 Hello, and thanks for joining us for the Conversations World Oceans Day webinar. I'm Jack Marley, Environment and Energy Editor at the Conversation. Since the Industrial Revolution, the ocean has absorbed between 30 and 40% of all the CO2 that humans have added to the atmosphere. As the planet has warmed, 93% of that excess heat has been mopped up by the ocean. In many cases, the ocean is the front line of our rapidly changing world. If greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated, scientists predict that we could see the near total collapse of tropical coral reefs this century, which are among the most species-rich ecosystems on Earth. All that additional warming would limit how much oxygen the ocean can hold to, potentially helping to create vast areas where life can no longer flourish. Already the oceans are more acidic today than at any other time in human history. Thanks in large part to the way our emissions have interfered with the ocean's delicate chemistry. While the world considers how to restart life following the pandemic in a way that brings our societies and economies into greater harmony with nature, it's the ocean that holds many of the greatest challenges, but also many of the solutions. This year marks the beginning of the UN decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development. One intention of this international landmark is to highlight the window of opportunity that exists from now until 2030 to fundamentally change how we relate to the ocean. To meet this opportunity, it's essential that we understand how humanity arrives at this perilous crossroads. Only then can we see the opportunities that exist for us to plot a new course for life on this blue planet. Joining me to discuss the ocean's history and its potential future are three experts. Jean-Baptiste Dufres is a postdoctoral researcher in sustainability science at the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University. His research explores what the Anthropocene means for the ocean and how social, economic and ecological challenges to sustainability can be overcome. Jessica Whiteside is an associate professor in ocean and earth science at the University of Southampton. She studies the many chapters of our blue planet's history, particularly how life has evolved through mass extinction events. And Joanne Preston is a reader in marine ecology and evolution at the University of Portsmouth, and she's also co-founder of the native oyster network, which is a community of academics and conservationists dedicated to restoring self-sustaining populations of native oysters in Europe. If you have any questions for our panel, then please put them in the comment stream and we'll try to get to them at the end. Welcome to all of our panelists and thank you very much for being here today. For my very first question, I'd like to start with you, Jessica. How old is the ocean and why has it always been so important to life on earth? Thanks for that question, Jack. Our ocean is very old. In fact, it's 4.3 billion years old, almost as old as the earth itself. And it's our most precious resource. It's what makes our planet unique. Other than ancient Mars, which had an acidic ocean and the icy moons that circled the gas giants in our outer solar system, this is the only water we know of in the universe. In fact, the search for the possibility of life elsewhere, the very definition of the habitable zone, focuses first and foremost on the presence of water. That's where the search for life begins. The NASA mantra is even follow the water. Water is the universal solvent, the central ingredient, and that's because it's ideal for allowing material in and out of cells. So that's nutrients into the cell and waste materials out of a cell. So very much the understanding of how our oceans have sustained over such a long time, 4.3 billion years, is intricately connected to the story of eventual life on our planet. The oceans hold that golden thread that weaves everything together. So let's talk a little bit about origins. The solar system settled into its current layout 4.5 billion years ago. The earth formed from gravity pulling, swirling gas and dust in, and then resulting in us being the third planet from the sun. There was no liquid water on the very earliest earth because it was far too hot within that infant stage. In fact, this interval of time has been called the Hadian. That's its proper name after Hades, the great god of the underworld, and it used to be thought. And in fact, even when I was a student in the textbooks, it was described as hot, hellish, a time when the planet was bombarded by meteorites and comets. It was lifeless and it certainly was not wet. It turns out that early in Earth's history, it did cool to temperatures below the boiling port of water that allows it to actually sustain an ocean and an ocean to form. So at its infant 150 million years old stage, the oceans formed. And the oceans formed from off-gassing a water vapor. So that's the gas phase of water that cools, condenses and rained out as liquid water from the Earth's molten interior. So like we see today with volcanic activity, basically steam escaped out of Earth's rocks and it was possibly aided by the delivery of icy comets or meteors that were smashing into the Earth. So the oceans were really early on in our Earth's history and how Earth retained that liquid water for almost its entire history and did so within an average temperature within a very narrow window. A narrow window being equivalent to the temperatures between your freezer and your stove top. This is all fascinating. The oceans have sustained themselves for 4.3 billion years and they did it in the face of a very faint young sun early on. In the very beginning, our sun was only 70% as bright as it is now. This is a great topic of interest because the ocean retained its habitability and the way it did it has to do with the atmospheric composition of greenhouse gases, particularly CO2 and methane, changing dramatically at that time and throughout Earth's history. Now we dread that mention of CO2 as a greenhouse in today's world because its rapid increase is a bad thing, but the presence early on 4.3 billion years ago was a good thing. Otherwise it would have been a much colder world and the oceans wouldn't have formed and life wouldn't have persisted. Now let's talk just a little bit about oceans and the importance for life over this 4.3 billion year history. Life emerges at 3.5 billion years on our planet and the ocean was the venue for that origins of life. It turns out that the oceans are the venue for nearly all the key evolutionary innovations on our planet. So the evolutionary storms that alter biogeochemical cycling, they happen in the oceans. All of them besides the spread of land plants, although that actually originates from coming from the ocean on to land. So that's the origin of life itself, the big divide between bacteria and nucleated organisms, eukaryotes, and the first whiffs of oxygen that then sustain oxygen in the atmosphere and build up for the proliferation of complex life, the rise of multicellular life, even mobility early on, bacteria and multicellular