Dubai: The UAE’s Arabian Ocean Rowing Team has become a partner of United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Clean Seas campaign to raise awareness on environmental sustainability, particularly reducing marine litter and protecting the oceans, with a focus on single-use plastics.
Arabian Ocean Rowing Team will promote initiatives such as #BePartOfIt campaign and visit schools and business across the UAE to highlight the issues caused by plastic pollution. The team will also be taking science experiments, designed by the students, on their crossing, so the students can understand first-hand how plastic pollution has impacted the ocean.
Clean Seas Initiative
Team founder and project director Toby Gregory said: “It is a great honour and a privilege for the Arabian Ocean Rowing Team to be working alongside amazing and talented individuals within the Clean Seas initiative and campaign. The ocean and coastal ecosystems sit at the nexus of the triple planetary crisis, the climate crisis, the biodiversity crisis and the pollution and waste crisis. The Clean Seas campaign has led the way in the global effort against marine litter and plastic pollution. Marine pollution is a complex problem and there is no simple solution; every one of us has a part to play”.
Lungs of the planet
As the earth’s largest biosphere, the oceans are home to up to 80 per cent of all life in the world. They generate 50 per cent of the oxygen we need; they absorb 25 per cent of all carbon dioxide emissions and capture 90 per cent of the additional heat generated from those emissions. Oceans are not just ‘the lungs of the planet’ but also its largest carbon sink — a vital buffer against the impacts of climate change.
Arabian Ocean Rowing Team’s crew aims to highlight that the ocean’s resistance and resilience is not infinite, and that the ocean cannot continue absorbing the effects of unsustainable human activities. In utilising the upcoming row, and sport more generally as an advocacy tool, the team illustrates the importance of ocean conservation by facing the plastic truth and finding solutions to end plastic pollution.
