At a time marked by the growing disconnect between humanity and the natural world, Dr. François Sarano, an internationally renowned oceanographer and former expedition leader of the legendary Calypso under Jacques Cousteau, invites us to reflect on the fundamental need to re-establish a balanced relationship with wild nature. His extraordinary career includes decades of underwater research, direct and prolonged encounters with white sharks and cetaceans, and a prolific career as author and co-director of the acclaimed documentary "Océans" by J. Perrin and J. Cluzaud (2010). This keynote examines how direct encounters with non-domesticated wildlife can transform our perception of the natural world, allowing us to redefine the appropriate boundaries between human civilization and the ecosystems that sustain us. The concept of "juste distance" (just distance) that Sarano develops, forged through thousands of hours of immersion and direct observation of the behavior of large marine predators, does not imply a detachment from nature, but rather the establishment of a respectful relationship that recognizes both our ecological interdependence and the intrinsic autonomy of natural systems.

Directed at researchers in oceanography, marine biology, scientific communication and environmental philosophy, as well as educators, documentarians, marine conservationists and sustainable tourism professionals, this conference offers both theoretical foundations on interspecies communication and practical tools derived from Sarano's unique experience. Participants will explore the underwater observation methodologies developed during his career alongside Cousteau, understand the insights extracted from his encounters with white sharks and cetaceans documented in his multiple publications and audiovisual productions, and access an innovative conceptual framework that integrates behavioral oceanography and environmental philosophy. Sarano's proposal provides a solid foundation for reimagining our relationship with the oceanic world and developing marine conservation strategies that honor ecosystem autonomy while recognizing our responsibility as a conscious species to participate in ocean regeneration, establishing a transformative paradigm for contemporary environmental ethics.

The Science of Transformation: From Individual Understanding to Systemic Action

‍The IPBES 2024 reports represent an unprecedented scientific milestone in our understanding of how to generate effective social transformation toward sustainability. Five years after the IPBES Global Assessment of 2019 documented the magnitude of the planetary biodiversity crisis, the new 2024 Transformative Change and Nexus Assessments provide the first scientifically robust answers to the central question of our time: what must we do to achieve nature-positive social transformation?

Empirical evidence from nearly 400 successful transformation cases documents for the first time the mechanisms of effective social change, revealing that transformation requires simultaneous modifications across three dimensions: our visions (ways of thinking, knowing, and seeing nature), our structures (ways of organizing, regulating, and governing), and our practices (ways of doing, behaving, and relating to ecosystems).

The Assessment identifies with scientific precision the three underlying causes that perpetuate ocean biodiversity destruction: disconnection from nature and domination over nature and other people; unequal concentration of power and wealth; and prioritization of individual and material short-term gains.

The revolutionary Nexus approach transforms our ocean understanding by empirically demonstrating that marine biodiversity, water, seafood, human health, and climate are inextricably interconnected, requiring integrated responses that generate systemic co-benefits. This systemic perspective is crucial as ocean ecosystems face irreversible biophysical tipping points such as the disappearance of shallow-water coral reefs and the collapse of global fisheries.

This keynote provides operational frameworks grounded in rigorous scientific evidence to translate understanding of these transformative mechanisms into concrete ocean rewilding strategies. With data demonstrating that positive outcomes can be achieved within a decade or less when diverse actors work collaboratively, this presentation shows that ocean transformation is not only urgent and necessary, but scientifically demonstrable, practically achievable, and economically viable.

At a critical moment where each decade of delay doubles the costs of action, this keynote translates the most advanced science available into immediately applicable tools for those seeking to catalyze transformative change in ocean conservation.

Based on rigorous scientific evidence, this keynote lecture presents a comprehensive assessment of the current state of biodiversity in the planet's major marine ecosystems. We will present the latest data on decline rates in coral reefs, pelagic ecosystems, deep-sea floors, and coastal zones, quantifying species losses and critical habitat degradation.

The conference will include a comparative analysis between oceanic regions, identifying ecosystems at greatest risk and the most determining stress factors. Through scientific projections based on current models, it will demonstrate why the next decade represents a critical window for action, presenting the scientific imperative that justifies the urgency of implementing conservation measures on a global scale immediately.

Lessons from (Cabo Pulmo (Mexico)/Gokova Bay (Turkey) on How Fully Protected Areas Transform Ocean Ecosystems and Coastal Communities.