life didn't even move. For burrowing, for churning below the ground to cycle nutrients like carbon and nitrogen, the rise of animals and the rise of carnivory, all of these critical events are related to the co-evolution of climate, the co-evolution of life and the co-evolution of oceans. Brilliant, thank you Jessica. I guess that I'm peeing out to sort of find out when humans came into this story and we know for instance that the earliest evidence of people actually sort of using the sea for sustains are some remains of shellfish that were found in 164,000 year old cave deposits. So Joanne, could you tell us a bit more about how that particular relationship evolved, our relationship with harvesting food from the ocean? Yeah, sure. So I'm going to talk about oysters. You know, as humans we love to fish and consume oysters, you know, they're a fantastic, easily accessible source of really high quality protein. And we've been doing large-scale cultivation of oysters since the Roman Empire, but we've now have been eating them since the dawn of humanity. Now, where I'm sitting now in Europe, we used to have the native oysters, Austria-Egyptus, going from Morocco along the coast of Europe, all the way up to Norway throughout the Mediterranean. But here in Layser problem, when you've got a species that is easily accessible, it's really easy to take from the sea. And the thing about the oysters is they don't move. What we call sessile. When they're adult, they just stay on the seabed. And so they can't run away, they can't shift their range. But what is important when they're larvae, when they're very small baby phases of this species, the larvae swim in the ocean and they need adult oysters to settle on. We call them gregarious. So you need the oysters on the seabed to complete the life cycle. And this is how they create these amazingly diverse biogenic oyster reefs. Now, it was the Industrial Revolution and the mechanization of fishing that enabled powered vessels to go offshore for periods of time and catch much larger, much larger numbers of oysters. And this is the thing that enabled unsustainable landings and a very, very rapid over-exploitation during the mid-1800s. So the habitat we see today is nothing like the one we would have seen if we had been walking along shores in the 1700s and early 1800s. And here are some examples. So there's a 120,000 strong fleet of oyster dredges that in 1864 supplied 700 million oysters to London alone in that year. In the Bay of Biscay, 80 million oysters were harvested annually prior to 1859. And in France, we have historical piles of shells of the native oyster that contain five trillion shells. So massive over-exploitation in the mid-1800s has meant that there's been this catastrophic decline. And now we've lost over 95% of all oyster reefs across Europe. And many areas are completely extinct. Now, the problem is we've also lost our living memory about what this healthy, thriving oyster reef habitat looks like. And what's disastrous for us and biodiversity in the climate is we've lost the services they provide. So oysters filter water and they draw down nutrients, they control pollution, but they also create an essential, complex three-dimensional structure that provides habitat for lots of other species. They support biodiversity and they provide a nursery ground for fish. And we've lost all those benefits that they provide as well as the habitat. Thanks, Joanne. So I guess that that's a really kind of good illustrative example of just how one fishery has really sort of transformed the sea that we would kind of have once been accustomed to, to what we see today. But obviously, it's clear that humans have been influencing sea life for a very long time. But I guess that there's nothing that really compares to sort of what we have seen in even just our lifetime, sort of in recent decades. And I know that you, Jean Baptiste, you discovered something exceptional about our relationship with the ocean in recent history. And I'm just keen for you to sort of tell us a little bit more about that. Well, you said it, Jack. I mean, and we've just heard Joanne talking about that, like humanity has depend on the ocean for millennia. But there is something different today, driven in part by technological innovation, the extent and the diversity of today's ocean use is unprecedented. And you have all these hopes and expectation for the ocean to be the next economic frontier and to be the engine of future human development. And this is really recent. Like post-World War II, from the 1950s, the period is often described as the great acceleration because you actually, if you look at a range of socio-economic environmental variables from global world population to the GDP, to deforestation, water consumption and so on, you see exponential increase over the board, across all the variables. And that's been called the Great Acceleration and that's been an iconic illustration of the Anthropocene, which is the age of humans, right, when humans have become a dominant force of planetary change. Well, the same is happening in the ocean. Many ocean-based industries today are growing faster than the global economy and in many cases, exponentially. This is what we called the Blue Acceleration in the spirit of the Great Acceleration, really describing a new phase in humanity's relationship with the ocean that exhibits a phenomenal rate of change over the last 30 years. So it's not 50 years, it's not 70 years, it's really, you see the sharp acceleration characterizing the onset of the 21st century. So it's more recent. Just to give you a few examples, over the past 20 years only, for instance, since 2000, nearly 1 million kilometers of fiber-optic cables have been led on the seabed and these cables carry 99% of all international telecommunication. It's faster, cheaper and more reliable than satellites. Likewise, the annual volume of cargo transported by container shipping has quadrupled over the last 20 years. Today, maritime transport accounts for 80% of global trade by volume, 70% by value. It really is the bloodstream of globalization. Most of the major discoveries of oil and gas deposit have happened offshore in the recent years and the ocean is also seen as a new frontier for renewable energy. For instance, offshore wind, offshore wind energy capacity has increased 400 folds since 2000. The first license for deep sea mining, a very controversial activity, was granted in 2001. Since then, an area of ocean flow equivalent to the size of Peru has been leased for exploratory deep sea mining. More than 13,000 marine genetic sequences have been registered in patents. A surge in desalination plants has led to 65 million cubic meters of sea water being desalinated every day. So this is the blue acceleration. It is this new reality of the ocean and it's fairly intuitive to imagine the cumulative pressures that these activities exert on the ocean in parallel with land-based activities and, of course, the impact of climate change. That was brilliant. Thanks, Jean-Baptiste. Really fascinating to sort of hear it spelled out in those really specific terms and it is sort of frightening to think that this is sort of what