'Severe' stress on oceans as rate of sea level rise doubles in 10 years, UN warns

[OKIsItJustMe]

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jun/08/un-world-ocean-assessment-severe-stress-sea-level-rise-doubles-pollution-fishing-climate

Global effort needed to limit effects of pollution, industrial fishing and climate crisis, World Ocean Assessment says

…

The UN’s third World Ocean Assessment, which reflects the work of nearly 600 scientists from 86 countries, looked at the oceans’ health from 2021-25. The previous report, that covered up to 2018, found persistent degradation of the marine environment.

Five years on, scientists know more about the cumulative impacts of anthropogenic pressures on the ocean, and the latest report shows just how much of the damage has been done in the past few years. The scientists’ key findings include:

• Sea levels continue to rise at an increasing rate, from 2mm a year prior to 2015 to 4.3mm a year in 2023.


• 16% of the increase in global ocean heat since 1955 occurred after 2018.


• The greatest relative warming has been observed in the Atlantic Ocean and the southern parts of the Indian and Pacific Oceans.


• Large gaps in knowledge persist – with only 27% of the ocean floor mapped by 2025, deep-sea ecosystems remain poorly understood.

António Guterrez, the UN secretary general, said: “We cannot keep treating the ocean as limitless. Urgent global collaboration is needed to protect marine ecosystems.

…

https://www.un.org/regularprocess/woa3

[thought crime]

1. "We cannot keep treating the ocean as limitless"

The ocean has been treated like a cesspool, a garbage dump, a storage facility for radioactive waste, and a source of food and energy. When the oceans die, we will die, too. We need to regain a focus on the basic human population problem that is the root cause of self-destruction.

[OKIsItJustMe]

2. Overpopulation (and we are overpopulated) is just one part of the problem

As i’ve said before, if the goal is to eliminate carbon emissions by 2050, population control won’t accomplish that goal (not even close.)

If the goal is survival, cutting emissions is only one of several challenges we face:

https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries.html

The 2025 update to the Planetary boundaries. Licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. Credit: "Azote for Stockholm Resilience Centre, based on analysis in Sakschewski and Caesar et al. 2025".

[thought crime]

3. Great chart, thanks

Population growth could be seen as the most fundamental problem, but of course controlling population cannot be a total solution. And there is a chicken and egg aspect: did population growth cause excessive industrial output, or did industrial growth enable population growth?

Anyway, I always defer to your analysis; thanks for your hard work.

[OKIsItJustMe]

4. You're welcome!

When i was young, my mother told me, “Whenever the population get’s too high, the ‘four horsemen’ tend to take care of the excess.”

One of the many contributors to our population explosion was modern agriculture. If the food supply expands, if fewer people are starving, if fewer children suffer from malnutrition, then the population expands. It’s classic Malthus

❝The perpetual tendency of the race of man to increase beyond the means of subsistence is one of the general laws of animated nature, which we can have no reason to expect to change.❞

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