It's no easy feat to survive 40 years, yet the UNEP Cartagena Convention has not only sustained its mission but expanded it, deepening its work to conserve and protect the ocean resources found within, and unique to, the Wider Caribbean Sea.

Aware of the power of youth, the Convention has spent recent years not just passing the baton to the next generation, but actively empowering its voice. At the Convention's 18th Conference of the Parties (COP18), held in Kingston, Jamaica, from October 13-16, 2025, delegates welcomed a formal intervention from young people: a statement delivered by the Caribbean Youth Climate Council marking one of the clearest signals yet that the region's youth are no longer being spoken about in these processes — they are being spoken to, and increasingly, speaking for themselves.

Building on that momentum, the UNEP Caribbean Environment Programme, Cartagena Convention Secretariat marked International Youth Day this year by formally launching A Shared Tide: The Young Person's Guide to the Cartagena Convention.

With a foreword from Coordinator Christopher Corbin, the guide is led by two fictional teenage narrators: Téo, from a small Caribbean island, and Mariana, from a busy port city within the region. Though their day-to-day realities differ, one measures the sea in tide pools and fish pots, the other in cargo cranes and shipping lanes; both are struck by how deeply their lives are shaped by the same shared resource: the Caribbean Sea, flowing around and connecting both of their countries.

"The real work of protecting this sea is done by 26 countries acting together — and by the scientists, fishers, rangers and communities across the region,"

said Corbin.

"My job, with a small team in Kingston, is to help them work as one, because the sea is too big for any one island alone."

That idea — a sea too big for any one country to protect alone, sits at the heart of both the Convention's 40-year history and the guide itself. Since it became international law in 1986, the Cartagena Convention has stood as the only legally binding regional agreement dedicated to protecting the Caribbean Sea and its coasts, uniting 26 countries under one shared framework, backed by three Protocols addressing oil spills, wildlife and protected areas, and land-based sources of pollution.

A Shared Tide translates four decades of that institutional work into language built for a younger audience, without diluting the scale of what's at stake. Through Téo and Mariana's exchanges, readers encounter the region's environmental pressures, from plastic pollution and sargassum blooms to coral bleaching and rising seas, alongside the cooperative wins the Convention has delivered: a growing network of protected marine areas, coordinated regional responses to oil spills, and shared standards for tackling pollution at its source.

Just as importantly, the guide doesn't stop at explaining the problem. It closes with a deliberate call to action, encouraging young readers to see themselves not as future stakeholders, but as present ones, with concrete, low-barrier ways to get involved, from beach clean-ups and reef-safe habits to speaking up in their own schools and communities about what their countries are doing to keep the Convention's promises.

For Corbin, that call to action is personal, and long in the making.

"My generation carried this promise for forty years. Now it's yours,"

he writes in the guide's closing letter.

"You won't do it alone; that was never the deal. But the sea will need people like Téo, like Mariana, like you, to keep the tide turning the right way. I'm handing it over with a full heart and a lot of hope."

Forty years in, the Cartagena Convention's story is still being written by the countries, scientists, and communities who have carried it this far. With A Shared Tide, the Secretariat is betting that its next chapters will be shaped just as much by the young people growing up along this sea's shores, the ones who, like Téo and Mariana, are only beginning to understand how much of their world already depends on it.

The UNEP Caribbean Environment Programme — Cartagena Convention Secretariat works in partnership with GEF IW:LEARN, the Global Environment Facility's International Waters Learning Exchange and Resource Network, to strengthen knowledge-sharing, information management, and partnership building across the Wider Caribbean's transboundary waters work, with a particular focus on Small Island Developing States. Through this partnership, the Cartagena Convention Secretariat connects its work to a global network of transboundary water projects, sharing lessons learned and building global and regional knowledge and capacity.

For more information, please contact Deonne Anderson, Communication Assistant, UNEP Cartagena Convention Secretariat [deonne.anderson@un.org]

Words and pictures by Deonne Anderson.

Thumbnail photo by Claudia Altamimi/Unsplash.