Both sanctuaries share a common narrative of community-driven transformation, where local fishers made the bold decision to sacrifice short-term catches for long-term abundance, becoming guardians of their own marine heritage. Cabo Pulmo's 463% increase in fish biomass over two decades and Gokova Bay's remarkable recovery of carnivorous species and biodiversity spillover effects into adjacent fisheries demonstrate that marine protection is not about restricting human opportunity—it's about multiplying it exponentially. These cases illuminate how fully protected marine areas serve as natural banks that generate compound returns in ecosystem services, economic opportunities, and community resilience, offering a replicable blueprint for ocean recovery at a time when only 2.7% of our global ocean enjoys such protection.

In a global context where human well-being is intrinsically dependent on ocean health, seriously compromised by anthropogenic activities—with fisheries overexploitation being the main driver of marine biodiversity loss—Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) emerge as fundamental spatial and ecosystem management tools that offer the broadest range of socio-ecological benefits available.

However, despite international agreements that promote their establishment, declared MPA coverage does not constitute a sufficient indicator of conservation success. Evidence reveals that numerous MPAs lack effective implementation and substantive regulations that establish operational differences between their internal and external areas.

To address this challenge, the MPA Guide is presented as an innovative conceptual framework that classifies MPAs using two critical dimensions: their level of effective protection (from 'incompatible with marine conservation' to 'fully protected') and their establishment stage (from 'committed' to 'actively managed').

Meta-analysis results reveal a direct and significant correlation between protection level and MPA effectiveness, including measurable socioeconomic benefits. Particularly alarming is the considerably low proportion of areas under full and high protection, contrasting markedly with the high figures officially declared in various regions.

This keynote emphasizes the imperative need for a paradigmatic shift toward effective quality of protection to achieve global ocean objectives, underscoring that quantitative coverage is insufficient to guarantee the long-term health of marine ecosystems.

This talk explores the critical challenge of managing fishing activities within marine protected areas, introducing a new IUCN WCPA task force designed to accelerate progress toward 30x30 targets through evidence-based best practices. As demonstrated by the remarkable recoveries at Cabo Pulmo and Gokova Bay, and guided by frameworks like the MPA Guide, effective ocean rewilding requires navigating complex decisions about compatible human activities within protected marine spaces.

Protected areas experience a spectrum of extraction impacts, from fully protected no-take zones that enable complete ecosystem recovery to multiple-use areas allowing selective fishing. Critical uncertainties persist regarding which fisheries, at what scale and intensity, align with conservation objectives—including the challenging definition of 'industrial' versus 'artisanal' fishing in marine contexts.

This presentation examines how successful marine protected areas have addressed fisheries management challenges, discusses existing guidance, and explores knowledge gaps the new task force aims to resolve by 2027. By bridging conservation science and fisheries management, this initiative supports the transformative change needed to achieve both biodiversity recovery and sustainable livelihoods in our transition toward healthier oceans.

Marine Protected Areas (MPA) are increasingly being promoted as an ocean-based climate solution. However, these claims are controversial because the literature on the climate benefits of MPAs is scattered and poorly synthesized. To address this knowledge gap, a systematic literature review has recently been conducted of 22,403 publications covering 241 MPAs and analyzing 16 ecological and social pathways through which MPAs could contribute to climate change mitigation and adaptation. This meta-analysis determines that marine conservation can significantly improve carbon sequestration, coastal protection, biodiversity, and the reproductive capacity of marine organisms, as well as fishers' catches and incomes. Most of these benefits are only achieved in fully or highly protected areas and increase with MPA age.

This conference will present these results and analyze the extent to which MPAs can constitute a useful tool for climate change mitigation and socio-ecological system adaptation.

Sustainable financing of Marine Protected Areas has become the critical bottleneck preventing countries from materializing their ambitious 30x30 commitments. While governments announce new ocean protection targets, financial reality reveals an alarming gap: most MPAs operate with insufficient budgets, fragmented management structures, and excessive dependence on volatile government funding. The problem extends beyond available money to how resources are efficiently managed, allocated, and executed—a financing-management crisis that directly threatens achieving global objectives by 2030.

This presentation offers a comprehensive analysis of the global MPA financing landscape, exposing both available tools and critical operational gaps that prevent effective implementation. Through global data and comparative cases, successful financial management models will be revealed that integrate budget planning, self-revenue generation systems, and efficient governance structures. Analysis will range from innovative blue financing mechanisms to adaptive management systems that optimize limited resources.

The objective is to transform conservation rhetoric into viable financial and operational plans, providing integrated frameworks that connect financial sustainability, management efficiency, and conservation effectiveness. By identifying how best practices can multiply the impact of every investment, this session delivers immediately applicable tools for ensuring MPA success in the decisive decade ahead.

