Permanent Mission of Portugal to the UN in Geneva

The Ocean may seem far from Geneva. Yet it lies at the heart of the climate, the global economy, food systems, environmental balances and many international decisions that are shaped here. Connecting Geneva to the Ocean also means connecting global decisions to concrete transformations on the ground.

It is from this perspective that the Permanent Mission of Portugal to the United Nations in Geneva takes part in the Geneva Forum community, with two areas that naturally converge: the Ocean, through the Geneva Nexus, and resilient and regenerative tourism.

Portugal has a relationship with the Ocean that goes far beyond geography. It runs through its history, its economy, its research, its diplomacy and part of its identity. This commitment is reflected today in its international role in support of Ocean governance and in the search for solutions capable of translating environmental ambitions into the real economy.

In Geneva, this experience brings something particularly useful: the ability to remind us that the Ocean is not simply one specialized field among others. It connects issues.

Geneva Nexus: making the Ocean present in a city that cannot see it

Many of the institutions capable of shaping the future of the Ocean are not necessarily located on its shores.

Geneva brings together issues relating to climate, biodiversity, trade, human rights, health, finance, research, cooperation and development. All of them, in one way or another, have a relationship with the Ocean.

This is precisely the value of the Geneva Nexus approach launched by the Permanent Mission of Portugal to the United Nations in Geneva: not to create yet another silo dedicated to the sea, but to make visible the connections between the Ocean and the decisions already being made in Geneva.

The figure is striking and makes this interdependence immediately tangible: more than half of the oxygen produced on Earth comes from the Ocean. Symbolically, when we take three breaths in Geneva, two of those breaths can remind us of our dependence on the marine world, while forests also contribute to this immense living system.

The distance between Geneva and the Ocean then becomes much less obvious.

Tourism as part of the solution

Tourism provides a very concrete way of approaching this relationship.

For a long time, the main question was how to reduce the damage caused by certain forms of tourism. Regenerative tourism takes the reasoning further: can a tourism activity help leave a territory, an ecosystem and a community in a better condition than before it took place?

For a coastal territory, an island or a community whose economy depends directly on the quality of its environment, this question is anything but abstract.

Protecting the Ocean can also mean creating new economic activities around knowledge of it, financing its restoration, training professionals, giving lasting economic value to natural and cultural heritage, or enabling visitors to contribute to the production of useful knowledge.

Tourism can then become a potential lever for transition rather than an activity that is simply subject to environmental objectives.

This is where the partnership becomes operational

At the Geneva Forum, the Permanent Mission of Portugal helps bring this reflection into projects.

It naturally finds its place in the work devoted to resilient and regenerative tourism, where discussions are not limited to destinations, but focus on models capable of combining economic resilience, ecosystem protection and lasting benefits for the populations living in the territories concerned.

A tourism initiative can therefore be viewed differently. No longer only through the number of visitors it attracts, but through what it makes possible to restore, finance, transmit and sustain locally.

The destination gradually ceases to be a backdrop. It becomes a stakeholder in the project.

From the Forum to projects that continue throughout the year

This conversation takes on another dimension when it meets the Global Impact Projects.

A project working on the Ocean may need a tourism component. A citizen science program may involve travelers in observing ecosystems. A restoration initiative may seek an economic activity capable of financing part of its operations. A destination may want to transform its model rather than simply increase visitor numbers.

It is at these intersections that the Geneva Forum plays its role.

Work initiated during a conference can continue in workshops throughout the year, join an existing project or give rise to new cooperation. Stakeholders brought together around tourism may discover citizen science, impact finance or the Rights of Nature; a few months later, what looked like a sector-specific discussion may have begun to take the form of a much more cross-cutting project.

The Ocean then becomes not only an issue to protect, but also a space around which new forms of cooperation can be built.

Connecting major international frameworks with what happens on a coastline

Multilateral diplomacy produces essential frameworks. Their value is then measured by their ability to change what actually happens on the ground.

This is why Portugal’s work around the Ocean finds a natural continuation in the projects developed at the Geneva Forum.

The ambitions of the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development can connect with participatory scientific programs. International momentum around resilient tourism can connect with operators, territories and economic models. Ocean protection objectives can connect with financing mechanisms capable of supporting their implementation.

Between the international framework and the local project lies an entire space of translation. It is in this space that the partnership finds its value.

And Geneva can become a gateway to the Ocean

The role of the Permanent Mission of Portugal is therefore not limited to taking part in a session devoted to tourism or the Ocean.

Its presence helps establish this connection on a lasting basis within the Forum community.

An organization may arrive with a coastal project. An international initiative may be looking for testing grounds. A solution developed in one country may be discussed with other territories. An environmental issue may encounter an economic model that no one had previously considered.

There is no need to know in advance where this conversation will lead.

What is necessary, however, is to create the places where it can begin, and then to provide a framework that allows it to continue.

Through the Geneva Nexus on the Ocean and resilient and regenerative tourism, the Permanent Mission of Portugal to the United Nations in Geneva helps bring together two realities that geography seems to keep apart: international decisions made in Geneva and the territories that live with, through and for the Ocean.

At the Geneva Forum, this relationship therefore takes shape around conferences, in the workshops where projects are developed and in the forms of cooperation that can grow throughout the year.

There, the Ocean meets diplomacy, but also the real economy and field projects.

And this may be one of Geneva’s most interesting functions: enabling stakeholders who are geographically very far apart to discover that, in reality, they are working on the same system.