Published June 12, 2026
By Bruna Campos, Senior Campaigner; Nathalie Eddy, Manager and Senior Attorney; and Alexandra Colón-Amil, Communications Campaign Specialist for Offshore Oil and Gas at the Center for International Environmental Law.
As the 11th Our Ocean Conference convenes in Mombasa, Kenya, from June 16 to 18, governments face a test of credibility. They cannot claim to protect the ocean while allowing offshore oil and gas expansion to continue unchecked. Decision-makers have an opportunity to recognize what civil society and frontline communities have long said — and what science and the law increasingly confirm: a healthy and prosperous ocean must be free of fossil fuels.
The Fossil Fuel Blind Spot in Ocean Protection
For years, fossil fuels — the main driver of the climate crisis — have remained largely absent from ocean governance spaces, including past Our Ocean Conferences. Governments often discuss how climate change is warming and acidifying waters, raising seas, shifting fish stocks, accelerating biodiversity loss, and increasing pressure on marine ecosystems and the communities that rely on them. They sound the alarm that the ocean’s role as a carbon sink and climate regulator is under increasing strain as global temperatures rise. Yet time and again, ocean action stops at the symptoms, naming climate impacts while avoiding their root cause: the production and use of oil, gas, and coal.
That omission has become increasingly untenable as the fossil fuel industry turns the ocean into a new frontier for expansion. The vast majority of new oil and gas projects discovered, sanctioned, and started up in 2024 were located in the ocean. This buildout is advancing even as evidence mounts that offshore activity harms marine ecosystems, the climate, and coastal communities throughout its lifecycle.
When ocean governance spaces fail to confront offshore oil and gas, one of the clearest threats to the ocean escapes scrutiny in the very spaces meant to protect it.
What Is at Stake at #OurOceanKenya
This year marks the first time the Our Ocean Conference is being hosted on the African continent, where offshore oil and gas expansion continues despite documented harms across the region. From the Niger Delta to Cabo Delgado and South Africa’s coastal areas, communities have resisted projects that put their waters, livelihoods, health, and rights at risk. For a conference centered on ocean protection, that context matters: the Our Ocean Conference in Kenya cannot credibly treat offshore oil and gas as separate from its agenda or ignore the global forces that sustain its expansion.
How Fossil Fuel Demand Sustains Offshore Oil and Gas
Global demand for fossil fuels, including from major consuming economies like the European Union, the United States, and China, helps sustain the push for new offshore oil and gas projects in Africa and beyond. That demand is often used to justify offshore expansion, while its long-term economic, environmental, and social costs are too often overlooked.
That is why protecting the ocean requires a coordinated phaseout of fossil fuels that addresses both demand and supply: reducing consumption while ending new licensing and approvals for offshore oil and gas projects. Without that shift, offshore oil and gas will continue to harm marine ecosystems and coastal communities, while fueling the greenhouse gas emissions that are already warming, acidifying, and destabilizing the ocean.
Protecting the Ocean Is a Legal Obligation
States must align ocean action with their legal obligations. The International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) and the International Court of Justice have made clear that States have binding duties to prevent climate harm, protect the marine environment, and safeguard the rights of people and communities facing escalating climate and environmental threats. Those duties point in a clear direction: governments must curb fossil fuel production and use, including by halting new offshore expansion.
That legal reality should shape what governments bring to the Our Ocean Conference in Kenya, as well as the ocean laws and policies now under development. For the European Union (EU), the forthcoming EU Ocean Act is one crucial test. A credible Act should prohibit new offshore oil and gas exploration and licensing, set a pathway to phase out existing offshore operations in EU marine waters, and reduce fossil fuel demand. At the Our Ocean Conference in Kenya and beyond, countries must uphold their legal obligations.
The Ocean Is Not a Testing Ground for False Solutions
Meeting States’ legal obligations means confronting the root cause of the climate crisis, not creating new risks for marine ecosystems. Yet the ocean is increasingly being targeted for speculative technological interventions presented as climate responses.
Proposals for marine geoengineering include marine carbon dioxide removal technologies such as ocean alkalinity enhancement, ocean fertilization, biomass sinking, and marine cloud brightening, as well as ice thickening. At the scale needed to affect the climate, these technologies could utilize up to 20% of the ocean’s surface and risk profound, unpredictable, and potentially irreversible impacts — effectively turning the ocean into a laboratory. Their effects could extend far beyond any test site, disrupting marine ecosystems, fisheries, rainfall patterns, and coastal livelihoods.
Despite growing corporate and investor interest, marine geoengineering is subject to a longstanding and repeatedly reaffirmed moratorium under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), while the London Convention/ London Protocol is developing a restrictive regulatory regime. Furthermore, the 2024 ITLOS Advisory Opinion emphasized that marine geoengineering could violate the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) if it introduces pollutants into the marine environment or if it converts one form of pollution into another. Our Ocean Conference commitments — even voluntary ones — must not legitimize marine geoengineering or create pathways for future reliance on it.
Ocean Prosperity Depends on a Fossil-Free Ocean
Advancing an ocean free of fossil fuels requires recognizing offshore oil and gas expansion for what it is: a danger to ocean health, climate stability, and any credible vision of a sustainable economy. Fisheries, tourism, cultural practices, and ocean-dependent work cannot thrive where waters are polluted, marine life is disrupted, and climate impacts are accelerating. Protecting the ocean from offshore oil and gas safeguards the livelihoods, food systems, and coastal economies that depend on healthy marine ecosystems.
At the Our Ocean Conference, governments should translate that vision into concrete commitments: halting new offshore oil and gas licensing, exploration, and drilling; ending public finance and subsidies for offshore expansion; requiring operators to fully fund decommissioning and cleanup costs; rejecting marine geoengineering and other speculative technologies that delay phaseout; and supporting just transition pathways for workers and communities.
Fossil fuels can no longer remain at the margins of a forum dedicated to ocean protection. The ocean cannot be treated as both a shared commons and a sacrifice zone for offshore oil and gas.