Marine ecosystems function as interconnected networks where the success of restoration efforts depends fundamentally on understanding ecological connectivity across entire seascapes. While traditional conservation approaches have focused on isolated protected areas, emerging science reveals that nutrients, larvae, carbon, and species move fluidly across coastal landscapes, creating dynamic webs of interdependence that transcend administrative boundaries. This connectivity is not merely an ecological curiosity—it is the foundation upon which all successful marine restoration must be built.

In the era of ambitious global targets for ocean recovery, seascape-scale thinking offers a transformative approach to restoration that multiplies conservation impact. Evidence from temperate coastal systems demonstrates that when restoration projects consider connectivity pathways—from watershed to deep ocean—they achieve exponentially greater success in rebuilding ecosystem resilience, enhancing biodiversity, and restoring ecosystem services. This integrated approach recognizes that restoring a seagrass meadow requires understanding sediment flows from terrestrial sources, that coral reef recovery depends on larval connectivity networks, and that fish population recovery relies on habitat corridors spanning multiple ecosystem types.

This keynote presents a paradigm shift from fragmented restoration efforts toward seascape-scale strategies that harness natural connectivity to accelerate ocean recovery. By adopting this holistic framework, restoration practitioners can design interventions that work with natural systems rather than against them, creating cascading positive effects that extend far beyond individual project sites and dramatically increase the likelihood of achieving global ocean restoration targets within the critical decade ahead.

Reflections on COP16 & UNOC3: Lessons from Global Frameworks on Ocean Conservation Implementation

In the context of the global biodiversity crisis we face, this keynote examines the most recent developments from the sixteenth Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, held in Cali, Colombia in October 2024, and the emerging results from the Third United Nations Ocean Conference (UNOC3), held in Nice, France in June 2025. This temporal convergence is not coincidental, but represents a unique opportunity to examine how integrating SDG 14 objectives with the Global Biodiversity Framework, especially the 30x30 target, can create transformative synergies between terrestrial and marine conservation.

The conference analyzes how strategic integration of three fundamental pillars emerging from these frameworks can transform global conservation efforts: science and evidence as the foundation for effective public policies, multilateral cooperation as an international governance mechanism, and grassroots initiatives including local communities, indigenous peoples, and citizen movements. Special examination focuses on the critical importance of ecosystem connectivity revealed in both conferences, exploring innovative strategies to create biological corridors and protected area networks functioning as integrated systems. The ocean dimension gains particular relevance considering that UNOC3 represents the first ocean conference since the adoption of the Kunming-Montreal Framework and the BBNJ Agreement.

This keynote provides tools for understanding the most recent international regulatory frameworks, identifying effective ecosystem recovery strategies validated by these global processes, and leveraging innovative financing mechanisms including sustainable blue economy approaches. Lessons extracted from COP16 and UNOC3 demonstrate that effective ocean conservation implementation requires mobilizing all of society through deep understanding of how these global frameworks can translate into transformative action, recognizing that ocean biodiversity constitutes the foundation of our planetary survival.

The ocean remains largely voiceless in legal systems designed by and for humans, despite providing the foundation for all life on Earth and facing unprecedented threats from climate change, pollution, and overexploitation. This keynote explores the transformative potential of emerging legal frameworks that seek to fundamentally reimagine our relationship with the ocean—from an extractive resource to be exploited to a living entity with inherent rights deserving protection and representation. While traditional ocean governance structures struggle to address accelerated marine degradation, innovative legal approaches are emerging that center the intrinsic value and ecological integrity of the ocean.

The presentation examines three interconnected pathways through which law is becoming a powerful tool for ocean protection: ocean literacy as the foundation for informed legal action, advocacy that transforms scientific knowledge into policy change, and strategic litigation that enforces existing obligations while establishing new precedents for ocean rights. Central to this evolution is the initiative toward a Universal Declaration of Ocean Rights, which would recognize the ocean as a living entity with rights to existence, ecological health, and freedom from irreversible harm, embracing the principle of "in dubio, in favorem Oceani"—when in doubt, rule in favor of the ocean.

Through case studies of recent climate litigation, rights of nature movements, and developments in international ocean law, this keynote demonstrates how legal innovation is creating new spaces for the ocean's voice to be heard in courts, policy forums, and international negotiations. At a critical juncture for ocean health, law emerges not merely as a regulatory tool, but as a means to fundamentally transform governance to honor our interdependence with the ocean that sustains all life.