we've seen in only just the last three decades. I guess it isn't really hard to see how these accelerating pressures of ocean, and as I said a bit in the introduction, that we know that the oceans are becoming hotter, more acidic, and less oxygenated. But Jessica, given your background studying sort of the deep history of the oceans, I'm quite keen to hear from you on that point about, you know, are we entering sort of an era that's unprecedented in the ocean or is there something, you know, quite familiar about the sort of changes on a sort of biological and physical scale that are currently happening in the world's ocean? Yes, we have seen these type of physical and biological changes in Earth's past. Geology teaches us that some, if not most, of the major mass extinction events that have happened since the dawn of animal life on our planet 600 million years ago are tied to times of high CO2. It's equally ugly twin ocean acidification and low marine oxygen levels that are a consequence of high CO2. So there's actually a cascading effect of greenhouse gas emissions. Now, John Baptiste mentioned that humans are a planetary or geological force, and when we talk about mass extinctions, they're caused in Earth's past by these geological forces. So for example, by planetary scale volcanism or fissure eruptions, lava intrusions that come from deep within the Earth and erupt over almost a million years spewing lava and greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and cover areas that are one third the size of the moon or the fallout from a giant asteroid impact that blocks sunlight and results in a cascading effect of no photosynthesis of the material that it hits causing heating and cooling on long time scales. So these are planetary scale eruptions and then we have arriving on the scene 100,000 years ago, the planetary force of Homo sapiens. So us, and in fact, we've just recorded the highest CO2 emissions in the last 4 million years in May, so reaching 419 parts per million. Numbers that we're throwing out and mass extinctions themselves, these have punctuated the history of life in our planet, resetting the evolutionary clock each time in unpredictable ways, but are responsible for the overall shape of life. And they've been caused in the past by these cascading effects of high CO2. And what were the consequences to life? Well, 50 to 90% of all species on the planet were decimated at these mass extinction events and these are numbers that I'm throwing out but if you can imagine, if you've been snorkeling recently to take advantage of the nice weather or if you remember going on walks during lockdown, if you were to remember what the ambient situation looked like around you then close your eyes and 50% to nearly everything that you see being wiped out. Those are the kind of levels of devastation that are the result of greenhouse gas induced warming and the measurable consequences associated with this at mass extinction events. And we know this from the sedimentary time machines, the rock record, the only tape recorder we have of the vast geological real estate that's on our planet and what the consequences to life were. So when CO2 was higher 56 million years ago, there were crocodiles that approached the North Pole. When CO2 was higher 66 million years ago, there were large expanses of coastal regions that were underwater and nothing bigger than 21 kilograms survived. When CO2 was higher 200 million years ago and 250 million years ago from that widespread volcanic events that one of them opening the Atlantic Ocean and ripping apart vast expanses of the earth and throwing up greenhouse gases. Well, those result in asphyxiation of the starvation of life where it's actually decimated because there's no oxygen. And these are events that have played out multiple times in this tape recorder of the past. We know this from studying these ancient abrupt climate events and it's that abruptness that makes them more severe. So these low oxygen conditions, well, they're part of the issue and they happen by the combination of the increased CO2 leading to higher temperatures. That increased CO2 dissolves in the ocean and creates a free hydrogen gas which basically attacks or eats away acidified shells. And then also the solubility of oxygen decreases in a hot ocean. So basically that's the same principle as if you try to enjoy a carbonated beverage on a hot day and you've cracked open the can, you've popped open that lid and notice that it doesn't fizz. That's because hot waters don't contain as much gas as cool waters do. And that results in oxygen disappearing so low oxygen levels. And that's toxic to most life because it needs oxygen in order to respire. So these mass extinction events in deep time, they have profoundly impacted the modern species diversity. Yet paradoxically, species are being lost at such a rate now that these ancient events are providing valuable lessons about the susceptibility of our modern species and environmental controls on species loss. That's great. Thanks, Jessica. I guess that there's a really kind of familiar sort of phenomenon you described there, these sort of low oxygen zones. And I think they're more commonly referred to as dead zones, these parts of the ocean where there's just such low oxygen levels that most life really can't exist. Joanne, I just want to come to you on that point. I know that dead zones are kind of a common problem around coastlines today, particularly in places like the Gulf of Mexico, as you noted, Jessica, where we have a lot of pollution that ends up in the water that kind of creates these massive blooms of algae that ultimately decay and sap oxygen from the water. But I'm also aware that nature had ways of keeping these events in check in the past. And I think one of the best ways of doing this was with oysters, I believe, oyster reefs, which essentially clean the water by filtering all that algae out. Could you maybe just tell us a little bit about how differently the coastal season Europe used to look when we had these reefs in place? How differently the sea behaved, I suppose, as well? Yeah, sure, Jack. So I think one single oyster can filter around 200 litres of sea water a day. And what they do is they consume the algae, the small phytoplankton in the water. And this controls sort of algal blooms and help control eutrophication. But obviously, remove the oysters, then you're not going to get that bottom-up control. Now, in 1883, there was a Piscatorial Atlas, basically a fish mat produced by a guy called Olsen, that showed the extent of oyster reefs all around the UK and northern Europe. And you realise, then, that there were dense oyster reefs all the way around the UK in many locations in the English Channel, and a massive one in the North Sea south of the Dogger Bank off the coast of Netherlands and Germany. And I've got a few what we call historical ecology quotes. And these are quotes from back in historic periods that tell us what things look like then. And this quote really brings it alive. This is from a report in 1875 of the Fisheries of Norfolk. And someone said, I understand that there is an enormous bed in the North Sea east of the Silver