Ecological restoration under the law of the sea - which framework for great whale restoration as a climate change mitigation tool?

Abstract

The years 2021-2030 have been declared by the United Nations (UN) both as the UN Decade on Ocean Sciences for Sustainable Development1 and as the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration2. As a crossway between those two major ambitions for the upcoming years, the present thesis aims at building bridges between the general law of the sea and the law of ecological restoration by examining the potential framework for ecological restoration under the law of the sea, using the restoration of great whales’ populations as a case study.