Prince William warns world's oceans are 'diminishing before our eyes' in call for urgent action

Prince William has warned the world's oceans are "diminishing before our eyes" and called on the world to "think big" on how to revive them.
Speaking at the Blue Economy and Finance Forum in Monaco on Sunday, he said everyone is responsible for change - both negative and positive.
"What once seemed an abundant resource is diminishing before our eyes," he said.
"We all stand to be impacted."
It comes as he teamed up with Sir David Attenborough in a social media video to talk about the harmful effects of over-fishing, pollution and temperature rise on our marine environment.
0:56
"This challenge is like none that we have faced before," the royal continued.
"But I remain an optimist. I believe that urgency and optimism have the power to bring about the action needed to change the course of history."
The Prince of Wales is also the founder and president of the Earthshot Prize, a global award that celebrates environmental initiatives. Finalists for this year's award were due to attend the event.
He ended his speech with a call to action intended to go further than just Monaco or even Europe.
"Halfway through this decisive decade, I call on all of you to think big in your actions.
"Let us act together with urgency and optimism while we still have the chance.
"For the future of our planet. For the future generations. We must listen to the words of Sir David Attenborough: 'If we save the sea, we save our world'."
To coincide with the event, and to attract a greater audience, a YouTube video was posted by Kensington Palace, showing William and Sir David Attenborough laughing together as Sir David tried on his first-ever diving helmet.
But their conversation soon turned to more serious matters when they discussed Sir David's new film, Oceans, and the horrific examples of damage uncovered.

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Learn with AIFact CheckingText to SpeechAI Summary

Related Articles

Daily Mail​

40 minutes ago

• Daily Mail​

Kate Middleton shares sweet message for Prince William's birthday - and reveals new puppies

Kate Middleton has shared a sweet birthday tribute to her husband Prince William as he celebrates turning 43-years-old today. The adorable image shows the heir sitting in a field, while playing with a group of small puppies, whose mother is believed to be Orla, the Wales' family dog. In the image, the father-of-three is dressed casually, wearing jeans paired with a long-sleeved green button down shirt, as the puppies crawl over him sweetly. The photograph is accompanied by a caption from the Princess of Wales and other members of their family. It says: 'Happy birthday! Love C, G, C, L, Orla and the puppies!' It follows an earlier tribute to William shared by his father King Charles, in which the monarch shared an unseen image of the heir as well as a sweet message via the Royal Family 's official X (formerly Twitter) account. In the somewhat casual photograph, the Prince of Wales is seen looking pensive as he sits outside in a rural setting. He is dressed in a button down pale blue shirt, as well as navy slacks - and in what may be a controversial move for some, he wears a very light beard. The image was accompanied by a simple caption which read: 'Happy Birthday to The Prince of Wales!'. The Prince of Wales has enjoyed a busy week in the lead-up to his birthday after last weekend's Trooping The Colour and joining the Royal Ascot carriage procession on Wednesday. However, he wasn't joined by his wife at the Berkshire racecourse as expected after she pulled out of the event at the 11th hour. She was said to be 'disappointed' at not attending the famous social and sporting occasion with her husband Prince William and the King and Queen. Racegoers had been hoping to see the Princess after the Prince of Wales was named as one of the figures awarding race prizes during the second day of the meet. Ascot officials had confirmed at 12pm that the Princess was due to be in the second carriage in the royal procession with William, in a published carriage list. But less than half an hour later, Kensington Palace confirmed just before 12.30pm that Kate would not be attending - and a revised carriage list was published by Ascot. MailOnline understands the Princess was 'disappointed' not to be in attendance 'but she has to find the right balance as she fully returns to public facing engagements'. In the past week Kate has attended three high-profile events - Trooping the Colour, the annual Order of the Garter service and a visit to a V&A storage facility in London. It is a tradition for senior royals to have their birthdays marked with the release of photographs and messages. Last year, Kate delighted royal watchers with the sweet portrait she shared to commemorate her husband's birthday. The fun portrait showed her husband excitedly leaping in the air with his three children. The image showed the family dressed in casual clothing - with William sporting a hoodie and shorts - as they grinned mid pose for the snap, taken by Kate in Norfolk in May 2024. Kate accompanied it with a caption that read: 'Happy birthday Papa, we all love you so much!.' The post comes almost after the Wales family were seen at Trooping the Colour - the annual celebration of the monarch's official birthday. William played a starring role in the event, riding on horseback alongside Princess Anne and the Duke of Edinburgh. And he was elaborately dressed for the occasion, donning the Full Ceremonial Guard Order of the Welsh Guards, and a bearskin hat. The prince also donned the Most Noble Order of the Garter Sash with the Lesser George and a Welsh Guards Sword. His outfit included his four, full size medals - the Gold, Diamond, and Platinum Jubilee medals, plus the Coronation Medal. Meanwhile, his wife and children travelled by carriage. Prince William Arthur Philip Louis of Wales was born second in line to the throne at St Mary's Hospital, Paddington, at 9.03pm on June 21 1982. He weighed 7lb 1 1/2oz and was the first-born son of the then-Prince and the Princess of Wales. At just nine months old, he accompanied his parents on a six-week official visit to Australia and New Zealand, which was a break from tradition with royal babies usually left at home in the care of nannies. His mother Diana, who separated from the then-Prince of Wales in 1992, died in a car crash in Paris in 1997. William was just 15 and his brother Prince Harry 12, and the boys walked behind the princess's coffin during a funeral procession through London. The prince met Kate Middleton at St Andrews University in Fife, and the pair married at Westminster Abbey in 2011 after dating for more than eight years. They welcomed their first child George in 2013, followed by Charlotte in 2015, and then Louis in 2018. After the death of the late Queen in 2022, the King announced in his first historic address that he had made William and Kate the new Prince and Princess of Wales. William has a long-running rift with his brother the Duke of Sussex, with no sign yet of a reconciliation. The fallout originated ahead of Harry's wedding to Meghan Markle, now the Duchess of Sussex, and worsened after the accusations Harry publicly levelled at his brother in his double tell-alls: his Netflix documentary and his memoir Spare. Despite years elapsing since that time, the once reportedly close siblings are still estranged from each other. Since becoming the Prince of Wales, William has kept himself busy with some major initiatives. In 2023, he launched Homewards, his five-year drive to eradicate homelessness in six locations around the UK. And he has continued to work on his other passion projects, which include raising mental health awareness, and the Earthshot Prize, his £50 million environmental competition to find solutions to help the planet.