Pits in about 27 fathoms deep. It's nearly 80 miles long and 25 miles wild. The trawlers avoid this rough ground, as they call it, as much as possible. But when they do, by accident, get onto it. The oysters are so numerous that they fill up the trawl and nearly bring up the vessel. That just gives you some imagination about what it will look like on the seabed. And then we have a witness report that sort of encapsulates this issue of the sliding baseline, the loss of living memory. And this is a quote in 1932 from an old fisherman in Wales in the UK. And he said that in 1856 he had caught in the morning seven holes in seven holes. So not many holes as many 8,000 oysters. And now just a catch of three or 4,000 constitute a good day's work. And you can see how those of the decline there affects the living memory. Another quote from 1946, the famous Fourth of Firth, Firth of Fourth Oysters in the, now practically extinct in the sea locks of the Scottish West coasts. And scarcier living oyster shell exists. And another quote from 1887 in Plymouth. There used to be oyster beds up the Plymouth and the Catawater Harbour. But there are, however, no beds now. And this is attributed by some to overdredging, but more probably due to the refuse from China Clayworks pouring down the river and choking the beds. And so we had incredible devastation decline by the mid to late 1800s. So we've undergone this process of flattening the seabed and not only removing the oysters, but all those services and the habitat they provide. And hopefully that gave you a bit of a picture what we used to have in our doorstep that is now almost entirely extinct. Yeah, definitely. Thanks, Joanne. I mean, that really does sort of, you know, there's one fishery in one species. Just that interaction has sort of really totally transformed the seascape that we've kind of that we're left with. It's really sort of quite sort of scary really to think about how much we've changed without probably even really noticing. I guess that this kind of comes back to your research, Sean Baptiste, because obviously what we are seeing now is this, you know, these massive changes that we're fully aware of that we can really sort of see happening in real time and happening over a much smaller time frame. So I know you recently published some research looking into the people in organizations who are behind this blue acceleration, as you call it. Could you tell us a bit about that, please? Yeah, of course. I mean if you think of the blue acceleration as some kind of race to the ocean, a scramble for the seas, then the question is who's winning this race and of course who's left behind. And this is research we did with Duke University led by John Verdin at Duke University where we looked at revenues from the ocean economy in eight core ocean-based industries as identified by the OECD. So that includes seafood, offshore wind, shipping, oil and gas, ports, marine equipment and so on. And what you see is that a small number of corporations headquartered in an even smaller number of countries generate most of the revenues from this industry. Like an example, in the cruise tourism sector, for instance, just 10 companies account for 93% of all revenues of the sector. And this is a pattern you see across the different ocean sectors, right? So now if you aggregate across all industries, the 100 largest corporation in the ocean by revenues, what we called the Ocean 100, they account for 60% of total revenues, the equivalent of 1.1 trillion US dollars. Now, nearly half of this Ocean 100 and nine of the top 10 are oil and gas companies, which is today by far the largest ocean-based industry by value. This in itself illustrates a stark contrast between the aspiration of a truly blue economy and the reality of today's dominant paradigms of extraction from the ocean. My final point here would be that concentration is also in specific parts of the world. So half of all revenues from the Ocean 100 end up in just seven countries, the USA, Saudi Arabia, China, Norway, France, the UK, and South Korea. Saudi Arabia is in this list because of Saudi Aramco, the world's largest oil and gas companies, which has a lot of offshore activities. So it gives you a sense of the poorly distributed revenues from the benefits of the ocean right now. Thanks, Jean-Baptiste. I guess that is pretty striking when you consider that obviously the human relationship with the ocean is fairly ancient and for much of that time it existed as a global commons. I guess that what I'm really kind of keen to sort of get your thoughts on is, you know, now that we've sort of found out about this, you know, the rise of the Ocean 100 as you talk about it, you know, what are the risks essentially and the opportunities for such massive private domination of much of the ocean's sort of economic activity in your view? Yeah, well, I mean, one of the main risks which we're observing already is that benefits disproportionately flow to economically powerful states and corporations while the harms are largely affecting developing nations and local communities. So it is well known that large corporations can use their power to lobby government against social or environmental rules, stifle innovation, and ultimately threaten access for traditional users such as small-scale teachers who often end up being marginalized in political and decision-making process. So effective public policies are needed here to improve regulations and help shift corporate power away from being exercised to the detriment of sustainable and equitable use of the ocean. In the meantime, though, I mean, a few large companies dominating the ocean economy, that also means one knows which doors to knock on in order to fast-track conversation about ocean sustainability. You know who to make accountable. So given their size and influence, voluntary sustainability commitments by the Ocean 100 could set new industry norms and accelerate transformation towards sustainability. In fact, these 100 companies, they represent the largest corporate beneficiaries of ocean use, which, as you said, Jack, is a global common. So you could argue that they are in a unique position to take responsibility to exercise global leadership and to ultimately drive change in their respective industries in the best of the world. And I think scientists have a critical role to play in this process. Increasingly, corporate leaders now regard sustainability as a key for their business and a chance for companies to add value or to access emerging markets. It's becoming a buzzword, right? And an important one for businesses, no any longer just for NGOs or civil society. The risk, though, is that companies hijack the sustainability agenda and define it in a way that is convenient for their operation and legitimates self-regulations over national or international rules, meaning failing to address major social and environmental issues. So I think the role of scientists here by engaging with business leaders, as we did at the Stockholm Resilient Center within the seafood industry with the SIBOS initiative, among other, it is to ensure decision making is based on the best available science with a particular