Community UN Office
• Bahu Trust
• Bloomberg Ocean Fund
• High Seas Alliance
• Interfaith Center for Sustainable Development
• Repair the Sea - Tikkun HaYam
• Soka Gakkai International
• UNEP Faith for Earth Initiative
• United Religions Initiative
• World Resources Institute
Introduction
The ocean speaks to the heart of our spiritual traditions. Water connects and flows through our diverse faiths in both symbolism and sustenance. We, representatives of diverse faith communities and spiritual traditions worldwide, are uniting to protect our shared ocean which demonstrates the interconnectedness and interdependence of lands, peoples, and all living beings.
The planetary crises of human-induced climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution threaten ocean ecosystems and violate the human right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment. The ocean, which regulates the climate and feeds billions, faces unprecedented threats. It is a moral imperative to protect and care for the ocean and the people in vulnerable situations who rely on it. Yet, when the ocean is given respect and care, it demonstrates remarkable regenerative capacity. As the fragile balance of ocean ecosystems becomes increasingly disturbed, we are called to respond with spiritual wisdom, scientific understanding, and bold action.
We invite contemplation of the ocean's depths as a journey of spiritual significance—from the sunlit zone through the twilight zone and into the midnight zone—offering wisdom that can guide humanity toward a more mindful relationship with water, the source of all life. The ocean's interconnectedness, as waters flow between continents, holds profound significance across our traditions and calls us to unified action.
The Sunlight Zone: Illuminating Our Interconnections
Scientific Understanding and Environmental Concerns: Extending from the surface to approximately 200 meters deep, this zone produces half the world's oxygen and supports most global fisheries, supplying food and livelihoods for millions. This critical region faces severe and converging threats. The rampant expansion of mass fishing has led to 90% of all fish stocks being fully exploited or overfished, while various human activities have destroyed nearly half of marine nursery habitats, including mangroves and seagrass. Climate change, including warming ocean temperatures, has triggered widespread coral bleaching, with projections of 90% reef loss by mid-century. Ocean acidification threatens shell-forming and many other organisms throughout marine food webs, while pollution, particularly from plastics and discharge of sewage and chemicals, creates expanding "dead zones" where little life can survive. Rising sea levels and intensifying storms further endanger vulnerable coastal and island communities where billions of people live. These factors increase the pressure on the very waters most essential to ocean productivity and human sustenance.
Faith Connection: The sunlight zone, where light penetrates sufficiently to support photosynthesis and life flourishes in abundance, represents the fullness of life we believe is possible through faith. Here, diversity mirrors the multitude of faith expressions across humanity, each unique yet sharing common waters. The sunlight zone is the water that connects people and faiths across the ocean. Just as this zone supports the majority of marine life through interconnected relationships, our faith traditions emphasize interconnectedness and mutual dependence, reminding us that our actions ripple far throughout the web of life.
The Twilight Zone: The Sacred Journey of Transformation
Scientific Understanding and Environmental Concerns: This zone extends from 200 to 1,000 meters deep and hosts Earth's largest animal migration, a daily vertical movement of countless organisms that creates a vital biological carbon pump. Scientists estimate this poorly understood region contains ten billion metric tons of fish biomass, yet faces emerging threats from multiple directions. Without knowledge of sustainable harvest levels, commercial fishing increasingly threatens species found in the twilight zone. Climate change alters ocean circulation and oxygen levels, which could disrupt migration patterns essential to both ocean populations and carbon sequestration. Deep-sea mining risks releasing sediment plumes through these waters, while ocean acidification threatens various ecosystems. The twilight zone's crucial role in carbon sequestration is at risk just as we begin to understand its importance, with countless species still undiscovered.
Faith Connection: The transition from light to darkness in the twilight zone mirrors the spiritual journey of the seeker: the passage between the tangible and transcendent, certainty and faith. This liminal space represents transformation and adaptation, reflecting our existence in both material and spiritual dimensions of reality. Faith traditions recognize these areas as sacred spaces where physical and spiritual realms intersect. The twilight zone's vertical migrations remind us that spiritual growth often involves movement between different states of being and understanding, helping us rise up from darkness to light.