BBC News

an hour ago

• BBC News

Prince William celebrates 43rd birthday with puppy photo

A photo of Prince of Wales playing with puppies has been posted by Kensington Palace to mark his 43rd birthday."Happy birthday! Love C, G, C, L, Orla and the puppies!" the Palace wrote alongside the previously unseen picture of Prince William, referring to his wife, the Princess of Wales, their children George, Charlotte and Louis, and their cocker was given to the royal couple by Catherine's brother, James Middleton, in 2020, shortly after the death of their previous dog dog - seen walking behind William in the picture - gave birth to four puppies in May. It follows a birthday message from the King and Queen, accompanied by an image of the prince sitting on a wall with a field behind picture was taken while the prince visited farmers and food producers on the Duchy of Cornwall - a parcel of land William now owns - in the lead-up to his birthday, Prince William attended the Trooping the Colour parade to mark King Charles' official birthday, appearing on the balcony of Buckingham Palace for an RAF flypast.A few days later, he and the Princess of Wales shared photos of Prince William with his children to mark Father's Day.

Telegraph

an hour ago

• Telegraph

Want a pay rise? Take this French writer's hilarious advice

Georges Perec was attracted by formal challenges to writing: his most famous achievement was his novel La Disparition, written without using the letter 'e' once. (This is particularly hard in French, but the late Gilbert Adair managed to translate it into English, under the title A Void.) There was serious intent behind this; it was an echo of the Nazis' efforts to remove every single Jew from Europe. (In the case of Perec's mother, as well as about six million others, they succeeded.) The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise is much more light-hearted, but is still the result of an act of literary restriction: an attempt to mimic, in prose, the recursive nature of a flow chart. First published in 1968, this delightfully unclassifiable text, now reissued by Verso, is short and exhausting, and features no capital letters, punctuation (apart from dashes), inverted commas or any other of the normal accoutrements of the printed page. In short, it looks like this: it is never very wise to approach a line manager at a time when his gastric functions are likely to overshadow the professional and managerial capacities associated with his hierarchical rank it is far better to go see him in the morning but what the hell he himself told you to come see him at 2.30 pm you have to take life as it comes so now it is 2.30 pm and you go to see mr x … and so on. I could have stopped anywhere. You can either put up with this kind of thing or you can't, but once you slip into its rhythms, it becomes both beguiling and hilarious (although you wouldn't really want it any longer.) For me it recalls Molly Bloom's soliloquy at the end of Ulysses, or some of the madder expressions of Beckett's prose works (and Lucky's speech in Waiting for Godot); or indeed, Don Marquis's Archy and Mehitabel, a similarly unpunctuated and lower-case text. There's something about this style which is particularly suited to the downtrodden, and in my experience there are few more miserable and downtrodden people than office workers. It first appeared in the journal Enseignement programmé, which was devoted to exploring computer programming (in those days, still in its youth); as it happened, Perec's day job was as a lowly information storage and retrieval technician, grade IIIB, which meant, as Bellos notes in his introduction, 'his prospects of getting a raise were quite as dim as those of the narrator of this tale.' And yet there's a kind of insane but helpless cunning behind his efforts: which day would be best to ask? (None of them, of course.) Look at the cafeteria menu, Perec says. Is fish being served? Then be careful, for your line manager may have swallowed a fish bone and be 'in a really awful mood'. Bellos uses the word 'circumperambulate' to describe the futile odyssey you must make around the building to find out where 'he' is; he seems at times as elusive as Godot himself. When he does call you into his office 'abandon all rancour and refrain from observing [that] … he could have bloody well given you an appointment three weeks ago'. You know the protagonist will exhaust all the possibilities of the flow chart and still not get his raise; it would, of course, destroy the comedy if he did. Even in the 1960s, people were becoming uneasy about the prospect of losing their jobs to computers; Perec's own job was one of the more fragile canaries in that particular coalmine. So this book, although describing a world from over half a century ago, still rings true: not only do we have the eternal dehumanised tedium of the office, which has been evoked ever since offices were invented (think of Dickens's worn-out clerks, or Melville's rebellious Bartleby), but the long shadow of the algorithm. 'It would have been nice,' says Bellos wistfully at one point, 'to translate this text without apostrophes either, which are not needed in French, but that might have tried readers' patience a little too much.' He acknowledges that the text is 'quite unreadable in the ordinary way', and you could say that now that I have given you the gist, I have spared you the task of reading the book yourself. But there is something delightful about its intent, a sympathetic humanity which is deliberately at odds with the relentless, machine-like persistence of the prose. It's a text that repays attention, and is timeless.