Environmental activist group Greenpeace literally exposed the European Union’s “failure” to protect the ocean as it projected messages calling out its lies and false promises on the Commission’s HQ in Brussels on Monday.
With this action, it called on Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and environment commissioner Virginijus Sinkevičius — who previously said “our future depends” on the oceans — to deliver on their promises to protect the oceans, which so far, have been empty.
“The European Union must deliver the ocean protection it has repeatedly promised. Along with the UK and the US, it’s largely responsible for the failure to reach a deal at the last round of UN negotiations in August 2022,” Laura Meller of Greenpeace’s Protect the Oceans campaign said.
The organisation noted the importance of such a treaty, both globally as less than 1% of the world’s oceans are protected, but also specifically for the EU itself, as its own marine environment is in a “dismal state,” with 99% of European waters unprotected from “high impact activities”, like bottom trawling or mining.