Can science save our oceans?

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Hello, you lovely, curious-minded listeners.

Welcome to a very special episode of Inside Science on BBC Radio 4, which was first broadcast on the 5th of June, 2025.

I'm Victoria Gill, and I am in Nice, in the south of France, this week because we are diving into an issue that will be the center of the world's scientific attention over the next two weeks.

The ocean and our planet, the life supporter system, is in a state of emergency.

There is now at least or at last an increased awareness of the plight of the ocean.

If we don't transition to a circular economy for plastics, we could have more plastics than fish in the ocean by 2050.

After living for nearly 100 years on this planet, I now understand the most important place on Earth is not on land, but at sea.

We have left the studio to bring you Inside Science from Nice today because 2,000 marine scientists from all over the world are gathered here for the One Ocean Science Congress to share the latest insights into the health of our seas.

It's the biggest and arguably the most important habitat on Earth.

70% of our planet is covered by water.

And this event lays the foundations for the crucial UN Ocean Conference next week.

That's when 200 countries will meet here in an effort to reach an agreement on how to protect the marine world from multiple threats, including climate change, overfishing, loss of biodiversity and pollution.

It will be a complicated negotiation, so fortunately I am joined on the Nice waterfront by an ocean expert who will be at both the scientific meeting and the policy meeting.

Marie Roberts is Professor of Marine Biology at the University of Edinburgh.

Hello, Marie.

Hi.

Thank you very much for joining us.

No, it's a pleasure.

Great to be here.

Around us, so we're standing on the harbour side where this sort of temporary tent city has been built for these two conferences.

We've seen politicians walking around, we've seen a lot of scientists, we've spoken to a lot of scientists.

What's your first impression?

of the scale of this and what's at stake.

So my first impression of the scale was actually we're on a harbour side and we're right next to to a research vessel.

This meeting is all about how science informs negotiations at the United Nations.

Without good science you're not going to get good decisions.

We need also to remember that data, that information has to come from people who go out on the ocean and so to have the ships that politicians and policymakers can see, walk around and feel, I think is going to be really important.

What are all these scientists gathering here now aiming to do?

All of the UN treaties that would, we hope in the future, lead to a healthier ocean rely on good science.

Well, how do we get that science?

How do we make sure that science is brought into the negotiations?

It's a great idea, simply, to bring 2,000 scientists together before the UN itself meets to discuss these issues.

And these issues then feed in past the UN Ocean Conference that happens next week into the very many other negotiations of the United Nations where the ocean is present, but sometimes because it's present everywhere, it's missing in core details, like the United Nations framework on climate change.

We live on an ocean planet, right?

So the ocean is central to the climate system, but needs to be better represented at UNFCCC.

Similarly, with the Biodiversity Convention, the Convention on Biological Diversity, where's the marine environment?

We need to make sure the ocean is supported, understood, and brought forward in all those negotiations.

This is the place where it starts.

Right.

It's bringing that scientific evidence right to the policymakers' doorstep

before they gather.

So we've got the scientific picture.

But you've named some of those conventions and those different meetings there.

It's a complicated process, isn't it?

The UN process of reaching these, of coming to these negotiations and talking about these things can seem so cumbersome.

Why is it important?

It's like acronym soup.

I'm a marine ecologist.

I study the deep sea and how things live and may change in the deep ocean.

It's been a real

really tough journey actually just trying to understand the processes that go on that we need to kind of wrap our heads around to regulate human activities in these places.

But actually, unless we put those hard miles in, we're not going to get there.

We've got to get there fairly, we've got to get there by consensus, and we've got to bring everyone along.

You can't go in and dictate terms.

That is not the way to do this.

People rely on the ocean for their livelihoods to feed their children, to feed communities.

We've got to figure out a way of making that sustainable and resilient in a future change climate.

At the end of this, would we see some sort of treaty, kind of in the same vein as the climate cops that we get to an agreement that everyone signs up to to say how we move forward in a way that's more sustainable there'll be a conference statement rather than a sort of legally binding treaty coming out of this people might wonder so all of these dignitaries policy makers business leaders scientists all gathering in the south of france in june to you know to reach a statement right why is there what's the significance of that but beyond that statement there are also legally binding measures and agreements that have been negotiated over decades of work.

And there's a new legally binding treaty on biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction, sometimes known as a high seas treaty.

We're hoping at this meeting enough nations will have ratified that treaty for it to come into force.

