UN Ocean Decade Conference

By: Paige Martin, Team Leader, User Training Team

ACCESS-NRI’s User Training Team Leader, Paige Martin, participated in the 2024 Ocean Decade Conference held in Barcelona, Spain from April 10-12 and organised by the UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission.

This conference was part of the United Nations (UN) Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (from 2021-2030). The conference tagline was “the science we need for the ocean we want”, with a goal of bringing together the international ocean community to chart the roadmap for the rest of the decade. There were over 1500 participants from 124 countries who attended in-person, and over 3000 attended virtually.

This conference was a bit different from the standard science or software conferences I’ve previously attended. One of the first things that struck me was that we needed to go through security to enter the building! The reason for this, is because the attendees for this conference included many high-ranking government officials (including presidents of several countries such as Cabo Verde, Seychelles, and Cook Islands) and UN delegates, alongside scientists, policy makers, and other ocean enthusiasts. To my pleasant surprise, there were a lot of early career attendees (dubbed “Early Career Ocean Professionals”, or “ECOPs”), which contributed to a great energy and focus on actions – not just words – that we can take to better support our oceans.

My talk “Turning the Tide: Open science for ocean capacity sharing” (Oral presentations listed here, click on “Session 4” and scroll down under “Challenge 9”) was in a session “An Inspiring and Engaging Ocean for All”, which focused on international ocean capacity development activities. I briefly discussed two computational ocean capacity development activities I’m involved with (Coastal Ocean Environment Summer School in Nigeria and Ghana and OceanHackweek) and made a pitch that we should coordinate better across activities to ensure a more unified approach to technical infrastructure and data access, as well as funding. There was a lively discussion after all oral presentations in the session, and the ideas raised will be incorporated into a white paper being written about Ocean Decade Challenge 9 (on capacity development), meant to inform actions moving forward into the decade.

Throughout the conference and associated satellite events (that took place across Barcelona the entire week), there was little discussion of global ocean or climate models, such as the ACCESS models. The focus was instead of improving access to observational datasets to interested parties around the world, particularly those that are high-resolution and can be used to inform local ocean and coastal challenges. There was a lot of discussion about the idea of digital twins of the ocean, which would integrate various different types of datasets (including both observational and model data) and allow users to discover a range of datasets for any particular region of the ocean. At the moment, I’m not sure how global models like ACCESS would be used in such entities, but it may be something for the ACCESS community to keep an eye out for.

Overall, this was a unique and exciting conference, where I was able to meet a wide range of ocean enthusiasts, and I look forward to instilling many of the ideas I heard into my new role at ACCESS-NRI.