Our Ocean Planet
This is a transcript of the film, which was produced by NRDC, Bloomfish Pictures, and Rock, Paper, Scissors. It premiered at the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco on September 14, 2018.
Narrated by Sigourney Weaver: Life began in the ocean. And the ocean has sustained life ever since. It provides us with food, oxygen, and fresh water, the riches with which we have built civilizations.
The ocean connects all things: earth to atmosphere, continents and cultures. The ocean controls and stabilizes our climate. It absorbs one-quarter of the carbon we emit burning fossil fuels, and stores 90 percent of the sun's heat on our warming planet. It distributes that heat around the world through ocean currents, moderating temperatures, maintaining favorable conditions for life everywhere.
But for too long, we have taken the ocean for granted.
Acting as though its resources were infinite, its systems immutable, we have pushed past its limits. Now the ocean is starting to falter, its water heating and acidifying, its corals bleaching, its islands drowning, its fish stocks in decline.
And yet we rely on the ocean now more than ever to guard humanity against climate change itself.
We must help the ocean heal.
That means turning away from dirty fuels and toward the abundant renewable energy nature bestows. We must also protect the ocean's ability to store carbon dioxide.
We can do this by nurturing the rainforests of the ocean, habitats that capture carbon and also help protect coastal communities, and by preserving the foundation of the ocean's food web, the organisms that help transport carbon to the deep sea.
The ocean can use its enormous power to cleanse and regenerate itself if we only give it a chance, by fishing sustainably and creating protected zones where life can flourish and adapt to the changing climate, and by using science to continue unraveling the ocean's secrets.
Because if we truly understand and respect it, the ocean will help us safeguard all life on earth.
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