Ellen Pokorny
Communications Manager, SIWI
A healthy ocean provides oxygen, food, and stability for all life on Earth; an unhealthy ocean threatens all life. Globally, communities must pay increased attention to our oceans.
We must reverse dangerous trends that pollute, degrade, and erode aquatic life and ecosystems, give rise to warmer temperatures, and threaten the air that we breathe.
Interconnected waterways affect ocean health
While some recognise that pollution plays a major role in contributing to ocean health, many may not understand how interconnected the waterways are that ultimately lead to the ocean. Any pollution, degradation, or erosion in one area washes into the seas and oceans through waterways.
Further, freshwater abstraction impacts all environmental flows — including connected streams, rivers, bays, and estuaries — and degrades ecosystems, while coastal wetland destruction and greenhouse gas emissions impact the ocean and its ability to regulate the climate.
Integrated water governance for sustainability
To make the ocean and water more sustainable and beneficial to everyone, an interconnected and holistic approach to water governance is necessary. The source-to-sea approach incorporates the varying connections between ocean, land, and coastal areas.
It is a multidisciplinary, multi-stakeholder, knowledge-based approach to sustainable development that addresses biophysical, social, and economic connections between land, freshwater and oceans — all while contributing to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for the 2030 Agenda.
To make the ocean and water more sustainable and beneficial to everyone, an interconnected and holistic approach to water governance is necessary.
The Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) leads the expansion of the source-to-sea approach, developing capacity at local and national levels and engaging stakeholders across sectors through the Action Platform for Source-to-Sea Management (S2S Platform).
The S2S Platform connects stakeholders to promote improved management of land, water, coastal and marine linkages, and expand the knowledge of source-to-sea challenges and solutions for more sustainable ocean development.
Solutions leading to and from the ocean
Oceans and humans are reliant on nature and each other. The impacts on the ocean come from both upstream and downstream. Therefore, the solutions must incorporate all avenues that lead to and from the ocean in their sustainability plans.
International cooperation, knowledge-sharing and coordinated actions are necessary pieces of the sustainable ocean puzzle — the only way to a healthy ocean is to work together.
