BPSC 69th CCE Prelims General Studies · Question 54 of 144

Correct — C, Oceans. The Lisbon Declaration is the political declaration titled 'Our ocean, our future, our responsibility', adopted at the 2022 United Nations Ocean Conference held in Lisbon from 27 June to 1 July 2022 and circulated as document A/CONF.230/2022/12. The conference's formal name states the subject without ambiguity: the United Nations Conference to Support the Implementation of Sustainable Development Goal 14 of the 2030 Agenda — Goal 14 being 'conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development'. Its theme was 'Scaling up ocean action based on science and innovation for the implementation of Goal 14: stocktaking, partnerships and solutions', it was co-hosted by the Governments of Kenya and Portugal, and Liu Zhenmin, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs, served as its Secretary-General. The declaration's opening paragraph has the heads of state and government 'reaffirm our strong commitment to conserve and sustainably use the ocean, seas and marine resources', and the text that follows is entirely marine. Paragraph 3 sets out why: the ocean is an important source of the planet's biodiversity, plays a vital role in the climate system and the water cycle, supplies the oxygen we breathe, acts as a sink and reservoir of greenhouse gases and carries global trade. Paragraph 4 supplies the alarms — sea levels rising, coastal erosion worsening, the ocean warmer and more acidic, a third of fish stocks overexploited, approximately half of all living coral lost — and regrets the collective failure to achieve SDG targets 14.2, 14.4, 14.5 and 14.6, which matured in 2020. Paragraph 7 takes note of voluntary commitments by more than 100 Member States to conserve or protect at least 30 per cent of the global ocean by 2030 through marine protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures, and calls for an ambitious post-2020 global biodiversity framework at the resumed fifteenth Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity. Paragraph 8 welcomes the decision of UNEA 5.2 to convene an intergovernmental negotiating committee for a legally binding instrument on plastic pollution covering the full life cycle of plastic. Paragraph 10 affirms the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea as 'the legal framework for the conservation and sustainable use of oceans and their resources', citing paragraph 158 of 'The Future We Want' and noting that 2022 marked the fortieth anniversary of that Convention's adoption; paragraph 11 backs the intergovernmental conference on marine biological diversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction; and paragraph 12 supports the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021–2030) and the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO that runs it. Paragraph 13 commits to restoring fish stocks to levels producing at least maximum sustainable yield, to combating illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing and to ending harmful subsidies in line with target 14.6, marking 2022 as the International Year of Artisanal Fisheries and Aquaculture. It also reaffirms, in paragraph 2, the earlier declaration 'Our ocean, our future: call for action', adopted at the first UN Ocean Conference held from 5 to 9 June 2017. Every operative paragraph is about the sea.

• (a)Air — Air and the atmosphere have their own, quite separate instruments — the Montreal Protocol for ozone-depleting substances, the UNFCCC, the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement for greenhouse gases, and regional conventions for transboundary air pollution. No declaration named after Lisbon belongs to that family. The confusion is understandable, because the Lisbon text does invoke the climate regime: paragraph 6 emphasises implementing the Paris Agreement and its goal of holding warming well below 2°C while pursuing 1.5°C, recalls Article 2.2 on common but differentiated responsibilities, and reaffirms the Glasgow Climate Pact. But it invokes them as instruments that protect the ocean, not as the thing being conserved — the direction of the sentence is from air to sea, not the other way.
• (b)Mountains — The mountain agenda runs through its own track in the UN system and has never produced a Lisbon Declaration. The geography is a hint in itself: Lisbon sits on the Tagus estuary at the Atlantic edge of Europe, and Portugal's claim to host a global environmental conference rests on an exclusive economic zone many times the size of its land territory, reaching out around the Azores and Madeira, not on any highland interest. The co-host reinforces it — Kenya is an Indian Ocean state with a long coastline and a large marine fisheries interest, and no plausible reason to co-convene a summit about mountains. Note also that not a single operative paragraph of the declaration mentions mountains at all.
• (d)Freshwater glaciers — The trap for a candidate who has actually read the text. The declaration does mention the cryosphere: paragraph 5 lists 'the decrease in polar ice coverage' among its alarms and cites the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's special report titled The Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate. But it raises these as climate impacts felt by the ocean, not as a conservation object of their own — what a text discusses is not the same as what it is for, and this one exists to implement Goal 14. The wording of the option is itself a clue that it was written to distract rather than to describe: glaciers are freshwater by definition, so 'freshwater glaciers' is a phrase no instrument uses. Ice has its own separate track in the UN system, and the declaration that would matter there is not named after Lisbon.

