We are living amongst ever-intensifying news about the Ocean’s heating up, the bleaching of coral reefs in many parts of the world, and biodiversity declines. It is taking more and more concentrated effort to focus on positive news, innovations and solutions that are helping us to address, mitigate and reverse these negative trends.
Once a year we celebrate World Ocean Day and many positive news about Ocean solutions are brought to focus. Mostly these are progress made by NGOs or development programs that have consistently been working on outcomes for years and decades and rightly so need to be celebrated. There are also many new opportunities and battle lines, such as the new high seas treaty and the battle against deep sea mining. Yet these fronts may feel distant to ordinary people who are not engaged in active conservation projects or professionally advocate for Oceans. Most people, after all, mainly visit the seaside or the Ocean recreationally or engage with it on holidays or short trips.
It is important that stakeholders of all kinds, those whose livelihoods depend on it and the Ocean lovers at large, are able to hold up a vision of healthy oceans and align their actions with this vision. Nature has an amazing ability to bounce back, adapt and thrive. We are reminded of this over and over again. Just recently a study was published in Science, that clearly demonstrated that conservation works in stopping and reversing biodiversity loss.
Ocean Eye provides the hope of small actions to key stakeholders in the Ocean realm. The coastal communities themselves of course benefit but also through empowering the massive 60 billion USD a year tourism industry to play their part as responsible Ocean custodians we can really intensify our joint efforts to support conservation.
Ocean Eye is on this journey to empower the regular Ocean lovers, who appreciate and value marine life to play their part in halting and reversing marine life decline. Through small actions equivalent to small change, we can support the conservation of critical marine biodiversity. This World Ocean Day we are celebrating our first public engagement event in Jakarta at the end of May and will soon announce more locations where people power can help protect Mama Ocean with the help of our technology.