France’s bucolic Côte D’Azur, with its pine-forested hills and picturesque harbors, is rarely the site of fractious politics. But this week, hundreds of scientists and government officials from across the world have converged on the Mediterranean city of Nice for the United Nations’ weeklong Oceans Conference, grappling over how to stave off calamitous ocean warming, rising sea levels, and an accelerating destruction of marine life—all without the participation of a crucial global power and the world’s biggest economy, the United States.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]While President Trump opted to skip the conference, his actions since returning to the White House in January overshadow almost every conversation among delegates and activists, in meeting rooms and halls erected around the old Port of Nice, with its yachts glimmering in the sun.
Opening the conference’s first session on Monday morning, French president Emmanuel Macron, who is cohosting the event with the president of Costa Rica, bluntly criticized Trump’s decisions. This includes an executive order from the U.S. president in April allowing deep-sea mining in international waters, which would seemingly violate global treaties that are currently being negotiated among governments. In signing the executive order, Trump described deep-sea mining as “the next gold rush.” The ultra-deep international waters are thought to contain rich deposits of strategic metals like copper, nickel, and cobalt.
Read more: Fishing Communities in the Philippines Are Fighting for their Future as Waters Rise
Macron also struck out at Trump’s stated desire to acquire Greenland, whose warming Arctic sea has opened the potential for hugely lucrative new shipping routes. More personally for Macron, Trump has ordered the U.S. out of the global climate accord known as the Paris Agreement, which was negotiated in the French capital in 2015, and for which Macron has regularly expressed pride.
“The deep sea is not for sale, neither is Greenland for sale, nor Antarctica,” Macron told hundreds of delegates, including about 60 heads of state or governments. “The climate, like biodiversity, is not a matter of opinion,” he said. “It’s a matter of scientifically established facts.”
Governments will spend this week thrashing out a 19-page “ocean action plan,” negotiated within the U.N. over the past two years. On paper, it commits the world to a wide range of initiatives to protect oceans, including investing heavily in coastal conservation, reining in large-scale fishing operations and cutting fishing subsidies, and implementing a global freeze on deep-sea mining.
The document describes oceans as facing a “global emergency,” ravaged by warming temperatures, plastic pollution, and the extinction of wildlife. U.N. officials and scientists say that could profoundly impact human life, since the oceans provide about half the world’s oxygen, and absorb most of the excess heat from carbon emissions.
Despite the sense of urgency, the U.N.’s labyrinthine summitry has frustrated activists and environmentalists, many of whom have gathered in Nice. At least 60 countries need to ratify a new global treaty governing international waters in order for it to come into force. But as of Monday afternoon, only 30 countries had done so.
Also lagging is funding: about $175 billion a year is needed for the next five years in order to roll out major global ocean controls; so far, barely $10 billion has been allocated for the next four years, according to the U.N.
“The wider geopolitical state of play represents an additional challenge to come up with an ambitious Nice consensus that can represent a decisive step forward for the protection and restoration of the ocean,” the Nice action plan states.
Activists put the problems with the action plan more plainly.
“There are a lot of warm words,” Megan Randles, head of Greenpeace International’s delegation to the Nice conference, told TIME. “It recognizes that we are in a climate and ecological emergency, that things are very, very, very bad,” she says. “However, there is a significant lack of action, even though it is called an action plan.”
Yet few people in Nice this week question the potentially dire situation facing oceans.
“We’re not talking anymore about what might be coming,” Peter Thomson, the U.N.’s special envoy for the ocean, who is from Fiji, told reporters. “We’ve altered the earth’s system.”
Thomson urged countries to drastically reduce carbon emissions, in order to limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels—the ambitious goal of the Paris Agreement. Scientists believe global warming could be on track to eventually rise by 3°C above pre-industrial temperatures.
“Our grandchildren, when they are taught geography, will be looking at a different map of the world than we were taught when we were kids,” Thomson says. “Our grandchildren will live in a different world just in the shape of our coastlines.”
Read more from TIME’s Ocean Issue
The World Isn’t Valuing Oceans Properly
‘Ignorance’ Is the Most Pressing Issue Facing Ocean Conservation, Says Sylvia Earle
Meet the Marine Biologist Working to Protect Our Oceans from Deep-Sea Mining
Geopolitical Tensions are Shaping the Future of our Oceans
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