The UN system marks each major environmental theme with its own conference series and a political declaration at the close of each round, and those declarations are usually known by the host city. They are not treaties: they create no binding obligation, and their function is to record an agreed diagnosis, restate targets and mobilise voluntary commitments that can be counted at the next meeting. For the ocean the sequence is short and easy to hold. The first UN Ocean Conference ran from 5 to 9 June 2017 and produced 'Our ocean, our future: call for action'; the second met in Lisbon in 2022 and produced 'Our ocean, our future, our responsibility'; the third was co-hosted by France and Costa Rica at Nice from 9 to 13 June 2025 on the theme 'Accelerating action and mobilizing all actors to conserve and sustainably use the ocean'. All three carry the same formal name — the UN Conference to Support the Implementation of Sustainable Development Goal 14 — all three sit under that Goal, and all three are anchored in the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which the Lisbon text calls the legal framework for the conservation and sustainable use of the oceans and their resources. Notice the division of labour that runs through the whole family: the declaration supplies the politics and the numbers, while the binding law stays in UNCLOS and, after 2023, in the high-seas biodiversity agreement negotiated under it.

City-named declarations are a standing exam shape, and the way to handle them is to pair the city with the conference rather than trying to recall the text — Fortaleza with BRICS, Lisbon with the ocean, Nice with the ocean again in 2025. If the pairing has gone, three other routes reach the same answer. The first is the host pair: Portugal's environmental diplomacy is maritime and it co-hosted with Kenya, an Indian Ocean state, which is a strange combination for a declaration on mountains or glaciers. The second is chronology — the Lisbon meeting fell in the middle of a run of ocean events, from the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development that opened in 2021 to the negotiations on marine biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction that were running at the time and concluded the following year. The third is the option list itself: three of the four subjects offered already have well-known instruments attached to other cities and other treaty bodies, so the odd one out is the one whose 2022 flagship meeting you cannot immediately place elsewhere. The one discriminating fact, though, is simply that the 2022 UN Ocean Conference was held in Lisbon — the venue names the declaration, and the declaration inherits the conference's subject.

• The Lisbon Declaration is the political declaration 'Our ocean, our future, our responsibility', adopted at the 2022 UN Ocean Conference in Lisbon, 27 June – 1 July 2022, and issued as document A/CONF.230/2022/12
• The conference was formally the UN Conference to Support the Implementation of Sustainable Development Goal 14, co-hosted by the Governments of Kenya and Portugal, with Liu Zhenmin, UN Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs, as its Secretary-General
• Paragraph 4 records that a third of fish stocks are overexploited and approximately half of all living coral has been lost, and regrets the failure to meet SDG targets 14.2, 14.4, 14.5 and 14.6, which matured in 2020
• Paragraph 7 notes voluntary commitments by more than 100 Member States to conserve or protect at least 30 per cent of the global ocean by 2030 through marine protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures
• Paragraph 10 affirms the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea as the legal framework for ocean conservation, citing paragraph 158 of 'The Future We Want' and recording that 2022 was the fortieth anniversary of the Convention's adoption; paragraph 11 backs the negotiations on marine biological diversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction
• Paragraph 8 welcomes the UNEA 5.2 decision to convene an intergovernmental negotiating committee on a legally binding instrument on plastic pollution addressing the full life cycle of plastic
• Paragraph 12 supports the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021–2030), implemented by the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO
• It reaffirms the declaration of the first UN Ocean Conference, 'Our ocean, our future: call for action', adopted at the meeting held from 5 to 9 June 2017; the third conference followed at Nice, France, from 9 to 13 June 2025, co-hosted by France and Costa Rica

• Reading a declaration by what it mentions rather than what it is for — the Lisbon text discusses polar ice and climate change, but it is a Goal 14 instrument
• Confusing the Lisbon Declaration with other city-named declarations that carry entirely different subjects, such as Fortaleza for BRICS
• Assuming any UN environmental declaration is legally binding — it records commitments and diagnoses, while the binding framework for the ocean remains the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea

BPSC asks city-named declarations as bare one-line identifications in its current-affairs block, usually with four unrelated subjects as options, so the whole item turns on a single stored pairing. UPSC has used the same shape for years — 'the Fortaleza Declaration, recently in the news, is related to the affairs of' — but is at least as likely to test what the instrument actually contains, as it did when it asked which instrument governs the phasing out of ozone-depleting substances.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The 2022 UN Ocean Conference, which adopted the Lisbon Declaration, was co-hosted by Portugal and which other country?

  • (a)Kenya
  • (b)Brazil
  • (c)Fiji
  • (d)Norway

  Answer(a) Kenya — the Governments of Kenya and Portugal co-hosted the conference held in Lisbon from 27 June to 1 July 2022.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Lisbon Declaration of 2022 was adopted at a United Nations conference convened to support the implementation of which Sustainable Development Goal?

  • (a)SDG 6 — Clean Water and Sanitation
  • (b)SDG 13 — Climate Action
  • (c)SDG 14 — Life Below Water
  • (d)SDG 15 — Life on Land

  Answer(c) SDG 14 — Life Below Water. The meeting's formal name was the UN Conference to Support the Implementation of Sustainable Development Goal 14, and the declaration regrets the failure to meet targets 14.2, 14.4, 14.5 and 14.6.