eye on the equity dimension, too. Not just the environmental side, but also the social one. Great, thanks, Jean-Baptiste. That's really great. I think that we've kind of, at this stage, we've heard a lot about, you know, our present relationship with the ocean and also how we've kind of got here. I'm really keen that we can sort of now turn to the future, and I suppose in particular the next 10 years, given that we are sort of at the beginning, the crest of this UN decade of the ocean, Joanne, I know that you're leading work to restore oyster reefs in European coastal waters, so what I'm really eager to hear is, you know, how does someone bring these habitats back to life? What does that work look like, essentially? What's involved? Well, I think the first thing I want to say is absolutely, absolutely doable. This is not rocket science. We have the biological, ecological knowledge and expertise to do this, but we don't have all the frameworks in place to roll it out. So this is a relatively new area in the UK and Europe. They've been pioneering this in the states in Australia, and so when we started doing restoration projects here in the UK, it's a massively steep learning curve, and it was really hard to find out the information you needed to know to put restoration in practice, and so as a community, we wrote a how-to guide. So anyone who wants to restore can pick up the guide, step-by-step guide and everything you need to know to set up a restoration project. But sort of to sum up, really, some of this content is that you cannot do it alone. This has to be a collaborative project involving stakeholders and partners, and that is the first thing you do. Restoration will not be successful without the inclusion of a wide range of knowledge, local ecological knowledge as well as scientific and invest in your relationships with your stakeholders. Then there's a few technical things you need to do like conduct feasibility, study, conduct baseline surveys to see if it's feasible to do it in your location. And then you need to set your restoration goal. Different restoration projects, even if the same species will have really different goals, so one might be to mitigate water quality and improve nitrate levels. Another one might be to improve biodiversity. Another oyster restoration project may be to provide overspill for fisheries and have a sustainable resource management plan in the area. The fundamentally there's two main approaches. Either you have some oysters but there's not enough of the right substrate, not enough of the right shell for the larvae to settle in. And that's what we call a substrate limited system. So then you need to put oyster shell back into the right sediment. So the larvae that swim in the water will settle and start creating that oyster habitat. And that might involve a shell recycling scheme or as part of your project. All this requires licensing and permitting which can take months if not years to get in place. That's a big part of the project as well. In other areas you just need more oysters. They're extinct or they're just in such low numbers or they've had a massive genetic population bottleneck. And that's what we call recruitment limited. So there's no larvae going into the system from adult oysters on the seabed. Now this is a fun bit. Trying to source oysters of a highly highly endangered or crisply endangered habitat. So you can sometimes take them from areas that are fished and put them into protected areas. I put them in protected zones so you then start to kick start to natural reef. You can produce them in a restoration hatchery. That's what we're doing here at the Institution Marine Sciences or you can buy from commercial suppliers. There's lots of things to consider around genetics and biosecurity but I'm not going to go into those details about that now. But fundamentally what you want to do is restore a self-sustaining population. Some of the things we've done is take oysters out of fisheries. They would have been going to the plate and put them into cages and baskets off marinas around the country so they breed more readily and just pump out larvae that go and colonize the seabed. But what we're really doing at the moment is scaling up into seabed deployment. So this is getting oysters, the right oysters for the right location and restoring the seabed by putting several hundred thousand, if not million back onto the seabed. And then lastly this is no good unless you know it's been a success so you need to monitor your project. So that's measuring things like the growth, mortality or the ecosystem services they provide like changes in water quality or turbidity. So in a nutshell that's how you do oyster restoration. So it's a great thing to do and it's a great thing to do as a community involving all the stakeholders that are interested. Thanks Joanne, that sounds really wonderful and just very quickly could you tell us how much you've actually managed to restore already and what you're kind of aiming to have restored by the end of the next decade? Yeah sure, so since 2015 it's gone from 0 to 11 projects in the UK and now Europe has 18 projects across 10 countries. We're still at the piloting and trialing stage, we've just finished that stage in Europe and now we want large scale seabed restoration and that's what we're going to be doing over this summer for example in the Solent we're going to be putting 2200,000 oysters into the seabed to sort of kickstart a natural sort of reimagine what the oyster reef might have been before it was taken out by humans. So far from the oysters in cages we've talked about the oyster nurseries, we know that we probably produced around 18 billion larvae that's been pumped out into the systems but what we really want to do is see restoration at scale you know so large self-sustaining populations of oysters being re-established in the coastal systems and providing all those ecosystem services we need of this restored habitat. We need an interconnected approach I want to see you know restoration alongside blue carbon habitats so it enables there an improvement of the environment for the restoration of seagrasses and other things like that we need to stop dredging the seabed we need to stop flattening and doing destructive extraction techniques because we don't need to do that and that will only happen if we don't see restoration as a luxury you know it is a necessity if we want to thrive as humans and we need it to mitigate both the climate and the biodiversity crisis in my opinion. Thank you Joanne, that's a really good point I think I'd like to come with you on that Jessica because of course the ocean isn't just a it isn't just a sort of an opportunity to restore ecosystems that could mob up some of the particular challenges like low oxygen zones and stuff like that it's also we're talking on a very grand scale you know we could harness the ocean to sort of remediate some of the damage that we've already done and could you talk a little bit just about the perhaps a couple of the major ways in which your experience has kind of prepared you to consider that question Sure absolutely so the oceans are a very useful ally and there are global