Pulitzer Center Update June 23, 2025
UN Ocean Conference: Pulitzer Center Fellows Help Keep Targets on Track
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Anyone who’s ever made a new year’s resolution knows that the easy part is setting a target. What’s harder, and far less glamorous, is working out how to do it effectively, and sticking to it over time.
This was the general feeling at this month’s United Nations Ocean Conference (UNOC) in the southern port city of Nice, France. Big announcements of money or new protected areas were welcomed, but were followed by many questions about accountability, implementation, cost, and delivery.
Luckily for us as journalists, this is where our reporting can play a transformational role. Take marine protection, for example. We can hold governments to account when they promise new areas, asking what level of activity will be permitted to make it truly protected, examining whether the communities who have long used the spaces have been included fairly, making sure the finances go to the right places and the targets are being met.
We can expose administrations who make conservation promises yet allow destructive practices such as bottom trawling, or investigate companies who make false claims about their sustainability records.
The first two years of the Ocean Reporting Network has seen our reporting Fellows asking exactly these types of questions in their stories. Around the world, 18 yearlong, deeply reported or investigative projects have covered illegal fishing, aquaculture, labor rights and abuses, pollution, deep-sea mining, marine geoengineering, and more.
Our ocean journalism has resulted in arrests and prosecutions in Peru, Indonesia, and Ghana. We have awarded nearly 40 individual story grants to support the hard reporting costs of journalists to travel to a remote Pacific atoll, Chilean fjords, Indonesian islands, South African coastal communities, and many more locations that are hard to reach but where stories urgently need to be told, in local, national, and international publications.
And this much-needed reporting comes as a critical time. Opening the five-day summit, co-hosted by France and Costa Rica, the U.N, secretary-general, António Guterres, warned that the health of the ocean was fast-approaching a tipping point “beyond which recovery may become impossible.”
Ocean politics
The conference, on France’s Côte d’Azur, hosted nearly 60 heads of state, 45 ministerial delegations, scientists, business leaders, philanthropists, and civil society groups. The main aim was to assess the progress toward the U.N. goal to “conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development.”
The summit was the third time that nations convened on ocean issues on a U.N. level, and it was the largest gathering of its kind so far, with more than 15,000 registered participants.
There are many international frameworks that govern different ocean issues, from pollution to marine protection, and as such UNOCs do not announce any legally binding targets like a climate COP. But they do provide a rare opportunity to accelerate action on these treaties and focus attention on ocean issues. More than 170 countries adopted the Nice Ocean Action Plan, which included a political declaration to commit to “urgent action” to protect the world’s ocean and a list of 800 voluntary commitments.
There were wins in gaining more commitments from countries to control deep-sea mining, harmful fishing practices, and marine degradation. But for many, it comes back to whether those promises will be delivered with concrete action in years to come.
Covering the conference
The Pulitzer Center took 10 Ocean Reporting Network Fellows and three staff members to Nice. Some covered the conference for their outlets, while others were able to interview people key to their yearlong reporting projects that they wouldn’t otherwise have been able to get access to.
Mongabay’s Elizabeth Claire Alberts got an exclusive with the prime minister of Papua New Guinea for her deep-sea mining project, which was a key theme at the conference, where 162 organizations from 30 countries called for a moratorium or precautionary pause.
Many news reports from Nice focussed on the treaty to protect the high seas, which aims to create a framework for protecting areas of the ocean that lie beyond national borders. For The Observer, Katie McQue reported on a sense of failure that commitments in Nice fell short of the target of 60 countries that are required for the treaty to enter into force. McQue also secured interviews with the head of the International Maritime Organization and countries that sell “flags of convenience,” supporting her project for Context on seafarer abandonment.
As a Canadian journalist reporting for The Globe & Mail, Jenn Thornhill Verma covered the launch of a High Ambition Coalition for a Quiet Ocean. Led by Canada and Panama, 37 countries are working to curb noise pollution from shipping, one of the focus areas of her yearlong project on the fate of North Atlantic right whales. She also spoke to CBC radio about covering the conference.
A New York Times story by Delger Erdenesanaa, who is looking at ocean warming for her ORN Fellowship, focused on the 20 new marine protected areas that were announced in Nice, part of an international goal to protect 30% of the ocean by 2030.
And for The Leader in Sri Lanka, Saroj Pathirana focused on the ocean leadership record of France, which came under repeated scrutiny during the conference.
Fellowship convening
UNOC Nice provided a central point around which we could gather our fellows to spend time together in person after almost a year of virtual team meetings. When we convened the Fellows last year at a U.N. ocean conference in Barcelona, we found that time together was invaluable, and from their feedback, one of the best parts of the Fellowship experience. We have seen with last year’s group that getting to know each other personally and professionally, sharing perspectives and experiences, has led to further collaboration on stories and continued relationships once the Fellowship ends.
In the margins of the conference, we made time for internal workshops with the data and engagement teams, where we explored impact, audiences, final steps in the Fellowship, and opportunities when it ends. We had exclusive briefings from U.N. experts on the history of UNOC, and built in time for people to get to know each other in an informal setting.
We also arranged several field trips that gave people access to pioneering research vessels and scientists, building capacity with the opportunity to learn about wider ocean issues and subjects outside the focus of their Fellowship.
These included a private screening of the documentary Ocean by David Attenborough, hosted by the Australian philanthropic Minderoo Foundation, which helped fund the film. The release just ahead of the summit on World Oceans Day meant that it was heavily discussed throughout the week, particularly for exposing the destructive extent of bottom trawling. Minderoo also invited Fellows onboard the Green Pioneer for a tour of the world's first dual-fueled, ammonia-powered ship and launch of OceanOmics, which is using eDNA tools to support conservation science.
We were also lucky to have a private tour of OceanXplorer, the world’s most advanced exploration, research, and media vessel. This 87-meter-long ship sails around the world conducting scientific research, filming it with Hollywood levels of production and using the results to educate and inspire global audiences. Less than 30% of the ocean floor has been mapped, and this vessel is aiming to radically change that, explained OceanXplorer's science program director, Mattie Rodrigue, as she showed us the incredible array of tech including submersibles, laboratories, sensors, robots, and data centers.
The conference also gave us the chance to present and promote the journalism and engagement work of the Pulitzer Center and its unique model of fellowships and grants.
At a networking event at La Boulisterie, jointly organized with Communications Inc, we brought together ocean journalists from our networks, the Earth Journalism Network, and other outlets. We put them together with selected scientists, communications experts, funders, and partners in a series of activities that gave them the chance to to share their work, make connections, and explore ways to collaborate on stories.
We were also able to promote the 2024 report Making Waves, which explored the current state of ocean journalism, with printed postcards that carried QR codes linking to the report and a social media toolkit, translated into French especially for the conference.
We have a few more cohorts to get through first, but the next U.N. Ocean Conference is scheduled to take place in 2028 and will be co-hosted by Chile and South Korea. Hopefully by then, the promises made in Nice will have been delivered on, but in the meantime, we will keep supporting the journalism that holds these accountable.
Applications for the third cohort of the ORN will open in September 2025.
