In partnership with the Varda Group, and in association with Dona Bertarelli Philanthropy, TBA21-Academy, the Tara Ocean Foundation, MedPAN, the Ocean BornFoundation and the Ocean-Climate Platform, we are publishing today Let’s be Nice to the Ocean: Thinking Outside the Box before the Third UN Ocean Conference.

All life on Earth depends on a healthy ocean, but our marine world is in crisis, we’ve seen it firsthand. Since the first edition of The Ocean Race in 1973 teams in our round-the-world competition have sailed through garbage belts, spotted illegal fishing fleets and encountered less and less wildlife as they journey across the planet.

Monaco Ocean Week has just started with the 12th Monaco Blue Initiative (MBI) which brought together various stakeholders and decision-makers in the field of sustainable management and conservation of the Ocean, on Monday 22nd March, around the theme of the blue economy.

IHO and CIESM have renewed their Scientific Cooperation Agreement for the next 4 years. This will provide a framework for active cooperation between the two intergovernmental organizations dedicated to marine science, based in Monaco.

An online workshop of the Because the Ocean signatories took place on 23rd March 2021, kindly hosted as part of the Monaco Ocean Week.

BeMed continues to support, through its call for micro-initiatives, projects that aim to reduce plastic use and find alternatives, improve waste collection, raise awareness, engage stakeholders and help implement regulations.

The Mediterranean Sea is one of the richest natural areas in the world in terms of biodiversity.

Will 2021 be a super year for the ocean? Those working to protect marine biodiversity hope so, after the global pandemic led to the cancellation or postponement of a line-up of potentially game changing events in 2020.

Once again this year the members of the Ocean and Climate Platform have won decisive victories in the theatre of international negotiations. Since 2014 their plan of attack has been to make the ocean an essential issue in global climate policies. Their strategy is based on the pillars of science as much as on the outstanding commitment of a head of state.

The level of the world’s oceans was unchanging for 6,000 years but has been rising at such a rate since the industrial era that almost a metre more of land will be under water by the end of the century. The sea will cover certain atolls, wash over the fertile land of deltas and flood coastal cities, driving back coastlines that are home to 40% of the global population.

For 20 years Laurent Ballesta dreamed only of exploring the depths of the Mediterranean Sea. In July 2019, the biologist, photographer and extreme diver, along with three companions, boarded a strange-looking steel vessel. Sometimes confined in a 5-square-metre pressurised habitat on the surface and at others equipped with diving suits and rebreathers and left to their own devices in the twilight zone, they endured a total of 28 days in a helium-rich atmosphere 13 times denser than the air at the surface. At depths of more than 100 metres, the aquanauts discovered a world that even the sun’s rays struggle to reach and yet that supports some of the world’s most beautiful ecosystems.

It took almost a century of scientific exploration to identify a hugely complex phenomenon that is threatening the lungs of the Earth: ocean acidification. During the industrial age, high concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere have altered the chemistry of our oceans.

In September 2019 the oceanographic team onboard Sphyrna Odyssey set off on the acoustic trail of Mediterranean cetaceans. Over six months, using two remote-controlled water surface drones developed by a company called Sea Proven, scientists recorded in very high definition the signals of large marine mammals off the eastern shores of the Mediterranean.