SUVA, May 8 (Xinhua) -- Fiji will reduce the use of fossil fuels in domestic shipping services by 2030 through a Blue Shipping Initiative, a Fijian government official said on Wednesday.
Speaking here at the opening of the Climate and Ocean Negotiators’ Symposium, Fiji's Attorney General Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum said that Fiji is in the process of putting forward a Blue Shipping Initiative with the Republic of the Marshall Islands and six other Pacific island countries.
He said that ageing shipping vessels in the Pacific island countries were inefficient and had an unacceptably high carbon footprint.
Meanwhile, the United Nations Special Envoy for the Ocean Peter Thomson also said at the symposium that human activities on land has a major impact on the health of oceans.
More than 20 delegates from across the world with expertise in ocean science and climate change are part of the symposium in Fiji.
Thomson said that when water from the land flows to the sea, it carries plastic, run-off of agricultural fertilizers, toxins and untreated sewerage which affects the oceans.
"And it is in the ocean this land-derived pollution will be carried by currents, tide, and wind to places most of us have never been, to beaches of remote islands, to the bottom of ocean trenches,” Thomson said.
He told participants that the solutions would not come easy but it was every human’s responsibility to address the issue of ocean health.
“We have brought a plastic plague upon our planet. Thankfully, humanity has woken up to this predicament and around the world solutions are being developed to overcome it,” Thomson said.
