Fighte fuaighte: woven into and through each other. Speaking at the Atlantic Summit 2026, surfer, scientist and explorer Easkey Britton used this Irish expression to describe our relationship with the ocean as something intrinsically interwoven, rather than two separate or disconnected elements.
It was a fitting thought for a Summit where many strands of Europe’s ocean agenda came together. Held on 8–9 October in Galway, in the context of Ireland’s Presidency of the Council of the European Union, the event gathered more than 300 policymakers, researchers, scientists, innovators, educators and ocean professionals around a common question: “What does Europe need to turn its ocean ambitions into action?”. The Summit’s Outcome Statement points to three priorities: making ocean knowledge a strategic investment priority for Europe, strengthening Atlantic partnerships and cooperation to deliver greater impact, and investing in skills and leadership needed for Europe’s ocean future. JPI Oceans was pleased to contribute precisely at their intersections, across three different – but closely interwoven - areas.
Ahead of the Summit, JPI Oceans and the Marine Institute brought the JPI Oceans Blue Carbon Knowledge Hub to Galway for the event Blue Carbon in EU Ocean, Climate and Biodiversity Policy: Presenting the JPI Oceans Policy Briefs.
The event highlighted the Knowledge Hub’s series of three complementary policy briefs, which together explore how blue carbon can be better integrated across marine, climate and biodiversity policies. This occasion also marked the launch of the third and final brief, Integrating Blue Carbon Considerations into the Implementation of the Nature Restoration Regulation, completing the series. The briefs address three interconnected European policy frameworks - the Marine Strategy Framework Directive, the EU LULUCF Regulation and the Nature Restoration Regulation - and they show how blue carbon can provide a common thread between protecting marine ecosystems, addressing climate change and restoring biodiversity.
Europe is moving from setting ocean and environmental ambitions to working out how to deliver them, with the European Ocean Pact and the forthcoming Ocean Act. Taken as a whole, the three briefs illustrate the less visible work behind advancing Europe’s ocean agenda: connecting scientific evidence across policy areas and translating it into coherent policies, investments and decisions.
You can read the full policy brief series here, and follow JPI Oceans on social media for upcoming interviews with the experts behind the publications.
Lead authors of the Blue Carbon policy briefs
JPI Oceans also joined the UN Ocean Decade North Atlantic Regional Blueprint Dialogue, part of a broader effort to identify priorities, challenges and solution pathways for the region. Through the Dialogue, JPI Oceans contributed to discussions by moderating the breakout session on coastal resilience, identifying priority actions, implementation barriers and opportunities for regional collaboration, helping to inform the development of the North Atlantic Ocean Decade Blueprint.
The conversation comes at the right time for ocean knowledge, ahead of the next Ocean Decade Conference in Rio in April 2027, and just weeks after the UN General Assembly High-Level Week in New York, where the EU and Canada launched the OceanEye International Alliance for the Global Ocean Observing System, with countries pledging almost €220 million for ocean observation. This gives a tangible weight to the Summit Outcome Statement’s call to treat ocean knowledge as a strategic investment.
The third strand came through JPI Oceans’ work in the All-Atlantic Ocean Research and Innovation Alliance (AAORIA). JPI Oceans contributes to the Alliance as a main partner in the EU-funded OKEANO Coordination and Support Action, supporting AAORIA and the implementation of the All-Atlantic Declaration. In Galway, we followed up on the All-Atlantic Intergenerational Hackathon held earlier this year in Salvador de Bahia, Brazil. There, Early Career Ocean Professionals (ECOPs) worked alongside their mentors on six challenges spanning coastal resilience, low-cost sensors, digital mapping of the ocean, small-scale fisheries, sargassum blooms and blue schools.
One ECOP from each team took their work across the Atlantic to Galway, bringing the solutions developed during 24 intensive hours of intergenerational collaboration onto the Summit stage and into a wider ocean science and policy conversation. This builds on several years of intergenerational work across the Alliance, moving progressively from dialogue towards implementation. It also found a clear echo in the Summit Outcome Statement’s call to invest in skills and leadership, reinforcing something the All-Atlantic experience has made increasingly clear: ECOPs are not only the future of ocean research and governance, they are already helping shape its present.
All-Atlantic Intergenerational Hackathon participants
From the EU Ocean Pact and forthcoming Ocean Act, from the EU OceanEye to the UN Ocean Decade, AAORIA and OKEANO, one can easily get entangled in the fabric of ocean cooperation composed of a mesh of policies, programmes and acronyms. This Atlantic Summit offered a reminder of how these pieces fit together: policy needs knowledge to know where to go, knowledge and cooperation need people on the ground to sustain them, and people need investment to turn ambition into action. Perhaps that is also where fighte fuaighte comes back in. Interwoven together, not humans and ocean as separate pieces that now need reconnecting, but parts of a system that were never really set apart in the first place.