Whether we get there or not, we don't know.

But that's one of the big things that could come from this negotiation.

So we have to wait and see.

And what's your role as a scientist?

Providing the data.

Marie, will you stay with us just for a little bit longer?

I'll be happy to, yes.

Now though, there's a bewildering array of marine science being discussed here this week, so we want to bring you some highlights.

With the UN's ultimate aim being the conservation and sustainable use of our oceans, fishing is of course on the agenda.

Professor Amanda Vincent from the University of British Columbia in Canada is here to share some new evidence about the controversial practice of bottom trawling.

Here's Amanda.

If you close your eyes and imagine your favourite hillside, your favourite forest, and imagine helicopters dropping down razor wires and shearing the whole thing off at ground level and digging into the ground and lying waste behind it, that's what bottom trawling is, but in the ocean.

So it is devastating removal of everything in its path, including a lot of the bottom fauna.

And it's something that you study.

What do we know about the effect on marine life of that trawling?

We know that trawling does a lot of damage, but most of the studies, it turns out, on bottom trawling have taken place in areas that have been trawled for hundreds of years.

So guess what?

The next trawl over doesn't make much damage.

And we're here also to highlight the fact that there is no research on what happens to bottom trawling and how it affects marine biota in most of the world, in the tropics, in the developing world, where trawling is much newer and where biodiversity is really concentrated.

And what's the scale of that practice?

How much bottom trawling happens around the world?

It's huge.

So about 100,000 bottom trawlers a day operate and they catch about a quarter of the world's fisheries landings by biomass.

Wow.

So, by weight.

You can find tiny trawlers that are operated by sail with two people, and you can find trawlers where the nets are big enough that you could put a 43-story building into them if tipped sideways.

So, it is a massive practice.

I'm a seahorse biologist, first and foremost.

I work on bottom trawling because they are devastating my animals.

And one way to explain the significance of bottom trawling is that many areas where we work, each trawler may only catch one to two seahorses per vessel per night.

Countries like Vietnam and Thailand export millions of seahorses every year.

So think about the intensity that represents of the repeat trawling in their waters.

Whoa, so every one of those seahorses that's exported is coming from bottom trawling?

The vast, vast majority, almost all.

How do you shift away from bottom trawling but maintain fishing livelihoods and keep sustainably eating seafood?

We're very much in favour of well-managed fisheries, so the trick is to transition away from bottom trawling with the tremendous costs it imposes ecologically, economically, socially and in many other ways into fisheries that are more selective, offer good employment and long-term sustainable use.

We're finding that many people enter bottom trawling because the conventional forms of fishing, the selective targeted forms of fishing have been badly damaged by bottom trawling.

And many people enter bottom trawling because they just need a job and they might come from urban areas or hill areas.

So yes, we have to worry about them, but there's not a long cultural affinity to the ocean and fishing in those people.

We also find that many people stay in bottom trawling because they get trapped into an indentured relationship where actually they owe so much to the trawl owners that have effectively become their bankers that they can't really easily escape bottom trawling.

Or that new technical innovations have enabled the fishery to keep going even as the fisheries catches start to plummet.

Where I work in India, for example, we have reached a point which we are calling annihilation fishing, where the bottom trawlers trawlers go to sea with no target in mind.

They're going out to catch life itself.

Just to scrape and see what comes up.

And what comes up and they sort it out and some stuff can go in a selective way but most is reduced to fish meal or fish oil or chicken feed for pennies a kilogram.

How do you stop it?

Like what have you found about how you intervene and bring an end to this in an equitable way?

Well I think the first thing to realize is probably the most useful tool for ending bottom trawling is no troll areas, no troll troll zones.

So

some protected areas allow bottom trawling, which always astonishes me, but we're going to have to have many no-troll zones as we work towards an eventual end to bottom trawling.

And so one of the pieces of research we've been doing is what happens if you end bottom trawling and only bottom trawling in an area, other fisheries persist.

And what we're finding is really encouraging.

The research is about to near completion, but we're discovering that you do get recovery in areas.

If we make change, we're going to see the ocean do better.

And that, I think, is enough to propel us forward into this transition.

Thank you to Amanda Vincent there.

Marie Roberts, have you seen the effect that bottom trawling can have on the ocean?

I saw this first myself as a postdoctoral researcher when I was invited to join a trip to Norway.