Scientific Understanding and Environmental Concerns: This zone, the least explored and least scientifically understood part of the ocean, exists in perpetual darkness under extreme pressure from 1,000 to 4,000 meters deep. Despite this extreme environment, it harbors extraordinary biodiversity. Bioluminescent organisms illuminate the darkness, while unique communities thrive around hydrothermal vents through chemosynthesis. These ecosystems face unprecedented threats as deep-sea mining targets the most biodiverse areas: mineral-rich hydrothermal vents and polymetallic nodules that form over millions of years. Bottom trawling damages deep-sea habitats that require centuries to recover, while climate change’s effects and other pollutants, including microplastics, reach even these remote depths. In this environment, human disturbances cause damage that persists for generations. What we destroy in moments may never recover in our lifetimes.
Faith Connection: The midnight zone, where life persists in remarkable forms, represents contemplative wisdom across spiritual traditions. In absolute darkness, many creatures generate their own light, just as contemplative practices reveal that divine illumination often emerges from within during periods of spiritual darkness. The extreme conditions of the deep ocean, where life thrives despite enormous pressure, mirror how contemplative traditions find transformative potential in life's most challenging circumstances. This zone teaches us profound lessons about resilience, patience, and humility, as we acknowledge how little we know about these ancient ecosystems that have existed long before human presence.
The Midnight Zone: Contemplation in Sacred Darkness
Call to Action
As people of faith and goodwill, unified in purpose, we commit to urgent, transformative action that restores right relationship with the ocean and with one another. We affirm the importance of centering human rights in all ocean governance and conservation, and support, in particular, the calls brought forward by Indigenous Peoples, small-scale fishers, and coastal communities.
We therefore call for the following:
1. Protect and restore at least 30% of our ocean by 2030 through effectively managed marine protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures (OECMs). This sacred commitment requires not just quantity but quality of protection, designations that truly safeguard marine ecosystems from harmful activities, including destructive fishing practices, offshore oil and gas activities, and other damaging industrial activities.
2. Support the moratorium on deep-sea mining. The ocean's depths must be protected from exploitation that could irreversibly damage ancient ecosystems. The international community should prioritize precautionary principles and preservation until science and inclusive consultation can guide responsible deep ocean governance.
3. Ratify and implement the High Seas Treaty (Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction Agreement) as soon as possible, providing the legal framework necessary to protect marine biodiversity and promote greater ocean equity in international waters, which constitute nearly two-thirds of the global ocean, store vast amounts of carbon, and hold vast biodiversity, but have remained largely unprotected.
4. Address marine pollution comprehensively, including plastic pollution, discharge of sewage and chemicals, underwater noise pollution, heavy metals, and nutrient runoff that threaten marine ecosystems and human health. We support the creation of a Global Plastics Treaty to tackle this crisis at its source.
5. Recognize the ocean's vital role in regulating climate and support ocean-based climate solutions by ensuring coherence between the outcomes of the UNOC and the latest reports from the IPCC. We call for urgent action to address ocean warming, acidification, deoxygenation, and sea level rise, while scaling up fair, equitable and rights-based blue carbon initiatives and nature-based solutions.
We commit to educating our communities about ocean conservation through our spiritual teachings while taking meaningful action within our spheres of influence. Whether through supporting marine protected areas, advocating for the 30x30 global target, or demanding stronger climate policies, we recognize our moral responsibility to communities already facing rising seas, intensifying storms, disrupted livelihoods, and food insecurity. As stewards, guardians, caretakers, and an integral part of the web of life, we are called to respond with both wisdom and love to the suffering of our fellow beings.
Some will educate, others will advocate, many will transform personal habits—together creating the necessary shift in humanity's relationship with sacred waters. Just as no single river can fill the ocean, no single approach can save it, but our collective action becomes a powerful force for renewal, helping achieve effective, equitable, and ecologically representative protection for at least 30% of our ocean by 2030.
This convergence of action is strengthened by the integration of diverse knowledge systems. Our knowledge and understanding through science, faith, and traditional knowledge create a more complete vision of our sacred waters and more effective approaches to their protection. No single knowledge system alone can address the complex challenges facing our ocean, but together these systems form a wisdom greater than the sum of its parts.
We invite all who hear this call to join us in ensuring future generations will know the ocean not as a tragic testament to what we destroyed, but as living and profound proof of how humanity transformed our relationship with the water that sustains all life on this planet.