engineering solutions that we can certainly push forward that doesn't mean that it's a get out of jail free card as global citizens as members of humanity we simply must decrease CO2 outputs and nutrient overload again coastal regions so we need to minimize these offenses and let the oceans recover the oceans are resilient we know this from the 4.3 billion year record of them on earth but history teaches us that but we need to give them a chance we need to acknowledge our damaging role and at the same time there are investments in concepts of geomimicry and biomimicry so global engineering that are essential and these take their names from evolution in the sense of life in our planet so just like the origins of flight and the shielding on a space shuttle come from reptilian skin there are ideas in terms of how the earth itself has had these very high levels of CO2 it's been a dynamic planet and how they naturally have resolved themselves so here we're exploiting and we're capitalizing on the benefit of the millions and even billions of years of trial and error that the earth and evolution have had to perfect designs in nature and it's logical then that human construction can benefit from drawing from the influence of geology and biology so there are two ways to do this when we're talking about carbon dioxide and that's considering the way the earth's carbon cycle works in general which is on the short term with the biological pump and on the long term by actually making rocks so in shorter time scales over the last 2 million years the most dynamic changes have been those related to giant glaciers that began to cover large portions of the planet and waxed and waned and they're tied to changes in carbon dioxide varying from 180 to 300 parts per million now remember in contrast this hit 419 parts per million in May and earth's past tied to these mass extinction events there were values at about a thousand ppm so for the short term for the biological pump this is something that would be global engineering on a long scale that comes into play when we think about well what was really controlling the ice ages and there's a great quote from a great and wild maverick put this out there John Martin who said give me half a tank of iron and I'll give you the next ice age meaning that if you see the top layers of the ocean with iron which is something that happened from continental runoff and dust going into the oceans in between glacial intervals that allows for microscopic marine organisms things like diatoms to multiply dramatically and then they photosynthesize on a great scale absorbing that carbon dioxide dissolved in the water which in turn draws gas out of the air and if this is done on a large enough scale then iron finalization might strip enough co2 and cool earth's climate now that might work on a shorter time scale there are some nuances of course with anything that that makes changes in that way in fact there are you know there are always pluses and minuses and another way to do this is to speed up the long term carbon cycle the silicate weathering system where you're actually looking for rocks quicker these are all part of the same system so they can be thought of in the same way that nesting dolls or Russian dolls are all stacked there's all pieces of the same thing they're just nestled within each other so on the longer term the carbon cycle makes rocks on geological time scales and the idea would be to speed up that process so that excess co2 is captured and actually stored in rocks and forms things like limestones so the same thing the coral reefs are made of or a piece of chalk and to do that would basically be to pump that co2 into areas where there hasn't been interaction with with the atmosphere yet and then use microbes to speed up the reactions in order to store carbon dioxide because in the silicate weathering system for every one mole of co2 that's in the atmosphere two moles of co2 are stored in the rock itself thereby sequestering and storing that carbon great thank you Jessica I think that we have a little bit of time left and I just want to kind of pivot from the scientific to the political and economic and I know Jean Baptiste you're kind of keeping a close eye on the sort of political opportunities that exist in the next decade to sort of reform how nations and industries operate in the ocean do you want to kind of just give us a run down of some of the key sort of flash points in that that people can sort of look out for? Absolutely and especially because I always get nervous when I hear geoengineering and this idea of putting iron in the ocean at large scale and it's quite unsettling and so I think it's certainly part of the solution probably to some extent but I think one political opportunity is in the coming decade and decades even is decarbonizing our society right and phasing out fossil fuels and then there are more and more countries actually making plans and setting ambitious targets to try to stop emitting as much CO2 in the in the atmosphere at the end of the day I mean it's not only the UN Decade of Ocean Science that starts this year it's also the UN Decade of Action of Action to deliver on the 17 sustainable development goals and I think scaling up and accelerating a shift towards sustainable ocean will require a collective and collaborative effort across entire value chain so that takes policy makers and regulatory bodies but also businesses, civil society, the scientific community and the financial industry as well to create the right incentives right an example of one of that is after more than two decades of negotiation the World Trade Organization is really close to strike a deal to eliminate government subsidies public finance for IUU phishing, IUU stands for illegal, unregulated and unreported phishing and the idea is that right now 35 billion annually of public finance is going and fueling over phishing more than 64% of those subsidies are considered capacity enhancing or in other words harmful and less than 30% are considered beneficial right so the point of the deal is to try to eliminate those harmful subsidies and also prohibit the certain form of subsidies that contribute to over capacity and to over phishing likewise another set of negotiations that have been underway since 2005 it is this time for an international legally binding instruments under United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea on the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction it is a mouthful but it's a really important one in essence it is to try to guarantee the conservation of marine biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction because there is something very unique with the ocean is that two-third of it lies beyond national jurisdiction so it's not the property it's not the sovereign right of any country it's called the international water, the high seas and the international area like the area that's the part of the seabed that lies beyond that jurisdiction and it's really hard to govern because all countries are involved it is the shared inheritance of humanity in a way on the finance side another example would be the EU taxonomy which is the flagship