Building an international transparent ocean community (OceanObs’19 special session)

September 2019

Prof Kehou PAN (QNLM) presenting at OceanObs’19 (seated from left, Dr Cai and Prof Visbeck).

QNLM and CSIRO hosted a special session at OceanObs’19, Hawaii in September 2019. The session focused on building an international transparent ocean community by encouraging nations to share data, develop innovative observing technologies, and build a cost-effective global observing system.

One objective of the United Nations Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021-2030) initiative is to create a ‘transparent and accessible ocean’ through observations, understanding, and modelling, leading to a ‘predicted ocean’, whereby all nations, stakeholders and citizens have access to ocean data and information, technologies, providing the capacity to inform their decisions.

The session also discussed the need for a ‘between-decadal’ conference in the emerging area of artificial intelligence and deep machine learning, to respond in a timely fashion to scientific and societal needs arising within the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021-2030) and beyond.

The special session made the following statements to the plenary:

  1. The Transparent Ocean Initiative will greatly contribute to the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development by providing vital information relevant to the development goals.
  2. It is essential to integrate observations, process studies and prediction/projection, to meet multiple demands of end users.
  3. Strengthened effort is needed to meet challenges of effective communication between science and research community and the general public.
  4. The Transparent Ocean Initiative could be an appropriate platform for overcoming the difficulty in data sharing, particularly coastal ocean data.

Professor Kehou PAN, pictured above, is Secretary General of Academic Committee and Member of Executive Committee, QNLM, China and Professor of the Department of Aquaculture, Ocean University of China (OUC), and a member of the CSHOR Steering Committee.

OceanObs’29 will be held in Qingdao, China.

Read more about OceanObs’19 and the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development at the following links: http://www.oceanobs19.net/ and https://en.unesco.org/ocean-decade.