And I remember to this day the scientists ashen-faced watching the devastation of areas that used to support rich, diverse deep-sea coral reefs that have been plowed down into the mud.

There was nothing left.

Is that one example where some lines could just be drawn to say, you know, some things are just too damaging and we just need to stop?

I think so, potentially, absolutely.

But you've got to have that conversation in the right way.

So many of the so-called marine protected areas that exist don't actually have management measures that would prevent you going in and bottom trawling or maybe extracting things in other ways.

They've just been agreed on paper, so they get called paper parks.

Now the hard work and those hard miles miles need to come in to bring people together to make sure that the most destructive activities are phased out.

Thanks, Marie.

Stay with us.

Now, in the ocean and on the radio, sound is everything.

And there's a team of researchers here testing some new underwater recording equipment to listen to some of the marine world's biggest predators, the whales.

Captain Roland Jordan and scientist Hervé Glautin invited me to eavesdrop on the lives of these marine mammals from their research boat.

Hello, Hello, it's so nice to meet you.

Bonjour, chanté.

We are heading out from Nice on the We Explore, which is a 60-foot catamaran that used to be a racing yacht.

The captain Roland used to race this boat, and now he has dedicated it to science.

It's now a floating laboratory, primarily used to record underwater sound, which is what we're going to try to do today.

Hi, I'm Hervé Glautin.

I am a professor in the University of Toulon.

I try to get information on the communication of the whales versus the pressures that we have with the boat traffic and with the noise we do in the ocean.

To study that, Herve and his team have designed a special device that can be towed silently behind a yacht with hydrophones or underwater microphones sealed inside it.

It's an unusual looking thing.

Just describe it.

What is it?

It's a foil.

We wanted the skippers who work with us to not stop their boat, but still record good sounds.

So a foil as in it's kind of hydrodynamic and moves through the water.

Is that why it's it looks like a m a manta ray?

It looks like it is it is a manta design, it's a bio-inspired design and uh so it's a good combination of electronic, computer science, hydrodynamics.

So we are very proud of that.

Yeah, it looks really cool.

I've I've never seen a recording device quite like that.

Drop in the sea

and it goes!

This slick recording device is designed to send what it hears directly to a computer on board.

The team has traveled hundreds of kilometers recording dozens of species with this kit, but today.

So, is it just not recording at all?

Not as we wish to be.

Okay.

Okay.

After some some fiddling, some coding, and a call to a technical colleague back in Tiwan.

Yes, we got it.

We have a

woohoo!

All we can hear on this calm afternoon is the sound of the ocean itself.

This is the noise of the water on the boat.

When it's glue glue, glue glue.

Otherwise,

that's just the background noise of the ocean.

And what is the background noise of the ocean?

Actually, it's a termic noise, it's agitation of the molecules of the water.

In two years of recording in the Mediterranean, though, Herve says he's heard every species of whale and dolphin in these waters.

Sometimes they're talking to each other.

So, this is a big dolphins.

Turshops, bottlenose dolphins.

Wow.

Is that communication or hunting?

Whistling is communication and clicks is hunting.

Another dolphin

It's doing clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack.

That is a boat or so.

Oh, see, the rumble is a boat, is it?

And then the clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack.

It's a dolphin.

It's a

blue-white dolphin.

And it's hunting like that.

It's doing a noise that is very good to get echolocation on fishes.

There's that sort of slow ticking sound.

Compared to the small dolphin, this one is the biggest hunter, so it's very large click.

This is a sperm whale doing clicks that are spaced of one second each.

There is still a click with one second between, but there is a second click.

Yeah.

It also one second between each.

So there are two.

Two animals.

Yes, this is the case where they hunt together and they dive together.

They stay one hour together and they breathe together.

And they do so for days.

This was

maybe 100 meters away

and it's a boat that is stopping.

The engines are really masking echoes of the hunters.

Hervey's colleague and PhD student, Justine Girardet, has been using similar technology in the Arctic, listening to how different species of whales that all feed on herring in the cold, productive Norwegian fjords respond to boat noise and to each other.

Yeah, there is a lot of boats fishing there, so if there is too much sound, they can't hear each other or they can't even prey or hunt.

Find their prey with their sound signals.

So this could lead to huge problem.

Yeah, I think of killer whale, for example, that need to communicate to coordinate their movement when they are

hunting.

If they can't hear each other, they can't hunt.