one of the pillar of the European Green Deal but building back better after the crisis among other and that is a classification system that establishes a list of environmentally sustainable economic activities so this is perhaps one of the most ambitious recent development in finance to redirect investments towards more sustainable practices by defining what can be considered a sustainable activity and how to finance it so overall I think the last few months have seen ambitious pledges by nations and by cooperation in some cases to safeguard the ocean every week almost you hear about a new commitment and what will make the difference is whether those nations and those cooperation do listen to the science ultimately and actually turn words into action and I think this is the challenge ahead of us thank you Jean Baptiste that was great thank you all of our panelists I think we've got a lot of questions from the audience so I just want to make sure they fit in as many as possible the first one I think this is probably most appropriate for Joanne this is a question from Josephine who asks can eating oysters ever be sustainable because apparently Josephine is meeting more and more people who are otherwise vegan but eat farmed oysters because they're supposed to be good for the environment what's your take on that Joanne yes I think there's a big publicity from some chefs saying that oysters are vegan pretty much but it is an incredibly sustainable protein source and food source and so it can be reared in a really restorative process through aquaculture it can also as well as being produced for food it can also serve as bar remediation for other other fisheries around it so I would say it's possibly one of the most sustainable protein sources you can get and it has a really really low carbon footprint it's the lowest carbon footprint of all those of the meats really and so in that sense it's very sustainable and so I think I could understand why if you for environmental reasons were a vegan you would then sort of maybe include your circle a bit wider to include oysters as well it has the potential to be incredibly so but the extraction process isn't always sustainable Thank you Geron I think Jean Baptiste you might have touched on some of these in your earlier answer but we have a question from Nicholas specifically about the treaty on areas beyond national jurisdictions and Nicholas asks what do you see as the main barriers to securing an agreement on that? Well there certainly are many because they've been negotiated for more than 50 years now 15 years one of the big barrier is that the way it was written originally like the way the negotiation were initiated meant that it should not undermine whatever the agreement would be could not undermine existing regulatory bodies and that is a problem because if you look at the ocean today it is a patchwork of governance framework right governing fishing in some areas with the regional fishing RFMOs regional fishery management organization sorry different like covering the ocean but you also have managing of the deep sea with the international seabed authority with the ISA you have the IMO the international maritime organization for the shipping so all those bodies and most of them are under the UNIT nation already exist and whatever is agreed for this area beyond national jurisdiction is not supposed to undermine this which means it's going to be really difficult to find a consensus on how we can move forward and how we can have all the countries including global north and the global south and some countries that depend much more on some resources for their future economic growth than others to actually agree on either not extracting those resources despite the fact that they need it while others have before it's always the same story so at the end of the day it's 150 countries negotiating that so this in itself is quite a barrier I see I've just got a question here from Ella as well and I think this is for Jessica you talked a little bit about the mass extinction events that we saw in the in the oceans history what is your understanding of the kinds of life that tend to persevere in these situations you know what tends to sort of get through I guess well that's a great question and when we think about all the species that have existed on our planet 99% have gone extinct and they basically have gone extinct in those five cataclysmic episodes of mass extinction events all to say that what we're doing to our planet isn't going to kill it it's going to make it look very different and when we think about what that landscape then looks like it's actually very difficult to predict because life is surprising and it's tenacious but who actually wins the extinction lottery is very difficult to predict especially at high trophic levels at the top of the food chain when we talk about microbial life it's a little bit easier but basically what proliferates through a mass extinction event are disaster taxa pioneer taxa they're things that tend to reproduce quickly and are great colonizers they have some general features that are selected for depending on the nuances of the cascading environmental effects but just to give you an example 400 million years ago the seas were dominated by a double-decker bus size shark eating fish these were placoderms they were apex predators they had guillotines for teeth and they had a front end that was built like a bulldozer then the events happened global change happened they go extinct they're basically asphyxiated because of low oxygen conditions spreading and what rises in their place is a story of the meek shall inherit the earth which is another typical thing that happens in the aftermath of mass extinctions what rises are bony fish so that's the type that make up your dinner plate those flourish again it's a story of the small things get through the things that you wouldn't anticipate getting through and then they proliferate and expand wildly it's the same story about whales in the wake of the incretaceous mass extinction that killed giant reptiles like plesiosaurus and mosasaurus and also the non-flying dinosaurs so that's for the big picture organisms it's also how we as mammals got through it's that same extinction event hedgehog size mammals get through there's a fundamental reptile mammal transition so life is tenacious it's surprising it's unpredictable in terms of what actually sustains during those interval in those regions of the oceans that have low oxygen conditions that's a microbial story so there's a whole suite of microbes that thrive in those kind of conditions and feed back to these blooms and then lead to even more cascading effects so microbial life so it's naked to the visible eye organisms that drive by geochemical cycles on our planet they do really well in those so-called dead zones they do well and they bloom and then algae build on those so that's what happens at these mass extinction events Thanks Jessica that's really fascinating and sticking with you actually I think that we've got one question from Mikey who was just curious to know more about the sort of you mentioned that there were a lot of nuances around this idea