06/11/2025

What’s at Stake as Leaders Gather to Negotiate Our Oceans' Futures

France’s Côte D’Azur is hosting this fractious political discussion

France's bucolic Côte D’Azur, with its pine-forested hills and picturesque harbors, is rarely the site of fractious politics. But this week, hundreds of scientists and government officials from across the world have converged on the Mediterranean city of Nice for the United Nations' (UN) weeklong Oceans Conference, grappling over how to stave off calamitous ocean warming, rising sea levels and an accelerating destruction of marine life—all without the participation of a crucial global power and the world's biggest economy: the United States.

While President Donald Trump opted to skip the conference, his actions since returning to the White House in January overshadow almost every conversation among delegates and activists, in meeting rooms and halls erected around the old Port of Nice, with its yachts glimmering in the sun.

Opening the conference's first session on Monday morning, French President Emmanuel Macron, who is cohosting the event with the president of Costa Rica, bluntly criticized Trump's decisions. This includes an executive order from the U.S. president in April allowing deep-sea mining in international waters, which would seemingly violate global treaties that are currently being negotiated among governments. In signing the executive order. Trump described deep-sea mining as "the next gold rush." The ultra-deep international waters are thought to contain rich deposits of strategic metals like cobalt, copper and nickel.

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