So, yeah.

And you've seen some really interesting things as well in terms of how they change their behavior when other species are around.

What is interesting is that so killer whale gather heroing into a bowl and umback whale are just waiting that the ball is created and when the ball is created they come, open the mouth and just grab the ball and go away.

So they let the orcas do all of the job coordinating the ball of herring and then

sit back and then come and swim through, take a big mouth ball.

And just enjoy it and go away.

Wow.

So they're listening to each other all the time.

Yeah, for sure.

These marine mammals communicate, hunt and navigate with sound.

To avoid drowning them out, Herve says there's one very simple thing that boats could do.

We want from the coast to the 12 miles, we want the boats to decrease to 10 knots.

To slow down.

Just slow down and keep their speed at 10 knots maximum.

This speed will generate so much lower noise when you are at sea you will take more time to move from a board to another but you will save life, biodiversity for years, for centuries.

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You're listening to a special oceans episode of Inside Science on BBC Radio 4 with me, Victoria Gill.

And you might be feeling calmed by the sound of the waves in the harbor here in Nice.

I hope you are.

And there's a team here from a Plymouth-based charity that tries to help people who are living with poor mental health by prescribing ocean-based activities.

Dan is one of the people who took part in this blue prescriptions trial last year, and he very kindly shared his experience with us.

He sent us this voice note.

Taking part in the Blue Mind programme was...

a genuinely enriching experience.

We had a guided tour of the aquarium where we got to access behind the scenes, which which was fascinating.

In particular, meeting Friday the turtle.

We went rock pooling, where we learned about the marine life in our local area.

There was a boat trip where we raised crab traps and spotted some seals lounging on the rocks.

We had a session dedicated to mindfulness.

I learned some techniques that I still use to this day, but snorkeling was easily my favorite part.

It was a reminder why the ocean ocean matters so much and how healing nature can be when you really take the time to connect with it.

Overall, the Blue Mind programme taught me a lot about the ocean, a lot about myself, and left me with some tools and memories that will continue to support my well-being.

And I am genuinely grateful that I took part.

Thank you, Dan.

We spoke to Freya Thompson Alberts from the Ocean Conservation Trust, who's leading the project.

We've been sending people to the ocean since Victorian times.

People would go to the sea to take in the waters and get away from the industrial areas like Birmingham, London, the kind of big industry centres.

So, what blue mind theory does, it was a term that was coined by Wallace J.

Nichols about 10 years ago, and it ties together all of the different research that's gone into

lots of different psychological benefits of being in, on, around, under blue spaces.

With our project, we started it in 2023 as a pilot of using blue activities as a way of improving people's well-being.

So, people that come on the programme are going to have some kind of diagnosed need.

They've gone to see someone within healthcare and they're saying that they're, you know, struggling with their mental health.

So, something like blue prescribing is really helpful to society because it actually reduces pressure on waiting lists that we have and it reduces the need for medication, or it can also coexist alongside things like medication.

The activities sound

really calming and really sort of nourishing, but how do you measure the, you know, that there's a benefit?

So, they do a baseline survey before we've even spoken to them, really.

We go, hello, Phil is forming.

And then at the end, we end with that form, but we also are measuring things like learning.

So, for a lot of people, they recognise that the ocean is really important for their well-being a lot more at the end of the sessions than they do at the beginning.

And in fact, 84% of people that have done the sessions, we've had about 40 people over two years, said that the sessions had a significant increase on their well-being.

There's a lot of evidence that being out in nature or engaging, having even a view of a tree from a hospital window can actually improve your recovery, can't it?

There's a lot of evidence about the positive effect that nature has on us.

Why is the ocean such a, in your experience, a healing thing in this respect?

It's super interesting.

I think there's so many different elements to the ocean so it's got all sorts of different sensory benefits so like the sound of the waves it calms your auditory senses down the visual looking at waves that colour blue there's a reason they use it in bedrooms because it's a very calming colour it helps you feel relaxed

the smell of the sea is actually sea salts and viruses and things weirdly so it supports all of those kind of calming measures that you need to make you feel good and then you can feel supported to go and carry on with whatever you're doing

Thank you to Freya Thompson Alberts there.

Murray Roberts is still with me.

You know, you've been working on the ocean, on ocean science for a long time, but do you think about how it affects you personally, about your health, your mental health?

I guess I do, but maybe not consciously.

