On June 8, World Ocean Day, President Joe Biden announced plans to designate the Hudson Canyon — the deep Atlantic submarine canyon that is an extension of New York’s Hudson River Valley — as a marine sanctuary. He also banned the use of single-use plastic, a growing source of ocean pollution, in U.S. National Parks by 2023 and established an Ocean Climate Action Plan.
A week later, on June 13, Biden signed bipartisan legislation, the Ocean Shipping Reform Act, to strengthen U.S. oversight over the container shipping industry that moves some 90% of the world’s trade goods. While this new law is more focused on resolving supply chain issues, both measures highlight how the Biden administration and other world leaders are beginning to recognize the link between the ocean, the economy, and the climate emergency.
That’s one reason why Biden declared June as National Ocean Month and the U.N. designated the 2020s as the “decade of the ocean.” This blue decade has been launched with several major ocean summits, including the annual Our Ocean Conference, which was hosted in April 2022 by the United States and the Republic of Palau.
