DEBBIE ELLIOTT, HOST:
Next week, world leaders and policymakers will come together for the third United Nations Ocean Summit.
(SOUNDBITE OF WAVES CRASHING)
ELLIOTT: It's being held in the French Mediterranean city of Nice, where we find our correspondent Eleanor Beardsley clearly on hardship assignment there. Good morning, Eleanor.
ELEANOR BEARDSLEY, BYLINE: Good morning...
ELLIOTT: Tough life.
BEARDSLEY: ...Debbie.
BEARDSLEY: Yeah, yeah, it is. You're right. You know, it is an absolutely stunning Mediterranean city with palm trees along the blue, azure waters, and I can see yachts out at sea.
ELLIOTT: Nice. So what is this upcoming ocean summit going to focus on?
BEARDSLEY: Well, one of the things is rising oceans. The citizens of Nice and some 1 billion people across our planet who live in coastal cities like this are threatened because of rising sea levels due to global warming. And the mayor of Nice has actually organized a coalition of mayors from coastal cities or across the globe who are meeting today ahead of the U.N. summit. And I'll be talking to some U.S. mayors who are here from New Orleans and Charleston, South Carolina, later.
ELLIOTT: What can you tell us about the problems being discussed there? What's at stake?
BEARDSLEY: Well, Debbie, the ocean is in poor health. This week, hundreds of scientists from across the world met in Nice to come up with some policy recommendations ahead of the U.N. summit. There's not only the rising seas, but there's overfishing, pollution - in particular, plastics - destruction of marine biodiversity and also changes to the deep ocean, which scientists previously thought was undisturbed. And it's warming, too. And I spoke with the deep-sea specialist Lisa Levin, who's a professor emerita at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego. Here she is.
LISA LEVIN: In terms of the health of the planet, it absorbs carbon dioxide, it absorbs heat from our atmosphere, and it helps regulate the climate. This planet would be far too hot to live on if we didn't have the ocean, and most people don't realize most of the ocean is the deep sea.
ELLIOTT: So this U.N. Ocean Summit starts there Monday. How will the United States be represented?
BEARDSLEY: Well, the organizers told me the U.S. has not yet confirmed its presence, but there were 140 scientists from American universities and private institutions at the presummit. Still, the glaring absence, Debbie, were the federal agencies, like NOAA, the National Oceanic Atmospheric Association, and NASA. These are pillars of ocean science. The Trump administration prohibited their scientists from attending.
And I spoke with Sarah Cooley, who was the director of NOAA's ocean certification program until February. She was also a keynote speaker in Nice until she had to cancel because of the travel ban for federal employees. And also, she was fired. I reached her at home in the U.S. last night.
SARAH COOLEY: The United States' presence in ocean science and around the world is something that has increased the United States' reputation and trust in the U.S. from other countries. We're collecting loads of data about the Earth system, and we share it. And that is huge. A lot of lower-income nations don't have the means to be monitoring the pulse of the Earth system like that.
BEARDSLEY: Now, Debbie, Cooley said these oceans - and we know this - are a shared common good, so you have to have international cooperation. I'll just give you one example. There are 4,000 floats across the planet that measure the temperatures of the sea - deep sea and surface. And those are basically - half of them are run by the U.S. and the other half by France. And their information is sent up to satellites and kept in databases in France and the U.S. So how is the world going to do without those systems if the U.S. is not involved? So it's something that clearly the whole planet is affected by and needs to be involved with.
ELLIOTT: That's NPR correspondent Eleanor Beardsley speaking to us from Nice, France. Thank you, Eleanor.
BEARDSLEY: Thank you, Debbie. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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