The Our Ocean Conference series focuses on generating voluntary commitments for significant and meaningful actions towards a clean, healthy and productive ocean. Over the past six Our Ocean Conferences, participants have announced more than a thousand commitments worth more than $90 billion and protected more than five million square miles of ocean. The 2022 edition of the conference series is hosted by the Republic of Palau. It will focus on six Areas of Action, convening partners from across the globe to identify solutions to manage marine resources, increase the ocean’s resilience to climate change and safeguard its health for generations to come.
On the occasion of the conference JPI Oceans is contributing the following new commitments:
Belgium, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Poland, Romania and Spain under the framework of JPI Oceans and together with BANOS, BlueMed, NOAA and the UN Ocean Decade, commit up to € 8.2 million for research and innovation project proposals on the issue of the acoustic pollution of oceans and seas. The overall aim of the call is to decrease the existing high levels of uncertainty and to promote specific lines of research that will contribute to the implementation of EU environmental legislation protecting marine environmental health.
The joint call for research and innovation proposals focuses on the topics of (1) effects of anthropogenic noise pollution on marine ecosystems and (2) innovative seismic sources as an option for quieter and effective alternatives to conventional marine geophysical exploration.
Under the framework of JPI Oceans, Belgium, Italy and Malta have established an expert group aiming to contribute to a better understanding and achievement of a Good Environmental Status of the European seas. The action will explore new approaches to determine the Good Environmental Status and provide efficient and effective observational strategies to Member States of the EU.
In 2022, the participating countries and JPI Oceans commit to organise an expedition by four scientific teams onboard of the Research Vessel Belgica. The expedition aims at assessing the environmental status of the marine environment by integrating physical, chemical and biological information from an area of the North Sea.
The Knowledge Hub on Sea Level Rise is a new joint effort by JPI Climate and JPI Oceans on regional to local sea level changes in Europe. It is a networking platform to promote generation, synthesis and exchange of scientific knowledge on regional and global, historic and future sea level rise, specifically addressing knowledge needs for societal policy makers. Currently the Knowledge Hub brings together over 50 experts from nine European member countries: Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Spain and Sweden.
The Knowledge Hub aims to support the development and implementation of sea level-related policies, by facilitating the interaction between research and policy professionals, and stakeholders with different disciplinary backgrounds and expertise. It adopts a cooperative and interdisciplinary approach to transfer knowledge, aiming to provide more frequent, detailed and regional-scaled assessments of sea level rise and its impacts to enable policy makers to make well-informed decisions regarding protective and adaptive measures needed for each of the major ocean basins around Europe. The key result of these assessments will be easy access to regularly updated and usable knowledge on regional-local sea level change in Europe, complementing existing global and European assessments by providing additional geographical and contextual detail, tailored to policy development and implementation.
In the first three years of the Knowledge Hub (2021-2023), a scoping process will involve surveying among stakeholders of sea level information, basin-specific scoping workshops (March-May 2022) and a large-scale conference (October 2022) to identify needs and knowledge gaps to address in the first assessment report.