In the early 1970s, a trip to the beaches of Naples, Italy was a roll of the dice.
The city’s coastal waters were so flush with sewage and industrial waste, that one summer nearly 20 per cent of Belgian and French tourists claimed they contracted an infectious disease after taking a dip.
While the situation in Naples grabbed headlines, similar environmental disasters were unfolding across the Mediterranean Sea in the early 1970s. A combination of rapid industrialization, breakneck population growth and lax environmental laws had turned the sea into one of the world’s most-polluted bodies of water.
But that would soon start to change. In 1974 The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) brought together nearly two dozen nations to hash out a plan for saving the Mediterranean. The work was made possible by contributions to the Environment Fund, UNEP’s core source of flexible financing, which had been established a year earlier.
The result of the talks was the Barcelona Convention, a 1976 pact that placed strict limits on pollution in the sea. The deal celebrated its 50th anniversary earlier this year.
“The convention was a landmark achievement,” says Alberto Pacheco Capella, Chief of the Regional Seas Branch at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). “It came at a critical moment for the Mediterranean and set the template for decades of environmental diplomacy.”
The Barcelona Convention marked the first success of the fledgling Regional Seas Programme, which has since evolved into a globe-spanning effort to protect the world’s saltwater bodies. The programme was founded on the idea that international cooperation is vital for protecting seas, which provide food and jobs to hundreds of millions of people around the world.
“Over the decades, the Regional Seas Programme has demonstrated what’s possible when countries work together” says Pacheco Capella. “It also shows how this kind of international cooperation can improve the lives of people who live near seas and who depend on them for their livelihoods.”
The success of the Regional Seas Programme is also a testament to the importance of the Environment Fund, says Soomi Ro, the Director of UNEP’s Corporate Services Division. Along with underpinning the diplomacy of the 1970s and UNEP’s convening power to have nations to work together, the fund supported what would become regional seas programmes around the world, from the Caribbean, to the Indian Ocean to East Asia.
Today, the Environment Fund supports the development of technical guidance and the implementation of targeted activities across the Regional Seas Programme. It contributes to the creation of strategic action plans for the various conventions, the most recent of which cover the period from 2026 to 2029. And it backs technical work, such as the Regional Seas Indicators Framework, which strengthens the ability of countries to generate policy-relevant data and insights on issues of concern.
“Core funding to the Environment Fund is pivotal for carrying out efforts, like the Regional Seas Programme, that transcend borders and decades,” Ro says. “It gives UNEP the flexibility it needs to conduct science, raise public awareness and bring nations together.”
The world’s seas remain under pressure from a range of human-caused threats. In many places, overexploitation risks the future of crucial fisheries. Climate change could wipe out virtually all warm water corals this century. And every day, the equivalent of 2,000 garbage trucks full of plastic are dumped into the world’s oceans, rivers and lakes.
But in some places, like the Mediterranean Sea, things are improving. The arcing Gulf of Naples – once a haven for typhoid and hepatitis – now has a dozen beaches that have been internationally recognized for their cleanliness and sustainability.
“The Mediterranean is showing that it is possible to reverse the fortunes of flagging seas, and that development and sustainability can go hand-in-hand,” says Pacheco Capella.
Held on 8 June each year, World Ocean Day unites the world to protect and restore the blue planet.
