THE most important place on Earth.
That’s how Ocean with David Attenborough (2025) pays tribute to the world’s oceans.
But the beauty this film portrays is inseparable from the vulnerability it reveals.
It delivers a stark warning: humanity’s relationship with the sea is out of balance.
One of its most powerful critiques targets industrial overfishing and the mega-trawlers that rake the seabed with vast metal nets, brutally hoovering up fish populations—much of which is discarded.
Attenborough calls this “the new colonialism,” a reflection of how powerful nations deplete the ocean’s wealth, often at the expense of developing countries and local communities.
The future of oceans centres not just on sustainability but on justice.
Ocean equity has emerged as an urgent imperative, one that requires us to evaluate who benefits from the sea and who bears its burdens.
Amid the triple planetary crisis: climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution; the inequalities in ocean access, governance and resource distribution expose a legacy of exclusion.
Colonial histories and Global North dominance have deep-rooted systems that sideline indigenous communities, small-scale fishers and developing maritime nations.
Fundamentally, ocean equity calls for dismantling these disparities.
While the global ocean economy is valued at an astonishing $3-6 trillion annually and supports 3 billion livelihoods, the lion’s share of wealth and influence remains concentrated among industrialized nations.
Powerful fleets exploit distant waters, often depleting resources crucial for vulnerable coastal communities.
For instance, in West Africa, foreign fleets have drastically reduced fish stocks, undermining food security for millions.
Meanwhile, institutions like the International Seabed Authority (ISA) and the High Seas Treaty negotiations reflect power asymmetries, where decisions are disproportionately shaped by wealthy states.
Critical to achieving ocean equity is the concept of ocean identity.
Beyond geography and livelihood, it incorporates symbolic and cultural connections between people and the sea.
For many marginalized, the ocean is a source of empowerment and survival.
Coastal women play essential roles in economic operations, including fisheries, yet remain largely invisible in governance.
For minorities, native communities and those with non-conforming ways of being and belonging, the sea exemplifies displacement, resistance and regeneration.
Their experiences embody the ocean’s fluidity and interconnectedness, making ocean identity a powerful metaphor for resilience and evolution.
Embracing this diversity disrupts dominant narratives that frame the ocean merely as a resource frontier and instead, grounds maritime policy in culture and compassion.
The UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021–2030) recognizes that science alone cannot ensure a just ocean.
Its Challenge 10, to ‘change humanity’s relationship with the ocean,’ underscores the need to reimagine our collective ties to the sea through equity and empathy.
This vision resonates with World Oceans Day 2025’s theme, ‘WONDER: Sustaining What Sustains Us.
’ Wonder – more than awe – should be a catalyst for responsibility and innovation.
In this spirit, a growing global movement is calling for legal personhood for oceans to ensure their rights and protection.
By aligning rights-based vision, we move beyond exploitative mindsets toward inclusive ocean identities and regenerative blue economies; futures where the ocean sustains everyone, not just a powerful handful.
The ongoing push for deep-sea mining captures the paradox of progress.
The promise of extracting minerals for green transition could devastate oceanic life and disproportionately impact underrepresented coastal communities.
The ISA’s recent push to advance mining contracts without robust environmental safeguards or meaningful consent echoes historical patterns of exploitation, such as British colonial control over the Indus River for canal irrigation that prioritized cash crops over local food security, the extraction of fish and salt from the Makran and Sindh coasts for imperial trade and the exclusion of local communities from decision-making that shaped resource access and economic dependency.
Pakistan’s 1,001 km coastline and 240,000 km² Exclusive Economic Zone offer vast maritime potential.
Realizing this means addressing widespread sea-blindness and embedding a coherent ocean identity into the nation’s consciousness.
Furthermore, existing and emerging national frameworks must prioritize equity, enable community involvement and uphold environmental justice to ensure that economic gains do not come at the cost of local livelihoods or marine ecosystems.
As shared spaces, oceans hold vast potential for cooperation over conflict and recognizing them as collective resource demands governance anchored in equity.
For maritime nations, a regenerative Blue Economy is not just an economic choice; it is key to national security.
Weaving ocean identity into the national fabric can help reimagine the sea – not as a place of extraction, contestation, or militarization – but as a space of shared innovation, resilience and diplomacy.
Such reframing is essential to enable just and sustainable ocean futures for all, in line with UNCLOS-82, which calls the ocean the ‘common heritage of mankind.’
—The writer is associated with the National Institute of Maritime Affairs. The views expressed are his own.
