When Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi visited Norway in early July, the two countries agreed to expand collaboration – from building greener ships to developing new ideas for the future of the maritime industry.

"In late 2024, we agreed on strategic work together on the green transition. It can be on shipping, can be on ocean management, on technologies," Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store told CGTN during Wang's visit. 

"And we want to take that forward. I mean, China is leading a lot of the transitions on renewable energy. Norway also has renewable energy potential, we have technologies in carbon capture and storage. So here we want our scientists and our companies to cooperate and work together."

In recent years, China and Norway have strengthened cooperation across the maritime sector, with Chinese shipyards building Norwegian car carriers, electric container ships and wellboats. 

"Many of the ships now in the world are being built in China, but a lot of the technology inside those ships come from Norway, and that's a good thing," Store said.

Chinese foreign minister Wang said both countries should continue strengthening cooperation in green shipping – a goal his Norwegian counterpart, Espen Barth Eide, strongly supports.

"We must build cooperation with China wherever it is possible, and in areas where we work well together," Eide said. "And that includes everything to do with the climate, nature, the green transition and, not least, the oceans."

But the conversations happening alongside these projects go much further, with both sides looking beyond shipping to broader cooperation on the future of the oceans.

"We had interesting discussions with China about how we can build on what is known as the Kunming-Montreal initiative – the Biodiversity Agreement, or Nature Agreement, in which China played a key role and to which I also contributed," Eide added. 

"And in this respect, China is much closer to our view than the US, in other words. China takes the climate crisis much more seriously than the US, which treats it as an abstract concept."

Beyond the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which aims to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030, China and Norway are also deepening cooperation on sustainable ocean management, following a memorandum of understanding signed last year.

While the maritime industry continues to put pressure on marine ecosystems, efforts to protect ocean biodiversity are taking on greater urgency as global climate policies evolve.