of iron fertilization could you sort of sketch out just briefly some of the main sort of concerns that scientists and others have about using a concept like that to help sort of cool earth Exactly so this is tough when we start talking about wide-scale global engineering because again just like with the mass extinction events the actual effects are not quite predictable so when we start thinking about CO2 storage in the oceans an ocean fertilization strategy is actually a temporary solution it itself leads to ocean acidification, changing chemistry changing ecologies like the proliferation of these bacteria that I'm talking about which have a feedback where then when you have proliferation of bacteria and algae you kind of run through the whole scenario again so the oceans absorb heat and they absorb carbon dioxide that's true there are great ally in that sense we heard that they absorb about 50% of CO2 that goes into the atmosphere but it's not without consequences as an additional oxygen loss further deoxygenation and acidification so there's a big trade-off Thanks Jessica so yeah it very much sounds like these are pretty difficult decisions that can't be sort of reliably predicted in advance I guess is the main takeaway one thing that we've got another recurring question we've seen in the comments is about marine protection and there's a question here about the idea of national marine parks from Fiona to what extent and I guess maybe John Baptiste this might be appropriate to you although I'm quite keen for anyone to sort of jump in as well because it does kind of refer to all of your research what extent do you think the sort of concept of national marine parks as it's currently constituted will be useful in the next 10 years for helping turn around some of the major problems we have in the world ocean Thanks Jack but I'm going to open the floor for Joanne maybe because maybe she has a more grounded reflection on that in the oyster case I can speak globally about the MPAs and the 30x30 agenda but maybe let's ground it into what was discussed on the oyster first Yeah sure so I mean an MPA could be a name could be a paper park a lot of them aren't effective what's important is what you are protecting so if you're protecting a degraded system it's not going to provide us with the services we need so what I think we need to do is have a bigger ambition if we understand what we've lost particularly in the coastal areas or the mangroves or the coral reefs or the sea grasses or the salt marshes or the oyster reefs if we understand what we've lost then we'll be more ambitious about what we will restore and when we restore these ecosystems at scale we restore the services the carbon drawdown the biodiversity the coastal protection the sedimentation the water quality all these things you restore with it so I think it's a great first ambition if that 30% included actually protected areas that did not have any destructive extraction of resources that stuck to sustainable aquaculture or sustainable approaches that's a non-linear approach it doesn't assume that there's an inexhaustible supply of resources from the ocean then they're great but many MPAs you can still fish in so we have to really grapple with what an MPA is and when it becomes effective and that needs to go alongside restoring degraded systems and then protecting them also so I think we need to be more ambitious than we are now and we certainly need to try and put back the ecosystems on which humans depend if we want to thrive as humans we need a thriving coastal ecosystem as well Thanks very much Joanne John Baptiste do you want to add anything to that? No I think that was perfect I think she really hits one of the key points which is the enforcement the monitoring and the enforcement of an MPA it's just not enough to draw a line on the map and say that's it that's an MPA as you said some MPA have fishing involved on the other hand some MPA you cannot fish but you're going to go and drill for oil to do seabed mining right so you have this mismatch between the aspiration of an MPA and its enforcement so I think this would be referred to as paper park where you don't have any kind of monitoring nor enforcement so the key is really in the enforcement and then if it's enforced all indication shows that it is very efficient and you even have what is called the spillover effect which is by protecting really and enforcing protection on a specific area it's going to benefit the adjacent areas as well which is non-negligible in the case of fishing for instance for the industry thank you so much that was brilliant so we only have about a minute left but I am really keen to squeeze in one last question and this is for each of you so if you can try and answer this maybe 30 seconds or less if there was one thing that you could hope to see change in our relationship with the ocean by 2030 what would it be for me it would be to stop destructive fishing practices and create restorative processes that are circular and work within planetary boundaries that we know we need to survive great thank you John very succinct Jessica or whoever wants to hop jump in well I think it's time we turn off the taps in terms of the causes of habitat destruction that leads to mass extinction so it's not just CO2 warming and melting ice sheets it's a certification expansion of dead zones measurable consequences of those increased CO2 so I hope we'll dramatically reduce CO2 emissions which will benefit the oceans but then I also hope that we will reduce release of urban waste so nutrients fertilizer sewage going into coastal waters we need to address the problems in those coastal waters and that requires local action on the scale of fertilizer use on large scales so places like the Gulf of Mexico where we alluded to the dead zones expanding that's because of the relationship to the Mississippi runoff from the American heartland so these are fixable problems we need to act now thanks Jessica very very quickly Jean-Baptiste very quickly then I'll go back to how I ended up the final question you asked me which is for nations and cooperation to really turn words into action and beyond that turn action into results right like six months ago in December the Norwegian government committed to 100% sustainable ocean management by 2025 which was really welcome and bold commitment and just weeks later the same government announced one new licenses for offshore oil and gas exploration and its plan to permit seabed mining as early as 2023 so there is a mismatch here between the sustainable rhetoric that everyone welcomes and that is much needed but the reality of ongoing policies and getting rid of that blue washing I think is what I look forward for the UNDK perfect thank you all so much I think that's all we've got time for I hope everyone enjoyed this webinar today brought to you by the conversation and a massive thank you to our panellists for their time and giving us these fascinating insights it is a very important topic so thank you Joan Baptiste Uffray, Joan Preston and Jessica Whiteside and thanks to all our viewers for joining us and for your excellent questions until next time thank you and goodbye