Beyond the horizon of national waters lies the forgotten half of our planet—the high seas and international seabed covering nearly 60% of Earth's surface and 90% of its habitable volume, yet remaining largely invisible to public consciousness and inadequately protected by international law. These areas beyond national jurisdiction represent Earth's last marine wilderness, harboring unique biodiversity, sustaining critical ecosystem services, and serving as highways for the planet's most magnificent migratory species. However, this blue heart faces unprecedented pressures: industrial fishing now occurs across 48% of the high seas, maritime traffic has increased 1600% since UNCLOS, and over one million square kilometers of seabed have been designated for possible deep-sea mining.

The recently adopted BBNJ Agreement represents a historic opportunity to transform governance of these vast oceanic spaces, providing the first comprehensive international framework for conserving marine biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction. After nearly two decades of negotiations, this "High Seas Treaty" introduces innovative tools for establishing marine protected areas in international waters, conducting environmental impact assessments, and sharing benefits from marine genetic resources, all guided by precautionary and ecosystem-based approaches. The agreement's success depends on rapid ratification, effective implementation, and political will to prioritize long-term ecological health.

This conference examines how the BBNJ Agreement could catalyze a paradigm shift from viewing the high seas as an unregulated common heritage ready for exploitation toward recognizing it as a global patrimony requiring stewardship for future generations. Through analysis of the treaty's innovative provisions and implementation challenges, we explore how humanity can finally give legal voice and protection to the forgotten half of our planet, ensuring the high seas become the first truly sustainable global commons of the 21st century.

Accumulated scientific evidence has demolished the Cartesian conception of marine animals as automatons, revealing neural architectures that, although evolutionarily divergent, sustain complex conscious experiences. Fish nociceptive systems process pain through trigemino-spinal pathways similar to mammals, while crustaceans show EEG-type signals when experiencing noxious stimulation, establishing solid neurobiological foundations for marine sentience. This convergence of neurological evidence, extraordinary sensory capabilities, and complex social behaviors not only expands the boundaries of animal consciousness but scientifically grounds the legal recognition of sentience as the basis for intrinsic rights.

This emerging scientific paradigm has catalyzed an unprecedented ethical and legal transformation that fundamentally redefines our moral and legal relationship with marine life. In 2022, the United Kingdom became the first country to legally recognize the sentience of octopuses, crabs, and lobsters in its animal welfare legislation, while in 2024 over 500 scientists signed the New York Declaration recognizing a "realistic possibility of conscious experience" in marine vertebrates and invertebrates. This evidence of sentience in marine organisms is not merely an academic discovery, but an ethical imperative that establishes urgent legal obligations toward billions of sentient oceanic beings.

The documented capacity to suffer, experience emotional states, and form concepts of "self" in marine species establishes inherent moral rights that transcend their human utility, demanding a revolution in legal frameworks from fisheries regulations to global conservation policies. Scientifically documented marine sentience provides the necessary empirical foundation to expand legal personhood and rights of nature beyond ecosystems toward individual species, transforming the oceanic legal paradigm from property toward recognition of subjects of rights with verifiable conscious capacities.

On September 30, 2022, Spain marked a historic milestone in European environmental law with the approval of Law 19/2022, which recognized legal personhood to the Mar Menor lagoon and its basin, making it the first European ecosystem to obtain rights equivalent to those of natural and legal persons. This conference examines the paradigmatic case of the Mar Menor as a pioneer in the practical application of rights of nature in Europe, an extraordinary achievement accomplished through a Popular Legislative Initiative that gathered over 600,000 citizen signatures and obtained parliamentary support from all political parties except one.

Dr. Eduardo Salazar Ortuño, Professor of Environmental Law at the University of Murcia and one of the legal architects of this revolutionary legislation, presents an analysis of the process that transformed the Mar Menor from an "object of protection" into a "subject of rights" with legal capacity to defend itself in courts. Law 19/2022 establishes fundamental rights for the lagoon ecosystem: the right to exist as an ecosystem and evolve naturally, the right to protection, conservation, maintenance, and restoration, creating an innovative governance system through the Mar Menor Guardianship, composed of a Committee of Representatives, a Monitoring Commission, and a Scientific Committee. The recent constitutional ratification by the Constitutional Court in 2024 and the approval of Royal Decree 90/2025 that operationalizes these bodies demonstrate the legal viability of this model.

This conference explores the transformative implications of the Mar Menor case for the evolution of global environmental law, analyzing how this European precedent is inspiring similar initiatives in other ecosystems and jurisdictions. From an ocean governance perspective, the Mar Menor model offers a replicable blueprint for giving legal voice to marine ecosystems in crisis, demonstrating that recognizing intrinsic rights of nature is not merely a philosophical aspiration but a practical and effective legal tool for environmental protection in the 21st century.