So here we are standing on the quayside, and just the sound of the water and the waves lapping, it immediately relaxes you.

And if I look in my own life to what I want to do on my holidays, I'll go sailing, I'll get in a dinghy, I'll go scuba diving, I will go back to the ocean.

And I'll remember being a kid swimming, I think, in Guernsey and putting a face mask on for the first time and realising there was a whole other life beneath the waves that I knew nothing about.

Never gets boring, it's not a busman's holiday for a marine scientist.

It's not.

And we're here talking about thousands of scientific insights and presentations, but there's been some research published this week.

We always try and have a troll through the scientific literature to sort of see what people should know about during the week that we broadcast Inside Science.

There's been a very timely paper on ocean over-exploitation that I know you've been having a look at, published in Nature.

What is this?

So this paper sets out the idea that there are some activities in the deep and open ocean and the deep sea that are just not compatible with sustaining ecosystems in those places.

They're just too vulnerable.

It talks about issues like bottom trawling, it talks about extracting oil and gas from these areas and the potential that we'd go to those places and extract mineral resources that we would deep-sea mine.

Those ecosystems just can't take that.

And we should just say we won't do it.

Those are areas that aren't owned by different nations, they're managed for the common heritage of humankind through the United Nations, and we should just put a marker down.

And I can totally see where the authors on that paper are coming from.

The nuance, I guess, is that the world is so complicated.

There are so many interests out there, and we've got to come together and we've got to work those issues through.

And there's another paper been published this week that I wanted to highlight in particular because it was about something fascinating that happened in Greenland, a huge tsunami that happened in a fjord when a glacier collapsed.

Can you talk about this paper?

It's so interesting.

It's an incredible story.

So I looked at the paper quickly last night.

I hadn't actually seen it before.

And the fact that this glacier destabilised and crashed into a fjord, so like a sea lock in Scotland, causing a mega wave to oscillate, to run backwards and forwards across the fjord.

That shook not just the fjord and that part of Greenland, it shook the world.

And the scientists modelled, they extrapolated and showed the waves of seismic activity spreading out across the whole northern hemisphere.

It was amazing, and it just shows that we are indeed on the edge of a precipice of these extreme events.

As the glaciers destabilize, as our planet warms, we're going to see more of this.

We are not ready for this at all.

If this conference had happened a decade ago,

in the last decade, how much has technology moved us on in terms of what we can understand about the oceans, but how much has the pressure increased and the situation got worse for the oceans?

Yeah, the question is great, but the question kind of answers itself.

So, yes, technology has leapfrogged in ways that I could never have even imagined.

The low-cost cameras that we can put to the deep ocean to visualize what's there, cameras that would have cost me £50,000 a few years ago, I can make surveys for £10,000 now.

Those are the plus points, those are the high points.

But we are now beginning beginning a kind of sprawl into the oceans that, again, we couldn't have imagined.

If we think of offshore wind, we need offshore wind to generate the power, the green power we need to power our societies.

But there won't be just a few oil platforms out there in the future.

There will be thousands upon thousands of turbines, each being installed with noisy pile drivers, each then having to be maintained with little boats, with cables running between that generate electromagnetic field.

So, other pressures come on the ocean.

So, we need the science and we need this activity to ramp up in parallel.

Marie, I know you have to go and actually get on with all of the sessions that you'll be attending at this conference but before you do can you just give me a sense of what you're hoping to see emerge over the next two weeks?

I think the big one is something that the UN can be really good at.

When the UN's doing great work it's bringing people together and it's bringing young people and the voice of youth and the voice of people that are often not represented in these places, indigenous peoples, local communities.

It's bringing that right to the fore.

So I think if it's about anything, it's about that.

So we have people that are informed and educated and motivated moving forward.

And also that we remember marine ecosystems are inherently resilient.

They can bounce back.

But we've got to take those pressures off.

Murray Roberts, thank you so much for joining us on this special episode of Inside Science.

It's a pleasure, thank you very much.

And that is all we have time for from Nice this week.

You've been listening to BBC Inside Science with me, Victoria Gill.

The producers were Dan Welsh, Claire Salisbury and Jonathan Blackwell.

The show was made in Cardiff by BBC Wales and West.

And we will of course keep Inside Science listeners updated with any news from the UN Oceans Conference as well as with all the other science stories you need to know about.

But for now, from the Nice Harbourside, thank you for listening and bye-bye.

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